Shannon’s posterous

Though we've been working 50+ hours/week on the Jamseed project since early June, I believe what has taken the greatest toll on my student developers is neither the work itself nor the quantity of time invested. Rather, I believe it is the pressure of working for a real client. As expected, throughout this effort, we have experienced daily, at times extreme, pressure from David (again, he's the CEO of Jamseed) in the form of email and phone calls. I suspect that this post on David's blog made Steve and Rose give serious thought to throwing in the towel. Having worked through deadlines under the watchful eye of an anxious customer on dozens of previous projects, I had forgotten the added stress of going through this experience for very the first time. We've come through this experience with success (see this follow up post; Steve and Rose earned equally high, though less public, praise from David). However, I think the whole experience would have been a more positive one (and likely one from which Steve and Rose could have learned even more) had I prepared them for what I implicitly knew was coming. I guess that's one more thing to add to my checklist for such projects in the future.

This summer I'm working with a startup company called Jamseed to redesign and develop a new version their existing web site before the company seeks to develop a customer base. Jamseed.com will be a site where bands/artists in the "we're good enough to play out but don't yet have a record deal" stage of their careers can acquire funding from their fans using a crowdfunding model such as that employed in recent political campaigns (i.e. Barrack Obama). The model here is slightly different however in that bands put together "seeds" that  fans can use to fund groups they like. Seeds are packages of mp3s, photos, videos, or promises to do something such as create the outgoing message on a fan's voicemail system a la Carl Kasell.

The idea is interesting, though no one from the CEO on down claims it is novel. See for example http://www.jillsnextrecord.com/. In addition, I still find the engineering of such a site to be fun. However, what has me excited about this project is the fact that I am building jamseed.com with two of my undergraduate computer science students, Rose and Steve. In the past two years, I've been working to transform Drew University's computer science program from a traditional curriculum designed to prepare students for graduate school to one that recognizes that the overwhelming majority of students who earn undergraduate degrees in this field take jobs in industry.

I have taken the position that computer science is largely about "building stuff", stuff that real people will use, that makes the world a better place, that makes money, or maybe both. As a result, in my courses and summer work I try to put my students in front of a real customer as much possible and have them work from requirements analysis through production to the extent that is possible.

Such projects present all kinds of interesting management challenges particularly given that students are frequently learning new concepts as technologies as they need them to complete the next phase of a project. More on these challenges later as we move forward with the Jamseed project.

For more on Jamseed see David Silverman's blog at Harvard Business Publishing. David is the CEO of Jamseed.