October 3, 2013 at 15:17[Translation] cyanogenmod.org/blog - Steve Condic - New Chapter
From a translator:
This is a complete and accurate (hopefully) translation of an article by Steve Condick (aka Cyanogen). This material seemed interesting to me (especially Steve’s personal memoirs) and I decided to translate it into Russian. It's amazing that so far no one has translated this interesting article, and only reviews / impressions of journalists on the hub and profile sites.
I think this post will help novice developers (not only Android), to pay attention that it’s better to release new versions of the product faster, even if you don’t feel like a cool pro, and also the importance of participating in communities, where they will always tell you in which direction to look and help with testing.
For all inaccuracies and errors - I ask in PM. Pictures were not specifically copied into translation, because they have become familiar several times (especially a dude with blue hair and a dog).
To all users, participants and fans of CyanogenMod: The
following are real events. Names are not changed to protect those involved. Let's start from the beginning.
May 25, 2009 was such a day when everything seemed completely mundane, radically changed the course of my life. This was my first XDA post on the new firmware for the T-Mobile G1. It’s hard for me to give new names, so I just added the word “mod” to my nickname and that was it. I was a complete noob and expected to be ridiculed in the forum, but still did it. I was delighted with all this and even despite the fact that I did not do anything fundamentally new, but assembled my build based on the work of the legendary JF, I figured that maybe someone would find it worthy. The reviews were great. Much better than I imagined. I "turned on" and spent every free minute pouring my energy into this thing.
XDA is a great community. As soon as I downloaded the new firmware version, hundreds of people instantly installed it, sending feedback on every step of the process. “That is how the development process should be” - was my thought. At that time I worked as a developer in a small startup in Pittsburgh and we did really interesting things, it was amazing to be able to see the results of my work in real time. Sometimes I downloaded several versions a day to fix bugs. The race against time was frantic - a lot of original work - the mods of your mod, and the mods of the mods of your mod. It was fun. We all shared a common idea - no one would write a product like we wanted, so we must do it ourselves at all costs. This idea has become a kind of ethos of our community.
Almost immediately after the release of the first version, I gathered all the add-ons together and uploaded the changes to Github for use by other community members. I have always been an ardent supporter of free software, so this step was logical. Some people who also made their own firmware decided to send me patches, which I quickly merged. Some really cool features were born in this project, which you would not get anywhere and definitely not on any sold phone.
I woke up one morning and found a message about thousands of new followers on Twitter that I didn’t even use. How the hell did these guys find me? And Twitter soon registered in the list of my hobbies.
Staying up late for hacking something was my usual behavior from childhood, and fortunately, my wife Stacy is very cool, allows me that. One day, our neighbor Val came home from work and informed me of some dudes in her coffee shop talking about CM. She voiced the thought: “This thing will be very cool, man. I'm serious". I laughed not really paying attention. I had no idea how many people actually use this thing or what will come of it, and I didn’t even think that my creation merges into the “real world”.
People came out of nowhere to work on this project. Google completely cut out a whole sector in the industry, making Android open-source and SM has become something of an underground revolution, opposing the players of this industry, clinging to a long-standing idea, trying to get you a one-time phone every couple of years, charging premium amounts for trivial functions. We all know that these are not just telephones, but powerful machines with enormous performance, and we can make them work as we like according to our wishes.
The user base was growing, we built some infrastructure, the fans provided us with build servers and traffic, we made a website and a forum. Later, everything approached the collapse in October 2009, when I received a letter from Google asking me to stop and further refrain from this project. I was shocked and angry, “how dare they hinder free software”! Although, unfortunately, we were not exactly a free software project. We included these unknown Google applications in the build, which we all know and love, without much thought, since they were the same ones that were preinstalled on the phones. We already had about a quarter of a million users, so it was not a surprise that Google had to do something. There were and are small offices, selling super-cheap devices with unlicensed versions of these applications, and maybe we came under the distribution with them. I'm still not sure about that. We eliminated the situation of those who simply refused Google applications when installing the mod and today we see Google as a key partner. This incident had an unintended side effect - the enormous pressure exerted led to more attention to our project. Although the installation process is very confused, the user base has grown rapidly.
New devices came out, for the most part the G1 iron variations and I quickly released CM versions for them. By the end of the year, the first Motorola Droid came out. Which was conceived as an unbreakable, but imperceptible error in the copy / paste function in the recovery sources opened a wide path for hacking. Later I met Kaushik Dutta, who made a version of CM for this device and shared the code. Kousch believed that my custom recovery was junk (this is true) and wrote his own much better, which helped our build system a lot. In the end, I met Koush personally when I was Seattle and he looked asleep for several days. He showed me a raw version of his ROM Manager, which was written a few hours ago. ROM Manager - an application that helps to install modified firmware, such as SM, on your device, soon became the top on the Android Market and lasted there for quite some time. People really wanted this thing and the simpler the installation option, the better.
