Things not to do at startups

The Java Posse Roundup is underway in snow-covered Crested Butte... and I'm serious about the snow part. Check out Robert Cooper's photo of fellow Roundup attendee Charlie Collins standing in front of a snowbank that blocks the entire first floor of the house behind him.

The theme of this open-spaces conference is "don't repeat yourself", a pretty flexible topic for unconference sessions. I kicked off a session called "startup mistakes not to remake", which started by discussing specific lessons learned from working at startups, and continued in some interesting directions. After all, as engineers, we can't keep management from doing stupid things, so the important survival skill is to see anti-patterns at work and stay the heck away from companies where they're evident. One of the themes that emerged was that in a startup, engineers can't afford to think they're better than anyone else; startup employees need to band together and believe in each other, and really can't tolerate the common "Dilbert"-style cynicsm about marketing or management. Joe Nuxoll and Dianne Marsh also offered some interesting perspectives about the relative markets for talent and entrepreneurs in the Bay Area and the Midwest, with Dianne trying to find a way to deal with the constant pressure from VCs to move nascent companies out West, even when highly-talented developers want to stay in (or return to) other parts of the country.

Session 2 for me focused on UI. It started with Joe Nuxoll talking about the best ideas in user experience, but took an interesting when some of the attendees pointed out that all the real progress is being made in new devices where a talented team can rethink all the concepts of user interaction: the iPhone and the Wii, for example. As Robert Cooper complained, there's been no substantial change in PC UI design since the mouse and windowed desktop took over in the mid-80's. Despite the occasional novel experiment, like the guy who did head-tracking with the Wii remote, there's nothing you as a programmer can count on being present on your end user's computer. What if, for example, your mouse had a small rumble pack, so you could get a little shake when you moused outside a window frame, or over a default button, as the Wii remote does? If it's a good idea, it might take hold -- Joe noted the quick emergence of the scroll-wheel mouse -- but improving the UI by improving the physical interaction between computer and user is a slow-moving process.

Cooper thinks it would help if JSR 82 (Java APIs for Bluetooth) was in core Java, so you could count on being able to access devices like Wii remotes. What do you think?