The old way of collecting information is one that many sites still attempt: collecting all of this information up-front:

Registration forms like this often encourage users to give up during registration, meaning low user counts, low ad revenue, and no opportunity to upsell to other products later.

LinkedIn did a good job innovating in this respect. They don’t require a full profile during registration, but gently remind users that they should fill out more information:

CommonRed is a social networking startup that’s using the same technique as LinkedIn, but has taken it further. In addition to the gentle nudge from “% Profile Complete”, they have a sidebar widget that asks users simple questions.

CommonRed is a networking startup, so they ask simple questions about hobbies that users can connect over. As a user clicks answers, each question fades away and is replaced by another.

This interaction is valuable. Not only does it get more users into your product, but it also gets you more information about those users in a pain-free way (I’ve personally answered at least 10 of these because I found some of the oddball questions interesting, and I wondered what was coming next). Think of how it can be used in your own product: gauging interest in new features, collecting demographic information for marketing, or even setting preferences.

Now that I’ve got you riled up a bit, let me explain what I mean, and why you already love Continuous Integration (CI), even if you don’t know exactly what it is yet.

The old way of developing and testing software was to write the code, launch it, and then go through as a user, clicking around, and looking to see if anything was broken. If everything seemed okay, it would be pushed into production where, again, people would click around a bit more to look for problems. This was “good enough” in that when a new feature is being built, it would get the most attention — any bugs in that particular feature would probably get caught.

There are two problems here. One is the obvious case of being a poor use of a developers’ time. Developers are expensive, and having to test by hand costs a lot of time. Every time a new feature is deployed, the entire system needs to be checked. The simple way around this is to only test the new feature — since it’s new, that’s where bugs are probably going to show up…right?

Unfortunately, no. In any modern software system, there are huge chunks of code that get used for different features throughout the application — even things that have no obvious relationship can be intertwined. Making a change to a piece of code to support one new feature can have unknown side effects for the other features where it gets used. You can tell this is the case, because any development team that relies on this hand-checking method will eventually start hearing things like “Well yeah, the new thing is working okay, but this other feature that’s been working fine all along is broken now.” If you’re a product manager or a business person reading this, I’m certain you’re nodding your head right now.

One way of solving this is by hiring a QA team to hand check everything. This still suffers from the human error issue, and is still expensive (although slightly cheaper per hour than developers doing the testing). Of course, then you introduce the overhead of the QA team and the developers having to work together to figure out the problems and fix them, and this takes you off down the rabbit hole of “not building new features because the engineers are busy keeping up with the backlog” — not a happy place.

The best answer to this situation is automated testing. There are different flavors of this — RSpec, PHPUnit, Cucumber, and Selenium are all words you might have heard when talking about automated testing. The idea is that you can write code to test your code. Once you have everything working in a nice balance, you know it will stay working into the future, and constant hand-checking is no longer required. Instant productivity boost!

There is a catch here. Running the tests still has to be done by hand, and the tests can take a long time to run. Large systems can easily have several minutes of automated tests, and when a developer is in the zone, being forced to wait for the tests to run breaks their concentration, their productivity drops, and that’s when they open up a web browser and get distracted for a half hour by the funny internet. The other, equally bad outcome, is that developers are discouraged from running tests (because they realize the high cost of them being distracted), and they just don’t run the tests anymore.

I’m sure you see what’s next here. If the tests can be automated, why can’t we automatically run the tests? How good of you to ask…we can. That’s called Continuous Integration. The idea is this: when developers are writing code, every once in a while (usually once or twice per ticket), they commit code to a version control system (something like Git, Github, SVN, etc). This act of updating the codebase triggers the CI system to run all of the tests, automatically checking that none of the existing functionality got broken by adding the new feature (the fancy way of saying this is that the code hasn’t ‘regressed’).

