The eternal optimism of the Clear mind 23 Jun

Clear just closed down.

Here’s how it worked while it was in business. You paid $200 for a one-year membership. You underwent a big, complicated background check to prove that you were extra-super-trustworthy.

In exchange, in a few big airports, you got to skip to the front of the TSA line for screening.

Now, you didn’t skip the screening itself. You still went through the X-ray machine and had to remove your shoes, belt, pocket contents, laptops, and plastic quart ziplock bag of toiletries.

You just got to cut to the front of the line.

A few people signed up. In certain airports, it was, indeed, worth actual money to cut to the front of the line.

This wasn’t Clear’s actual business plan. The actual business plan was that Clear would do detailed background checks on travellers, who would then be trusted to bypass security completely because they were extra-super-trustworthy.

Now, the TSA doesn’t even trust pilots, who go through the same screening as the rest of us to make sure they’re not bringing something extraordinarily dangerous onto a plane like a 3.5 oz bottle of shampoo. Because, of course, with a little bottle of shampoo, they could make a bomb, which they could use to fly the plane they are piloting into a building, something that is impossible for mere pilots sitting at the controls of the jet.

So as it turns out, the TSA never actually agreed to go along with this skipping-the-screening thing, and ultimately, all Clear was allowed to do was get you to the front of the line.

At this point, and here’s the interesting part, at this point, a rational businessperson would say, “Well, does the Clear idea still make sense if we can’t actually let you skip the screening?”

OK, maybe it still makes sense to charge to skip to the front of the line. Maybe there’s a business model in that.

In that case, though, why did they still do background checks? It doesn’t make any sense.

The environment changed. It turns out that Clear’s business model of prescreening wasn’t going to be possible. But they kept doing it anyway. What kind of organizational dysfunction does it take to completely ignore the changed circumstances and keep at a money-losing business?

What’s even funnier is that Clear could probably have been profitable if they had just skipped the one unnecessarily stupid part of their business model: the detailed background checks on all their customers.

Nobody at Clear did any thinking. They had a business model, the business model wasn’t actually possible, everybody knew it, and they still plugged away at it. Thoughtless optimism. I don’t know whether to salute ‘em or laugh.

Platform vendors 10 Jun

Dave Winer (in 2007): “Sometimes developers choose a niche that’s either directly in the path of the vendor, or even worse, on the roadmap of the vendor. In those cases, they don’t really deserve our sympathy.”

iSmashPhone: 15 Apps Rendered Obsolete By The New iPhone 3GS

When independent software developers create utilities, add-ons, or applications that fill a hole in their platform vendor’s offering, they like to think that they’re doing the vendor a huge favor. Oh, look, the iPhone doesn’t have cut and paste,  they say. Business opportunity! They might imagine that this business will be around forever. Some of them even like to daydream about the platform vendor buying them up. Payday!

The trouble is that only a tiny percentage of iPhone users are going to pay for that little cut and paste application. With any kind of add-on, selling to 1% of the platform is a huge success.

For Apple, that’s a problem. That means that the cut and paste problem isn’t solved for 99% of their customers. They will solve it, if it’s really a problem. And you’ll be out of business.

Filling little gaps in another company’s product lineup is snatching nickels from the path of an oncoming steam roller.

A good platform always has opportunities for applications that aren’t just gap-fillers. These are the kind of application that the vendor is unlikely ever to consider a core feature, usually because it’s vertical — it’s not something everyone is going to want. There is exactly zero chance that Apple is ever going to add a feature to the iPhone for dentists. Zero.

A visit to Microsoft and Google 10 Jun

From my latest Inc. column: “Giant corporations such as Google and Microsoft are like cities full of relatively anonymous people: You don't actually expect to see anyone you know as you walk around. Going to lunch on either campus is like going to the cafeteria at a huge university. The other 2,000 students seem nice, but you don't know most of them well enough to sit with them. Meanwhile, a typical lunchtime at my company is like Thanksgiving dinner: There's a big meal you get to share with a bunch of people you know and like.”

Conferences in New York 10 Jun

Andrew emailed to ask why we don’t have a StackOverflow DevDays day in New York City. That’s a fair question! There’s a big software development community here.

There are two reasons New York is low on my list. The first is cost. Hotels, venues, and catering are prohibitively expensive in New York. At a medium-class hotel, say, the Marriott on the East Side, giving everybody one coffee break with coffee, tea, soft drinks, and nothing to eat costs $23 per person [PDF]. It’s simply impossible to do a $99 one-day event in New York.

The other reason is attendance. I don’t know why, but techies in New York just don’t turn out for events at the same level as other cities. When we did the FogBugz world tour we had three times as many attendees in London as New York. Maybe New Yorkers are extra busy. But turnout is always surprisingly thin in the city.

It’s a particularly bad place to do tech conferences, too. Hotels are $600-$700 a night. Everything about putting on a conference is remarkably expensive. And half of your attendees wander off to visit the Statue of Liberty when they should be in your Python tutorial meeting.

