• Choice of language / technology - language bigots will argue the merits of one language over another, but a good developer should have no trouble learning a new language.  For the founder, it's more important to understand what technology or language is most appropriate for your business.  Are you a PHP shop, .NET, J2EE or something else?  What can you afford?  What kind of developers are you likely to attract in your regional talent pool?  Once you start coding it's hard to switch to another language so choose carefully.
• Coding guidelines - most developers have a preferred coding style and most times no two are alike.  Once you have more than one dev in a code-base one person's style will begin to annoy the other.  To avoid bugs due to an over-zealous dev reformatting code that he doesn't need to touch, come up with and agree to a set of coding guidelines that detail coding style, best practices and naming.  Be hard-core about rejecting code that was not written to the "standard".  It won't take long for your developers to write to the new guidelines and start to love them.  If you're writing .NET code, run FxCop.
• Code reviews - if you have more than one developer on your team, start requiring code-reviews before each check-in.  Knowing that one has to present one's code to another developer forces one to really review it first, comment it and make it robust.  Another set of eyes on the code will help find bugs earlier and your devs will learn more from each other if there's an opportunity to give feedback before check-in.
• Build a resource manager - you may think today you'll only need one UI language, but the day may come when you want to localize and pulling out hard-coded strings and re-writing parts of functions that build display strings by concatenation is a pain in neck later.  It's easy to create a resource manager.  Take the time to do it in the beginning.
• Script Versioning - keep in mind when running a web site, you will be pushing new builds to the server all the time.  This means that you need a versioning scheme for cached resources like scripts, css and images.  Take the time in the beginning to make your URLs versionable.  One way is simply to put your files in a folder named after the version you are on, i.e. http://domain/[version]/scripts.  Update the version number in the paths and the browser will seek them from the server and not the cache.

via Omar and Sean Alexander:

Microsoft Corp., together with leading companies in the digital imaging industry, today announced enhancements to the family of Windows® operating systems that will enable consumers to easily work with RAW files in current and future versions of Windows. Working closely with digital imaging industry leaders including Adobe Systems Inc., Canon Inc., Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd. and Nikon Corp., Microsoft plans to deliver native support for digital camera RAW images in the next major version of Windows, code-named “Longhorn.”

In addition, Microsoft is enhancing the digital imaging experience for Windows XP with the upcoming availability of the Microsoft® RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP, allowing consumers to view thumbnails and preview and print Canon and Nikon RAW files from Windows Explorer in Windows XP.

Neat.  Dad's running into this with his D70.  Nice to know MS will support the RAW format.  I think this might affect K & I with our next camera.

Eric Sink mentions that he's no longer writing the Business of Software column on MSDN.  I am bummed as I was still waiting for that piece on software trade shows.  Did I miss it?  I am sure Eric's experience wrt. the micro-ISV will continue to be talked about on his blog, which is great.  Actually I hope MSDN can pick up another industry person to pick up the column.  It's one of my favorites.

I have been playing with Amazon's web services lately, seeing what kinds of things they expose and how I can use them in my sites.  I am basically seeing what's available and what would make sense for my stuff.  I am impressed.  As I was telling my brother-in-law, it's weird to think of Amazon as a platform, like you're programming to the .NET framework or Win32 or something. 

Amazon has a geek culture that is lacking in competitors like Walmart.com.  They get it, just like Google gets it, Flickr gets it and Microsoft especially gets it.  I am hearing SteveB's chant as type this -- "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!!!"  You want to build critical mass, you need partners.  You need devs writing to your API so that their stuff increases the value of your stuff and vice-versa.

Amazon's web service API is free and their "associates" program offers several levels of integration.  At the least technical tier, there are snippets of HTML to include in your pages to display IFRAMEs of ads from a particular shopping category.  You can choose what best fits your particular site.  There are search boxes you can display on your site to search the Amazon catalog.  At the second technical tier, there are special URLs you can request to return XML payloads of items from the catalog.  The requests involve things like looking wishlists, search for products by manufacturer, etc.  This allows you more control over the display of Amazon items on your page.  Finally there is a full-on SOAP API for developers to consume.  Each has the ultimate goal of selling more Amazon products and the more you sell the bigger your cut.  Fun stuff.

