2009 was a good year.
I love my job, I love being up near Bristol, and my wife and son make me happier than anything.
But most of all it’s been about this amazing little guy.
Here’s to 2010 being the year of family, runs, and software releases.
It’s definitely not called twilter, but I was sick of my text editor and felt like putting my Engineering degree to some kind of use.
It doesn’t matter. I’ll still kick it around the house before eating it.
Recently I’ve been looking for a new [product] to replace the free, open source and somewhat buggy [product] that my [client] is currently using. I tested out some commercial replacement [products] and found one that I really liked.
I wanted to find out approximately how much it would cost so I could do some calculations and work out the best way to present a technical and business case for moving away from [product]. But could I get a price out of these people?
After two phone calls and two emails they were pushing for meetings, timescales, for me reveal the details of my client and the stakeholders, full information about who would sign the contracts and how long they would want to purchase the licence for.
Maybe this is how it works in the business and sales world, but I’m a technical person. I can poke my head in, relate to people, and live up there for a while, but I don’t like bullshit and I’ll go somewhere else if you piss me off.
When you say that you want to:
optimize [my] software investment with pricing that is customized for [my] situation, based on how the product will be used and deployed
I know that you’re really saying:
we want to work out how much money we can get out of you and squeeze you for as much of it as possible
I liked your [product] technically, but if you can’t meet me half way, I’ll find someone else who I can work with.
Like I said in my first email, I was looking for a general idea of how much [your product] was likely to cost so that I could work out the best way to put forward some kind of business case for moving away from [existing product]. I’d tested out a number of [products] and was impressed with the performance of [your product].
It’s obviously a complicated process to work out the cost of a licence, so for now I’m going to use the price of [your competitor] as a base line and forward the [competitor] and [your] details to the appropriate people in my client’s Procurement and Operations departments.
I don’t know what processes they use or what the timescales are likely to be, but I’m going to leave all discussions from now on up to them.
Thank you for your time, and my apologies for not being able to progress this further.
Anyway, back to my beloved code.
I’ve been using Twitter for nearly three years now. I love this particular form of interaction, and it’s because of Twitter that I have my current job.
As great as Twitter is, there are some things about it that I don’t like. I like Twitter when it’s doing what it does best – sending and routing messages between millions of users. I don’t like Twitter when it’s showing me things I don’t want to see, and hiding things from me that I do.
To make Twitter better for me, I started writing a twitter proxy back in September. It acts as layer between twitter and all of my Twitter clients so that I can control, in one place, the flow of information between me and Twitter. I’ve been using it on my desktop and iPhone ever since (both Tweetie and Twitterrific support specifying a different “API URL”). I’m planning to make it ready for public consumption over Christmas.
Some of the things it supports/will support are:
I don’t know exactly how I’m going to release it, but it will probably be a combination of:
If all goes well this will happen just after the new year.