Our community was quite strong, we wanted to be able to better support our product. Our group - me, Chris, Cayan, Jeff, Koush, Ricardo and Ebhisek - called themselves the core of the team, dozens of other people worked on the project, inventing new features or porting SM to new devices. Our user community has grown exponentially. All together we met on Big Android BBQ every year and came off to the fullest. We split into teams working on various parts of the project and tried to stay organized. People came and went, got jobs, received doctoral degrees, some got rich, serious companies took our work as the basis of their projects.
In August 2011, I went to work in Samsung, because of this I had to move away from the project a bit, then my wife and I moved to the other end of the country, to Seattle, to start a new life. I already did not have enough time to work on SM, but I did my best to keep the project alive. Over time, I found a balance to return to the project. Moving to another city gives a fresh look at everything, and SM was no exception. I really started to see the potential of the mod - the mobile OS, which is actually designed by the people who use it.
Several million people around the world used SM at that time and countless modifications were used. The movement was getting steeper.
Fast-forward until the end of 2012, when I received a letter from Curt McMaster, who had ambitious ideas about a future project. They opened my eyes. Not only good ideas were invented, it was a development of the very essence of SM. All the existing developments in SM simply could not develop otherwise - a huge community gathered and did an amazing thing that was not there before, because it was necessary. We had serious costs of growth, and scaling an organization to this type of explosive development was incredibly difficult. What could we build if all the obstacles were removed and we could devote all our work to the development of the project? I asked Koush if he would like to help me make the project even bigger, and he agreed. Kert introduced us to some potential investors in Silicon Valley, after that we started hoeing our site. The first meeting was held on December 13, 2012 in Palo Alto, Cyanogen Inc. was born
At the same time, my wife was expecting a baby by early January. My little Emmaline is daddy when it comes to terms (as soon as possible!) Decided to make her grand appearance before December 12, 2012 (the best birthday). It was the best day of my life, but I had to join the first meeting on the phone, right from the hospital! Mess! The next few months were blurred in memories, the knowledge of fatherhood, hard work at my main job, meetings with venture investors in California. The dream was not in my deck of cards.
It was a long process, but the vision was clearer every time we told our story. We selected Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures as our partners and completed the Super League round in April 2013. “Everything is now really serious” (this phrase takes on a new meaning when you enter into this kind of business). I quit my job for this risky undertaking and began to work bringing as many people from the SM team as I could. We rented an office in downtown Seattle and a second office in Palo Alto. In the true spirit of SM, we even painted the room on our own. Since April, 17 people of the team have worked tirelessly on what we think will be the next mobile revolution, and as a result today we are ready to inform the world about this.
As you probably noticed, the pace of development has increased very much in the past few months. More devices are supported, more projects, such as CM Account, Privacy Guard, Voice +, a new version of the supervisor and secure messages. We have significantly improved our infrastructure. We make more bug fixes, create more features, and work on improving feedback. We think the time has come when once again your mobile device really belongs to you and we want to convey this idea to everyone.
Our goals today are simple and straightforward:
* Organize, manage and support our community
* Create a stunning interface that focuses on YOUR way of working
* Truly working security solutions
* Stay committed to adding features that users want
* No spam
* Constant updates
* Accessibility for each device and user
The biggest obstacle we want to get out of the way is the terrible installation process. Today, more and more open and unlockable devices are on hand than ever, but they all have their own tricks and a wild multitude of installation methods. We tried as best we could to document the process for each device on our wiki site, but for non-geeks this is still complicated. This state of affairs is unacceptable - the installation process must be simple and safe. There are great difficulties in support when you are dealing with almost a hundred different devices, but we decided to eliminate them.
Our installer will be available on the Play Store in the coming weeks.
So what exactly does this all mean for the community? What I wanted to do first of all, when I realized that we are actually doing, is to share with everyone. But when you open a company, you need to keep in mind an expanded picture of events. This means not announcing anything until the right time, so that the entire interior kitchen of the project is in order and that there is something to show.
I saw how open source projects came and went, some were sold and closed, others were blown away and sidelined. I do not want something like this to happen to SM.
In all this fuss, there were still projects developing harmoniously, while supporting the company and the community - SM will go in this direction. Our community is our greatest value. With any changes in such a structure, there should be an answer to the question of motivations and reasons. New products created by us should bring you the idea of our motivation, of where we are striving.
What will change is our abilities, our speed and our size. I'm not the one to let something stagnate. If earlier, the current aspirations of the SM were out of reach, now the way forward is clear. I hope you feel the same way.
I understand that there will be many more questions than I can tell you. Today we will do Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) later, you will have the opportunity to ask all your questions.
Exciting times ahead!
