The old app was focused on 50 friends max, and photo sharing. Once when visiting their office and seeing if they were interested about my profile I told them it’d be more “bally” to even limit to 10, but not counting family members. This way people could actually add as many people as they wanted, but the baseline would have more impact (Note: In case you wonder they told me they had nothing for me, either because Dave Morin – CEO of Path – is super good friend with Joe Green – CEO of Causes – which I was leaving, or either because I suck).

I guess that didn’t work too well as they pivoted a bit to be a full featured facebook like sharing (locations, photos, music, status, and even when you go to sleep). I now see way more activity than before, and more friends joining (but that’s because I’m a geek with geek friends, you might actually see none). The iPhone application is really slick, and some people starting coping their UI (objective-c or even CSS based).

The feeling I have is there is still room left for improvement on mobile iPhone applications, even on busy segments like social networks. It’s funny to see Facebook hasn’t been that good on mobile (seeing how long it took for an iPad application – I heard some people refused to work on it unless they could ditch three20 from the app), Path2 seems way slicker and not as busy. Thinking about it the way I use the Facebook mobile app on the iPhone is exactly the features giving by Path, no more – no chat, etc. Using Path2 I remember how I should remove features from mobile apps, focusing on what matters the most.

So when is someone releasing a Facebook Path2 like application, as slick? This way at least I can use it with my friends.

En sortant de l’aéroport international, à 50 mètres devant la sortie, vous trouverez un guichet de “prepaid taxi”, petit cube blanc de 3 mètres sur 3. Le temps de ces 50 mètres vous serez demandé une 10aine de fois ‘prepaid prepaid’ par des chauffeurs, ignorez-les.

Dites au guichet où vous allez (Vivek Hotel, Pahar Ganj, Main Bazaar Road), j’ai payé 390 roupies. Vous donnez un billet de 500 roupies (vous venez de changer un billet de 50 euros dans le bureau de change Thomas Cook à l’intérieur de l’aéroport), et là le gars vous rend… 100 roupies! S’imaginant qu’il va en gagner 10 au passage… Tapotez sur le billet il comprendra, vous sors un billet de 20 roupies genre il a pas de monnaie, (et vous non plus), attendez un peu et hop magie, il trouve 10 roupies à vous rendre. N’oubliez pas les _deux_ feuillets qu’il doit vous donner (un pour vous, un pour le chauffeur).

Là les chauffeurs vont vous approcher, _ne donnez pas le feuillet chauffeur avant destination_, le jeu du chauffeur c’est d’avoir ce feuillet le plus tôt possible, le votre de lui donner uniquement une fois devant l’hotel. Assurez-vous avant de monter dans le taxi qu’il sait où aller, ils diront toujours ‘ok ok’ mais en fait ils ne savent rien. En général les questions qu’on vous pose sont “when is your last time in India”, répondez “last week”, et “first time in Vivek Hotel?”, répondez “third time”. En effet on tachera de vous dissuader d’aller dans cet hotel en vous disant qu’il a brulé il y a 3 jours, etc, mais n’en croyez pas un mot.

I will now try my Leica M9 in India, you can follow my work and experience on the way here or on my photography website: Leica M9 India (and my flickr).

David Bacher, a friend of mine, has been shooting weddings for a few years now. If you’re looking for an engagement photographer in Paris he might be able to help you, he’s American. He even has a blog if you want to follow his work.

I’m going to be in India for 3 months this October 2011, with a Leica M9 and a few lenses, and will be blogging from here and my photography website : India Leica M9. You can like my Facebook page Penso Photography as I will post updates there.

As last time, my plan is to get an Enfield 350 and ride the North (I did 3 months in the South). I had hoped to get to Ladakh but October will probably be too cold already, therefor I’ll just visit Rajasthan, Gujarat and if I have time, ride all the way to Benares and Calcutta.

If you have advices or are looking for photography with a Leica M9, check my work soon I’ll try to upload some real time on my Facebook page.

The original Push application has about 50,000 users, hopefully the lite version will boost it even more. Spread the words, and send me feedback.

A few weeks back I was at WWDC (San Francisco), the Apple conference. Something strikes me, every time I hear French I usually say a few words asking where they’re from and so on, and 50% of the time they patronize me.

They look at me as I’m a little student who came from Paris, for a week or two, I only worked since my 18 (I’m turning 33). It usually comes to a point where I say I actually live in San Francisco (well not for long now as I’m thinking of not coming back after my Parisian vacation in July), the discussion suddenly changes, but not all the time. They then want to know how I’ve managed to be here, and how they could achieve the same.

A few days ago I was at Summit (better than coworking space to my opinion), a great Coffee shop in San Francisco with lots of developers hanging around on day time, working on startup ideas. I heard 2 French guys, obviously Engineers, and talked to them. They patronized me (again!) and didn’t even say hi, they just didn’t want to talk.

American Engineers very rarely have that attitude, they’re always very happy to meet new people, and I’ve met numerous people at Summit and other places while not going there for that purpose. Even non Engineers love networking, and San Francisco is the only place where I can wear a short, t-shirt, flip flops and talk to a CEO with a $400 shirt without him patronizing me. Engineers are the people making startups happen, and they’re very aware of that.

