coclarity

Today’s Tuesday Push is for Tuesday Push itself. We’re all pushing the push.

Damien Mulley describes the Tuesday Push as “a way for the small but growing tech community in Ireland to make some noise about ourselves by picking a good example of an Irish Tech Company and highlighting their product(s) every second Tuesday.” Its another great idea from Damien, and a great example of taking positive action and pooling our resources in these “interesting times”. Past Tuesday pushes included companies like PutPlace and Toddle who wrote about the positive benefits of the push.

So if you want to help and get help from other people in the startup community, get out there and push.

coClarity was selected as one of the companies on Webmission 09.

Mike Butcher of Techcrunch describes Webmission as:

taking 20 of the best UK and Irish Web Entrepreneurs out to Silicon Valley from 28 Mar to 3 Apr 09. The point is to enable the successful entrepreneurs to build relationships with great people in the US, meet US VCs, explore business opportunities and ultimately do business with potential US VCs, partners and clients.

The mission coincides with Web 2.0 Expo. It is supported by UK Trade & Invest, Oracle, Orrick, Web2.0Expo (O’Reilly and TechWeb), and the Technology Strategy Board (TSB). WebMission’s online presence is managed by Information Architects and PR by Braben. The trip is organised by WebMission Ltd, a joint venture between Polecat and Oli Barrett.

It’s great to be included with well established companies like Huddle and Trampoline Systems. In addition, there’s another Irish company from Cork Compliance & Risks.

Just over a year ago we took part in a similar mission organised by Irish Companies. That trip was a fantastic success. The companies who were on it, forged strong links, met amazing people and returned to Ireland with a can-do attitude.

We’re really looking forward to the trip. It’s a great opportunity to meet up with some of our advisors and customers who are based in Silicon Valley. We’re looking forward to finding some new ones as well.

Yeah, I know I’m late. Not only that, but I’m writing this in the People’s Republic of Cork, home of the global headquarters of Sxoop Technologies, this week’s Tuesday Push. Pixenate love developing photo software for the web.

Their main product is an online photo editor, think web-based photoshop. Most recently they’ve developed twitter mosaic, which allows you to generate a mosaic image of your twitter friends and followers. Not only that, but they have a service where you can order a mug, t-shirt or other merchandise with the mosaic on it, a fantastic idea. They might already be making more money out of twitter than Twitter do.

Here’s a mosaic of my followers, the poor souls who sometimes see my tweets float by in the twitter deluge. Time for me to get on my bike and find/follow some more.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

From a development point of view I believe Walter is running this on AWS, a favourite of ours as well. He’s also put in some nice Ajaxy touches to allow you to remove some followers like the “o_O” ones.

It was over two weeks ago but I’m just getting to post these slides from a talk I gave in IT@Galway. Things have been crazy busy in the world of coClarity. The talk tied together Patterns, Scrum, eXtreme Programming, GTD and Ferris’ Four-Hour-Workweek.

While agile techniques owe their inspiration to other disciplines, like design-patterns, they have been improved by the software industry. So even if your business has nothing to do with software development or “agile” you can probably apply some of these ideas and practices.

The slides are on slideshare.

About 45 people showed up at the the Cairnes Business School in NUIG. Kieran Conboy of NUIG also talked about the future of agile techniques and how they compare with each other.

I told some stories of first-hand experience applying agile techniques in tiny, medium and massive companies. The stories began at a “fringe” talk at OOPSLA 98 where eXtreme programming was unveiled on green single-sheet handouts, continue to 1999 and applying Scrum before anyone really knew what it was, then on to 2003 where both eXtreme and Scrum were used on the development of drivers/firmware for a very successful processor. The stories culminate in the present day where the techniques are being used to bootstrap a web-application for project coordination (coClarity).

We had a good interactive chat with some excellent questions lobbed in from the audience. I even got to chat with some former colleagues from Tellabs and Digital afterwards. Last week I got to reuse some of the slides in a guest lecture to 3rd year engineers in Limerick Institute of Technology.

Someone from Enterprise Ireland was there and they’re talking about organising a repeat of the talks in Cork and Dublin.