Tech Evangelist Joey deVilla on Shopify, startups, software development, tech news and other nerdy stuff

Goofus

Last week, OMGPOP’s CEO Dan Porter had worked his way into popular techie demonology by bad-mouthing employee Shay Pierce, the only one at the company to turn down the offer to join when they were acquired by Zynga. Pierce wrote a piece in Gamasutra titled Turning down Zynga: Why I left after the $210M Omgpop buy.

Porter wasn’t too pleased with this and instead of simply remaining silent or at most saying “We wish Shay the best of luck in his future endeavours”, he vented on Twitter:

After being called out on it in more than a few places online and by Markus “Notch” Persson (the creator of Minecraft)…

…Porter finally did the right, grown-up thing, retracted his tweets and was pretty straightforward with the mea culpas:

Gallant

That was last week. This week’s Dan Porter story is quite different, and it’s pretty well summarized in the article’s title: Before OMGPOP Sold For $210 Million, The CEO Hired Back Everyone He Laid Off And Made Sure They Cashed In.

The story comes from an anonymous tipster that Business Insider claims is an “unimpeachable, first-hand source with knowledge of the situation”. Among other things, this person says:

[Porter] was literally negotiating the deal and jamming the re-hires back into payroll to make sure they were covered with hours remaining in the close.  Their options kept vesting and they benefitted from the sale.

Porter didn’t have to do it. It was just the mensch thing to do.

There was one guy who used to work for OMGPOP who was facing a deadline on whether or not to exercises his options. He couldn’t decide, and Porter didn’t want him to lose out, so he hired him as a contractor to extend his vesting as well. He made money too.

Every single employee got something from the deal, even new employees who hadn’t reached their cliff. Porter made sure it happened.

So Which is He, Goofus or Gallant?

Let this be a lesson (or reminder) that it’s all too easy to reduce someone to a one-dimensional caricature when you have only a handful of facts. Porter was easy to demonize: he’s a “suit” who unfairly called out a developer (if you’re a developer who hasn’t been screwed over by some stuffed shirt, you haven’t been in the industry long enough), and he’d just sold his company to Zynga, a company that’s done some terrible, unforgivable things to games and gaming (more on this in a later article).

Diametrically opposed as they may seem, Dan Porter’s actions last week and this week are two sides of the same coin: loyalty is something he values greatly. To Porter, Pierce’s refusal to join Zynga and writing that article explaining why (in which he called Zynga “evil” and described their practices as making things worse for the whole industry — and he’s got a point there) were a slap in the face and acts of disloyalty, if not outright betrayal. People flip out when the values they hold most dear are violated, and that’s pretty much what happened. Porter’s tweets in anger were petty and inexcusable, but they’re also short actions made in a flash of anger, off-the-cuff acts that probably took no longer than a minute or two, with no time for sober second thought.

Let me reiterate: it was a dick move. But it was an act of a moment.

On the other hand, rehiring laid-off employees just so they could get a piece of the acquisition action was also about loyalty. It was a longer, more deliberate process than those tweets made in anger. It’s not something you can do on a whim, especially when you consider that such an action actually reduced shareholder value. There were probably other C-level execs and possibly even a board of directors at OMGPOP to sell on the idea, and it’s likely that someone who didn’t truly believe in the cause would’ve simply given up or said “too bad; them’s the breaks”. This was an action that would’ve taken days, if not weeks, and there were probably plenty of opportunities to back out honourably.

This was a CEO action so good that it’s almost shocking in this day and age, and it couldn’t be anything but premeditated. You can’t do this sort of thing on a whim.

The timing of this story — it broke on the Monday the week after a lot of negative publicity — should raise our suspicions, but rehiring laid off employees so they can share in the wealth isn’t a cheap PR move, especially if you consider that it happened before his misstep. At most, I will simply say that if Porter got a PR company to make sure that this story got out, he’d better be paying them generously.

So which is he? Barring a revelation next week that he eats live kittens, I’d have to go with “Gallant”, with a moment of “Goofus”. All things considered, that’s pretty good.

