I’ve been working on a custom Firefox toolbar for a really cool project that I can’t talk about yet.
What I’ve been finding is that the quality of documentation for developers isn’t good, and is both inconsistent and frequently missing important details (or hasn’t been updated to reflect changes).
I’m going to post a few things I’ve learned over the past few days that took far more time to figure out than it should have. Hopefully somebody else will benefit from my wasted time. Continue reading
I’ve been learning a lot of hands-on technical things lately.
Recently made the switch from Drupal 6 to 7 (I’ll probably write some technical posts about that), started playing around with Drupal’s REST services module (useful, but poorly documented – I’ll write about that too!), and am in the process of putting together a Firefox toolbar for a project (hopefully released to the public soon).
The toolbar will be heavily integrated with a Drupal website, including login control. That was an interesting challenge, since Drupal uses cookies to manage sessions, and javascript (at least in modern browsers) won’t allow cross-site cookie access. That could be a topic for another post.
In addition, I’ve been playing around with HTML5 canvas, and particularly manipulating images on the fly. I’ve experimented with it before, over the past two years, but until recently it wasn’t supported by enough browsers for me to actually use it for a live project, and in addition the javascript libraries weren’t there yet, so everything had to be hand-coded. jQuery makes things a lot easier, of course. There’s a number of tutorials on the topic now, but I find that they don’t address some of the “obvious” beginner stuff that I had to figure out through trial and error. I may write about this as well, although it will depend on the timing of a project that I can’t talk about yet.
Stay tuned for some techy material!
Once in a while (actually every few weeks, give or take) somebody asks me if I’ll do a project for equity instead of cash.
My immediate response is “what’s your exit plan?”.
Usually this is met with a blank stare, which is when I follow my question up with “what I mean is, how do I sell those shares, and when?”. At this point, in 90% of cases, the other party is already starting to look panicky. I then usually politely excuse myself and leave.
It isn’t that I’m opposed in general to holding equity in a project that I’m working on. Far from it. The lack of an exit plan, however, implies a number of things about the person doing the asking though:
By asking a developer to work – possibly for months, or years even – without cash, the person isn’t paying much attention to how the developer will pay their bills in the interim, and how the developer will ever get paid for the project (i.e. by selling their shares).
What they’re saying is that they want the developer to assume all of the project risk, in exchange – maybe – for some pieces of probably worthless paper. Even worse, if things go completely pear-shaped, the developer might even wind up on the hook for company debts or legal issues. Even with paper, the developer can also still wind up with their equity diluted or out and out taken away – contracts can be tricky things.
Aside from all of the above, they also clearly haven’t thought through what happens when the developer runs out of cash (i.e. they leave, or they become unmotivated).
The converse to this situation is one in which a business has a clearly defined plan, cash on hand to pay contracts or salaries, and wishes to align staff with the overall goal – this is the only time when I would ever want to be holding equity in somebody else’s company.
The following is a crude, first attempt to try and define a way for an online market to operate that is entirely decentralized (i.e. there is no central exchange).
In addition to describing some of the mechanisms that would allow such a market to operate, I am also calling for a) the establishment of a foundation or industry association to ensure that standards are created for the necessary systems, and b) the voluntary acceptance of some level of regulation (i.e. government) by the virtual market community. I’ll make cases for both below. Continue reading
I was going to write a short article on some of the challenges that face virtual currencies in order to obtain main street acceptance, along with some possible solutions. Some of the possible solutions turned out to be interesting, and highly “disruptive” business models, and its a bit premature to discuss them in an open forum. Continue reading