Get To Business.

In case you were wondering whats up with Octabox …

We are currently in the middle of a major upgrade and redesign. Based on feedbacks we have received from our private beta and ideas from internal brainstorming and review, we are building a completely new user interface. Simpler interactions, increased responsiveness (and more eye-candy ) and overall tightening up of the user experience.

In addition we will be adding two new work-modes to complement the basic data management tools.

One is a ‘planning stage’ (we like to call it a ‘Thinking’ stage), in which a user can create contextual information - by stating a goal and then planning the steps to completion with the goal as motivation. A goal can be anything from completing a work project, buying a new car, doing your homework or any context in which you might want to manage information.

After thinking of the steps for goal completion, a user will be using Octabox management tools to manage information related to the goal (this is the second stage, ‘Manage’).

This will be similar to the previous management tools supplied by the platform, however we are reworking and improving everything.

The third stage is a review stage we like to call ‘Learn’, in which expectations are compared to results and lessons are learned - and implemented for better planning for future goals.

We have no set deadline for the completion of this transition, however, based on current progress we expect to have a public beta version in a couple of months. Hope to see you there.

Good To Great is yet another book about business management, written by Jim Collins, or so I thought when I started reading it. Jim is the author of the best-seller, Built To Last, an analysis of what makes great companies, well… great, and in Good To Great he attempts to determine what are the distinctive qualities and conditions that allow merely good companies to become great.

You might be asking yourself what is a great company, what is a good company and apparently Jim has the answer:

A great company has to generate cumulative stock returns that exceeded the general stock market by at least three times over 15 years—and it has to be a leap independent of its industry.

Jim and his research team have examined the performance for 1435 established companies (with over 40 years of public stock history), and found exactly 11 companies fitting this profile. In his book he systematically breaks down the results of his study that include hundreds of interviews and deep introspection into the similarities between those good-to-great companies. It can be summarized in one word, and that’s discipline.

Summarized in a full sentence it would be read as: Disciplined People with Disciplined Thought to Disciplined Action = Good To Great. This is a gross oversimplification, but I really suggest you read the book - It is full of insights and its well written.

When it comes to getting started, good-to-great leaders understand three simple truths. First, if you begin with “who,” you can more easily adapt to a fast-changing world … All good-to-great leaders, it turns out, are hedgehogs. They know how to simplify a complex world into a single, organizing idea—the kind of basic principle that unifies, organizes, and guides all decisions … It was an inherently iterative process—consisting of piercing questions, vigorous debate, resolute action, and autopsies without blame—a cycle repeated over and over by the right people, infused with the brutal facts.

Reading it I came to realize the rational beyond many decisions we made at Octabox that just felt right even though it wasn’t obvious why. Jim presents such a simple and almost obvious theory of how to achieve greatness from merely average, that you almost have to wonder how it is so rare to see it in reality. The truth is discipline is becoming a rare quality nowadays, and discipline combined with talent and smarts is even rarer. Still, I believe almost everyone reading this book will be enriched by it.

I also found Jim’s site to be full of pearls of wisdom, and his core concepts are explained there for free (Take a look at this useful summary). Good To Great really is a unique proposition and I’m a smarter man for having read it. Now I just have to catch with with its predecessor, Built To Last… Hopefully it will be just as good.

Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo has written an interesting post about How to save money running a startup. Reactions to this post were all over the board, from supporting his view (here and here) to labeling him a mad tyrant (here, here and here). Pretty harsh.

While I think that Jason could have worded his tips a little better (he does come out a little fanatical regarding his employees rest time), I basically agree with almost everything he wrote. Reading that post and this one, it is obvious to me that Jason is very passionate about his work. The basic concept I see between the lines of both of those posts is that for a start-up to succeed, it must have a team of extremely passionate and hardworking individuals. Those people should love what they do and work hard because of that.

I know that I think about Octabox all the time. When I’m working, when I’m watching TV or surfing the ‘Net, it’s always on the back of my mind. It’s a passion that burns inside of me and fuels me to work long hours everyday. I wouldn’t have it any other way, and I expect my team to feel the same way about their jobs. If you love what you do and feel the burning desire to do it the best you can, hard work doesn’t seem so hard at all.

After another hang up from Zend Studio for Eclipse (the IDE formerly known as Zend Studio) in which about 10 minutes of unsaved work was lost, I threw in the towel and went back to good old Zend Studio 5.5. For those not in the know (ie, You The Reader), Zend Studio is a line of development software for PHP from Zend. Having recently revamped their product to combine it with an eclipse project named PDT (PHP Development Tools), they created what would appear to be better but is ultimately inferior product.

Having used Studio for Eclipse for over two months religiously (~10 hours a day) you could say I have gotten pretty used to it. However, there is no getting past the hangups, which are not acceptable for a professional developer.

Firing up the old Studio 5.5, I was shocked on the apparent difference in responsiveness. I was so used to Studio for Eclipse that I forget how much faster the old 5.5 handles.

No more will I see the dreaded ‘Building PHP projects: 0%’ hoping it will not hang yet again.. especially when I hit the save button only to find out it has been queued behind that cursed process (which of course, will never finish… forcing a manual shutdown and loss of code).

Zend Studio for Eclipse has some nice ideas - like a code analyzer and an integrated unit-testing with code coverage statistics. Too bad those features which sound great in theory are the downfall of this software product - it is the code analyzer that seems to be a big reason for the build process hangs (in response to a support ticket I posted to Zend, I was instructed by a support employee to turn off code analyzing.. It’s great to know that they are aware of the instability of this feature. However the Studio continued to hang up). And I spent several days (!) trying to make my unit-tests run from inside the IDE (ultimately failing despite some small successes).
You can say many things about me, but when it comes to making computer related things GO, I am your guy. The fact that I could not make Studio for Eclipse run the tests… Goes a long way for me as indication for the maturity of this software product.

If you are a PHP developer considering the move to eclipse, my advice is give this one a pass. At least until it matures enough to be a worthy replacement to the old Studio 5.5.