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In case you hadn’t heard, you can read Zuck’s announcement on his Facebook stream and Instagram CEO Kevion Systrom’s post on their blog.

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Found via Reddit. Click to see at full size.

This is a photo of a photojournalist taking pictures at the scene of the recent F-18 crash in Virginia. She’s got at least 2 SLR-type cameras and 3 telephoto lenses that we can see, but in the photo, she’s taking a picture with a mobile phone, leading to the funny meme caption.

With all those fancy cameras at her disposal, why is she taking pictures with a phone? Probably because it can do what her cameras can’t: quickly send a photo, whether it’s to the news organization she’s working for, or quickly post it online.

Once again, I’m reminded of William Gibson’s quote from the short story Burning Chrome: “The street finds its own uses for things,” and that’s certainly the case for mobile tech.

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Found via Reddit.

Let’s face it, a lot of the slides you see in people’s presentations could be replaced with this one.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

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If you haven’t yet listened to episode 460 of This American Life, Retraction, you should. It’s the one in which they retract the content of episode 454, Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory, in which Mike Daisey relates his experiences of a visit to China to see the factory where iPhones and iPads are made. Daisey tells stories of meeting with underage and injured workers, armed guards at the factory and secret union meetings at Starbucks — stories which turned out to be fabrications when investigated further.

Daisey was invited back to NPR’s studios to explain himself, and in the episode, he’s a total weasel. He does apologise for presenting his piece as journalism, but he insists that it’s theatre, which gives him some artistic license in telling what is essentially a true story. He refuses to acknowledge that he lied or attempted to cover up the truth, even when confronted with evidence that he did so.

Instead of being a grown-up and owning up to his mistakes, when questioned, he hedges, he makes lame excuses, but most damningly, he just sits there and says nothing. There are long periods of silence after he’s asked questions that would clearly expose his fabrications, and they’re rather painful to listen to.

Michael Sippey’s done something clever: he’s taken those questions and the following silences and turned them into a single piece titled The Silence of Mike Daisey, which you can listen to using the audio player above. It’s all of Daisey’s weaselling, all in one go.

Found via Jason Kottke. Thanks, dude!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

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HackDays, the cross-Canada API hackathon, returns this Saturday, March 24th at the offices of A Thinking Ape and Shopify will be there. HackDays hackathons are all-day gatherings where developers of all manner of platforms and skill levels to take APIs from providers like Shopify and other sponsors like iQmetrix, YellowAPI, FreshBooks and TinEye and build some cool apps by using one or more of them. It’s a great way to put your coding and app design skills to the test, discover new APIs, meet other developers in your community and even win great prizes!

The “Scavenger Chest” app being presented at HackVan, August 2011.

At the start of the day, you’ll gather your team — you can either bring them with you or find people to work with there — and come up with an idea. Ideas must use at least one of the sponsored APIs, and we’d really love it if you used the Shopify API!

You’ll spend a handful of hours putting together the app…

Ducking out of the way of the projector while making a presentation at HackVan, August 2011.

…and at the end of the day, each team will present their apps. A panel of distinguished judges will review the presentations and pick the best apps to receive prizes.

The hackers watch the presentations at HackVan, August 2011.

If you’re looking for a fun, mentally challenging, rewarding and unusual Saturday in Vancouver, come to HackVan this Saturday!

The Details

The HackVan Main Event (Saturday, March 24th): Register here for $10.00 — the money shows you’re serious about attending, but it goes a long way. You’ll get breakfast, lunch, and a free invitation to the Friday pre-HackVan mixer!

The Friday pre-HackVan Mixer (Friday, March 23rd): Register here for $10.00 — if you can’t make it on Saturday or won’t be coding, come to the pre-HackVan mixer and meet and network with everyone!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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Octocat looks a little lost. I snapped this photo of a guy wearing a giant Octocat head while posing for photos on Austin’s 6th Street during South by Southwest 2012.

There are still many developers out there who seem a bit uncomfortable with Git and GitHub. If you’re one of them, these tips and tutorials mights help you learn and have fun along the way.