Link to the original - www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/a_new_chapter
This is a complete and accurate (hopefully) translation of an article by Steve Condick (aka Cyanogen). This material seemed interesting to me (especially Steve’s personal memoirs) and I decided to translate it into Russian. It's amazing that so far no one has translated this interesting article, and only reviews / impressions of journalists on the hub and profile sites.
I think this post will help novice developers (not only Android), to pay attention that it’s better to release new versions of the product faster, even if you don’t feel like a cool pro, and also the importance of participating in communities, where they will always tell you in which direction to look and help with testing.
For all inaccuracies and errors - I ask in PM. Pictures were not specifically copied into translation, because they have become familiar several times (especially a dude with blue hair and a dog).
New chapter
To all users, participants and fans of CyanogenMod: The
following are real events. Names are not changed to protect those involved. Let's start from the beginning.
May 25, 2009 was such a day when everything seemed completely mundane, radically changed the course of my life. This was my first XDA post on the new firmware for the T-Mobile G1. It’s hard for me to give new names, so I just added the word “mod” to my nickname and that was it. I was a complete noob and expected to be ridiculed in the forum, but still did it. I was delighted with all this and even despite the fact that I did not do anything fundamentally new, but assembled my build based on the work of the legendary JF, I figured that maybe someone would find it worthy. The reviews were great. Much better than I imagined. I "turned on" and spent every free minute pouring my energy into this thing.
XDA is a great community. As soon as I downloaded the new firmware version, hundreds of people instantly installed it, sending feedback on every step of the process. “That is how the development process should be” - was my thought. At that time I worked as a developer in a small startup in Pittsburgh and we did really interesting things, it was amazing to be able to see the results of my work in real time. Sometimes I downloaded several versions a day to fix bugs. The race against time was frantic - a lot of original work - the mods of your mod, and the mods of the mods of your mod. It was fun. We all shared a common idea - no one would write a product like we wanted, so we must do it ourselves at all costs. This idea has become a kind of ethos of our community.
Almost immediately after the release of the first version, I gathered all the add-ons together and uploaded the changes to Github for use by other community members. I have always been an ardent supporter of free software, so this step was logical. Some people who also made their own firmware decided to send me patches, which I quickly merged. Some really cool features were born in this project, which you would not get anywhere and definitely not on any sold phone.
User-created mobile OS - for users
I woke up one morning and found a message about thousands of new followers on Twitter that I didn’t even use. How the hell did these guys find me? And Twitter soon registered in the list of my hobbies.
Staying up late for hacking something was my usual behavior from childhood, and fortunately, my wife Stacy is very cool, allows me that. One day, our neighbor Val came home from work and informed me of some dudes in her coffee shop talking about CM. She voiced the thought: “This thing will be very cool, man. I'm serious". I laughed not really paying attention. I had no idea how many people actually use this thing or what will come of it, and I didn’t even think that my creation merges into the “real world”.
People came out of nowhere to work on this project. Google completely cut out a whole sector in the industry, making Android open-source and SM has become something of an underground revolution, opposing the players of this industry, clinging to a long-standing idea, trying to get you a one-time phone every couple of years, charging premium amounts for trivial functions. We all know that these are not just telephones, but powerful machines with enormous performance, and we can make them work as we like according to our wishes.
The user base was growing, we built some infrastructure, the fans provided us with build servers and traffic, we made a website and a forum. Later, everything approached the collapse in October 2009, when I received a letter from Google asking me to stop and further refrain from this project. I was shocked and angry, “how dare they hinder free software”! Although, unfortunately, we were not exactly a free software project. We included these unknown Google applications in the build, which we all know and love, without much thought, since they were the same ones that were preinstalled on the phones. We already had about a quarter of a million users, so it was not a surprise that Google had to do something. There were and are small offices, selling super-cheap devices with unlicensed versions of these applications, and maybe we came under the distribution with them. I'm still not sure about that. We eliminated the situation of those who simply refused Google applications when installing the mod and today we see Google as a key partner. This incident had an unintended side effect - the enormous pressure exerted led to more attention to our project. Although the installation process is very confused, the user base has grown rapidly.
We increase our team and user core
New devices came out, for the most part the G1 iron variations and I quickly released CM versions for them. By the end of the year, the first Motorola Droid came out. Which was conceived as an unbreakable, but imperceptible error in the copy / paste function in the recovery sources opened a wide path for hacking. Later I met Kaushik Dutta, who made a version of CM for this device and shared the code. Kousch believed that my custom recovery was junk (this is true) and wrote his own much better, which helped our build system a lot. In the end, I met Koush personally when I was Seattle and he looked asleep for several days. He showed me a raw version of his ROM Manager, which was written a few hours ago. ROM Manager - an application that helps to install modified firmware, such as SM, on your device, soon became the top on the Android Market and lasted there for quite some time. People really wanted this thing and the simpler the installation option, the better.
