Tag: Primal Fusion

Posted on

Alpha beta soup, summer edition

Back in March I wrote about a major milestone at Primal Fusion. We went public with our first product and put out an alpha release for people to try. I also wrote a little about what it means to be in alpha release, particularly in a world of permanent beta products such as Gmail. We certainly decided what alpha means at Primal Fusion, as I wrote in that post, and we continue to make progress with our releases.

Meanwhile, over at Google, as of yesterday the the beta designation has been removed from Gmail and other Google apps. Wonderfully, for Gmail users made nervous by such an epochal move, ‘Back to Beta’ is a Google Labs feature that restores the now-missing word ‘beta’ to the Gmail logo. I wonder how they’ll measure the impact of that feature?

Perhaps alpha is no longer the new beta. Maybe it now really is the place for innovators!

Posted on

Ten Thoughts on what matters at a startup: Help

Why does help matter at a startup?

At a startup there’s a lot to do, you’re under-resourced, and you’re all in it together. You’ll need help from your team and they’ll need help from you.

“That’s not my job” is not something that anyone wants to hear when a milestone is looming. “How can I help?” has a much better ring to it, and is much more likely to lead to success at a startup. Having said that, knowing your own limitations is fine. A willingness to help is what’s important.

One of my favourite emails at Primal Fusion came in the days after we launched our product at DEMO. The influx of users led, inevitably, to issues that needed to be addressed. My manager and I dived into answering emails from users who encountered problems. We had good fun, and at one point he sent me this email: “All these years of professional services and you and I have finally been promoted to help desk ;)”

I’m pretty proud of that, even though it really had little to do with my job.

Finally, two things to keep in mind regarding your willingness to help. First, help isn’t about stepping all over your team mates. Remember, “How can I help” is a question to ask, not a directive to interfere. Second, make sure that the work you’re actually accountable for gets done, or negotiate something else.

This is one in a short series of posts called Ten Thoughts on what matters at a startup. The thoughts started life as a presentation I made at VeloCity residence at the University of Waterloo. While they’re far from definitive, and aren’t a top ten, they’ve mattered to me in my software startup experience.

Posted on

Why work at Primal Fusion?

Logo: Primal Fusion

As I’ve often written here, I work at Primal Fusion, a software startup in Waterloo. Some of the background regarding what we’re doing can be gleaned in blog posts by our founder, Peter Sweeney. It’s challenging stuff, and we think what we’re doing is important and will change the Web. A bold vision? Certainly. Can we deliver? We can. Is Primal Fusion a great place to work? Absolutely.

We’re always looking for smart, motivated people to join Primal Fusion and make the vision a reality. It’s fun and rewarding work. It’s also hard, and fast-paced, and even uncertain. We’ve made great progress, though, and with the help of new team members we can do even more. Try our thought networking service by signing up for our private alpha release. Have a look at our careers page and see if you might fit in.

Right now, I’m particularly interested in finding a couple of great developers with strong UI skills to join my development team. We’re a Scrum shop, and my team builds products on the Primal Fusion semantic synthesis platform. If you have what we’re looking for, you’ll have a chance to put your skills to use and make a meaningful impact. If that sounds like what you’re looking for, get in touch.

Posted on

365 days and counting

Today is the one year anniversary of my joining Primal Fusion. I’m amazed that a year has gone by already, and yet I’m so fully immersed in Primal Fusion that I’m not altogether sure that I remember what work felt like prior to the move. During the last year I’ve been lucky to work on some amazing stuff. Some of it is already out in the world, and some of it is yet to come in future releases. All of it has been rewarding.

This blog is, in large measure, essentially an ongoing record of life at one particular startup. Today’s post is an acknowledgment of a milestone on my Primal Fusion journey. I’m looking forward to many more significant ones down the road.

Posted on

Thought Networking presentation at StartupCampWaterloo

I attended my first StartupCampWaterloo last night. It was great – well-organized (without feeling regimented), engaging, lots of energy. I managed to arrive late, having come directly from work and a late meeting, which meant that I didn’t get to pitch my Primal Fusion presentation, but I did get to demo our Thought Networking product anyway. There were some good questions from the crowd and I had some interesting conversations afterward. Overall it felt like a positive response.

The other presentations were quite enjoyable to watch, and there were some interesting products on display. Waterloo is really a great place to work, with so much going on and so many people beavering away on their own thing.