Githug: “Git your game on!” is this project’s motto, and it’s an accurate description. It’s a game where your objective is to get to the next level, and the way to do that is to use git commands.

Git Immersion: A guided tour created by the people at EdgeCase. It’s “learning by doing”; as the site explains, it’s inspired by the premise that to know a thing is to do it.

The Git Community Book: An online, collaboratively-written book creating by members of the Git community. A pretty thorough book on Git that’s also kept up-to-date. You should bookmark this one.

Mark Dominus’ Git Habits: Mark’s a serious long-timer on the ‘net: he’s been hacking on Perl since forever, founded  Kibology (anyone remember that?) and wrote Higher-Order Perl. He’s sharing the way he uses Git, and it’s probably a good idea to steal a few tricks from him.

Getting the Hang of GitHub: Once you’ve gotten good with Git, the next step is to get good with GitHub, the hosted Git service, which lets you  share your Git-versioned projects.

Let’s Suck at GitHub Together: My friend and fellow BarCamp Tour member Chris Coyier (the guy behind CSS-Tricks) has a great screencast on learning GitHub.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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There’ve been rumors about PayPal putting together some kind of competitor to Square for some time, so it wasn’t a complete surprise when they announced PayPal Here earlier today. As with Square, it’s a small reader device or “dongle” that plugs into the audio jack of your smartphone (and presumably your tablet device) and allows you to accept card payments. It also includes an app that will let you to scan in cards and checks using your phone’s camera (according to The Verge, if you use the camera to scan in a card rather than the dongle, you’ll have to manually enter the card’s CVV code and the zip code associated with the card into the app).

PayPal’s entry into the “accept credit card payments with your smartphone” game is a sign of things to come. It “validates the market”, to use a phrase in the startup vernacular, moving it from a relatively fringe idea to something you’re going to see more often in the coming months. Shopify’s biz dev dynamo Brennan Loh observed at a recent conference for retailers that there seemed to be two schools of thought about what cash registers should be: the old school vendors with their old-style anchored-to-the-checkout-counter cash registers and the new school vendors, who cash registers were either phones or tablets, a la the Apple Store.

Shopify’s Edward Ocampo-Gooding watches as “Cajun” the pedicab driver charges his credit card with his mobile phone.

I’ve made mobile payments indoors a number of times, at a couple of small shops where there just wasn’t room for a traditional cash register. It wasn’t until a couple of days ago when I got the “fully mobile payment experience”. My coworker Edward and I were at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival and took a pedicab — a bicycle-powered cab that can take two passengers — when we realized we were both short cash.

“No problem,” said “Cajun”, our driver. “I got Square.” When we got to our destination, he took his iPhone out of his pocket, stuck the Square dongle into the headphone port and swiped Edward’s card, a transaction that would’ve been impossible only a couple of years ago. And now, there are at least two big providers of such a service.

It’s an interesting new arena, and as a techie in the ecommerce and mobile businesses, one I’ll definitely keeping an eye on.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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A few of my coworkers from Shopify and I spent most of last week at ConFoo, the annual “web techno conference” in Montreal. With 600 attendees from Canada, the United States and Europe, 100 of whom were speakers, it may very well be the largest web and mobile developer conference in the area (eastern Canada and northeastern U.S.) that takes place this time of year.

Shopify’s David Underwood talks about ActiveMerchant, the open source payment gateway module that powers Shopify.

We presented at two sessions: Ruby as She is Spoke on Thursday and Mo’ Money, Less Problems with ActiveMerchant on Friday, attended a number of interesting presentations, mingled with developers who came to the conference from far and wide and had a great time while doing so.

Playing the “feature or bug?” game at the Back Alleys of Ruby Session.

Confoo’s organizers don’t lack for ambition. The conference schedule featured 10 simultaneous tracks with 20 broad topics covering languages like Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python and Ruby, as well as topics ranging from Accessibility to the cloud, to data persistence to project management/agile to security to social netowrking to systems administration to testing.

Microsoft’s Frederic Harper strikes his best “code ninja” pose at Make Web Not War’s ninja photo booth.

