Recently, an odd set of coincidences made me wonder if, as a society, we’ve gone over the line in technology dependence.

Item 1) A Quiznos sandwich store was getting ready to set up shop in the lobby of the OpenLogic building. Signs announcing its arrival met every entrant. A huge, heavily bolted Quiznos kiosk was stashed in the corner trying to look unobtrusive. Then, it just went away. Signs explained it was moved to another building in the office park. The reason (not explained on the sign)? They couldn’t get a comm line for their credit card machine.

Item 2) I took my son to Red Robin a few weeks back. When we finished and asked for the check, we waited and waited. Eventually, our server came by to apologetically explain that their “system went down.” We waited for at least 20 minutes after our meal was done. Back at the server’s station, I could see a Windows logo coming up, then disappearing like a drowning sailor - no doubt it was bobbing repeatedly with a Ctl-Alt-Del dunking. Finally she came back with a hand-written ticket and credit-card charge slip. Their system never came up. By the time my charge showed up on my account it was for several dollars more than I had signed for. Just enough to not make it worth the bother to contest it, but just enough to feel like they stuck it to me.

Item 3) OpenLogic engineers often go to Heidi’s Deli, but on more than one occasion, we’ve been turned away right at the start of the lunch rush because they couldn’t take cards. They blew an entire 2 hr lunch window.

In all 3 cases, the business ground to an halt due to lack of basic, working technology and no support. In 2 cases, the businesses decided they couldn’t even make a sandwich without a network connection. In all cases, there was no alternative process in place to conduct business.

Have we become so dependent upon business technology that the average street vendor in Bombay, armed with a cell phone and enough inventory to fit on a rickshaw, could out-hustle a successful national sandwich franchise?

(OpenLogic Engineer) Brad's 9 yo daughter uses a program called Hackety Hack to learn and write Ruby. She wrote a program to download an mp3 and play it the other day. When she asked Brad what he was working on, he replied "basically the same thing". 

Open sourcing a project, releasing an existing project, under an open source license, is hard to do well.  The SnapLogic blog has a good essay on it, Constructing the Bazaar: Taking advantage of the open-source development model in your project.  The three main points in the article are:

1. Modularity
2. APIs
3. Remember the guy that doesn’t have time to come to all your meetings or check out all the modules.

All those will make it easy for someone to contribute to your project.  I'd add, make it cool. 

• Don't open source a completely baked project.  (Is there such a thing?) 
• Leave some cool parts and features for the other guys. 
• Along the same lines, be open to new ideas and new directions for your project - otherwise you'll always be saying no to the guy that wants to help out.

Good luck!

Here's a reason to ignore people who give flippant advice (in this case me).  Following is an interaction I had with my co-worker Rod who sits right next to me this morning .

• [Out of silence, a very annoying ringing sound ensues. ]
• Random developer [seeming very annoyed]:  What is that sound?
• Rod [looking down on the floor by his feet]: Hmm… I think that's my UPS backup.
• Me:  It's annoying, make it stop.
• Rod: What should I do?
• Me: Push the button.
• Rod [pushes the button]
• Rod's computer [turns off]
• Rod:  D'oh…Ugh… That turns my whole computer off.
• Me: You shouldn't have pushed that button
• The rest of the engineering team: racous laughter

Google is coming out with a standard "social graph" called OpenSocial.   This social graphing tool would store users' information and who they were friends with, then all the social networking applications (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) could use that data instead of asking you to recreate it each time.  

Until now, Google was just one of many people trying to solve the social graph problem.   However, they just signed up MySpace as a partner, as well as others like LinkedIn and Plaxo, so they now have a very good chance of succeeding!