I have been standing aside of new clients and projects for the whole summer, there have been two great reasons for this decision. One: I wanted to enjoy the summer, and two: I needed time for my own projects, or better said: my own projects need time from me.

When I’m working for a client I’m really concentrate on which I’m responsible of. I focus very deep in my client needs and I offer the 100% of me to the project I’m being payed for.

If I want to work on my pet-projects I have to free myself. I have to clean my TODO list and open a clean period, without deadlines or external responsibilities.

My pet-projects periods are very important for me. They are one of the reasons I am very grateful of this skills of me that I have become in a profession.

Spending time working in my pet-projects not only makes me feel fulfilled, it also makes me be a better professional. They feed my passion, and keep me alert, they are very hard exercises those push me to my limits.

So, which are these so important pet-projects?, this is a summarized list of all the ‘on developing‘ projects I’m working on.

Vitreous

“The transparent personal website manager”

The first in the list because is the one where I have placed more energy lately.

Vitreous has been born to revolutionize the personal website and portfolio manager systems environment.

Focused in users with a very minimal web experience, print designers, photographers, writers, any kind of content producers, who wants to have a personal (and customizable) website but feel so lazy to deal with the actual available options.

Vitreous is a transparent personal website management. You have not to login in any where, you have not to upload files using webforms, you just have to copy files into your local hard disk, organize them into folders and Vitreous will do the magic.

We are currently in beta version, we are accepting beta testers and we have already some examples to show.

There have been multiple fights to achieve the actual status of the development. The Dropbox API is not as complete as we would desire, defining a versatile metadata system using files has been a complex work, to offer a secure full access to the templates has needed ingenuity and good programming, implement a solid and reliable stand-alone design render engine has turned indispensable.

BookySitter

“The market place for the independent publishers”

This is the oldest still ‘on development’ project I have in my pocket. I have been working on it for the last three years, not very actively of course.

The independent publishers have a lot of difficulties to reach the final readers, there are multiple reasons for this, the most important is the difficult of the distribution.

BookySitter tries to offer a solution for this, offering a possibility to the independent publisher to create his own online book shop, easy, simple and customizable. With small but useful functionalities especially focused in the small publisher needs like bookshops management.

But this is only one side of BookySitter, in the other side BookySitter wants to be a market place for the independent publications, where any reader interested in books made from the heart and not from the pocket can find a reliable catalog.

So what we have is a multi store system with independent and common catalogs. Full customizable templates. Multi-shopping-cart system.

We are still in a very green development status but we have already a shop in production: escrito a lapiz’s shop

We are also open for beta testers. Any independent publishers who is interested in open an online store can talk with us, we will offer our service and support by free.

The Kids Art Gallery

“A gallery that respects and assesses the artistic power that have the most creative creatures on the world”

This is the project closest to my heart.

The Kids Art Gallery is an online multi-gallery for children paintings.

This is a very personal initiative with no any profit purpose underneath.

I want to build an online reference for the producers and the lovers (as I am) of this kind of art. I want to build a pleasant interface to navigate and appreciate in every detail children art sample.

The intention is not only build an online gallery but also a place of understanding and comment this contents, inviting psychologists, fathers and children to comment and write about the works of art.

Currently we are working in the design and the user experience where we have a lot to improve.

In this moment we are accepting new artists so if you know any one please ask me for an invitation code.

Sitoi

“The trade fair stalls manager”

One of the few projects with a very clear business model.

Sitoi is a for rental spaces online manager. Is focused in street markets, trade fairs, parkings, … any situation where there is an space divided in for rental portions.

This project is still in the conceptualize state, but this is the most important part of it. We have defined a very fast, easy and versatile way to publish online spaces for renting.

We are now working in the user interface.

ScrapStats

“Data is every where”

When you are not the owner of the data is difficult to follow up and make monitoring of the changes.

ScrapStats allows you to monitor the changes of any data that is accessible for a browser.

With a very simple system based in html scrapping you can register as many data monitors as you need, ScrapStats will take an snap-shot of the data periodically and offer you alerts and charts of the evolution.

We are in alpha status of this project, there is already an operative prototype but we need to improve the user interface.

Space Suckers Chronicles

“You can introduce this space ship where it fits!”

Building a multi-user-text-based-game has been always a murmur in my head. Born as a RMU exercise it is now one of the projects I’m working on.

in S2C you can build space-ships, mines, colonize planets and confront your fleets with the other players ones. Every thing happens in real time, and in a persistent way so even if you are not in front in the computer your fleets and planets are still there living their own lifes.

There is not graphics animation or any other representation of this parallel world rather than the text info you are feeded with.