In addition to the sessions were a handful of booths where some local development shops were doing recruiting and the Make Web Not War Lounge sponsored by Microsoft and friends. The Microsofties had an Xbox and Kinect set up so that people who wanted to take a break could play Fruit Ninja, as well as a photo booth where you could strike your best ninja pose. Also present were ExoPC, who were showing off their touch applications on a tabletop touchscreen.

Lunch at ConFoo. Better conference food than the usual, especially for a developer conference.

ConFoo has been held at the Hilton Bonaventure since its inception, and it’s a good, solid conference venue. Located right downtown, a stone’s throw from the central train station, a short walk from Montreal’s “main drag” of Ste-Catherine street and a quick cab ride away from all manner of interesting neighborhoods, from Old Montreal to the Latin Quarter to Chinatown to Mont-Royal and more. The place was more than able to accommodate all 600 of us in ten tracks, and still leave plenty of room in which to hang out. The Hilton’s rooms were quite good, and the food was also better than your typical conference fare, especially developer conference fare.

A slide from Eric Pickup’s keynote on how ManWin rebuilt YouPorn.

The opening day’s keynote presentation took place at the end of the day rather than the beginning, and it was a fascinating one. Eric Pickup from Manwin talked about his most recent project: an ambitious effort to re-code their flagship website, YouPorn [here’s a link to YouPorn’s Wikipedia entry], from the ground up, in a matter of months, without the users even noticing.

My natural habitat: working on Ruby demos in a bar, with a nice dark beer.

The conference wifi was quite good, allowing many of us to stay in touch with work, as well as make last-minute tweaks to our presentations.

The ConFoo cocktail party.

The ConFoo cocktail party took place Thursday evening, and it was a great way for all 600 attendees as well as interested non-attendees to get together, share ideas over drinks and just plain network.

The Hilton Bonaventure’s heated rooftop pool at night. If you attend ConFoo, bring a bathing suit!

The rooftop outdoor heated pool was one of the most interesting diversions offered by the hotel. Even though it was –4 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit) outside and snow was falling, the pool was maintained at a constant 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit). It was great for either exercising and socializing with our fellow attendees.

Jamming with the pirates at Le Cabaret du Roy.

The closing party took place at Le Cabaret du Roy, a restaurant with a 17th-century pirate theme serving rustic food – old-school brown bread, pemmican, ox cheeks, deer ribs and duck legs – with entertainment in the form of gambling and jigs and reels sung by the waitstaff and entertainers. They invited me onstage to join them on accordion for a couple of jigs and reels including that classic, What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?

Even the PHP mascot checked out the pool!

Would I attend next year’s ConFoo? Most definitely. There’s usually not much in the way of conferences around that time of year (late February/early March), and conferences that combine high-stuff/low-fluff technical depth with a broad range of topics and platforms are especially rare these days. The speakers they invite are great, the people who attend are a bright, enthusiastic international crowd, and the conference’s size is large enough to make it interesting, yet small enough that it feels more like a temporary community than just a random meetup. Put that all together and set it in a lively city like Montreal, with its culture, nightlife and oh-so-many things to do, and you’ve got a must-attend conference. I’m looking forward to attending ConFoo 2013, and you can bet that I’ll submit talks when their call for presentations come out later this year!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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It’s been too long since we’ve had a Toronto Techie Dim Sum – since November, in fact – so I’m declaring one for this Wednesday, March 7th at noon at good ol’ Sky Dragon (Dragon City Mall, top floor, southwest corner of Spadina and Dundas)!

These are casual, informal lunchtime get-togethers for that broad category of people that I call “The Toronto Techie Community”. It includes programmers, designers and “suits” who work in the web and software industries or anyone interested in hanging out with such people for interesting conversation that isn’t always about technology, as well as cheap, cheerful and delicious Chinese food. If even the notion of attending a lunchtime gathering appeals to you, you’re the sort of person we’d like to see there!

Once again, Toronto Techie Dim Sum happens this Wednesday, March 7th at noon at Sky Dragon. We should be an easy group to spot – look for the table with me (see the photo, inset on the right).

