Jake is currently taking the crash course on InDesign plug-in development, so wish him luck, as few of us emerge from that particular gauntlet unscathed.

I’m particularly pleased to have found such a great match for our team and I am very excited about what we will be able to accomplish with an additional developer in house. Everyone wish Jake a hardy welcome!

With the location settled, and having sifted through the various office spaces located therein, I am now moving forward on my top choice. But an existing tenant in the building wishes to expand into the open space, so it might not work out. I’ll have an update after returning from WWDC.

Things are really starting to cook around here lately. We have a variety of new clients discussing fresh projects and long-term partners coming back with some exciting plans for the remainder of this year. We are also fully engaged in work on our own technology platform that is centered around automated publishing. It has been a busy year and I think I can still see January back there not too far down the timeline.

Those of you that know me, know that I hate saying no. Having to turn down excellent opportunities and slowing down work on our internal projects one to many times has finally tipped the balance. We are ready to shepherd in a new engineer in the Seattle office in the very near future. The full details and job application form are available online.

Send us your résumé if you are interested or pass the word on to anyone you know that might be a good fit. I’m really looking forward to seeing a few fresh muzzles around here.

I have a few requirements to satisfy before I even consider seeing the space itself:

It must be reasonably close to where I live.
It must be near a rail station.
It must be in a good location.

I live in Farmingdale, and through experiential data gathering I have determined reasonably close is bounded by the four sided polygon having vertices at Bellmore (SW), West Babylon (SE), Melville (NE) and Hicksville (NW). I grew up in the West. I never expected to find a town named Hicksville east of the Mississippi, let alone east of NYC. At this point I must say I already prefer the southern half of the quandrangle because it’s simply easier for me to commute to and from that direction.

By and large, near a rail station shouldn’t be a problem, and with that we get easy access to the city and an additional commuting option for new hires. The LIRR has a major branch at Hicksville, a line through two parts of Farmingdale and another line along the southern edge next to Sunrise Highway. Every space I looked at on Friday was within easy walking distance of a platform.

That leaves “good location.” That’s a tough one. There’s plenty of industrial buildings or warehouses but even though it might have a cool factor, the noise from the nearby manufacturing companies using the space will be way too much. Lot’s of retails spaces too, but I don’t want the casual shopper peering into our office space, wondering what we sell. The ideal location will be an office space near several useful businesses for a busy coder: A coffee shop or two (Dunkin’ Donuts doesn’t count — although I love donuts!), good diverse take out and a book store. Something just like the center of the universe. would be perfect. In fact, I looked at space in Bellmore on Friday, and I just peeked at Bellmore Village on my way home. It intrigued me and I will be back this coming week to see exactly what it’s like.

I’ll keep you posted as the office seeking progresses!

Jeff happens to be one of RogueSheep’s oldest employees as well, having been one of the original founders of the company. It’s good to have him on board, if just to prove the old adage, “Once you go sheep… you never go baaaaack!”

Currently, Apple’s licensing restrictions for the Mac OS prevent the desktop client from being used as the guest operating system in a virtual machine. Because of this limitation virtualization tools such as VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop prevent you from installing the MacOS into a virtual machine.

This limitation in purely for licensing compliance. With the release of Leopard, Apple has modified the software license so that virtualization is allowed for OS X Server. Both VMWare and Parallels have betas that allow installation of Leopard Server in a virtual machine. This relaxation of the restriction for servers is a step in the right direction. We may even put that to use on our intranet here at RogueSheep.

Still, I believe that nearly all developers can benefit from virtualization of the standard MacOS. Craig makes excellent points about testing in various versions of the OS and easily having parallel installs of your development environments such as Xcode. In our work, we run into even more situations on a regular basis that I wish we could use virtualization for.

We often have multiple projects in progress for several different clients or our own in house development. Frequently, work for a particular client will require all manner of supporting frameworks and libraries as well as specific configuration of InDesign, InCopy and the various Creative Suite applications to enable the proper operation of a workflow environment.

Many times as one project is winding down, a new project is beginning. Sometimes the components required for two projects that any one of us happen to be working on at one time will conflict. Other times the pain comes from just having to juggle the configuration of the development environment and supported applications when switching contexts between projects.

If we could virtualize the MacOS, each project could start with an image that was prepared with our needed development environments and configured properly for the system that is being developed. Only one person would have to do this configuration and the result could be shared with all members of our team. When any one of us was forced to switch projects for a quick bug fix or consultation, it would be as simple as launching the appropriate virtual machine. The benefits to our work and our clients, Apple’s customers, I think is clear!

I’m not going to claim I know the exact reasons for Apple’s restrictive licensing. I will suggest though that I would be absolutely fine with requiring Select or Premier membership in the developer program to gain this support. If Apple wants to work with VMWare so that the only desktop OS that will install virtually are those downloaded as assets from our ADC benefits, I’m game.

I chatted briefly with the VMWare folks at MacWorld this year. They said they would love to add support for virtualization of the standard Mac OS. They encouraged all of us that need virtualization to contact Apple and let them know about our needs. Personally, I’ve done just that.

If you are developer using a Mac, I urge you to read Craig’s blog posting and then file your own bug, referencing the bug he notes.