“It runs on the world’s most powerful graphics chip, imagination.” – Dc. Sheldon Cooper

This project is in alpha version, there is a prototype already working implemented in a three layers infrastructure:

• The logic
• The server
• The client

It is an Open Source initiative.

Now that you know all my ‘on development’ pet-projects you can join me to push any of them that you feel interested in. Just give me a shout and tell me why you are interested and how you can help. Currently my bigger weakness and bottleneck is in the user interfaces development.

I remember three years ago talking with one of my respected colleagues about our freelance way of life. I was defending the experience of working with end customer, taking the project from the beginning when it is only an abstract idea, extracting to the customer all the info the project needs, to become one abstract idea in reality, teaching your contracting how to build an internet project is and what it needs.

He was in the other side: he preferred to not deal with all of this.

He had just more experience than me. The time has placed me in the same opinion.

Now I’m starting to generalize so please don’t take offense of my words at least you feel recognized on them.

The history is common and it starts like this: A new email contact achieves to my inbox, someone was looking for a freelance web developer and arrived to this web site and decided to contact me. This history has never had a happy end. Just a waste of time on my side.

These are the mistakes this customer is gonna make:

• He doesn’t believe there is a relation between quality and price. He thinks all professionals are the same, they just have to find the cheapest one.
• He is not calculating property the amount of resources that an internet entrepreneurship needs to wake up. He thinks that finding a programmer is enough, no idea about user experience, information architecture, graphics and design, marketing, market studies, usability, SEO, maintenance, servers, customer attention, business model, investors, legal implications, …
• He overrates his idea. He thinks he has a million dollar idea, but he even hasn’t studied the other players, the competitors. He thinks his idea is the most important part of the project when the reality is that it is worthless without a good development in every sense of the word. He thinks he has the idea very good defined but it is just an abstraction with not definition or analysis at all.
• He wants it all. Every stupid functionality is indispensable. Not possibility to discern between necessary and desirable. Not possibility to define a first iteration with a basic functionality. Negation of the nature of an internet project: it will ask what it needs, you just don’t know yet.
• He is not gonna take any responsibility. He thinks his only function in this adventure is to push with the budgets and the timings. He doesn’t accept he has to work, he has to offer answers, solutions, cover no technical tasks, … and do it fast. I need him to be a companion, a partner.
• He is not gonna take any risk. Really? you are starting up a supposedly great business and you have reserved 1.500 euros to do it real?. This is less than the vegetable store on the corner pays for rent. This is very related with the previous point: one of the biggest responsibilities he is gonna avoid is the obtaining of money. He says he has not to much money and I should understand this issue. What he is telling me is that he just failed in one of his most important responsibilities: the money supply.
• He doesn’t sell it self. He just writes an email with petitions (usually a budget). He just says he has a great idea and he is expecting me to convince him that I’m the right professional he needs. He doesn’t say anything about him, about his experience in internet entrepreneurship, why should I accept to work with him?, which are his references?.
• He doesn’t understand his own business model. I know better than him which the possibilities are, even which of them are possible better for his business proposition. I feel scared with his ideas. This is one of the most frustrating situations. He has lost his leadership. He is not an inspiration for me.
• He asks me for my programming skills and what he is really asking me is to be his CEO. He wants me to build the team, to manage it, to resolve any issue, to be a technical and business consulter. And if for any reason the project doesn’t success like it was supposed to, he will want me to be the responsible.
• He wants a fixed budget, even if the idea is properly defined and documented (what is unlikely) is literally impossible to know which are gonna be the final needs of the project, or the issues we are gonna find, or the specification modifications we will should face up.

I think I have realized that the desirable end customer, the one that knows the domain, who knows the value (and the price) of the quality, who respects me as a professional, who takes risks to stand up his idea, who has the experience to offer justified and well analyzed ideas, who understands his responsibilities, the one that is a really leader and an inspiration, who really believe on his project, he is not calling you in his own name, will be the start-up he has just created to wrap the project who will call you.

This is why my really preferred end customer, which officially are not really end customer, are the Start-Ups.

Today I have comeback from a five months isolation bubble of coding, partnership and teamwork in Berlin.

When I talked by phone with Markus for first time I didn’t expect how wonderful and grateful was gonna be to become the new member of his team.

I just was looking for a position that allow me to work among an small developer team and I found an excited startup very concerned in find the most talented people, I have spent half of a year surrounded by 60 very interesting and friendly people from more than 22 nationalities.

The multidisciplinary team

One thing SponsorPay has confirmed to me has been that it isn’t possible to success in an Internet entrepreneurship if you only focus in technology. From the 60 people of the Berlin SponsorPay’s team only 7 of us are programmers. The big weight of the business is carried by people attending the needs of our customers and users, people thinking in new business ideas, people measuring what is working and what isn’t, people talking to other people about us, …

Of course every of these departments depends in one way or another in our small techie team, as well as we depend in the plugs to work, is a very common mistake to don’t think even in the existence and the necessity of this people as much as the programmers.

