Archives for December 2015

Unicorn Bots: Slack for fun and profit

December 16, 2015 Leave a Comment

I am a big fan of Slack. It is tough to live up to the hype, and even if you don’t use email it doesn’t mean you don’t have to do messy collaborative work.

It has become an indispensable tool for plenty of companies (with 2M daily actives) and it can cut through silos in an organization, if the channels are setup correctly. In a world of complex matrix organizations it helps to be able to get past the hierarchies and work across teams. With a tool like Slack you can not be chatting with: your peers (@group-managers), folks who do what you do (#engineering), your team (@team-ndomorph), folks who work on your platform (#ios), and also shared interests (#birdwatching). Cross-cutting for fun and profit.

I am very interested to see how the businesses who build on Slack do, as they ramp up a fund and support systems.

There is often a land grab when a new platform is born. Folks want to jump in, wire something up on the new platform, and be the first app to do something useful in the space. Doing this is more akin to jumping on a new domain name when a new top level is born. The good ones re-think the experience with the context of the new platform, but how many large companies are built like this?

It is easy to get lost on the new platform and not think about the core unique service that you are offering. Building a bot that sits on slack and routes to Netflix APIs isn’t a business.

There is much talk about “messaging as the new operating system” and I am curious how it fits into the greater landscape. We used to have desktop computers, with the Web connecting us in fantastic ways. Then mobile happened, and now we have voice (ambient and improving), VR, wearables and good ole IoT at various stages of hype and adoption.

At the same time we have capabilities opening up on the backend via machine learning. This is where I get excited. Messaging and voice are inputs into a smarter backend that can understand me more precisely over time, and it gets smarter with its answers.

When thinking of a problem to solve these days, I try to think about the variety of input and output methods available and I find the best fit for the problem. Don’t just think of building a slack bot, think about all of the ways your users could interact with you, and then spend the lions share on how to create that unique service that will make them feel badass.

If you look at the great Internet companies, they have phenomenal engineering that allows them to create value for the long term, way past the fad of a new input method. That being said, you should seriously consider how your users should be able to interact with you. For many of your services, a slack bot may be in order. I love how messaging and voice interfaces can cut through to the point like nothing else.

I can’t wait to see what people come with next.

ps. What about HipChat, or other chat services? That’s the beauty of thinking more broadly. Why wouldn’t you want users who are on HipChat to get access to your chat interface too? One of the advantages of HipChat is that the entire company isn’t focused on chat, and this allows them to be great in that area without all things collaboration to have to be chat first. When you have a hammer…..

Ecosystems vs. Platforms

December 8, 2015 Leave a Comment

I have enjoyed platforms, but I have loved ecosystems. As I was thinking about becoming a renoogler I was thinking about the Web and what made it special, and that lead to this tweet:

There are features I like (e.g. URLs) and parts of the developer experience that I enjoy (as well as parts that I do not!) but it is the core emergent properties that I love.

There is something special, albeit messy, about the Web ecosystem. One definition is:

“An ecosystem is a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment (things like air, water and mineral soil), interacting as a system.”

The Web is much more distributed in its power than many other platforms. We often think in hierarchies and assume that top down approaches make the most sense, but that isn’t what we see in our most successful systems: nature, or our bodies / brain.

Most people still think of our brain as the CPU of the body. It’s the CEO! It calls all of the shots! In actuality we keep learning that the brain is only a piece of the overall system. Our gut and nervous systems act as “brains” in some regards, and in general systems take care of a lot autonomously. Inside the brain itself it also gets murky. We create an ego, a notion of self, to make sure that we keep ourselves safe, alive, and ready to procreate, but what is that self? We have seen fascinating situations. For example, in patients that have had a corpus callosum severed we can see that both “sides of the brain” can actually act quite differently. Seeing someone answer verbally one way and write a different answer is quite… freaky.

In a natural ecosystem there isn’t a CEO tree in the middle of the forest calling the shots. “Ok lads, it feels like winter is coming so time to get rid of these leaves!”

