Influential Blog

Things definitely got more interesting this afternoon when I headed upstairs to meet up with friend and former Stanford classmate Jim. He kindly gave me the Cliff’s Notes SparkNotes version of Benioff’s various announcements during the keynote. ZDNet has a good summary.

Then I wandered in to the Apex Developer Network area, which was like its own mini-conference, complete with (independent) sponsorship from Apple and Google, informal presentations, and a plentiful supply of test machines (iMacs, of course) that anyone could use to play with the new Visualforce interface technology unveiled this morning.

UPDATE: All pics are now on Flickr: www.flickr.com/mikegoelzer

Yesterday was the last day of an awesome Dreamforce 2006, and I’ve got about 3 half-written blog posts sitting on my laptop with some reactions to the conference. But I noticed something just now that I wanted to quickly mention, because I think this could be my life’s 15 minutes of fame.

ideas.salesforce.com is a Digg-like site that Salesforce unveiled a few days ago as a customer community product wishlist. Anyone can nominate a feature for development, and anyone else can second an existing idea. The ten ideas with the most votes appear on the ideas.salesforce.com homepage, and represent a kind of “short list” from which future development priorities are drawn.

So you can imagine how excited I was to log on this morning and notice a screenshot of my own company’s work on that homepage:

See the pie chart and bar graph embedded within that standard Salesforce page? That’s part of an analytics module that we are building for Salesforce’s HR recruiting AppExchange package.

This little graph is actually a good illustration of how my company operates. An onshore senior developer (in this case me) created a rapid prototype of this graphing component for the recruiting application in an iterative, back-and-forth development process with the client (in this case Salesforce itself). Once they were happy with the functionality in this functional-but-raw prototype, we embedded it into their demo platform so that they could begin immediately using it for sales demos. Simultaneously, I handed a requirements spec based on the prototype to my team in Nepal for a ground-up rebuild and subsequent software lifecycle management. By the time the recruiting app goes live on the AppExchange in a few months, the rapid prototype will have been replaced with a more robust component that is suitable for real customer usage.

UPDATE (Oct 12, 12:05pm): In the time it took me to write this post, we dropped out of the top 10 on ideas.salesforce.com. Currently, we’re at number 12. But it really was in the top 10 when I started writing this, and once platform has field history tracking on custom objects I’ll be able to prove it to you.

Kathmandu is largely shut down today due to one of the frequent street protests staged by a local political party. Cars cannot move and the public transportation system is not functional.

But the machinery of the IT business is still humming.

After all, the power is still on, and radio ISPs are still operating. Because Kathmandu residents have gotten used to these shutdowns, most are prepared to work from home. Many have motor bikes that allow them to weave through traffic and navigate around the massive street demonstrations.

If this were America, I might make some cliche observation about how the Internet is changing the way we work, virtual offices, flex time, blah blah blah. But in a place like Nepal, these things take on much greater significance. Informational technology is a very small sector of the overall economy here, but it holds the distinction of being one of the few that is relatively immune to the strikes and curfews. In an economy that needs all the help it can get, that can only be a good thing.

When I tell other Americans about my work managing software projects in Nepal, it seems to conjure up images of Buddhist monks working diligently inside mud and bamboo huts. Indeed, prior to traveling out here, I too had wondered what life was like at the other end of the VoIP chat.

These photos, all of which were taken with explicit permission of the company managers, show the insides of a few Nepali software shops. While these offices may lack the marble and mahogany opulence of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper, they are not really very different from the office space you might find in use at a small startup company in Silicon Valley. My overall conclusion: the inside of a software shop looks about the same here as it does back home.