Codename MC

The Boon and Bane of the Background

I’m sure a bunch of you are wondering, “Whatever happened to Codename MC?” Well, the long and the short of it is that Terralien’s been doing well, and that’s distracted us from working on MC. Progress is still being made (I’m very hopeful we’ll have a “Terralien Friends” release in a week or two), but it has slowed down dramatically. And while I’d certainly like to have it sooner rather than later, this is actually MC fulfilling its mission.

You see, the great thing about a project like MC is that it keeps us busy when things are a bit slower around Terralien, which is especially important for us because of our model. Most consulting shops are run in the typical employee model: hire some folks, pay them salaries, and do all the usual employee/employer “stuff”. In past jobs we’ve done the employee thing, and while it has its pluses and its place, it’s just not the right fit for a bunch of passionate, entrepreneurial, self-managing designers and developers. Instead we’ve got the Terralien crew: a carefully selected, close-knit group of sub-contractors that work together on a recurring basis to make magic happen for Terralien clients.

Now, we love the crew model, but it comes with its own set of challenges, and one of the most difficult ones is scheduling. If one project winds down and there’s a lull between it and the next project locking in, it’s understandable for a crew member to get a bit antsy and go looking for work on their own. Sometimes they find their own gig and it works out great, but often they get a gig that isn’t as good as what Terralien can land, they don’t get the help and organization that Terralien provides on projects, and they duplicate the time and energy that Terralien puts in to sales and marketing. On the other side of things, Terralien then has difficulty setting up new gigs, because just as a gig is locking in the crew members that would be a good fit for it are often locking in to their own projects.

For a long time this has just been an unavoidable cost, and we’ve rolled with the punches and still been able to deliver some amazing projects. But as we’ve built up  more momentum (and capital!) we’ve reached a place where Terralien can start sponsoring projects like MC in the background to smooth over the gaps in the project schedule. And this is not inconsistent with Terralien’s mission, which is to be an “entrepreneurial incubator” in every way possible, both by doing amazing things for our clients and also by being entrepreneurial ourselves.

All that to say that background projects like MC will go faster when Terralien is less busy, and slower when we’re slammed. Once a project launches we’ll always stay on top of the support side, but new development will drop off in favor of client work. That is, until a project goes cashflow positive and can start being a client itself - then you can expect the work on it to take off! All our projects are designed to have low operational overhead and thus earnings can be funneled right back in to new development.

So, right now while we’re making less progress on MC, we’d like to thank you for your patience, and let you now that we’re still pumped to share it with you - it’ll be worth the wait!

Post Holiday Update

Just wanted to drop all you loyal followers an update about Codename MC and what we’ve been up to over the holidays. Work has continued and the app is getting close to the internal alpha we’re calling the “Terralien Friends Release”. Duff has cranked hard the past few weeks, and the code side of the app is pretty much ready to go.

Of course, Duff had some extra motivation: his beautiful new daughter arrived on the 29th, so he was getting as much done before being knocked out as possible! This has put him a bit ahead of Rich, but design is quickly getting caught up and we’re working hard to get the settings area of the app (a key piece!) to a point where we can give it to our compatriots without hurting their eyes.

I had a chance to reveal a few more details to the folks at our local Ruby hack night last night, and heard lots of “I want that!” from the crowd. And if anyone does want an in-person peek, I’m more than willing to sit down and show you, you just have to promise to Twitter something nice like James (kidding!).

I can’t wait to pull back the curtain for all of you, and fully expect to do that in the next few weeks. The more I show MC to people and hear their feedback, the more excited I am by the potential of the application to change user’s lives for the better. Thanks for your attention as we crank along - it’s so appreciated, and it will be rewarded!

Finessing Brute Force

One of the services that MC needs to talk to is Github, our preferred manner of hosting and collaborating on code here at Terralien. As we researched Github’s API, we quickly figured out how to pull in commits for public repositories, but were struggling to do it for private repositories. Unfortunately that made the API unusable for MC, since all of our project work goes on in private repositories.

So what to do? Well, first we did our due diligence and Google’d and asked around as best would could. We found one article, but it wasn’t working and turned out to be something of a red herring. Finally, we threw up our hands, and pulled out the universal lock pick: mechanize! It’s basically a really well done screen scraping tool, and since Github’s HTML is pretty clean, it wasn’t that much work to just pull what we needed right off the pages.

Unfortunately, mechanize is a brute force solution (if a really nice one). It’s harder to get working initially (lots of digging through HTML source), more prone to break, higher bandwidth, etc. But sometimes, when all else fails, you have to trade elegance for progress, and that’s what we decided to do.

Thankfully, though, as we proceeded down the mechanize path, we did one other thing: we got really chatty about it. If you have to brute force something, be sure to talk about it, whether it be on a mailing list, Twitter, or even just within your own team. Brute force plus being communicative allows you to build some momentum, show some initiative, while also getting a bunch of other people thinking about whether there’s a better way to do what you’re doing.

Which is exactly what happened: just as we about had the mechanize solution working, ryanbriones twittered with the right way to do it, and we were able to rip out mechanize and use the proper API. So was the time spent with mechanize wasted? No, it just had its payoff in momentum rather than in functionality.

Bottom line? Never allow yourself to be blocked waiting for the “best” solution, but at the same time be smart and open up lines of communication. If you do, you’re much more likely to find a better way, sooner or later.

Marketing Hat

From Nathaniel:

It’s been quite the learning curve to really push the boundaries of my marketing know-how and promote MC like crazy. I’m at that point in the learning curve where I feel like I might be getting it… and then quickly oscillate to feeling like I have no earthly idea what I’m doing. Yet that’s what I’ve felt whenever I’ve learned something new, whether it was programming, Ruby, or how to run Terralien. And in each case, it’s been worthwhile in an amazingly life-changing way.

Of course, the first step to marketing is to build something worth talking about. If you build something mediocre, all efforts to get people using it will be both painful and useless. If you build something remarkable, it can’t help but spread. I see a microcosm of this regularly on Twitter - people talk about the remarkable, and you hear barely a peep about the merely ordinary.

And yet, while being remarkable is a necessary prerequisite, it’s not everything you can or should do. Word of mouth is great and is the underlying driver of all good marketing, but it works slowly and it needs to be seeded. It can be “watered” by getting the amazing thing you’ve made in front of as many people as possible so they have an opportunity to experience what you’ve created. The best part is, if you’ve built something you really believe can improve people’s lives, then you can do all this honestly and genuinely - it’s not something that has to be manufactured.

So where am I at in this process? Well, I believe we’re making something remarkable, and I’m doing my best to build an interested audience that will want to try it out when it’s ready. Where I still feel inadequate is in building a story, a narrative about what we’re building, rather than just a bunch of disconnected bits. I want the narrative to transition smoothly from the current mystery in to the revealed application, and I’m not sure how all to do that yet.

But the best way to learn is to do, so do I shall, and with as much vigor and skill as I can muster. Thanks for following along so far, and know that I’m doing my best to make sure you have a worthy payoff for the time and attention you’re giving us!