Posted on

DemoCampGuelph demonstration of Primal Fusion

Last Wednesday I demonstrated Primal Fusion at the ninth edition of DemoCampGuelph. I had previously presented at the same event early last year and enjoyed it. This time I was essentially doing a demonstration very similar to the one given by Peter Sweeney and Bob Barlow-Busch at the DEMO conference in March.

I have to confess, though, that I was much less polished than those two! To ensure that everyone realized that it wasn’t a canned presentation, I decided to demo our product based on Toronto transit commission, a topic drawn from a presentation made earlier that evening by Jay Goldman. That worked out well.

The event was great fun, and the other demos were enjoyable to watch. One challenge that I had, though, was that because I arrived late I watched the other demos from the back of the crowded bar. It was hard to see and hear everything clearly back there!

Posted on

A visit to VeloCity

Today I had the opportunity to make a presentation to students at the VeloCity residence at the University of Waterloo. If you don’t know about VeloCity, it’s worth checking out. In their words:

VeloCity is no ordinary student residence.

It’s a place where some of UW’s most talented, entrepreneurial, creative and technologically savvy students will be united under one roof to work on the future of mobile communications, web and new media.

It’s a place where students, faculty and corporate partners will be active collaborators and beneficiaries of the talent, ideas and innovations that evolve.

It’s a place where the ‘next big thing’ could happen.

My presentation was a pretty simple one – Ten Thoughts on what matters at a startup. It certainly wasn’t meant to be definitive, but it did cover the kinds of things that, in my experience, matter on a daily basis. Some of it was informed by my recent experiences at Primal Fusion. Anyway, it seemed to go over well, and I had some good conversations with a few of the students after I finished.

In the near future I’ll start a little series of posts inspired by that presentation.

Posted on

That vision thing

One of the things that is important to any organization, but in particular to a startup, is a clarity of purpose. With limited resources, a startup can’t afford to allocate them to the wrong activities. Clarity of purpose is informed by a strong vision of what the company is about. At Primal Fusion we have a diverse group of smart and experienced people driving the company, and our shared vision originates from our founder, Peter Sweeney. In a series of provocative posts to our company blog, Peter has been revealing that vision to the world. Are we in the midst of a new industrial revolution? Peter thinks so. Read his latest post and see why. Read the others to see the vision that he’s been laying out for our particular startup.

Posted on

Two nights on the town: UX and QA/Agile peer-to-peer groups

Bowls of popcorn

I’m lucky to have access to some great resources in town for career-related learning. Communitech, the Waterloo Region Technology Association, host many peer-to-peer groups focused on a variety of areas of interest to people working with technology. I’ve mentioned the UX Group of Waterloo Region in previous posts. This month’s meeting was an entertaining night of UX-related videos (and accompanying popcorn)

This week, in addition the movie night, I also attended the Waterloo Agile Lean peer-to-peer meeting on Testing in Agile – a QA’s journey. Guelph-based Innosphere shared their experiences with QA and Agile over the last 2+ years. The thing that I enjoyed most was hearing how similar many of their experiences are to what we’ve found with integrating QA and Scrum at Primal Fusion. It’s reassuring to hear that others are on the same path and have arrived at similar solutions to the various challenges.

Posted on

On your mark, get set, oh wait…

This week at Primal Fusion we decided not to release an update to our thought networking service.

We had a completed update ready to go, but as we reviewed our work prior to release it was clear that there were design issues that we were just not comfortable with, and we didn’t have an obvious solution. How did we end up in that situation? To be honest, we made design decisions in haste without fully thinking them through. That became obvious during the review.

The decision to not release was tough because we had gotten into a great rhythm of regular releases. It was also easy, though, because we knew that we had another release in the very near future and correcting the issues was the right thing to do. In fact we have since corrected the issues and we’ll deliver our next update soon.

In my last post I wrote about the challenges of integrating UX with Scrum. I have to say, though, that once you get into the habit of regular releases after each sprint, it’s a great feeling to see a new one go out the door. A new release is a great motivator.

The flip side of that great feeling is the less-than-great feeling that comes with deciding not to push a release out. We’ve learned, though, that it’s not fatal to decide to not release the work that we do in a sprint. A course correction is acceptable once in a while.