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. [...]
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 the [...]
Recently I decided I wanted to develop a small, lightweight Windows client to use for Baconfile, Leah Culver’s latest side project for easily uploading files to Amazon’s S3 service. Chris Wanstrath made a nice little Mac client and I thought Windows users might enjoy the same type of functionality.
After deciding on how I wanted the [...]
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.