StackOverflow DevDays: Five New Cities 09 Jun

Whoa. Less than a month ago, we announced first Stack Overflow DevDays and opened registration to 300 people in each of five cities.

Well, that sold out pretty quickly. Ryan Carson, who is taking care of all the conference logistics, was pretty sure we’d be able to book larger event spaces, so we allowed even more people to register... we’ve got 2388 people booked worldwide so far, including over 800 in London, but it’s clear that with just five events we weren’t going to be able to accomodate all the people who want to spend a day meeting online Stack Overflow friends in real life and learning a little something about some hot new programming topics.

So, we decided to take the show to five more cities. Here’s the new schedule—click on a city to register:

Oct 07 Boston NEW!
Oct 14 Austin NEW!
Oct 16 Los Angeles NEW!
Oct 19 San Francisco
Oct 21 Seattle
Oct 23 Toronto
Oct 26 Washington DC
Oct 28 London
Oct 30 Cambridge, UK NEW!
Nov 02 Amsterdam NEW!

Tickets are $99 in the US, €84.75 in Amsterdam and £85.00 in the UK. A limited number of very cheap student tickets are available. If you already booked but want to change cities, email devdays@stackoverflow.com.

In the meantime, I’ve been working hard lining up speakers. I’ll be speaking myself in all ten cities, as this will be the launch event for FogBugz 7 and a new product now under development by the Fog Creek summer interns, who just arrived and are already coding away earnestly. Jeff Atwood will be speaking in San Francisco. Scott Hanselman will be speaking in San Francisco and Seattle. Jon Skeet will be speaking in London. The basic agenda should, more or less, include: Android, Python, Google App Engine, iPhone development, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, FogBugz, Mercurial and DVCS, and a different speaker from academia in each city. There will be lunch, two breaks, and we’ll organize some kind of birds-of-a-feather post-conference meetups.

Anyway, at the current rate, it’s pretty clear these conferences will sell out long before the events themselves, so don’t wait until the last minute to decide.

Get a job 03 Jun

The Joel on Software Job Board has been working well since we launched it almost three years ago. It logs about 220,000 unique visitors every 21 days, including many passive job seekers who have RSS subscriptions.

But a few employers place ads and just don’t find anyone. I’m pretty sure we’re the only job listing service in the world with an unconditional money back guarantee, so these people call us and we give them their money back. It’s not a lot, usually just two or three a month, but I’d still prefer to have a wider audience for these job listings as long as it didn’t diminish the quality of resumes.

In the meantime, Stack Overflow has been attracting a huge community of smart developers—we’re running over 3.7 million unique visitors a month.

So today we’re launching a new Stack Overflow job board and a Server Fault job board, which will both be linked up with the Joel on Software job board. Any ad placed on one appears on all three sites. This will be a great way to recruit great programmers and a great place to get great jobs.

It’s not much of a secret, but Stack Overflow is already a great place to find good programmers, because you can see how good people really are by reading the answers that they post. I’ve noticed a lot of people putting their Stack Overflow reputations on their resumes, and we’re starting to hear stories of people who got jobs through the site. Jeff and I are committed to building features to make this easier in the next “six to eight” weeks. For example, I’ve always hated traditional resumes, which just don’t give the right kind of information about a candidate. If you wanted to hire an iPhone developer, would you rather know that person’s Stack Overflow stats in the iPhone tag and read their answers to technical questions? Or would you rather know where they went to college?

If we pull this off, getting jobs in the tech industry will be a lot saner.

In the meantime, if you are hiring, do yourself a favor and try placing an ad on Stack Overflow. (FAQ) If you’re looking for a job, check out the listings.

Server Fault now in public beta 29 May

Server Fault is now in public beta!

When Jeff Atwood and I launched Stack Overflow last fall, we really wanted it to be a site for and by programmers. But the engine behind the site, the Q&A engine with voting, editing, and tagging, could obviously be used in a lot of other professions.

The first field we picked is close to our heart: system and network administration; as programmers, we often end up doing system administration ourselves. And it’s the perfect domain for a Q&A engine... there are a million detailed problems that depend highly on lore to get right. There’s no way to accidentally discover aspnet_regiis.exe -I until someone shows you the trick. How much time have you wasted trying to figure out which process is holding a file open preventing you from deleting an otherwise empty directory? Can you use dd to clone a disk drive?

Thus, Server Fault. If you already have a Stack Overflow account, you’re all set up, although your reputation score, badges, and favorite tags are separate. It has all the great features from Stack Overflow which I talked about at Google last month (video).

Jeff: “I am sorry to inform you that you may be a system administrator or IT professional.”

Stack Overflow DevDays 12 May

Stack Overflow has been going nuts—after just six months in business, we’ve had 3.5 million unique visitors per month. We’ve starting thinking about how to get that great tribe of developers together in the real world.

We decided to launch a series of Stack Overflow events: the first gathering of the tribe of great developers making Stack Overflow so successful that over 90% of questions get answered [video].

