My one week Start-up challenge

Regular readers of this blog know that I relish a challenge. Two years back the task was to conjure up a mobile app in 3 days. This time, I’m aiming to launch a start-up in 1 week.

At the beginning of December Rob Ashton posted a startling entry to his blog. “I’m not looking for a job” was the title, and 1-2 weeks of his expertise in exchange for just expenses and a roof over his head was his offer. It was exactly the catalyst I needed.

I suspect many software developers suffer from the affliction I’ve experienced ever since going freelance: the urge to launch some new product. We developers love making things, and seeing people get value out of them. And we freelancers would love to be free of the tyranny of the clock – earning exactly in accordance with the time we can bill for.

About the middle of last year I settled on the niche I wanted to target, and the product I wanted to build. Ever since then I’ve been waiting for everything to fall into place so that I could get started. Of course, things never happen like that. There’s always just one more paying project that crops up first, one more thing to get out of the way before you get going.

So when Rob’s offer came along, I seized it. I knew that if I committed myself, things would start moving. I emailed Rob the day after he posted his offer, and arranged to host him for a week. With a deadline settled, and other parties involved, things have started to fall into place. My product now has a name, it has a graphic designer working on a logo, and it has a landing page which illustrates why I should not be left in charge of graphic design (or copywriting too, come to that).

And by the end of the first week of March, with Rob’s help, I aim to have a minimum-viable-product coded and in the hands of beta testers.

Follow along here, and on Rob’s blog, and we’ll let you know how it goes.

Next up: what is we’re building?

Data virtualization in Silverlight

When I first went freelance (15 months ago – how time has rocketed by!) I promised myself that, with the reigns of my schedule tightly held in my own fist, I would dedicate more time to blogging. Well! You can all see from my blog archives how that turned out. I have discovered that when you have clients willing to pay for as much time as you can give them, there’s a strange temptation to give them as much time as you’ve got!

However.

Just before I went on vacation last week, I found made the time to write a mini-blizzard of blog posts, though not for Functional Fun. Ayende, my client for the last few months, has published them on his company’s blog. In the first batch, I wrote about some exciting new features I’ve coded up for the user interface of RavenDb, Hibernating Rhino’s Document Database server.

But I think you’ll most enjoy a couple of posts I wrote about data virtualization in Silverlight. The problem is a common one. How do you display huge lists of data items in a client application without pulling data unnecessarily from the server? Often applications fall back on paging – show one page of data, and make the user click a Next button when they want to see more. But in terms of usability, this technique feels pretty neolithic. So I figured out a way of using ListBoxes and DataGrids without needing to load all the data up front, but with properly proportioned scrollbars, slurping data from the server just in time as the user scrolls.

Over on Hibernating Rhino’s blog you’ll find the two posts I wrote about this:

• Data Virtualization, Lazy Loading, Stealth Paging–whatever you want to call it: Here’s how to do it in Silverlight
• Data Virtualization in Silverlight: Digging into VirtualCollection

There’s also a bonus post on how I created a VirtualizingWrapPanel for Silverlight – built so that we could display data in a card view rather than a list view.

And best of all, I published a sample application on GitHub with all the code you need to use this technique in your own applications. For those WPF-aficionados amongst you, you should find that the code translates without much difficulty.

Crunch, the RESTful Accountants (And Introducing the Crunch API Explorer)

One of the things that scared me a little when I thought about starting my own business was the thought of the bookkeeping. I know, I know – I have a Maths degree, so I ought to be able to cope with adding up a few numbers then working out the 20% I owe to the tax man. And the 20% I owe to the VAT lady. And how to take just the right amount of salary to avoid giving anything to the PAYE person. But my arithmetic has always been terrible, and the mathematicians who lectured me, strange to say, rarely used actual numbers. It was all xs and ys and βs and πs. So that didn’t help.

A big factor in persuading me to make the leap into running a company was finding an excellent online accounting service to handle all those troublesome numbers for me. Crunch are a smart bunch of accountants based down in Brighton who have teamed up with an equally smart bunch of developers to create bookkeeping software that is actually quite fun to use (I know – I couldn’t quite believe that when I read it on another freelancer’s blog, but it’s true!). You enter all the numbers in the website as you rake in the profits, or fork out to your suppliers, and at the end of the year, Crunch will put together your accounts and send them off to H.M.R.C. They’ll even submit your VAT returns for you. And handle your payroll, if you should happen to have any minions employees. All for £59.50 a month. It’s great. Sign up here and we’ll both get a £25 Amazon voucher!