Now, many companies will ask "will they come if we build an API?".  Who knows.  The thing is, they will never come to build on it, if you don't have one.

Apparently you can get yourself a beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 code-name Whidbey right here.  All my sites run .NET 1.1 (Everett) and there's some serious coolness in the 2.0 Whidbey stuff.

Eric Sink has another Business of Software column on MSDN (Geeks Rule, MBAs Drool) where he gives the advice to keep your micro-ISV as developer centric as long as possible.  As a matter of fact, he also quotes Spolsky who is also of a similar mind:

If you ask me, and I'm biased, no software company can succeed unless there is a programmer at the helm.

Sink also mentioned that Microsoft has people who move from Test to Dev, Test to PM, PM to Dev and back, but you don't hear about technical people moving to Marketing very often.  As a matter of fact, I only know one guy who was a test intern who came back in a marketing role.  Sink as a developer feels like a marketer with a developer background can be a valuable thing with a little polish.

As a marketing person, a developer can help with decisions where technology choices affect market strategy.

K received a LinkedIn invitation from a former VP in the mobile devices division so she invited me in.  It being a while since I did anything with my last social network service, Orkut, I decided to try this one out.  Actually, I feel sort of bad about Orkut.  I get one or two emails a month from people asking for an Orkut invite, which I usually have just blown off.  Sorry about that.  I've been too busy and really haven't found a reason to check-in on what's going on there.  I am thinking it's time to delete myself from there as I have with Friendster, but haven't yet.

Anyhow, it's LinkedIn now.  K's connection with her ex-VP initially set my "network" pretty large.  I sent some invites to my usual sub-group of contacts that know what social networking software is and would be interested in trying out this one.  I intentionally left it to people in my business as well, as LinkedIn is a kind of "friendster for business".  This means some of my homies who aren't directly working in tech are left out.  Sorry about that too, although if you really want an invite I will send one out.

LinkedIn differs from Friendster and Orkut in that you can only search through people already in your network.  This encourages its growth of course, and encourages real connections.  The people you add to you network have to explicitly accept.  After reading Jason Calacanis' entry I thought wth and decided to introduce myself and ask if I could add him to my network.  To my surprise, he agreed although we've never met and now connected to half a million people.

Immediately, I like the following about LinkedIn:

• Ability to search for people by company and date
• Ability to search for jobs
• Ability to automatically resend an invitation (I need that for InfiniteHoops)
• The focus on business connections, the idea that there are 595,300+ in my online rolodex.

We will see if this SNS ends up being any more sticky than the rest.  So far the only thing I've done with these things is to give away too much personal information and email addresses, then delete my account. 

O'Reilly has an interesting interview with Stewart Butterfield of Flickr.com.

Flickr boasts 270,000 users, four million photos, 30 percent monthly growth in users, and 50 percent monthly growth in photos.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/02/04/sb_flckr.html

Google, Yahoo, MSN, Six Apart, Telligent and many other blog software vendors are very excited about the rel="nofollow" attribute that will attempt to combat comment spammers.  The idea being that any anchor tag with rel="nofollow" will not be weighted in calculating the popularity of a site by the major search engines, thereby taking away the prize of a higher ranked site through comment spam.  Having been annoyed by comment spammers on my .Text weblog, I happy to jump on board and support rel="nofollow" in my BabyPhotoBlog.com software.

Albert and Omar report that MS Antispyware has surpassed expectations in cleaning up their family members' computers.  A couple months back I ended up wiping my sister-in-law's machine just to be safe after the antispyware tools I tried could not clean everything.  It's way too easy to get nastiware on your machine.  I am really glad to see MS going after this problem.

MS AntiSpyware (beta) has been released to the web.  Here's the download point.  Running my scan now.  So far so good.

This is cool.  Microsoft has a beta of a new SQL Server management tool, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Manager, you can use to manage SQL Server 2000 or MSDE 2000 databases.

Engadget has an interview with one of the co-founders (Caterina Fake) of Vancouver BC based Flickr.com.  It's mostly a "what is Flickr" kind of piece, but interesting as well.