Four years ago on February 17th, 2004 a group of restless engineers that had all left their cozy positions as engineers and engineering managers at Adobe Systems took the next step in making their little startup business a reality by filing the articles of incorporation that officially birthed RogueSheep.

Its been a fairly remarkable 5+ years years since the first gatherings that would lead to the formation of our beloved little business. From basement meetings and home offices, to the christening of our official headquarters in Seattle. From the launch of our first product, to the suspension of its further development. We’ve lived through the departure of old sheep and the arrival of new sheep. Product ideas have come and gone; projects have been canceled only to be revived and later suspended. We’ve done work for clients as small as a group publishing the writings of Tibetan monks, to as large as world-renowned software vendors and retail chains. Altogether we’ve seen and done quite a few remarkable feats and learned a phenomenal amount about running a business along the way. Throughout it all we have continued to use our experiences, the successes as well as the occasional missteps, to hone our business model and refocus our efforts.

Personally, I couldn’t be happier with how it has all turned out. The decision to leave the comfortable confines of the large corporation and to strike out as an independent developer ranks as one of the best decisions I have ever made. Sure there have been those scary moments; wondering if its really all going to work and can we really support our families doing this? Its definitely a ton of hard work. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that running your own business isn’t a 60+ hour a week job at the minimum. If all you have ever known is the sheltering womb of the mother corporation, it can be quite a shock to find out how many little details someone else has always taken care of for you.

Still, I can’t imagine anything more exciting or enticing than my current job. I learn something new every week and its certainly never boring around here. Much like the joy of producing a new piece of software from nothing but bits in the ether, growing a business from the embryonic, huddled meetings in a basement to a stable fixture with a solid reputation and excellent prospects for the future is nothing short of intoxicating.

As RogueSheep enters its fifth year, things are continuing to look great. We have plans for a notable expansion of staff this year and are on track to deliver some innovative new technology to the market. We continue to work with existing clients on exciting new projects while looking to navigate new partnerships and alliances while moving forward. I predict a thrilling and banner year as our toddler comes into its own.

Happy Birthday RogueSheep and thanks to my tireless partners and associates for making this such an excellent company to work with and for.

Though we love our positions within the flock, there are a few downsides for our developers. Almost all of the modern publishing and graphics applications have a long legacy in C and/or C++ and the Carbon APIs in particular on the Macintosh. The monolithic size of many of these applications coupled with the need for cross-platform development means it will be a long time yet before this situation changes substantially. Most of us have been working on this technology for many, many years. This of course is a great asset for our clients and creates a market for our skills.

Still, it is no secret that most engineers thrive on the chance to play with the newest and freshest technology our discipline has to offer. Unfortunately, our skills in these venerable technologies that pay the bills now may work against our success in the future. Besides just boredom, there are other dangers present in this cycle. As time marches on, our skill sets run the risk of stagnating, which in turn will marginalize our future market position.

Another, perhaps not so obvious, downside comes in the form of potentially stifling the creative expression of our developers. Many aspects of software development, be it user interface design or code architecture, are truly expressions of creative forces focused by the developer. Often, the nature of a consulting project means that the creative aspects of the components under development are already well-baked. The application of a creative solution can be too risky in a mature product. For instance, consider a typical porting project. Often there is just simply not the required allocation of testing resources to justify cleaning up or fixing an existing bad design. Similarly, potential improvements to the user interface can’t always be authorized when the client has not budgeted for training and revision to user guides and/or help documentation.

Realizing that happy engineers are more productive engineers, RogueSheep has decided to borrow a page from Google and has implemented a new employee benefit this past year: Pet Sheep Time. The concept of Pet Sheep Time is to allocate paid time for pursuing the personal development interests of each employee. Because much of our revenue is based on billable hours on projects with tight deadlines, we can’t justify a full 20% time plan the way Google does.

What we do instead is start with a base of 10 days of vacation per year. In addition, we allocate another 15 days of extended vacation that is exchangeable directly for Pet Sheep Time. These extended vacation days trade at a ratio of 1:2, so 5 days of extended vacation turn into 10 days of Pet Sheep Time. If you just need to shake off the monotony of the day job with some time at the beach and surf with the family, you can take a long vacation. On the other hand, if 2 weeks of fun and sun is enough for you, max out the Pet Sheep time for a decent personal project development cycle.

Of course, much like an extended period of vacation, Pet Sheep Time taken in bulk needs to be approved with the team and scheduled at an appropriate time for the current workload. RogueSheep also reserves the right of first refusal for any newborn Pet Sheep. Perhaps it will just become a free offering on our web site, or maybe it becomes an internal tool that makes all our jobs easier. In rare cases we might even find the work to be directly marketable. Either way, RogueSheep benefits from happier, more productive workers enjoying continual expansion of their personal skill set and education.

The reality of the past months has meant that we have been busy almost non-stop. We haven’t yet had a chance to pursue breeding new Pet Sheep, except for a few sporadic moments here and there. We look forward to combating that problem by hiring a few new developers in the coming months, at which point I hope we find more time to exercise our new pets. So, dear readers, what do you think about Pet Sheep Time? I will report back here on how the system works and detail any tweaks we make to the plan as we go along.