And as if all that wasn’t awesome enough, earlier this month they launched an API. It its RESTful, speaking XML, with OAuth authentication. That’s right – a REST API from an accountancy company! I should caution that the first release is limited to dealing with expenses and suppliers, but the dev team plan to add areas according to the priorities indicated by us users.

The Crunch API Explorer

Well, you know me. I couldn’t leave a shiny new toy like that lying on the shelf. So I had a play, and knocked together something that I think you’ll like.

Allow me to introduce the Crunch API Explorer:

It’s a little tool to help you poke and prod the Crunch API. You enter a URL, set the appropriate Http Method, hit Go!, and it will show you the XML that Crunch returns.

You can download it here (it installs using ClickOnce, so it will auto-update when I add new features. If you don’t already have .Net 4.0 on your machine, you should be prompted to install it). To connect to Crunch using the Crunch API Explorer, you’ll need your own API key which you can get by contacting the nice folks at api-dev@crunch.co.uk. Then you can make REST calls to your hearts delight. All the documentation you need about the resource URLs and the structure of the XML for submitting updates can be found here on the Crunch website.

Here are a few of my favourite features:

• XML Syntax colouring when you’re editing requests (this courtesy of AvalonEdit, the open source WPF text editor component that is part of SharpDevelop)
• Makes you confirm any update/delete requests made to the live server (but not to the test server)
• All the source is available on GitHub, so if ever you wanted an example of how to connect to an OAuth API with DotNetOAuth, well – now you have one (see CrunchFacade.cs). It’s all in C#, with some WPF, and of course a topping of MVVM.

There are a couple of things I wanted to add, but didn’t get time for – maybe next week:

• Remembering frequently used resource URIs, and maybe saving template Xml request documents
• Ability to choose a file and insert it into the XML request documents in Base64 format for the APIs that support file upload
• Saving Base64 encoded data in the responses to files

Anything else?

I’d love to hear from anyone who finds this useful. Feature requests are welcome (pull requests even more so). And if you fancy forking this and adapting it to explore other APIs, be my guest.

Happy Christmas to all

I hope you have all enjoyed a Happy Christmas. Nothing technical today. I just wanted to share with you something my six-year old daughter made for me:

Announcing the launch of Mixed In Key 5

I’m very pleased to announce that Mixed In Key LLC, one of my clients, have just launched the product I’ve been working on for the last eight months. Mixed In Key 5.0 is for DJs who put together their DJ sets using harmonic mixing, a technique for ensuring a musically pleasing transition from one track to the next by eliminating key clashes.

How it works

Mixed In Key supplies the key ingredient to successful harmonic mixing. It analyses every song in a DJ’s collection and determines which key it is written in (by key, I mean musical key, like C#, F#, A Minor, etc.). Every song is then added to a searchable database.

The other ingredient comes from music theory, and has been cleverly codified by Mark Davis into the Camelot Wheel. This shows the relationship between each key in a diagram arranged like a clock. To build a harmonic mix, a DJ finds the key of his first song on the wheel (so E Major is at the twelve o’clock position). For his next song he should pick one in a key which is an “hour” to the left or right, or stay at the same hour but switch between major or minor keys. Mixed In Key 5.0 includes a clickable Camelot Wheel to instantly search the database for songs in a particular key.

Under the bonnet

The User Interface is all built in WPF. As I hinted in an earlier blog post, I had a great time taking the designs beautifully drawn up for us in Photoshop by our designers and mapping them into XAML. Though I have to say, it is a painstaking process, poking all those pixels into precisely the prescribed positions – I guess it took something like 5 or 6 days to polish the 4 screens in the applications.

But more important than looking gorgeous, Mixed In Key 5.0 had to be fast and responsive (we started the project many months before Windows 8 was announced, otherwise that would have been “fast and fluid”). I have to thank the Task Parallel Library in .Net 4.0 for making this really easy to achieve (though not as easy as it will be in C# 5.0, when we get our hands on the await keyword).