Our community was quite strong, we wanted to be able to better support our product. Our group - me, Chris, Cayan, Jeff, Koush, Ricardo and Ebhisek - called themselves the core of the team, dozens of other people worked on the project, inventing new features or porting SM to new devices. Our user community has grown exponentially. All together we met on Big Android BBQ every year and came off to the fullest. We split into teams working on various parts of the project and tried to stay organized. People came and went, got jobs, received doctoral degrees, some got rich, serious companies took our work as the basis of their projects.
In August 2011, I went to work in Samsung, because of this I had to move away from the project a bit, then my wife and I moved to the other end of the country, to Seattle, to start a new life. I already did not have enough time to work on SM, but I did my best to keep the project alive. Over time, I found a balance to return to the project. Moving to another city gives a fresh look at everything, and SM was no exception. I really started to see the potential of the mod - the mobile OS, which is actually designed by the people who use it.
Several million people around the world used SM at that time and countless modifications were used. The movement was getting steeper.
Raising the bar: the birth of a company
Fast-forward until the end of 2012, when I received a letter from Curt McMaster, who had ambitious ideas about a future project. They opened my eyes. Not only good ideas were invented, it was a development of the very essence of SM. All the existing developments in SM simply could not develop otherwise - a huge community gathered and did an amazing thing that was not there before, because it was necessary. We had serious costs of growth, and scaling an organization to this type of explosive development was incredibly difficult. What could we build if all the obstacles were removed and we could devote all our work to the development of the project? I asked Koush if he would like to help me make the project even bigger, and he agreed. Kert introduced us to some potential investors in Silicon Valley, after that we started hoeing our site. The first meeting was held on December 13, 2012 in Palo Alto, Cyanogen Inc. was born
At the same time, my wife was expecting a baby by early January. My little Emmaline is daddy when it comes to terms (as soon as possible!) Decided to make her grand appearance before December 12, 2012 (the best birthday). It was the best day of my life, but I had to join the first meeting on the phone, right from the hospital! Mess! The next few months were blurred in memories, the knowledge of fatherhood, hard work at my main job, meetings with venture investors in California. The dream was not in my deck of cards.
It was a long process, but the vision was clearer every time we told our story. We selected Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures as our partners and completed the Super League round in April 2013. “Everything is now really serious” (this phrase takes on a new meaning when you enter into this kind of business). I quit my job for this risky undertaking and began to work bringing as many people from the SM team as I could. We rented an office in downtown Seattle and a second office in Palo Alto. In the true spirit of SM, we even painted the room on our own. Since April, 17 people of the team have worked tirelessly on what we think will be the next mobile revolution, and as a result today we are ready to inform the world about this.
Providing Cyanogen Experience to Everyone
As you probably noticed, the pace of development has increased very much in the past few months. More devices are supported, more projects, such as CM Account, Privacy Guard, Voice +, a new version of the supervisor and secure messages. We have significantly improved our infrastructure. We make more bug fixes, create more features, and work on improving feedback. We think the time has come when once again your mobile device really belongs to you and we want to convey this idea to everyone.
Our goals today are simple and straightforward:
* Organize, manage and support our community
* Create a stunning interface that focuses on YOUR way of working
* Truly working security solutions
* Stay committed to adding features that users want
* No spam
* Constant updates
* Accessibility for each device and user
The biggest obstacle we want to get out of the way is the terrible installation process. Today, more and more open and unlockable devices are on hand than ever, but they all have their own tricks and a wild multitude of installation methods. We tried as best we could to document the process for each device on our wiki site, but for non-geeks this is still complicated. This state of affairs is unacceptable - the installation process must be simple and safe. There are great difficulties in support when you are dealing with almost a hundred different devices, but we decided to eliminate them.
Our installer will be available on the Play Store in the coming weeks.
So what exactly does this all mean for the community? What I wanted to do first of all, when I realized that we are actually doing, is to share with everyone. But when you open a company, you need to keep in mind an expanded picture of events. This means not announcing anything until the right time, so that the entire interior kitchen of the project is in order and that there is something to show.
I saw how open source projects came and went, some were sold and closed, others were blown away and sidelined. I do not want something like this to happen to SM.
In all this fuss, there were still projects developing harmoniously, while supporting the company and the community - SM will go in this direction. Our community is our greatest value. With any changes in such a structure, there should be an answer to the question of motivations and reasons. New products created by us should bring you the idea of our motivation, of where we are striving.
What will change is our abilities, our speed and our size. I'm not the one to let something stagnate. If earlier, the current aspirations of the SM were out of reach, now the way forward is clear. I hope you feel the same way.
I understand that there will be many more questions than I can tell you. Today we will do Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) later, you will have the opportunity to ask all your questions.
Exciting times ahead!
Link to the original - www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/a_new_chapter