Today my friend Sara Chipps and I are announcing the creation of the MVC Melee! The contest will be a 48 hour competition where teams of ASP.NET MVC developers will have 2 days to come up with a rad web application idea and put it in action. The public will judge. Prizes will be given. [...]
This past weekend Roz Duffy, Kelani Nichole, and I hosted our second Barcamp Philadelphia at the University of the Arts. It was, by just about any measure, a success. One issue we’ve struggled with over the past two years is whether or not to charge an entrance fee. The spirit of barcamp, in one sense, [...]
Today I learned about the Hornget project which is lead by Paul Cowan. Hornget attempts to solve the elusive “package manager for .NET” problem by creating a packager system for open source .NET projects. An interesting choice the Horn project team made was to keep the repository (not the design pattern, the actual place where [...]
Treat your users like you’d treat your customers.
Being available to their users for help and advice is something that some, but sadly not all, product-based businesses understand. For project owners, this means being active on your wiki, your forums, and your email lists. John had a great anecdote about a help request he received to his personal email account. Instead of ignoring the user or reeling off a terse “RTFM” response, he exchanged a few messages with them and eventually got them sorted. It turns out this user was a head architect at Amazon. You never know who your users are – treat them all like customers. Satisfaction gaurenteed.
Facebook and Twitter are on a collision course. And my money is on Facebook. What gives? With Facebook’s latest, and decidedly controversial redesign, they put status updates FRONT and CENTER. Admittedly, this wasn’t a huge departure from the way status updates were displayed before, and the change probably wouldn’t have been a big deal – [...]