At the heart of the application is song analysis, which is a process with several steps. First, we read the song data using some custom DirectShow filters (DirectShow is actually rather fun to use once you’ve got the hang of it). Then we send extracts of the data off to our analysis server in the cloud for processing. Finally we have to add it to the database. Each of the steps takes a while to complete, so are ideal candidates for Tasks.

.Net 4.5 has a rather nice Dataflow library that is ideal for setting up a pipeline of tasks that need to be processed asynchronously. But that’s not out yet, so I used some extensions that Stephen Toub wrote to the current TPL library for chaining Tasks together. Here’s what our analysis pipeline looks like:

AnalyzeSongAudio(progressReporter, file)
   .Then(audioAnalysis => file.AudioAnalysis = audioAnalysis)
   .Then(_ => ReadFileTags(file))
   .Then(tags => file.Tags = tags)
   .Then(() => SetItemStatus(file, QueuedFileStatus.DetectingKey))
   .Then(_ => DetectKey(file))
   .Then(result => file.SongAnalysisResult = result)
   .Then(_ => RewriteTags(file))
   .Then(result => AddSongToCollection(file))
   .Then(song => UpdateQueuedFileWithSong(file, song))
   .Then(() => SetItemStatus(file, QueuedFileStatus.UpdatingFile))
   .Then(() => UpdateFile(file))
   .Then(() => SetItemStatus(file, QueuedFileStatus.Completed))
.OnError(task => UpdateItemWithError(file, task.Exception.InnerException), Schedulers.UIThread)
.ContinueWith(t => DecrementQueuedFileCount(), TaskContinuationOptions.ExecuteSynchronously);

As an aside, do you know the best thing about using Tasks in your application? You get your free lunches back again! As PCs get more and more cores, your application will automatically scale to take advantage of them.

What a launch!

Yakov, the founder of Mixed In Key LLC, tells me that the launch has been very successful already.The Mixed In Key Twitter stream has been flooded with happy comments. Here are a few of my favourites:

Woke up without a hangover, got called off jury duty & @MixedInKeyjust came out with version 5.0 that analyzes video!!! Start of a good day

@MixedInKey You guys did it! #MIK5 is working like a charm. Gorgeous interface, unrivaled speed, heaps new features and still easy to use!!

My new @MixedInKey purchase rocks! Firing on all 4 cores at the moment at 100% CPU, this thing is #fast! Currently scanning 3000 songs :)

@MixedInKey is very very fast! Like a thunder! The multicore processing is the best feature

So Congratulations to Yakov and the rest of the Mixed In Key team, and thanks for letting me help out on such an exciting project.

Say hello to a hatchling: Seaturtle Software Ltd is born

Two months ago I handed in my notice. One month later, Seaturtle Software Ltd was hatched. I shepherded its dash to the ocean. And now I hold the reigns as it begins a journey in the vast ocean that is the international software industry.

To put it another way, I now own a software start-up.

And what a surprise that is. Three years ago I was in negotiations with my boss looking for a way to escape the slippery slide into management. Today I’m a business owner.

What changed?

Recession, and a radical restructuring changed the landscape at the company where I worked. Of all the former employees, I was the only one remaining. I stayed to make a last-ditch attempt to launch the product we’d been working on for two years. But it was not to be.

The directors and I explored several avenues for re-building the business. Eight happy and fulfilling years I’d worked for them, starting two weeks after I completed my Degree (my honeymoon occupied the interval). In that time they’ve given me fantastic opportunities to grow as a person and a software developer. I was hesitant to move on from a relationship that has blessed me so well for so long. But in the last couple of months I’ve come to realise that I have the skills to go it alone. And I’ve discovered that my taste in challenges has diversified beyond the merely technical.

Most importantly, I learned that starting and running a business is not as scary as you might think. Creating a company is just a legal formality (you can do it online for much less than £100). There are clever websites backed by smart accountants who will handle your book-keeping and tax returns for a very reasonable fee. The wonders of cloud computing provide infrastructure on demand.

All I need is a quiet room, a desk, a PC – and some bright ideas.

So Seaturtle Software is open for business.

Consulting will be my initial line of work, specialising in the things you know me for here on Functional Fun. So if you have a knotty WPF problem to solve, a tricky algorithm to implement, or simply want a leg-up with your UI Automation testing strategy, get in touch.

sam@seaturtlesoftware.com