While I have been off working on other things and getting ready to work on my little PHP development project, Swindell, McGlynn and others have been getting out a set of great new products.  The Ruby announcement is very exciting, as is the new JBuilder and C++ release.  As you see from the eWeek article, CodeGear is focused on developers.

As we discussed when we formed CodeGear the focus was going to be on bringing innovation to developers.  From what we have done with our first step on PHP to what we have now announced with Ruby, CodeGear iscommitted to bringing the magic you have seen from CodeGear over the past 24 years back to developers.

Jim is taking this to the next level as he not only works with the team to drive this innovation but also works to simplify the business and more importantly simplifying and improving how it feels to do business with CodeGear.  

There is a lot of work ahead, but the team is making it happen.  A great example of this is last weekend I had a set of people from a couple of companies I founded, invested in, or just helped get created out for an A’s ballgame.  There were a bunch (I mean a bunch– it started as one suite and we ended up having to borrow and extra one for the day) of great people there ranging from developers in startups to even the former CFO of Mercury and GM of Yahoo Travel, along with a set of CodeGear people, and lots of kids.  It was great to hear the CodeGear people share their excitement right along side of companies who just got their exciting first round of Sand Hill Road investment, etc.   The passion and excitement for what they were doing came across to everyone there.

Now having said that, a few of the people I invited came back in 5 minutes at 1am in the morning on Friday to tell me they could not make a Saturday afternoon game.  They were so pumped up on getting some code out that is about to be released they were going to be working on the release that afternoon.  It is that passion that is going to take CodeGear to the next level of delivering innovation to developers and make it a world class place where Developers Matter.

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So Swindell and I have been talking about my PHP app at the local Starbucks.  We kicked around a couple of simple ideas.  It has to be simple as all the great developers at CodeGear know because I don’t pretend to be a great developer.   

The interesting thing is that because of what you can find in the PHP VCL you can leverage things like Google Maps very easily.  So here is our idea for the product.

We want to make a Google map Mashup to show where all the CodeGear developers are.

Key requirements:

A map with a developer and key public stats on the developer places in the general geographical area they work. 

An ability to drill down on developers where there are large clusters.

Each developer being able to claim themselves and edit a simple profile.

A developer being able to add himself to the map.

Now let us know if you have ideas how we should do this and how to keep it simple.  We will of course do with some sample data as a prototype first.

Here is a sample of a few other mashups.  Currency Tracking, drink specials in NY, and a list of others. 

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I have been pretty busy with a couple of other things and frankly having way too many meetings in Starbucks so my PHP project has not gotten very far.  Clearly I need to better manage my priorities. 

Over the last few weeks, I have spent a lot of time with my web friends and one of the things I began wondering and asking around was just what has been built on PHP.  Now this is far from perfect but here are some of the top sites that leverage PHP heavily:

Facebook

Wikipedia

Yahoo

Napster

Digg

And even Sourceforge

All of these are of course places where lots of scale is required and significant flexibility in changing the front end is important.   My favorite is Wikipedia.  The concept of a user generated application growing to the 7^th ranked web destination (yes above AOL) is very powerful.    It is clear with important applications like this, it was time to bring the CodeGear Magic to PHP.

Lots of work left to do to get the product perfect, but clearly PHP from CodeGear is something a development focused company had to bring to market.   I am looking forward to seeing CodeGear impact on other areas, like Ruby.

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Let’s start by explaining that while my name may have snuck onto a couple of patents and I fancy myself a product guy having created or helped create a few products, I am not really a developer or a great product guy.   I have not written code since I was at Davis.  It was Fortran, it was using a MAC SE/30 that I often snuck into the IBM location where I worked, and it was for finite element analysis. And while some of the spreadsheets that Levin has done are certainly magic and software development, I don’t even think I could do that quickly any more.

So, I am a developer at heart but not really a developer.

I installed Delphi for PHP today.   Now I did not have to go through the find it and buy it process.  I had a special access point.  I just ask Allen to shoot me the install link and passcode etc.   So here is my first experience.  I was installed, activated and running in 5 minutes.   All via the web.   Now, downside is, my wifi dropped 2 times, so I could have probably done it faster.  It felt pretty good.  As I have heard, I am sure not everything is perfect and we certainly need to improve the first customer experience as Jim has mentioned.   However, this felt pretty good and when it came up, it was pretty exciting.  It will certainly be even better when that series of CodeGear links you see are really focused on PHP and helping a developer get started.

Now, I am pretty busy right now, so don’t expect me to have built the next big web application by next week.   But as I go along, I will keep sharing what I can find. 

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Jim has joined the blogging world.  I have been excited by the passion I am seeing from Jim on the business.  I have been away from the office for the past week, but every time someone talks to me about Jim the words energy and enthusiasm come up.   It is great to see the team have an advocate as they advocate for developers. 

I spent a lot of the last couple of weeks with a few companies where software developers have been changing the world.  Can you imagine a world without instant messenger, RSS, web search, and always on wireless access…well most of us over 30 probably actually can, but people under 30 can’t.  This has all been made possible by developers with the vision to see the possible, the courage to try, and the passion to make it happen.  CodeGear developers have the vision and passion, and with Jim’s leadership, will continue to have the courage.    

Now back to writing that PHP app I am working on with Delphi for PHP.   No, I am not spending all my time watching the baseball season get started…

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As a number of you probably now know, we appointed Jim Douglas as the new CEO of CodeGear today.  The CodeGear team is an incredible bunch of people focused on solving developer problems.  Under Jim’s and the rest of the CodeGear team’s leadership, I am looking forward to seeing CodeGear continue to recapture the innovative spirit that defined it over the past 23 years.   