You are very wrong if your think behind a successful website there is just code.

Teamwork

This last five months have been stressful and rewarding very just in the perfect balance. I feel like I have been doing anything else but work but in the same time I feel full and not empty.

In any case my stress feeling has never been produced because an slavery schedule or my bosses pushing me, all the opposite, the schedule is based in objectives and not in hours sitting down on the chair, an the objectives for every sprint are decide by all of us with especial respect for the development team previsions.

Technically the projects we are carrying are not specially complicated, the hard part is that every thing is in continuos movement and everyone in the team has to know and to understand what the others are doing.

We have become in a git warriors.

Another hard side of our technology is that it has to deal with a high work load, with an average of 150 requests/second and maximum peaks of 400 requests/second, we have to move any feet very carefully.

So this is the situation: we are 7 people dancing together in a very dense and moody multiple choreography carrying cups in our hands under an storm trying to not any drop to touch the floor.

This is why they need good dancers and this is why they can be proud of the dance group the already have.

The European Style

Another thing I have felt in my professional experience in this wonderful city is the respect for the talent.

SponsorPay is a company with less than two years wich has already raised more than 10€ Millions of venture capitals.. And of course is not the only startup based in technology business that is protected this way by investors.

What is this money for? To build a good team, talented professionals. They know to obtain this costs money, they know they need it and they know that to choose a regular worked instead a good professional is never profitable.

Why isn’t this happen in Spain? Because there are not experienced business people carrying startups, so all the startups are carried by, possibly, enthusiastic people who is risking his own money to become an idea in a reality, but, sorry I say this, this is not enough. One of SponsorPay’s cofounders, and actual CEO, left his job as CEO of Telefónica Deutschland to push up an small company that was fighting in a very risky and futuristic business model.

When have you seen this in Spain? Do you imagine this guy taking the decision to change his very comfortable, and profitable, chair to put all his expertise and, even most important, all his contacts to drive a tiny and unknown company of uncertain future born in the hands of a twenty-something entrepreneur?

The summary of these last paragraphs is something that is becoming in a ‘meme’ lately: If you are a good professional and you want to find people that appreciates and respects your value run away from Spain.

So, what have I come back to Spain?, you will be wondering… because this and this. Besides, they have offered me the possibility to telecommute :).

Friendship

But over all and the most important thing I have build in this Berlin experience has been a few really good new friends.

Different kinds of work have different time quanta. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity. But the time quantum for hacking is very long: it might take an hour just to load a problem into your head. So the cost of having someone from personnel call you about a form you forgot to fill out can be huge.

This is why hackers give you such a baleful stare as they turn from their screen to answer your question. Inside their heads a giant house of cards is tottering.

The mere possibility of being interrupted deters hackers from starting hard projects. This is why they tend to work late at night, and why it’s next to impossible to write great software in a cubicle (except late at night).

Paul Graham in How to Make Wealth.

…Reading Paul Graham I feel someone gets me on.

That was awsome, but this wasn’t what Indexhibit is.

Since this moment I was looking for the moment to develop by my self the kind of ‘transparent portfolio manager’ I was thinking on.

The result is still inside of my fingers but for the moment I have an experimental version ready to work: Vitreous.

Vitreous is a simple Ruby + Sinatra + Dropbox API application that looks on your Dropbox online folder and builds a simple web site with collections and items.

Using simple tricks you can: short the collections and the items, add a description text for each item, configuring home image and description.You can manage your portfolio just creating folders on your local hard disk and adding images to them. Dropbox and Vitreous will do the rest.

The next step is to build a multi user application so you will be able to open a Vitreous Portfolio just introducing your Dropbox Api Credentials on an online form. Multiple portfolios for unique user, template system, auto cache refresh,

…(I am still a few angry with the Dropbox API… I hope they will move forward soon).

Playing with the Dropbox API for an another experimental pet-project I needed to test how my mini-application was responding to different Dropbox contents. On the beginning I was configuring a real Dropbox account for testing but this was not agile and flexible. So this is because I decided to mock the dropbox ruby gem and this is because DummyDropbox has been born.

The working is simple: you point the gem to a local folder, all the dropbox API calls will think that this local folder is a real Dropbox account.

Example:

require 'dummy_dropbox'
DropboxDummy.root_path = "#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/test/fixtures/dropbox"
session = Dropbox::Session.new('key', 'secret')
assert_equal(
  File.read( "#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/test/fixtures/dropbox/file1.txt" ),
  session.download( '/file1.txt' ) 
)

Wondering if this could be helpful for someone.