A French friend of mine actually noticed the same and don’t talk to French people anymore while going to conferences. If you’re French, don’t do that. Network is important.

The existing tools like Gitx, Tower, Gitk, Sprout, Gitnub are all very similar in the way they do things, they are only improved tool of a basic Gitk but nothing than actually makes you want to use it full time.

I know, you think this is a useless application, git in command line is good enough. But you’d probably say the same thing about Github 4 years ago, as you had your own servers, but it still became the de facto standard for Git source hosting today. Most of all because they added features noone thought about git at the time (easier pull, social coding, etc).

Questions coming to mind about a GUI Git application:

1. Why you don’t use a GUI?
2. Why such a tool doesn’t exist yet?
3. What would make you use this tool?
4. How long would it take to make such a tool?
5. Would it be sustainable?

My answers:

1. You don’t use those GUI because they suck, if you use git you probably know what you’re doing. Adding features slower to use in GUI than command line is a bad idea. You then basically run a GUI only to view branches and do visual things, once a week.
2. A better tool doesn’t exist because it’s tough to develop, a new one need to find a new workflow, using complete different workflow than the existing bad ones.
3. You would use the new tool because it saves you time, and allow not so advanced git user to do tricky things without knowing git as well. It also needs features for small groups, like push notifications when someone push code, local gitjour similar feature (share your git locally and discover others through Bonjour) for quick hackathon. You’d want a nice branch visual like the ones from github, and a commenting system similar to github. You’d want full Github support, a live activity feed similar to BaseCamp listing commits, new comments. You’d want a light chat to reply live to commits, only for developers. You’d want more than just a git GUI.
4. I think a beta version of such a Cocoa tool would take 3 months full time to get a beta, 6 months to get something working on a daily basis, for a team of at least 2 very good developers. There is a lot of thoughts to put in the design first.
5. I can’t say, but seeing github is bigger than Google Code and Sourceforge, and everyone in San Francisco has a mac laptop as a development laptop, I have the feeling such a tool, if popular, would be sustainable for a team of 3 people full time. San Francisco is a lot about trends, if you can make such a tool popular among a few top developers, there is a big change the others would follow.

A little less than a year ago, I started to work for Causes, a great experience overall. First time I’ve worked full time for a US based company, and the best users/employees ratio you can imagine. Causes.com announces 150 millions users (fact is it’s a little more), run by less than 10 Software Engineers. The last months I’ve worked:

• A lot on the Facebook Open Graph
• On the Email infrastructure (emailing all those users without being flagged as SPAM tis more difficult than you think)
• Improving test run, using decentralized methods (hydra, but don’t use hydra really, just upgrade to rspec and use other tools)

The Engineer team I’ve met at Causes is probably one of the best I’ve met so far, I’ve learned a lot about:

• Scrum and Sprint jobs
• Pivotal Tracker which I ended up liking a lot
• How Git commit messages are more than more important for your team
• Ruby, yes I’ve learned more about Ruby and the more I use it, the more I like it.
• More stuff I’ve forgot as I’m typing this.

I you ever get the chance to interview or join Causes, you’ll have a lot of fun and join a great project, not to say an amazing office. But tomorrow will be my last day there, and I’ll be free for the next weeks to meet you.

I’m flying back to Paris on July 8th, and don’t plan to come back for now unless I get a good opportunity in San Francisco before leaving. I do iPhone and Rails development but really like doing iPhone applications overall. I’ll also work on tweetsell.it and Push4 on a side.

If we haven’t met yet, please contact me I’m free and look for amazing project to join. You’ll find my linkedin profile and my online résumé (PDF) if you care. I’ll also be at WWDC next week and will try to show up in a few events this month.

J’ai donc fermé cette entreprise vers septembre 2009 (il y a donc plus de 18 mois environ). Plusieurs mois plus tard la RSI (Régime Social des Indépendants) dont le site web vous rappellera les sites web du siècle dernier me demande des charges pour le dernier trimestre 2009, que je n’ai pas à payer. Le Kbis de la dissolution de l’entreprise ne suffit pas, j’attends un papier de l’URSAAF que j’obtiens finalement tant bien que mal et que j’envoie à la RSI.

Je me considérais tranquille… et bah non. Je viens de recevoir une demande de paiement de 2,000 euros environ (avec frais supplémentaire dû au retard) pour le dernier trimestre 2009. Ma maman appelle de Paris, la RSI dit pas de soucis on vous rappellera dans une semaine sinon vous rappelez. Évidemment ils n’ont jamais rappelé, et en rappelant le service recouvrement RSI demande maintenant ma déclaration d’impôts 2009 (qui leur servira à rien dans ce cas précis).

Bienvenue en France, le pays où on vous fait chier 18 mois plus tard parce que vous avez eu le malheur de créer une entreprise. Note: le jour de la création de votre entreprise il n’y a jamais de retard sur vos charges que vous aurez à payer manu militari avant même d’avoir généré le moindre sous. P’tain…