Global Nerdy

While I have annoyed more than my fair share of higher-up executives at Microsoft, as dramatized in the photo below:

…there’s one guy who I’m quite sure still thinks I’m a righteous dude: Charlie Kindel, pictured below:

Charlie has been at Microsoft longer than there’s been a World Wide Web: here’s been there for 21 years, and the very first web page at CERN was put online only 20 years ago this past weekend. If you put it in terms of a typical run at a high-tech company, Charlie’s longevity at Microsoft is like being reincarnated 7 times.

I met him while he was in his final role. In the great tradition of unwieldy Microsoftian names, his title was “Partner Group Program Manager for the Windows Phone Application Platform and Developer Experience”, which he would acronymize into “PGPMWPAPDE” on the title slide of his presentations to great comic effect. It was his responsibility to get developers to build apps for Windows Phone 7. This was an unenviable task, as Microsoft had fallen asleep at the wheel with mobile, tragically underestimated Apple (“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share,” said Steve Ballmer in 2007, “No chance”) and were now playing a game of catch-up where the front runner had a three-year lead and were pretty much defining what a smartphone was.

Charlie did a fantastic job of rallying the troops. He gathered us Windows Phone Champs — a hand-picked team of evangelists, developers and tech writers — and not only walked us through the fine points of developing for Windows Phone 7, but also instilled in us a feeling that yes, this phone is worth championing. It’s one thing to go over technical details; it’s entirely another thing to get the troops revved up, especially against some pretty long odds.

He was also good at recognizing the Champs’ contributions and helping them play to their strengths. At the MIX 2010 conference, he sought me out and made sure I had one of the rare and coveted “I [heart] Windows Phone” stickers for my accordion, which is still there even though I’m no longer a Sith Lord with The Empire:

For his work, dedication and especially his support and vote of confidence, I will always be grateful to Charlie.

The word’s out that after 21 years and a gazillion projects at Microsoft, Charlie’s leaving to launch a startup. It’s still in stealth mode, but he’s provided a hint in his farewell blog post, where he says it’ll be about “sports, advertising, mobile, social-networking, and, of course, the cloud”.

True to form, he left the Phone team with this message:

To the Windows Phone team: I may stop using some Microsoft products now that I’m out of here. But not Windows Phone. The BEST product Microsoft has ever built. Do not let up!

Well said. Charlie’s one of the reasons I still hold onto my Samsung Focus and keep my Windows Phone 7 dev tools up to date.

Charlie, good luck with the startup — I’ve got an idea of what that’s like — thanks for everything, and I’ll see you out there!

I’ll be in “Vangroovy” next week! My fellow Shopifolk, David Underwood, and I will be there to meet up with Vancouver developers, designers and entrepreneurs to talk about Shopify, ecommerce and “the industry” in general, catch up with some people at the Grow Conference and to participate in HackVAN, HackDays.ca’s hack day taking place in Vancouver.

Here are the quick event details:

• What: HackVAN, a “hack day” run by the cross-country event known as HackDays
• When: Saturday, August 20th, from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Pacific
• Where: Mozilla Vancouver (163 West Hastings Street, Suite 200)
• How much: There’s a registration fee of $10, which helps cover breakfast and lunch
• What’s in it for you? Prizes! Really nice prizes, too!

Want to find out more about HackVAN?

• David put together a quick write-up on the Shopify Technology Blog
• There’s more at HackDays.ca, including a list of the prizes you can win
• Here’s a quick write up from DealMaker Media’s Under the Radar blog

If you’re in Vancouver and can do even a little programming, you should be at HackVAN!

 

Judging from this slide from a recent presentation of his, Nick Small, Shopify’s resident JavaScript guy and the guy behind the batman.js framework, needs a hug. Give him a virtual one on his Twitter page!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Pictured above: Screencap of the Potato admin panel.

I had only one real complaint when I started working at Shopify’s office: the internet connectivity wasn’t all that great. For the longest time, you could easily fit the entire company into a van, but since late last year, the company had grown from 30 to almost 70 Shopifolks. The once-adequate service, made up of some bonded DSL lines, was no longer up to the task.

The additional people meant that we were going to switch offices soon, which ruled out signing up for different lines, whether cable, fibre, or what-have-you. By the time whatever telco we’d go with had secured the permits, ripped up the sidewalk and done the installation, we’d be in a different office. The solution had to be a combination of both workable and temporary.

Enter “Potato”. It’s the solution created by one of our guys, Adrian Irving-Beer, and it uses a PC running Debian to bond together 6 lines and load-balance them. The internet connectivity is so much better now.  I’ll leave it to Adrian to explain how it works, which he does quite well in an article in the Shopify Technology Blog titled How a Potato Saved Shopify’s Internet.

Better still, you too can use Potato to solve your bandwidth problems. Adrian’s posted the source and config files on Github. Enjoy!

Mark Dunkley is one of the designers here at Shopify, and he’s not just good, he’s fast. When we needed a theme for the Angry Birds store cranked out it short order, he did just that — and it looks great, too!

One of the secrets of his speed is having documentation for template at the ready, and now you can have it too. Take a look at his online cheat sheet, which covers the settings, keywords and variables you need to know to do Shopify shop design. Everything’s laid out in front of you and nicely organized on the page, and to get more details, you just have to click:

If you design Shopify templates, you’re going to want to bookmark the cheat sheet. Check it out now!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Skida is 20-year-old Corinne Prevot’s company that sells hats, bandanas and neckwarmers aimed at skiers, and it’s a Shopify shop. She started selling hats when she was 17, carrying her inventory to her local sports shop, without any idea of what to charge. Three years later, she’s got a profitable company that made $100,000 in sales in the last 12 months (almost half of which was profit), she’s selling hats in 47 brick-and-mortar shops across the U.S. and she’s also moving her stuff online with Shopify (click here to visit her online store).

Just as “write what you know” is popular advice from many writing schools, “sell what you know” seems to be the lesson from Corinne’s example. An avid skier, she switched from downhill to cross-country skiing while in high school at a “skiing-focused boarding school” (why did I not know about the existence of such things?). Downhill skiing has all sorts of fashion options (perhaps only snowboarding, the superior sport IMHO, gives you even more), but Corinne noted that cross-country skiers had only “kind of black and knitted” stuff to choose from. That might’ve been an acceptable choice for a Montrealer, but Corinne “wanted something more interesting”. And thus Skida was born.

Here’s Corinne in a quick video interview for Forbes; her story also appears online in an article titled All-Star Student Entrepreneurs: Hat Trick. The article is one of a series covering students who are attending school full-time and running businesses making six figures; they were invited to a special summit hosted by Michael Dell, “the original dorm room entrepreneur”.

As always, if you’d like to find out more about Shopify, you know who to call.

After reading my article about Unicorn, Shopify’s achievements system, people have asked me what my particular quest is. I’ve decided to go with a tough one — one with these particular qualities:

• It’s incredibly important to the business
• It serves a serious technical need
• I have have a specific and hard-to-come-by set of skills suited to the task
• Nobody else wants to do it.

“What is that quest?” you might ask. Simple:

Adapted from “This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult” at Allie’s blog, “Hyperbole and a Half”.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.