The case of the curious SNAP Sony Development platform
25 November, 2010
Yesterday evening I followed a reddit post to this.
Shortly thereafter it's on hold
Some pages are up, but the link to download the SDK is no longer working. You can still get to the class reference (http://snap.sonydeveloper.com/snapdocs/Base/index.php)
Now one would think, if Sony were to be getting into the game with a language that is very very close to what native iPhone apps are developed in various news outlets would be all over this. What's Sony up to ? Overzealous agency publishing pages before they were meant to ? It went up and swiftly got taken down for other reasons ?
Well, well, well.. very interesting indeed.
The brains:
MBP - for profit
Tower - Watercooled (both GPU and CPU), overclocked, beast. C2D E8500 @ 3.59ghz, 4GB DDR2-1000MHZ, EVGA 8800GT, 15'000RPM Velocripator drive. *always* put your money into fast drives, money well spent.
Backup - Lacie BigTriple in Raid 1 config.
Routers - Hacked (
The brawn:
If that intrigues you, follow this link ... 
So they're 
.
Updated 26th August A number of amp boards later, some very helpful staff at NuForce, and suffice to say, the Icon (at this stage) won't work well with Energy RC-Mini's. So don't buy my setup Something in the frequency response curve of these speakers really disagrees with this amp. I'm moving on to a different amp - using the NuForce as a preamp. I have a tasty little tube amp on it's way up from the states at the moment, which should be quite something on the desktop. So if you're contemplating different speakers other than the S1 for the Icon, I'd recommend posting on forums and seeing if anyone else has them. You may run a very small risk that they won't work.
Now for the little treat...
So you get something out of reading this - people will pfaff on about audio gear forever. But it's all about the music. So here's one kiwi band that is truly amazing and tends to get rave reviews - if you're into electronica and dub, try Pitch Black out for size - some free MP3's from live performances, I recommend listening to the Tokyo mix 
Yes.. those are laptops waving in the air, and yes that is Zed on stage. Just look out for the mp3..
I have a rather entrepreneurial friend back in New Zealand, he consulted at a Software company I worked for once. Over time we became good friends.. One day him and his business partner came up with a widget. And sold a few, and then needed to sell some more. Then one day he gave me a call. You can imagine as a web developer the conversation "Yeah some some company wants [insert horrendous figure here] to build us an e-commerce site" pffwaaaattt (coffee all over desk)...
It's one thing sitting at a desk job, saying something will work, and then meh, it doesn't, this happened or that happened, whatever the reason, your thing doesn't work. There's a kazillion reasons why something won't work, or can't be done, or is late etc. Depending on your character this will bother you, or not (hopefully the former!). It doesn't *really* teach you responsibility. Now, taking someones money personally, and promising delivery of something, with nobody else to shoulder the workload. Now that's responsibility. There's only you and your Mac/PC. So long as the two of you are both in working condition, and you haven't bitten off more than you can chew well there's no excuses.
Everyone reading this should be familiar with the actual mechanics of building something, but most often you're shielded from the business elements. Why are you building what you're building ? Is some Business Analyst telling you chinese whispers. Do you really know ? It's all about the vision.
This isn't some contrived management tactic, there's a reason people put it on the top of briefing/requirements docs, if you buy into the ultimate business goal, then you will be far better at doing what you need to do.
There is a famous saying in New Zealand - "Make the boat go faster" an entire army of engineers, yachtsman, craftsman, tacticians were all about one single minded goal - making the boat go faster (and they did, Black Magic won the Americas Cup).
In our case it was all about selling the widgets. By being both a friend, and supplier, you realise you're taking money from this company, your friend, to build something. They're going to have to make that money up by selling product. So, you'd better do what you can to help them sell that product.
By keeping the vision at the forefront of your mind you're not going to use technology for technology's sake. You're not going to waste time spending 10 hours getting some little bit working when it doesn't matter. You are going to learn how to prioritise - especially if you're doing this in your hometime. Once you've wasted 3 evenings in a row and not gotten any further along the path to completing your objective you'll quickly learn what's important!