Lately I’m involved on projects that do a very intensive use of email accounts as input of information.

The use of mail in an automatic process is always a pain in the ass because of the huge casuistic and also for the difficulty to test it.

Nothing we can do with the first problem but for the second one here is my propose of a very simple Ruby Gem to mock the Net::POP3.start petition so you can simulate the emails that a real POP3 petition could find:

FibberMailman the mock for the Net::POP3.start.

Just charge a bunch of raw mails in an strings array and send them to the FibberMailman.lie_to_me method like this:

require 'fibber_mailman'
 
raw_mails = [
  File.read( "/fixtures/mail1.raw_mail" ) ),
  File.read( "/fixtures/mail2.raw_mail" ) ),
]
 
FibberMailman.lie_to_me( raw_mails ) do
  <your code that uses the Net::POP3.start on any point>
end

Every petition to the Net::POP3.start method into the inside block will be feed with fake emails built from the raw mail strings.

There I had the opportunity to talk about one of my unfinished pet project OneOfZombies the Game.

I have always loved the kind of paintings made for people that suppose don’t know how to paint, the drawings full of colors with aggressive strokes and absolutely non pretentious motive.

After a while I realized that there is a name for this kind of paintings: Art Brut, drawings made for people without art knowledge, the outsiders. I don’t know why but this paintings send to me a lot of energy and always produce an smile on my face.

After visiting several Art Brut expositions I have found the real Art Brut artists: the kids. They are awesome, they produce the most wonderful Art Brut I have ever seen, and they do it with an incredible productivity.

My girlfriend’s nephew is one of them, I love every of his drawings, I thought that it will be a good idea to build him an small website for his drawings, not only to share them with acquaintances but also to let him know I’m very proud of his stuff.

After a few code lines written I realized that this was a multi kids’ art gallery will be a fucking good idea and this is because theKidsArtGallery has born.

I have found a bunch of pages that implements the same idea but in my opinion none of them have a good functionality.

theKidsArtGallery is a virtual gallery of paintings and drawings of children from around all countries and continents.

A gallery that respects and assesses the artistic power that have the most creative creatures on the world.

It also wants to be a place for appreciation and motivation for the children creativity.

If you have children, or any other young relative you will know that they produce a very big and uncontrollable amount of small pieces of art, theKidsArtGallery can be a good way to keep them organized and to share them.

The whole project is non-profit, I just wanted to make real a reference place for people with my same interest for the kids drawings.

The site is on continuous development, I didn’t find yet the functionality and the style I’m looking for, any suggestion on this fields will be welcome.

If you are interested on open a gallery for your small familiars or even for your old drawings when you was a child, please contact with me.

On a recent conversation with Raúl Murciano about the new improvements on the Twitter API I was defending the need of Twitter becoming an open protocol.

The first response could be “Why is this needed?, why don’t just use the Twitter platform?“, the answer is not easy to do with the mind it is more a feeling on the heart.

Twitter has been become on an incredible simple and useful service, twitter is everywhere and it is used for anything. It has become in the chat of our age, also in an alert system, in a marketing place, there where you want to put an small piece of information there is Twitter.

So now Twitter has proved what wonderful it is, what kind of a powerful tool it is, and all this power is always better to be shared and to open it to the people.

Of course there is something wrong on my approach: Twitter has built Twitter so it deserves to keep it, to open it is not a profitable idea and all of us know what is what moves the world. But at the moment Twitter keeps distrustful the control of Twitter it has not anymore the right of keep it.

The natural way of Twitter is being an open protocol where there is not anymore only one service provider but a bunch of them, communicating with each other, and anyone can buildup its own Twitter server, and we can choose our favorite one. I don’t see the difference between Twitter and email, or IRC, or HTTP it self. How would you feel if the email service was offered only by one company?, doesn’t matter how fashion and nice guys they were.

The decisions are not anymore taken on an unilateral way, the power is not anymore owned by anyone, the tool is already uncontrollable (in the good sense of the word), the service is distributed and scalable, the privacy has a possibility, the competition helps to the user, this is the kind of sons Internet is proud of.

Technically it has not to be the most complicated of the protocols, the most important thing Twitter is offering to us right now is just us, the users. Despite the incredible server balancing technology is has to support, but this is just a consequence of being the Only One.

Twitter is awesome and Twitter can be proud of itself, it deserves all our ovations but is time to move on, Twitter has the right to keep what it has built and we have the right to do it better, if Twitter doesn’t do it someone must to.

The real question is: are we willing to change our fashion ‘@nick‘ by a one more standard and scalable ‘nick@server.com‘?