David Chan’s Blog

Although there are increasingly more and more things fighting for a slice of my time, I always find time to read a bit every day. The material I have been reading in the past included a lot of coding language references and insights into best practices and methodologies, and I still enjoy leafing through Joel on Software or the Pragmatic Programmer every once in a while.

However, over the last two years I have been immersing myself into books about marketing and startups. My work deals solely with the internet, and I figure that trendiness and quick beginnings make for success in this field. Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin have earned a spot in my “Non-trivial Blogs” tab in iGoogle (which includes 37signals and Joel, and also Kathy Sierra before March of this year). I am looking to continue increasing the size of my bookshelf, and will be looking to read Love Is the Killer App in the very near future.

Looks like I’ll have plenty of things to keep me busy during the unpleasant autumn (read: cold and wet) in Vancouver.

Over the recent years, the popularity of blogging and weblogs has increased tremendously and shows no signs of slowing down. With as many as 1.3 million posts made per day, weblogs are right up at the top with other mainstream media outlets such as television and print. And of course, mainstream media has the power to influence its audience to make certain decisions as consumers (which sometimes leads to bribery).

So what are some popular brands mentioned in blog articles? Cameron Olthuis has compiled a list of the 10 most popular brands on Digg, a prominent weblog aggregator, in the last year. In the article, he made a simple yet insightful brand versus brand comparison:

Wii - 1503
Xbox - 781
PS3 - 787

iPod - 690
Zune - 154

Apple - 1731
Microsoft - 1502

Google - 1484
Yahoo - 1105
Microsoft - 1502

I decided to see how the above companies did over the course of the last 12 months, and to see if a brand’s popularity in the blogosphere agrees with its success.

The below data is collected from Google Finance, for the period of March 2006 to March 2007, and it outlines the growth of the company’s share price.

Wii (Nintendo): +48.29%
Xbox (Microsoft): -0.29%
PS3 (Sony): +5.8%

Apple: +29.76%
Microsoft: -0.29%

Google: +22.13%
Yahoo!: -5.06%
Microsoft: -0.29%

There are a lot more factors affecting the growth of a brand/company than just media attention, but there is no doubt that many brands and products would like to ride the wave and get on the blog bandwagon.

Sometimes it can be hard to convince management and/or non-technical people to weigh in on code refactoring. Firstly, the term “refactor” may not be well known outside of the software development circle. Once explained, however, the concept is very intuitive and most would agree that it is something that should be done on a regular basis.

Code refactoring is the term given to the clean-up of existing code to improve its structure and make it easier to be understood by other programmers. The definition from Wikipedia states that refactoring is “any change to a computer program which improves its readability or simplifies its structure without changing its results”. Unfortunately, the audience will be keen to point out the fact that the resulting output from the software has not changed, or there is no (visible) benefit to the customer. Given the already tight schedules and budgets that most development teams face, it’s not surprising to see resistance against spending resources on refactoring code. There are numerous reasons why code refactoring should be a best practice implemented by all software development teams, and a well-formed argument will go a long way to justify refactoring.

Many web-based applications are fixated with the perpetual beta. Companies apply the term “beta” at the end of their product’s name, and in doing so, allows new functionality to be added into the system at anytime without a major release (as well as to limit the liability of bugs in the program). I personally believe that this is the only way to go for web-apps because anyone with an idea and a compiler can and will be a direct competitor for web traffic. And in order to quickly and effortlessly add new functionality into an existing system, code must be easy to read and understand in order to be edited or updated. To constantly introduce requirements without refactoring is similar to playing Jenga. The higher the tower becomes, the longer it will take to remove and place a game piece.

We all know how a game of Jenga ends.