Graham Glass, etc.

EDU 2.0 Logo

We have a good candidate for the EDU 2.0 logo ready; any feedback is most welcome! The next step is the web design concept, which I'm really looking forward to.

New Venture, Part 12

This is part 12 of the series; part 11 is here.

We launched an early private beta of EDU 2.0 two weeks ago and so far it has gone very smoothly; the initial feedback has been positive and no nasty bugs have surfaced.

The next step is to migrate to a professional web design, move the system from our office server to a clustered and hosted environment, and add a few more key features. We hope to complete these tasks in about 4-6 weeks, at which point we'll launch a public beta. In the meantime, we're also releasing previews of future features via EDU 2.0 Labs.

It's a busy time, but a lot of fun! I'm most looking forward to working on some cool non-traditional ways to teach kids.

EDU 2.0 Labs

We just introduced EDU 2.0 Labs, a place that showcases new features under development but not ready for prime time. The first previewed feature is deep support for curricula.

The idea is that educational materials can be associated with the knowledge and skills that they teach/test, which in turn can be associated with one or more curricula. Once these relationships are in place, you can do interesting and powerful analyses such as:

• tracking a student's progress relative to a particular curriculum
• comparing the knowledge/skills required by various curricula
• generating new curricula dynamically based on student interests

The site includes a simple mockup that associates a few education materials with some knowledge and skills required by the Californian and UK curricula. We have many enhancements planned for this particular feature, but we thought we'd get an early prototype up and running in order to solicit some feedback.

New Venture, Part 10

This is part 10 of the series; part 9 is here.

The private beta of EDU 2.0 will be unlocked this friday, and the first set of users will receive their passwords shortly thereafter.

Now that the private beta is almost out, I thought I'd share a few statistics about the project:

• time to build the private beta = 1 year
• cost of all software = $1500
• cost of all hardware = $6000
• cost of legal work = $3000
• number of database tables = 28
• number of controllers = 48 (5 methods average)
• number of models = 42 (4 methods average)
• number of views = 48 (4 rhtml files average)
• number of javascript files = 15

In addition, we used the following third party software:

• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails
• Mongrel
• RadRails IDE
• MySQL
• FCKEditor
• Gruff
• ASCIIMathML
• Design Science
• RMagick
• ImageMagick
• SILK icons
• Yahoo Groups
• Typepad

Soon we will also be using:

• Subversion
• Capistrano
• Pound

We ended up implementing a lot more features than we had the time to test, so we removed a ton stuff that will be delivered in subsequent releases. The good news is that we have a very good idea of the roadmap for the next year because most of it has already been prototyped!

Part 11 of this series is here.

New Venture, Part 8

This is part 8 of the series; part 7 is here.

We've been making good progress on the education software platform, and the core of the system is nearly complete. The main remaining tasks fall into four categories; user interface improvements, web site graphics, performance tuning, and testing. The next couple of weeks will be dedicated to spiffing up the UI using various AJAX widgets, which should be fun. There are quite a few widgets to choose from these days, and I'll blog about whatever we decide to go with.

The goal of our company is to provide free, high quality education to anyone with Internet access. The software is designed to work in both supervised and unsupervised learning environments. It uses a Wiki-approach for the creation and evolution of education materials, but with some special twists. Will this approach be successful? The only way we'll find out is to launch the product and see what happens! Based on our current rate of progress, this will occur in Q2 2006.

Part 9 of this series is here.

New Venture, Part 7

This is part 7 of the series; part 6 is here.

My working vacation to Thailand was very productive, and as a result I'm about one month ahead of schedule. I consider the current PHP-based prototype an alpha version because it implements a decent subset of the final functionality without stuff like security, content versioning, scalability and internationalization.

The next step is to port the PHP code to Ruby on Rails. I'm hoping to get an initial port done in about a week, at which point I'll add the additional features necessary for an invitation-only beta 1 release at the end of December.

Since I'm not familiar with Ruby on Rails, I expect the initial port will not take full advantage of the language or the framework. It's not a big deal though because I still have plenty of time in the schedule to polish the design and code. I will blog any interesting things I find out while I'm doing the port. It should be a lot of fun!

Part 8 of this series is here.

New Venture, Part 6

This is part 6 of the series; part 5 is here.

It's been a month since my last update, and I've made very good progress on the prototype of my education product. At this rate, the prototype will be finished before the end of the year at which point it will be time to create the production version.

I've known all along that the PHP prototype is 100% throw-away code, and I'm reading some books on Ruby to make sure it's the right choice for the production code. Since I have a strong background in Smalltalk, I've found the language quite easy to learn with just a few areas that don't initially impress me. I'm going to wait until I've written a bunch of Ruby code before making any criticisms though, because it's possible that there are some good usability reasons for the parts I don't like.

When I have a little more free time I'm going to blog about some programming language ideas of my own. This might sound odd, but I don't think that programming languages of the future are going to be object-oriented, at least not in the sense that Java, Smalltalk and Ruby are. Stay tuned for more details on this topic.

Part 7 of this series is here.

New Venture, Part 3

This is part 3 of the series; part 2 is here.

I've noticed that my lifestyle has quickly shifted into startup mode. The same thing happened with my last three companies, so it's no surprise.

I usually wake up around 1pm (yes, you read that right) and go straight to lunch with my notepad and source code listings in hand. I use mealtimes to work on design issues and code clean-up since I am relatively free of distractions. By the end of the meal I normally have plenty of action items including improvements to the current codebase. When I get back home I knock out the code enhancements and start working on the core design issues for the day.

At around 6pm I go for a workout which is usually a one-mile run and about 45 minutes of machines. After that I do a bit more work and then eat dinner at around 8pm. Somtimes I take a 30-minute nap. Then I work until about 5am.