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

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My old main axe from my Microsoft days, the Dellasaurus (a Dell Precision M6500).
Click the photo to see the original article.

Dell says that they’re getting out of the consumer PC business and focusing on enterprise IT. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve been doing that for years. I’ve gotten to experience a lot of Dell hardware over the past decade, but especially during my two-and-a-half-year stint as a Microsoftie, where Dell Canada was my hardware sponsor. Just look at their catalogs: there’s an “enterprise first” mentality in the way they’re designed. They’re pretty solid machines, but they’re the computers that the IT department makes you use rather than the computers you want to use. When it comes to so-called “consumer” machines, Dell’s been thrashing about cluelessly from netbooks (and you probably know what I think of them) to “ultrabooks” to “slates” to phones.

15 years ago, when Dell was riding high, Michael Dell made his now-infamous comment about 1997-era Apple and Steve Jobs’ return (remember, it was believed he was going to be the CEO to finally kill the company): “What would I do now? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” He’s going to get that quote thrown right at him over the next couple of weeks, and it seems that he already has a response to that. When poked about this at Web 2.0 Summit back in October, he claimed that his answer was misconstrued: what he meant was that he’d never even consider being CEO of another company. Such nakedly transparent backpedalling calls for an Orson Welles slow clap:

Of course, Dell will be fine: the enterprise market’s a big one, judging from how much money people gladly pay to willingly inflict SharePoint on themselves. It’s just not as visible to the consumer market, nor is it as exciting (part of the reason I got out of that racket). With their shift to enterprise and away from consumer and things like their 2009 acquisition of the IT company Perot Systems, it looks as if they’re going to become an IBM – just without the cool research projects. Perhaps it’s more accurate to think of them as an Accenture with a hardware division.

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Shiner Bock: The unofficial official beer of SxSW.
Creative Commons Photo by Berenice Garcia. Click the photo to see the original.

Shopify’s going to be at the South by Southwest Interactive festival this year from Friday, March 9th through Tuesday, March 13th, and we’d like to invite you to join us for a drink and chat while we’re down in Austin! Whether you’re a shopowner with a Shopify-powered shop, a developer who builds Shopify apps, a designer who make Shopify themes or just wondering what Shopify’s all about, we’d like to meet up with you.

We’re working out the exact details of where and when – we’re thinking late afternoon/early evening of Saturday, March 10th — but we’ll announce it all over the place: on this blog, Facebook, Twitter and everywhere else we can.

More details soon!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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ConFoo is Montreal’s big “web techno conference”, and it’s happening this week! It’s not too late to register and catch all sorts of sessions, including these two by Shopify people:

Mo’ Money, Less Problems with ActiveMerchant

My coworker David Underwood, Developer Advocate, will be giving the Mo’ Money, Less Problems with ActiveMerchant presentation on Friday, March 2nd from 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.. Here’s the abstract:

Your Ruby/Rails application is up and running, you’ve got users, and better still, they’re ready to pay to for the fruits of your genius. Okay, genius: how do they pay? The answer is ActiveMerchant, the de facto standard for handling payments in Ruby. ActiveMerchant gives you a single, simple API that supports many payment gateways and lets you authorize a payment and capture the money, all with only a screenful’s worth of code. In this session, we’ll walk you through a simple payment, work up to a full Rails-based shopping cart with payment authorization and capture and show you what the industry standards are and the security precautions you should take.

Ruby as She is Spoke

Yours Truly, Joey deVilla, Platform Evangelist, will be giving the Ruby as She is Spoke presentation on Thursday, March 1st from 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m.. Here’s the abstract:

Speak you Ruby surely like native? Have you a grip on using the rectified idioms for coding in the language? But seriously: like human languages, programming languages are also about clear communication, and the best way to speak a language is to understand it idioms. In this session, we’ll look at Ruby turns of phrase and other patterns that the best-written Ruby code uses to communicate clearly and that best take advantage of the Ruby language.

Register for ConFoo now!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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