This WILL make you a better developer. Too often I read posts about the top x number of things looking for when hiring a developer. Technical brilliance is IMNHO focused on WAY too much. By doing the process from start to finish, you'll realise, the minor technical bits are quite small in the overall scheme of things (unless of course you need to build some ninja fast product requiring complex calculations)
Note as I've been writing this Ilya put up a 
You will hear and see a lot people who are singularly focused on one technology, one piece of the puzzle, they're specialists. That's great. But a piece of code, or a sql call, or a config file does not a web app make. If you have to do everything from ordering a server to getting the finished app up and ready to login, you'll realise there are a lot of pieces of the puzzle.
By doing everything yourself you'll begin to realise the other side of the fence is not as nearly black magic as you thought it was. Gaining experience in all aspects, from server config, mysql setup, dns setup, playing with cron will make you a lot more well rounded. By becoming more experienced in different aspects, you'll realise you can do a lot more.
[As a side note, this is also why I think working in a startup, is a damned good thing. Every dev should do it at least once!]
Along the way, your client is going to ask you for things, lots of things. And you're going to have to manage that feature request cycle. Now who knows better - you or the customer ? 
Now, why did I say in my opening statement maintaining an app. Long term there is no greater thing than maintaining what you wrote. In our day jobs, we move on, client's move on, the code moves on. But invariably the business doesn't - it stays there and so does the site.
By maintaining something yourself you get an appreciation for the movement in technology(when we first wrote this app, the nearest thing to a published framework were the PEAR libraries, nobody had yet come up with a solid stack). Now 3-4 years later I'm rolling in Rails into the mix.
You'll understand the value of commenting the tricky bits. it always comes up as a reminder, just last week I was all over some code questioning "WTF did I do here?" especially when the business decision hadn't been written down beside the code.
Along with gaining a much fuller appreciation of clean, modular, readable and reusable code. Also you'll get the chance to refactor and it makes you (well at least it does for me) feel good. Some crufty bit of code you haven't touched for 6 months, and you get to make it look better and work better. Nice !
This might seem counter to what I've been saying. But I think this is how a lot of new technologies get adopted. People are playing on pet projects and attempt to use a new technology. Doing your own app, you get to make the choice. It's either going to work or it's not. And you have to live with the win's or losses. Whereas in your day job there might not be anyway on gods green earth you're going to implement technology x as the impact on a large team is huge, but on your own time - it's your choice.
You get to play with jQuery for instance (whichs rock extremely hard by the way), or mix and match Rails and PHP. Can you imagine what a system architect is going to say when you propose that in your day job? No f-cking way.
Of course, you have to pick your moments and rationalise why you're choosing that technology. What is it really doing better for you...
This is where doing a project for yourself shines. I saw a great clip by Tony Robbins the other day, must say I've never seen him before, and not likely to buy his products, however he did say something that that resonated with me loudly - too many people blame the lack of resources time,money etc but ultimately their failures are not about lack of resources, but the lack of THEM being RESOURCEFUL.
This is what I'm talking about with this post. Maybe it's a really long winded way of putting it, but by building and maintaining your own app, in order to do it successfully you'll have to be resourceful. You'll have to learn, prioritise, be accountable, responsible, problem solve, etc and it will all matter because..
You'll get this at the end of the day. That's what I appreciate in developers. People who when faced with a challenge won't back down. They will find different approaches to a problem. They will try and try to get something running, they'll go away, rethink the problem and have another crack at it. Once done, they'll polish it, make it look work better/faster/ etc to acheive the end goal/vision. Having done that they'll take pride in it and say "I did that, I think it's cool and it rocks, and here's why ... ".
Going back to my original opening statement, doing a project yourself gives you the opportunity to do so, virtually unrestrained. You'll get a tonne of challenges from technical, emotional, financial, time, the whole gamut. But by taking on the responsibility to do it yourself, (or be responsible for delivery yourself - you could farm the whole lot out, then you've got a whole new set of problems!), it means you have to meet and break through each one of those challenges. The only constraints in general, are your time and motivation. A number of years down the track you can look back on it, and go 'damn that feels good'
When I get the chance to interview people one of my questions is always
Feel free to answer it here, I'd like to see what makes other people tick..
