Safe from the Losing Fight

For those who don’t know, I’m a partner at Order N Development. We do a lot of contract work, and among those contracts is doing the Mac porting of SereneScreen’s Marine Aquarium.

Recently I came across the blog of one Phill Ryu, who attempted to rank the ten best screensavers for Mac OS X. I say “attempt”, because obviously he failed. Despite all the hard work I put into it (well, technically it was Jim who did the “work”), Marine Aquarium was only ranked number two.

Clearly this contest was rigged from the start. The upstart “Fenêtres Volantes” took first place with its cheap French name and obvious payoff. I’m no expert, but there’s no telling how much money was made by the author off this so-called “freeware”, whatever that means.

This called for an investigation. I dug into the past of this Phill Ryu, if that’s his real name, and discovered he has a blog and likes to rank screensavers. It was obviously a cover for something far more sinister. What, I don’t know, because I lost interest after seeing all that shiny plastic over at MacThemes. I’m not sure who runs that site, but maybe they should be the ones ranking screensavers. They sure do know what looks like plastic.

I also take offense to the characterization of Marine Aquarium in the review. Its hardly “an oldie” as Phill suggests. I mean, you don’t hear geriatric radio stations playing The Marine Aquarium, do you? I thought not. Its usually something by The Beatles or Elvis. Phill also suggests that you cannot “touch” Marine Aquarium. Hooey. I caress my monitor all the time when its running. The fish like that. It reminds them of the time they were in the dentist’s office.

Finally, Phill implies that $20 is a steep price to pay for a screensaver. Oh, like all the other guys give it away for free? psh. Listen, Phill, web site hosting isn’t free, and I have to have some place to mock your hard work. So there.

(BTW, if you do decide to buy Marine Aquarium, please do it from our website. I get more money that way.)

My business partners and I were reviewing an NDA for a potential contract today. We were marveling at the dense prose used in it. I mean, the lawyers really earned their keep on this one. No one with a soul was going to understand it.

Anyway, that got us to thinking about NDA’s in general. I suggested that NDA’s should be written in a lighthearted poem format. My suggestion was:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Please work for us
But don’t tell anyone you knew

Its a good thing I’m an engineer.

The other guys tried, but they were even less successful than I was. I mean theirs didn’t even rhyme. psh. Whoever heard of a poem that didn’t rhyme?

After coming to the realization that we weren’t poets, we started talking about how much we should charge this sucker. I mean mark. I mean customer. Customer. Whatever.

Its always a delicate balance. If you charge too much, they assume you’re trying to rob them outright. But you charge too little, they assume you’re going to steal something on the way out. So you have aim for the price range that says “I’m probably not a thief.”

Regardless, I’m pretty excited about this. Its always good to have new suckers come in. I mean customers.

I’m about three weeks into my new partnership at Order N Development. Its a lot different from my previous job as a full time software engineer at Macromedia.

First, I’m an actual partner, meaning I own a large part of the company. That comes with a lot more responsibility. I have to fill out a lot more paperwork and just in general do a lot of non-engineering tasks. Expense reports, reading contracts, making bids, and so on. Of course, the fact that there only four of us influences this too.

There’s a lot more multitasking involved. For example, I’ve already written up a spec for a potential client, hammered out a rough schedule for another client, reviewed a couple of contracts from potential clients, and brainstormed ideas for our own product. Oh, and somewhere in there I did some actual coding on a contract that we already have. Hopefully this is making me more “well-rounded” as opposed to “crazy”.

I have to say, the contracts are the most disturbing part of the whole process. I can deal with generating product ideas, writing specs, architecting a feature, coding it, and debugging it. Contracts are a whole ‘nother story. They aren’t written in code or English, the only written languages I happen to understand. Contracts are written by lawyers with the express intent of trying to pull a fast one on you. The contract is a legal attempt to put all the responsibility on you while removing all responsibility from the client. But that’s not clearly stated, its written in legalese so you have to spend $400 paying another lawyer to tell you how screwed you really are. A good measure of screwedness appears to be how hard the lawyer is laughing when he hands the contract back to you.

I’d go into specifics, but a lot of contracts say we’re not allowed to mention the client’s name without their express written consent. I understand that the clients are trying to protect their name, but come on. I just did a bunch of work and I’d like to be able to tell people about it. I’ll admit that telling people “I can’t tell you who I’m working for” sounds all cool and mysterious, but it doesn’t really seem to bring in more contracts.

The other scary part is the money doesn’t come in regularly. Well, since we’re working several contracts right now, it kind of does, but nothing is guaranteed. I don’t draw a salary; I just get money when the company actually makes money. The flip side is I’m not limited in how much money I can make. And that’s kind of cool.

One of the things I am enjoying is ability to freely think of product ideas. What’s so “free” about it is that I own any idea that I come up with. Yep. I’m not sure how many people would want a hamster powered beanie, but that’s my idea, and I get to keep it. Seriously though, knowing that I get to keep any idea I generate is a pretty liberating feeling. It also makes the whole brainstorming process a lot more fun. I’m not trying to come up with an idea to make some large corporation another $100 million, I’m trying to come up with an idea that I’d like to work on and that I’m interested in.

And that’s my goal: work on something that interests me.