Kalzumeus Software

I was sort of expecting maybe one or two folks to actually get back to me about the 30 day June cooperative development sprint that I proposed the other day.  There are, hmm, substantially more than two folks interested.  Well, great, the more the merrier. 

In the interest of not totally overwhelming everyone and also keeping the amount of administration to an absolute minimum (I will be, shall we say, sort of busy that month… ;) ) , Sohail (fellow BoSer who wanted something like this to get organized) and I are going to set up a unified RSS feed.  (Basically, its like PlanetMicroISV except it only contains posts about this project, and it doesn’t have a dedicated website.  If you don’t know how to use RSS yet, I recommend http://reader.google.com)

We encourage you to subscribe to the RSS feed and post here with the category or tag level feed for your own blogs which is specific to this challenge.  For example, if you were me, and you were diligent about filing these posts under the category 30days, your feed address would be http://www.kalzumeus.com/category/30days/feed .  This will hopefully keep the signal to noise ratio of the unified RSS feed fairly high.

Participants In No Particular Order

(If your name isn’t on this list but you got in contact with me, it is either because I wasn’t quite sure if you wanted to be publicly acknowledged or I missed it in the torrent of email.  My apologies.)

Scott Kane

“I Hate Integers”

Steve McLeod

Sohail

Simon Shutter

Peter Row

Marcus McConnell

Bracken Mosbacker

Tarek Demiati

Joel Marcey

Yakov Vorobyev

If I missed you or you have a feed URL which you’d like added, kindly drop it in the comments to this post.  Akismet, the WordPress anti-spam package, sometimes doesn’t play well with links in comments.  Rest assured that even if it doesn’t pop up automatically I’ll be hunting to make sure it doesn’t get lost.

Alrighty, thats all the time I have for today.  Come back on the 1st for the official kickoff of my project, and hopefully my first of many comments on what other folks are coming up with.  See you in June!

I’ve been quiet for far too long, as mentioned in the last update.  Recently, in the continuing quest to take over the world one set of bingo cards at a time, I ran into a snag.  I can solve the snag, that isn’t the problem.  Thinking about how to solve the snag, however, made me realize that :

• it requires programming effort
• it is really difficult for a technically disinclined person
• it affects a lot of link-chucking people, like bloggers
• it gets in the way of some people making money
• it has a solve-once apply-anywhere model to it. 

So, basically, it screams “I Am A Viable uISV Problem“.  And its got an obviously achievable minimal solution and an iterative improvement path which could keep me busy for quite some time.

When I realized this, I got that far-away look in my eyes, and I started to see code and database schematics and promotional schemes.  (Hey, THAT certainly didn’t happen last time… guess I’m learning…)  I just have to do this now.  So I snapped up a catchy domain name (might not end up using it, but at the moment I’m liking the branding potential) and will shortly grab my sketchbook and start capturing design documents.

I’m crazy busy at work and can’t do another one week long coding binge to get this accomplished, so it will be a longer term project.  Artificial deadlines work very well for me, and there has recently been a bit of a buzz about something called the 30 Day Challenge on the Business of Software forums. 

I’ve got little interest for anything which purports to be for complete Internet-commerce newbies, as it smacks of Make Money Online and I have my sights a little higher than $10, but I love the idea of a peer group and a deadline.  So I’ll make any of you readers out there a deal: I’m going to start developing my new project starting on June 1st.  I will offer it to paying customers on July 1st — exactly 2 years after BCC, come to think of it.

In the meanwhile, I am going to be posting about everything and the kitchen sink, like I usually do: a bit of code, a bit of design, a bit of marketing, etc.  If you also have an itch that needs scratching, and you get in touch with me by the 1st, we can informally develop and blog in tandem.  This will be very informal — no rules, no mandates, just a bit of community and some of that lovely “Its early and rough but at least the page displays, let me show you my new toy” interaction that we’ll surely need after long nights and missed weekends.  Rather than develop a separate domain for the purpose, I’ll just post my contributions to the discussion on my blog — I suggest folks try that as the barrier to entry is nothing and we’ll have plenty of issues building websites without having to build a website about building our website.

This offer is open to as many people as want to take me up on it, for whatever you want to do.  (Within reason — I’m not going to devote 3 seconds of my life to considering the merits of Porn Collector 2008 or Payday Loanz4u).  I’m interested in seeing what you come up with, and can’t wait to show off my new baby as well.

Come back to the blog on the 1st for the first of many posts on the topic.  (Ideally I’ll be blogging daily but can’t commit to that.)  I plan on unveiling at least the problem domain and general gist at that point — having done this once I’m much less worried about getting cloned these days than I used to be.