I'm a night owl, and find that it's much easier to work when it's dark outside and there are no interruptions. I sometimes play music in the background, and drink plenty of coffee until around 3am. I keep things interesting by interleaving the computer work with fun things like learning the Russian language, listening to music, IM'ing with friends, surfing the web, and writing blog entries.

During the last 2 hours of the evening I normally drink a glass of wine to wind down, create a to-do list for the next day, and read a few chapters of a book before finally falling asleep at around 5am. Eight hours of sleep and then it's time to repeat the cycle all over again!

It's hard work, but extremely satisfying and rewarding.

Part 4 of the series is here.

New Venture, Part 2

This is part 2 of the series; part 1 is here.

I've been working on my new startup for about 4 weeks now, so I thought it would be fun to write about what I've been up to.

I had the idea for the company years ago, so I'd already figured out a bunch of the basics, such as what the company will do, how it will make money, and how it will differentiate itself.

I decided that the most important thing for me to do in the early days was to get a good idea of how the product will be used in practice and how much effort it would be to create a beta version that could be made available for general use.

The product itself will be web-based and used by children, teachers and parents. In order to get a feel for how the product would function, I started by drawing pictures on paper of how the various screens would look and how the users would perform key functions. For example, how would a teacher create a lesson about Isaac Newton? How would a child learn about physics? After about a week, I felt pretty good about the paper version of the product.

The next step was to convert the paper version to HTML so that I could try out a simple hardcoded version from a browser. I bought Dreamweaver and created HTML versions of the paper screens, including the links between the screens. At this point, there was no backend to the system at all, since the idea was just to get a simple hardcoded HTML version of some common use cases. This phase took about a week, at which point I could run the sample screens from any browser.

I set up Tomcat as a web server on my development computer and got one of my friends to run the sample across the Internet, just to make sure everything was fine. One benefit of this approach is that after just two weeks of work, I could effectively demonstrate a very early version of my product to a potential investor anywhere in the world.

By the end of the second week, I was getting very tired of creating static HTML using DreamWeaver. For example, one of the screens was a lesson about Isaac Newton. Creating a single lesson by hand is not a big deal, but imagine creating twenty lessons using the same approach! At this point, it was natural to take the next step and make the web application dynamic and driven from a backend system. So last week I started on the design of the backend, focusing on the database technology required to power the system. I'm a big fan of the semantic web initiative and it's a natural fit for what I'm up to, so I prototyped some pretty cool stuff for representing knowledge in a flexible way.

The early prototype of the semantic web stuff is now up-and-running, so the last remaining part is to write the code that generates the web front-end dynamically from the database. This will probably take me a few days, at which point I'll be able to run the application that was initially drawn out on paper as a dynamic web-based application. Of course, that's just the beginning, because I punted on a large number of tricky usability and design decisions. But in the early stages it's very important to just prototype the basic stuff, and I don't clutter my mind with things I know I will tackle in later stages.

In about a month I will have a much better idea of how much additional work will be involved to bring the product to market. This in turn will allow me to gauge how much investment I should look for as well as having a pretty slick demo to show to teachers, kids, parents, and potential

Part 3 of this series is here.

New Venture, Part 1

As some of you might already have noticed from the webMethods 8K filing, I resigned as their CTO effective July 15 in order to pursue other interests. Specifically, I've decided to start a new company focused on education.

Education is an area I've been interested in for a long time. I went to a great high school in the UK, loved the learning experience, and always thought it would be a lot of fun to teach kids. When I was a teenager and people asked me "What would you like to be when you grow up?", my answer was "I'd be a teacher if the pay wasn't so bad."

In the end, I studied Computer Science, earning a BSc from the University of Southampton and an MS from the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). After a short stint as a lead developer for a Dallas-based oil and gas company, I decided to start teaching Computer Science at UTD for a paltry $27,000 a year in order to devote more time to research neural networks and biological systems.

I found that I had a knack for explaining complex topics in simple terms, as well as making classes fun through the use of interesting projects and analogies. Eventually, I published some books that captured what I had learnt during my UTD teaching years, the most popular of which is called UNIX for Programmers and Users.

I enjoyed teaching so much that I then started my first company, ObjectLesson, which taught topics like UNIX, Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, and Object-Oriented Programming to corporations throughout the USA. At this point, I was essentially a professional instructor, although my heart was really into product development. After a couple of years, I'd had enough of full-time teaching and co-founded my second company, ObjectSpace.

ObjectSpace focused on object-oriented technologies and grew rapidly to around 250 employees. I started the ObjectSpace training department, taught full-time for about a year, and then started the company's product group. The most well-known product from ObjectSpace was Voyager, a multi-protocol object request broker that was particularly easy to use. I left the company in 2000 after a disagreement about its strategic direction and founded my third company, The Mind Electric.

The Mind Electric released two products, Glue and Gaia. Glue was an easy-to-use Java web services platform, and Gaia was a web services management platform. The Mind Electric was acquired by webMethods in 2003, where I served as CTO until recently.

So although I've spent most of my career in the enterprise software space, there has always been a significant educational component, whether it was teaching at University, writing books, teaching in corporations, starting a training department, explaining complex topics at seminars, writing articles, or evangelizing service-oriented architectures.

In many respects, my greatest strength is the ability to understand a complex system and then represent it in a simple way. Over the years, I've applied the same skill to writing, teaching, architecture, and product development.

So after many years of working on enterprise software, I've decided to get back to my training roots and start a fourth and as-yet unnamed product company focused on improving the education system. Although the product itself will be an easy-to-use web-based application targeted at K-12 students, teachers and parents, the underlying software infrastructure will be quite complex and utilize many concepts from the semantic web.

Part 2 of this series is here.