Matthew Lang

Curtis McHale has some words of wisdom when it comes to deciding to work towards something more than just a 9 to 5 job.

The things we want are hard, we may fail.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bother trying.

— Good Things Are Hard and Have High Failure Rates, We Should Still Try

I enjoyed working for myself. In faact I loved working for myself. But it came with a risk. The risk was that I focused on long term contracts with fewer clients, so while the long term looked good, I found it difficult to maintain that run of long term client work. Eventually I found myself unable to sustain the work and I started looking for full-time work.

Now, two years later, I’m building a product on the side for a market that I have some knowledge of. There’s no guarantee that my product will be a success though.

Every week I spend a half hour going through some RSS feeds and a Twitter list of organisations that are the target market for my product and a Twitter list of competitors. The market is healthy and there’s plenty of worldwide opportunities for my product, but there are times when I doubt myself and I think the product will fail to take off.

It usually lasts for a couple of days and then I find myself shaking off the thoughts of risk and I through myself into the backlog of work I have to do for the product.

I have to at least give it a try.

It’s a question posed by the tech team behind the seach engine Cliqz. Sure, they might have a vested interest in seeing more traffic going to their own search engine, but I think they’re onto something.

We need more search engines.

Google has a huge share of the search market but it has hardly lived up to it’s long running ethos of don’t be evil. What started as a great search engine with a range of good products around it, has turned into an ad platform that hoovers up data on every Google service you use.

I’m starting to wonder though if it’s not so much more generalist search engines we need, but more specialist search engines instead.

We’re at the point where we have billions of web pages, but depending on the search we want to do, even filtering through the search results can be difficult. We will always need generalist search engines, but what about search engines that focus on a particular type of search or information?

We already have a number of these specialist search engines. I’ve used job search engines over the last few month to look for specific roles in the contract market. I’ve had some success with my results on these specialist search engines but not much more than using a generalist search engine like DuckDuckgo. That’s only one example though.

There has to be more examples and matching specialist search engines to match them. And if they don’t exist, why can’t we build them?

A favourite saying of mine is Phil Karlton’s quote about hard things to do in computer science.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

— Phil Karlton

I can’t say that cache invalidation has given me major issues in the past but naming things has always been a challenge. If I was to take this beyond the realms of programming though, I would say that naming anything is a difficult thing to do.

My portfolio of web applications include DailyMuse, Markcase and WriteAbout. I find it hard to get away from the compound naming theme. It’s just a way of naming things that I stick with. It’s easy to do, but it feels like it lacks imagination. I would love to come up wth alternatives that don’t follow this convention but everything I have come up with didn’t feel like a good fit.

The other thing I don’t like about compounded product names is deciding whether to upper-case the second word or leave it as lower-case. GitHub’s branding is clear that they favour upper-casing the second word, but there are examples of other brand names that are made of two words that just user a lower-case word for the second word. Take Feedbin for example.

For my bookmarking service, Markcase, I choose to use the lower-cased form instead of MarkCase, and I have to say I prefer it.

I’m working on something that is bigger than anything I’ve worked on in the past. I’d like it to become my full-time gig eventually so it’s quite important to get the naming of it right. I do have a name for it, but I’m torn between whether to use the upper-case form or the lower-case for.

I am edging towards the lower-case form. It reads easier and looks better in the different styles that I have for it.

I find all aspects of branding and marketing quite a challenge. I’m creative to an extent, but I’m definitely not well-versed enough to launch a huge marketing campaign. To get my product off the ground though, I’m taking little steps in executing it and learning as I go. I might not always get it right to begin with, but adapting the product and the marketing as I go, is better than not doing anything at all.