It’s going to be in October, in five ten separate cities. In each city, we’re planning a one-day event.

We decided to cram as many diverse topics as possible into a single day event. Like a tasting menu at a great restaurant, we’ll line up six great speakers in each city.

This is not going to be just a Java conference or a .NET conference or a Ruby conference. This will be completely ecumenical. We’ll have somebody to introduce Microsoft’s new web framework, ASP.NET MVC, but we’ll also get someone to talk about writing code for Google’s new mobile operating system, Android. And in each city, we’ll find one local computer science professor or graduate student to tell us about something new and interesting in academia.

For smart programmers who are interested in learning about something a little bit outside of their own immediate field, this is the conference for you. We’re doing it in the spirit of Byte Magazine. Remember Byte? Every issue covered a wide range of topics and technologies. Sadly, Byte disappeared, to be replaced by Mac-only magazines, IBM-PC only magazines, even Microsoft SQL Server-only magazines.

The conference is for programmers. The conversation is going to be hard core. Speakers are going to be writing code.

Putting on these conferences is really expensive—conference centers can charge you $1000 for one urn of coffee. That’s why typical developer conferences can cost $1500, plus travel, hotel, and $73 for the Internet access in your hotel room. With the current worldwide recession, that just isn’t gonna fly. Many great conferences, like SD West, have been cancelled. Attendance is way down at the conferences that survive.

So I got together with Ryan Carson, whose company, Carsonified, has been putting on great conferences like FOWA, and we tried to figure out how little we could possibly charge for this thing. The answer: $99 per attendee.

That’s it. These one day conferences are just $99. You can bring your whole team for less than the cost of a normal conference.

We’re doing it in five cities, so you may not even have to travel. We’ve got room for just 300 developers in each city:

October 19 San Francisco SOLD OUT
October 21 Seattle SOLD OUT
October 23 Toronto SOLD OUT
October 26 Washington, DC SOLD OUT
October 28 London SOLD OUT

Update! Due to popular demand, we’ve added five more cities:

October 7 Boston
October 14 Austin
October 16 Los Angeles
October 30 Cambridge, UK
November 2 Amsterdam

Register for Stack Overflow DevDays right now. Given the huge demand and the limited number of tickets, I expect all five cities will sell out pretty much instantly.

OK, here’s the FAQ:

Who will be speaking?

I’ll be speaking in every city. Jeff Atwood will appear in San Francisco only. We will line up about six speakers in every city.

What will be the topics?

The topics haven’t been nailed down yet and depend on speaker availability. I’ll do my best to get speakers on as many of the following topics as possible:

• Android
• Objective C and iPhone development
• Google App Engine
• Python
• jQuery
• ASP.NET MVC
• FogBugz 7.0
• Mercurial and Distributed Version Control

Each talk will be fairly introductory but will be intended for advanced developers. If you already know about a topic, say, iPhone development, you can wander outside and hang out with the other iPhone developers in the hallways.

Is this the same in every city?

Not exactly. Some topics will be repeated—my talk will be the same in all five cities—but we may not have the exact same topics and speakers in each city. We aim to have at least one local speaker in each city.

I’m hungry!

Me too. I’m always hungry. Breakfast, lunch, and afternoon tea are included in the price of the ticket. Half of the fun of this conference will be meeting other Stack Overflow members.

Where are the events?

We haven’t booked halls yet. The exact location will be announced. There is a small chance we may have to adjust a date a little bit if we have trouble booking a space.

Note: If your company is in one of these cities, and has a presentation space that is suitable for 300 people, we’d love to have you as a sponsor. Please email devdays@stackoverflow.com.

What should I wear?

Make a T-shirt with your StackOverflow identity and reputation (see sample at right). You can order them here or make your own.

Are there academic discounts?

There are a very limited number of subsidized student tickets at $10. Due to the cost of putting on the event, I regret that there are only a limited number of student tickets in each city.

How can I help?

Ah! Thank you for asking. We need lots of help to pull this all together.

• We need volunteers in each city. If you live in one of these five cities, and would be able to help check tickets and just generally be useful during the conference, please email devdays@stackoverflow.com.
• We need sponsors for the meals and breaks. If your company would like to be a sponsor, please email devdays@stackoverflow.com. This is a great way to recruit superstar programmers: sponsors will have the opportunity to set up recruiting booths at the conference.

I have more questions.

That figures. Email them to (you guessed it) devdays@stackoverflow.com and Natasha at Carsonified will get back to you.

Why Circuit City Failed, and Why B&H Thrives 05 May

“Even as competitors like Circuit City go bust, B&H remains packed with loyal customers. And that makes me very happy. For a business owner, there's nothing more satisfying than watching honest dealers expand their operations while the schmucks, with their going-out-of-business markups, go down the drain.”

From my Inc. column: Why Circuit City Failed, and Why B&H Thrives

Talk about StackOverflow 29 Apr

Here’s a video of a talk I gave at Google last week about StackOverflow.

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