I have had an incredible opportunity to work with great people as we not only acquired a series of businesses for Borland but prepared CodeGear to be a place where Developers Matter.    There is a lot of work ahead and I am confident in the team who is leading this business and Tod’s personal commitment to developers and CodeGear. 

I really appreciate Tod’s comments about what we accomplished as we started CodeGear:  "Jim will be responsible for driving CodeGear to the next level, building on the solid foundation and momentum achieved by the CodeGear team under Ben Smith’s leadership.  Ben has vast experience establishing new ventures and has done a great job with CodeGear’s formation and has prepared the organization for growth.  Now that the critical formation phase is nearly complete, he will be moving on to work again in the private equity, acquisition and venture arena.  I would like to thank Ben for the significant contribution he’s made in setting the right tone, energy and structure at CodeGear, and for being a key driver in Borland’s business development and acquisitions over the past couple of years." 

However, I have to say that as I told the CodeGear team from the beginning, CodeGear is their company.  I was just lucky to help lead thier team for a bit.  (As someone on the team pointed out this morning, nothing like finding some free time on opening day.)

My most important experience at CodeGear was seeing the power of a team focused on a simple mission with incredible energy and talent.  CodeGear is a place where Developers Matter because of the passion of the developers who work in it and the team who works with them.   

As I hand over the reigns, I am reminded of Nick’s comment over dinner the other night about some of the code in Delphi for Win32 done by Shaughnessy being "beautiful, elegant, like a work of art", I believe CodeGear is about helping developers create works of art.

Developers Matter.

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While there is a lot of focus on the Delphi for Win32 and Delphi for PHP the Java team at CodeGear has been making some big moves as well.  We just won some accolades on the new JBuilder product which was built by a great team here at CodeGear working with Eclipse.

A quick quote that reflects how I certainly feel about the product -

“Due to Borland’s well-publicized difficulties and the fact that this is the first release on a new platform, I expected a good product with rough edges. Instead, I found a very smooth, very robust IDE with many innovative features.  It’s safe to say that CodeGear decided to throw everything it had at this release — and succeeded brilliantly.”  Andrew Binstock at Infoworld goes on to say, “JBuilder also offers impressive collaborative features.  It sports a developer-oriented messaging system, which helps with code reviews as well as developer communication”.

This team, a lot of which we reformed after we announced the formation of the developer tools group, has come back together quickly as part of CodeGear and JBuilder 2007 is only a first step in a lot of the innovation you are likely to see from them.

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I have had a busy couple of days, so I have not been doing enough communicating via the blog.  Of course, part of being busy was a great event for the CodeGear Scotts Valley team Thursday afternoon and taking my son to see 300…so I should not be complaining.  I missed the performance of CodeGear beating IBM though.  Now next year, we will see about those Google guys.

I was catching up on what some other people were talking about and bumped into this that applies to a lot of things that I see often.  Nothing like ruining a great developer or sales person by making them a manager.

We also just released the CodeRage content onto the web.  I finally had a chance to take a look and was reminded what a great team we have at CodeGear.  

We are continuing to get feedback on Delphi, please let us know more feedback when you have a chance.  And of course feel free to jump into the tagging effort of the 5 things you love about Delphi for Win32 or even start one on Delphi for PHP.

Looking forward to PHP next week.

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We spent a good bit of time working through issues this weekend.  As I mentioned at a meeting with the CodeGear team this morning, we have had a lot of “firsts” recently.  This ranges from the first time we have simultaneously shipped so many different languages on Delphi to our first foray into the PHP world.  It also included some operational firsts ranging from CodeRage to our ISD and ESD shipments.  Doing these things the first time is what we mean by innovation when we talk about Innovate, Simplify and Grow.  It became clear in a few cases that as we addressed innovation and growth, we need to make sure we drive simplicity.  We well keep driving to simplicity as we work to our vision of being a place Where Developers Matter.

As we worked through the issues over the weekend, a number of developers from the community, including a few who told me they had been with us since Delphi 1.0 or had not bought a product since 2000 or were being brought back to working with us with PHP..etc etc..ask me over and over again, what they could do to work with us on our mission of being the place Where Developers Matter.

So here is a list off the top of my head:

• Engage with us on product ideas
• Get us feedback on any quality issues
• Help us get our story out about developers and our products. Blogs are powerful things.  
• Partner with us in helping developers
• Tell us when we need to simplify the business   
• Tell us about people we should hire  
• Tell us your favorite stories that show that developers matter
• Tell us about heroes who are developers, we want to get to know them.
• Oh yeah, buy some product.  J

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We shipped some product, in spite of a winter in Scotts Valley that is feeling way too much like summer.

CodeRage was a great success.  Tod came on at the end right before me and as usual showed his commitment to the CodeGear team and developers.    We are really excited about Delphi for Win 32 coming out.   There has been some great comments about the product already.

The execution has been great with the product being released around the world and in multiple languages all at the same time, for the first time.  This was not a trivial engineering effort, but it was also not a trivial operations effort with a number of people making things happen. 

On the side we also released the Japanese version of InterBase 2007 today.

We still are working to make sure Delphi for PHP meets the enormous early response next week.   Michael is a bit well, punch drunk today from working all night but can not get enough.  Let him know when you install on his install shout out.

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