RocketBoots is a small innovative software company that develops Rich
Internet Applications (RIA).

Disclaimer: The interview below is paraphrased from an audio podcast available on line, answers are summaries and are not exact quotes of what was said.

What do you do?
The main thing that we do is solve other people’s problems. Businesses come to us with an issue and they think, “IT will fix it!” They don’t always have a clear idea of what the problem or solution might be, so we go from figuring out exactly what problem they have to building the solution to solve it.

One of the things that I never realised when I was a computer science student in uni was that success or failure comes down to whether or not you understand the problem. It’s a huge part of what RocketBoots does and I think we do it pretty damn well.

Another challenge we face is realising that clients pay for requirements, but it costs us to develop components, so we have to map those requirements into components we can build. When I was at uni I was completely uninterested in this, but my whole experience afterwards have shown me that this is really important.

I would recommend the book by Kovitz, “Practical Software Requirements”. It’s a book that people who go work in industry for a few years, make all the mistakes and then reads it and they smack themselves on the head and say “of course!”.

Tell me a bit about your background
I went to the University of Sydney for a degree in Computer Science and Pure Mathematics. I loved graphics, compilers and some of the pure math stuff by Turing and Godel.

After that I went to work for Accenture. It was a good place if you take an interest in what you’re doing and find people you can learn from.

I then joined a .com called Zivo, which was eventually bought by a company called Liberty One. This was in 98 where there were some good ideas, but also lots of really dumb ideas. Investors were just throwing money at them. I saw some companies pull people off the streets and put them in an office so when the investors came they could say, “these are our programmers.”

I’ve also worked as a sales engineer for Allaire, makers of ColdFusion which was one of the first engines for web programming. Interesting fact: when Microsoft was deciding what to use for their web services, they tried to buy ColdFusion, but they eventually had to go for their second choice which was ASP.

What made you start RocketBoots?
I worked at Macromedia for a while and saw that there was a lot of demand for consulting because a lot of programming projects were going wrong. For example, most of the Flash clients were written by designers, not programmers. That’s one of the reasons why Flash has a bad reputation of being slow.

Manoj: You can actually write some really efficient graphics programs in Flash particularly with Pixel Bender. We’re doing a bit of computer vision and augmented reality stuff with it at the moment as well.

37 signals book – “Getting Real” and a book called “The Pragmatic Programmer” are good to read about starting and running a software business.

Advice for uni students
If you’re still at uni, get involved in some clubs and societies. It’s the only time in your life where you get to be in charge of something where you won’t necessarily be at risk of going to prison or going bankrupt. You can’t get that experience anywhere else.

Develop yourself in a lot of ways, if you’re interested in something, doesn’t have to be technical, go learn it.

What’s it like working for RocketBoots and what kind of people do you hire?
We want to do new things. You can get a lot of money pushing stuff in and out of a database, but we want to do cool things as well. We have what’s called research days where we just do research on what we want. For example, we where thinking of setting up some Flash clients for distributed computing.

Manoj: One of the things that I did was implement Fast Fourier Transform in Flash and made a quiz so when people say “hooo” it’s interpreted as a yes, and when people say “shhhhh” it’s interpreted as
a no.

We look for people who like to learn, people who are good communicators, people who are open minded and don’t get too religious about a particular technology.

Some other words of wisdom
Programming is the opposite of being a pilot. When you’re flying the priorities are aviate, navigate, and communicate. When you’re programming, the first thing you have to do is communicate so everyone knows what you’re doing. The biggest risk in programming is you end up solving the wrong problem which is why 75% of software projects fail. Communication is key. Then you navigate which is where you plan, and at last you aviate where you actually do the programming.

Special thanks to Manoj Patel for helping me set up this interview.

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