If everything is okay, the CI server logs that everything went okay, and the developers have already moved onto the next ticket. If something goes wrong, the developers get alerted, and the bug gets fixed. This means bugs get caught during development, and not in production by your users. CI saves developers time, and produces higher quality code with less bugs. It’s one of those happy times in life where you get “more” and “higher quality” at the same time.

There are lots of CI solutions out there, but the CI system of choice at Cloudspace is the high-quality and open source Jenkins (the CI system formerly known as Hudson).

And of course, let’s not forget the gratuitous self-promotion. In addition to our skilled engineers, we offer a hosted CI service — Always CI. Please get in touch with us if you’d like us to help make CI easier for you.

Testing is dead. Long live testing!

Finally the world will see us as the woman we truly are!

Yesterday was Cloudspace’s 15th birthday! We closed the shop at 1:30 to celebrate in the only way we know how. With copious amounts of beer and laser tag.

Drinking lots of beer and eating lots of chicken before we played lots of laser tag was a questionable choice.

We’ve got a lot of tricks up our sleeve for year 15, so keep an eye out for something dumbfounding. It might be a music service that changes the way bands interact with fans, it might be a way to cut out hours of prep work before you launch your product, or maybe it’s a product that allows you to easily create and share understandable mockups so your Graphic Designer doesn’t pull out his hair trying to understand exactly where you want that blue, squiggly thing. Heck, it just might be all three of those things AND THEN SOME.

Thanks to all of our amazing clients who helped us get here, your support has been awesome and your ideas and products have been inspiring. Here’s to another 15!

<3

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Inside a project team, we have two types of meetings: daily, and weekly.

Calling the daily meeting a “meeting” might be overstating it. It’s a quick opportunity to catch up and make sure that all of the developers are on the same page. Within Cloudspace, many of our projects follow the Team of Two pattern, so catching up is somewhat automatic. When we pair with our client’s developers, the daily meeting is slightly more formal, since there’s a larger team involved, but it’s important to get done quickly — anything more than 60 seconds per person is probably too long.

Our developers also have weekly meetings to plan the work that’s coming up and make sure everyone understands what needs to be done. These (daily and weekly) developer meetings make sure that there aren’t any unaddressed problems. It’s important for everyone on the team to know about things that can hold them back (a bug in a remote API), or more happily, can make them more successful (new functionality completed in the past week).

Every Cloudspace employee has written some amount of code — even the non-engineers, although we keep them away from client work. Given that we’re an entire company of developers, keeping up with new tools and techniques is important. Every Friday morning, the team comes in early for Cloudspace breakfast, and they spend time either reviewing code on a project, learning how to work with a new Ruby gem or JQuery plugin, whatever is a need at that moment.

Since Cloudspace is a big believer in the value added by doing things as a team, we also have management meetings every Wednesday. Obviously having IM makes it easy to catch up during the week for one-off decisions, but there’s still no replacement for frequently getting everyone together and catching up.

Anyone who has followed Cloudspace’s long and illustrious career knows that we love to sponsor a good event. This time we chose Startup Weekend: San Jose, sponsoring a total of 5 tickets. Although we can’t go ourselves, which is pretty heart-breaking, we hope those tickets will get some young entrepreneurs with great ideas started. The event itself starts tomorrow (the 15th) and will last the entire weekend finishing up at around 8:30pm on Sunday (the 17th). Very rarely do great minds gather en mass like this, and we expect nothing short of greatness to come out of it. To register, click here. Anyone not going is missing out on what could possibly be the worlds greatest 54 hour brainstorm, ever.

You can view more pictures of the event here, courtesy of Mark Gil Perez. We will have our flickr updated with photos shortly!

Jasmine Becket-Griffith standing in front of her art with fellow artist, Mark Gil Perez

Featured Artists:

Jasmine Becket-Griffith

Michael Banks (who sold everything he had in the gallery!)