Embracing these systems isn’t easy. I find myself thinking about the global financial system, quickly realize that there isn’t some guru out there who groks the entire system, and I freak out. The Fed doesn’t have all of the answers. It’s just too complex of a beast, but maybe that is OK.

There are still players who have a strong pull on the Web ecosystem of course. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, W3C, etc are key to the evolution of the system. The developers that build on top of the core platform also add a ton of value and often enable the developer experience that we have today (that the core Web doesn’t give you out of the box). I know that it can be painful, not having someone come down from the ivory tower to tell you how to do something. I would sometimes envy the .NET folks when I was in the Java world. There was a new Web framework every five minutes, but with Microsoft you could just eat your ASP.NET. However, I was never tempted to .NET, even though I thought C# was superior to Java at the time. The Java ecosystem was so different.

What about the platform?

“A computing platform is, in the most general sense, whatever pre-existing environment a piece of computer software or code object is designed to run within, obeying its constraints, and making use of its facilities.”

You run within, or on top of, the platform. It gives you the constraints. You don’t have other, different and maybe competing platforms where you can easily run on top of (unless you go for cross platform tools, but even then you need to grok the different platforms).

The Web platform is shared. It is standardized, and although the implementations are never the same, they are getting more closely aligned rather than further apart.

So many of the core Web engines are open source, or are starting to open source now. Vendors are working closer than ever. Who would have thought Microsoft would be announcing an open source JavaScript runtime at JSConf?

It turns out that the threat of the app platforms are bringing together the protectors (and benefactors for sure) of the Web.

One of the reasons I was so excited to head back to Google was the fact that ecosystems are built into its DNA. I can’t wait to be part of the great ecosystems that are out there, and to give developers the partnership they need.

Heading to Google… Take 2.0!

December 4, 2015 Leave a Comment

“Would you work there again?”

When I left Google to join Mozilla with Ben I would have answered that question in the affirmative, but I wouldn’t have thought that it would actually become a reality.

This week it has. I am very excited to have re-joined Google, and this time I get to do so with Ben.

Why?

The Google Developers space has changed a lot over the years that I have been gone, and the group is pretty darn impressive. The quality of content makes my original videos laughable, and the quality of engineering humbles me.

The general developer space has also continued to evolve. Gone is the era where you are solely focused on building a website. That changed when the mobile revolution changed the reach of our services to our pockets. At first we focused on simplified use cases with fantastic user experiences. We are past the simple “crank out a great lil mobile app that is a CRUD viewer and call an Angel” times. Now we are going deeper. We are expecting more intelligence out of our data models. We want to be able to give systems some data and have them understand and build connections for us. We want to communicate with them simply, maybe with a simple voice phrase, and have rich results instantly back with us.

These are exciting times and Google has a meaningful role to play in today’s rich ecosystem. I want to help developers create the next generation of experiences, ones that push the bar and truly help people.

Because, leverage

One of the side effects of going through my journey of health transformation was that it got me thinking a lot about life, and what I want to be doing with my own. I realized that I needed to deeply care about my next mission and the people it can affect. It wasn’t enough to love the team or the challenges, I was looking for more.

I spent quite some time thinking and working on areas across education, health, productivity, and the developer space. These were the topics that felt the most me. I could tell by the fact that I would wake up thinking about scenarios in those areas.

Within those spaces I also knew that I wanted to work on something that has leverage. It is great to work on something impactful, something that can touch many lives.

As I was working through all of this, Google called. They have new leadership and are attacking the developer space with vigor. The more people I met, the more excited I was to join forces once again. It is one thing to build a great app, but it is also very rewarding to help others build their own.

I am very curious to see how Google has changed, and to see how the world of technology will change in the future.

It has already been fun to see old friends, see my old calendar and Google Drive come alive, and to send surprise emails to folk from my “old” email. Wish me luck! Oh, and tell me what else we could be doing to help you!

p.s. Getting rid of the serifs also sealed the deal! 😉

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