Bianca Roman-Stumpff

Mark Gil Perez

John T. Carter

Tic Bowen

Jason Childs

Scott Barrow

Jamie Lindsey

Cat Hulshoff

Ken Knafou

Tony Baldini

THE BEATLES

Photo Credit: Dezo Hoffman

This week forty seven years ago, 4 boys from the U.K. with silly haircuts did something no one thought was possible or even reasonable. They held the top 5 positions in the Billboard Top 40 singles in America. They trampled all over famous American musical legends like Elvis Presley, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry. Without the help of Rubber Soul, Revolver, or Sgt Pepper’s which are widely viewed as three of the best albums of all time. In other words, they made chopped liver out of their idols while still using their proverbial training wheels. In honor of their historical (and still standing) 5 slot record, we have decided to dazzle you with a bevy of Beatles trivia. Hold on to your butts!

• Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the first rock album in history to provide a full listing of lyrics with the album. To this day I curse bands that do not extend the same courtesy to their fans. I’M SORRY KURT COBAIN, I CAN’T UNDERSTAND YOU. TRY MUMBLING LESS. source
• John Lennon co-wrote David Bowie’s first #1 single Fame. Lennon’s voice is also heard singing the repeated words “FAME, FAME, FAME” with his voice heard at a fast, normal, and slow playback speeds, until Bowie’s voice is heard singing the final lyrics of the song before the fade. source
• Before Paul McCartney wrote Penny Lane it was just an ordinary street in Liverpool. After he wrote Penny Lane it became a Mecca for all those suffering from Beatlemania. So much so that after a countless number of street signs were stolen, the city began screwing placards into the pavement. After those were finally pried up, the city officials decided it would be best to just paint the street name onto the side of buildings. In unrelated news, I have begun researching how to pry brick walls out of buildings…. source
• After accidentally leaning his guitar against an amplifier in 1964, John Lennon became the first mainstream musician to ever use feedback. And Jimi Hendrix never even said thank you. source
• A year after toppling him on the Billboard charts The Beatles met their God, Elvis. And then he tried to have them deported for their “Anti-Americanism.”  Well he had one thing right, they aren’t American. Thanks Captain Obvious. source
• One woman, George Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd, is responsible for the songs Something, I Need You, and For You Blue. Then she divorced George and married his best friend, Eric Clapton. Eric wrote Layla and Wonderful Tonight about her. Yeah, she was pretty hot. Thanks for being a groupie Pattie, we got some really great music out of it. source
• The track listing for the only time in history that one band has held the top 5 spots on the Billboard Top 40 in order, are: Can’t Buy Me Love, Twist and Shout, She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand, and Please Please Me. source

Regardless of the fact that they set records left and right The Beatles have left a lasting impression on the planet. The love of their music has been passed down from parent to child and will continue to be for generations. As a young girl I practiced piano everyday with this hanging on the wall above. To this day, I will assume you have terrible taste in music if you can’t name 5 of The Beatle’s songs; and that assumption is always right. Even the founder of Cloudspace, Todd Sampson, has to admit that his mother out-hips him if only because she liked The Beatles before they were cool:

My mom actually saw the Beatles live at their first American show in Washington D.C.  This is the same show “in the round” that Apple included as a video of when they launched the Beatles on iTunes.  While she said she could hardly hear the music over all the other screaming girls at the gig, it’s still hard to know I’m never going to have an experience as cool as my mom did back in 1964.

So here is to The Beatles. Thanks for paving the way for poetry writing, leftist weirdos to be successful. May you always be the basis by which we judge all other bands.

I think they’re really spot on with the gamification trend. I know a lot of people think gamification is about cute icons and points, but there’s something deeper. Companies like OneTrueFan are gamifying the whole web, and products like UserVoice’s new Full Service product incorporate game mechanics to make customer support better (Q: what’s the difference between game mechanics and analytics? A: “fun”)

I also see a big need to help organize the app store. There are some innovative products in early alpha that are trying to solve the problem of helping mobile app developers get their products out there, and to help people find cool apps that do what they need done (or just find fun games).