[Translation] cyanogenmod.org/blog - Steve Kondik - New Chapter
From the translator:
This is a complete and accurate (hopefully) translation of the article by Steve Kondik (aka Cyanogen). I found this material interesting (especially Steve’s personal memories) and I decided to translate it into Russian. It is surprising that so far no one has translated this interesting article, and on Habré and specialized sites only reviews / impressions of journalists.
I think this post will help novice developers (not only Android) pay attention that it is better to release new versions of the product faster, even if you don’t feel like a cool pro, as well as the importance of participating in communities where they will always tell you which direction to look for and help with testing.
')
For all inaccuracies and errors - please in PM. Pictures are not specifically copied into the translation, because they have already become familiar several times (especially the dude with blue hair and the dog).
To all users, participants and fans of CyanogenMod:
The following describes the real events. Names are not changed to protect those involved. Let's start from the beginning.
May 25, 2009 was a day when everything seemed completely routine, radically changed the course of my life. This was my first post on XDA, which was dedicated to the new firmware for the T-Mobile G1. It is difficult for me to give new names, so I just added the word “mod” to my nickname and was like that. I was a complete noob and expected to be mocked at the forum, but I still did it. I was happy with all this and even though I didn’t do anything fundamentally new, but put together my build based on the work of the legendary JF, I thought that someone might find it worthy. 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 a new version of the firmware, hundreds of people instantly installed it, sending feedback on each step of the process. “This is exactly what 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 some really interesting things, it was amazing to be able to see the results of our work in real time. Sometimes I downloaded several versions per day to fix bugs. The race against time was frantic - a lot of original work - the fashion of your fashion, and the fashion mods of your fashion. It was fun. We all shared a common idea - a product, such as we wanted, no one would have written, so we have to do it ourselves at any cost. This idea became a peculiar ethos of our community.
Almost immediately after the release of the first version, I put all the uploads together and uploaded the changes to GitHub for use by other members of the community. I have always been an ardent supporter of free software, so this step was logical. Some people who also made their firmware decided to send me patches, which I quickly did. Some really cool features were born in this project that you would never get anywhere on and on just one selling phone.
I woke up one morning and found a message about thousands of new followers on Twitter, which I hadn’t even used. How the hell did these guys find me? And Twitter was soon registered in the list of my hobbies.
Staying up late for hacking something was my usual behavior since childhood, and fortunately, my wife Stacey is very cool, she lets me. One day, our neighbor Val came home from work and told me about some dudes in her coffee shop talking about CM. She voiced the thought: “This thing will be very cool, dude. I'm serious". I laughed not really paid attention. I had no idea how many people actually use this thing, or what will come out of it, and I didn’t even believe that my creation merges into the “real world”.
People appeared from nowhere to work on this project. Google completely sawed out a whole sector in the industry, making Android open source and SM became something like an underground revolution opposing the players of the industry clinging to an old idea, trying to push you a one-time phone every couple of years, twisting premium amounts for trivial functions. We all know that these are no longer just phones, but powerful machines with tremendous performance and we can make them work as we please.
The user base grew, we built some infrastructure, the fans gave us build servers and traffic, we made a website and a forum. Later, everything came close to 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 interfere with 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, as they were the same ones that were pre-installed in the phones. We already had about a quarter of a million users, so it was no surprise that Google had to do something. There were and there are small offices selling super-cheap devices with unlicensed versions of these applications, and maybe we came under the distribution with them. In this I am still not sure. We settled the situation simply refused to 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 put on led to more attention to our project. Although the installation process is very confused, the user base has rapidly increased.
New devices came out, for the most part variations of the iron G1 and I quickly released versions of the CM 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 source code, the recovery opened up a wide path for hacking. Later, I met Kouchik Dutta, who made a CM version for this device and shared the code. Koush believed that my custom recovery was junk (true) and wrote my own much better, which helped our build system tremendously. In the end, I met Cauch personally when I was Seattle and he looked like he had been for a few days. He showed me the 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 CM, on your device, soon became a top on the Android Market and lasted there for quite some time. People really wanted this thing and the easier the installation option was, the better.
Our community was quite strong, we wanted to be able to better support our product. Our group - I, Chris, Kayan, Jeff, Cauche, 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. Together we met on the Big Android BBQ every year and came off to the fullest. We split up into teams working on different parts of the project and tried to stick to organization. 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 a little away from the project, then my wife and I moved to the other end of the country, to Seattle, in order to start a new life. I did not have enough time to work on the 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 is no exception. I really began to see the potential of the mod - a mobile OS that is actually designed by people who use it.
Several million people around the world used the SM at that time and innumerable amounts of different modifications. Dvizhuha getting steeper.
Fast forward to the end of 2012, when I received a letter from Kurt McMaster, who had ambitious ideas about the future project. They opened my eyes. Not only good ideas were invented, it was the development of the very essence of CM. All the existing developments in the SM simply could not develop otherwise - a huge community gathered and did an amazing thing that hadn’t been there before because it was necessary. We had significant growth costs, and scaling up the organization for this type of explosive development was incredibly difficult. What could we build if all the obstacles were removed and we could devote all of our development to the project? I learned from Cauch, he would like to help me to make the project even more, and he agreed. Kurt introduced us to some possible investors in Silicon Valley, after which we began to hoe our site. The first meeting was held on December 13, 2012 in Palo Alto, the company Cyanogen Inc. was born.
At the same time, my wife was expecting a baby by early January. My little Emmaline is all in dad, when it comes to timing (as soon as right away!) Decided to make her grand appearance earlier, on December 12, 2012 (the best birthday ever). 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 the memories, the knowledge of fatherhood, hard work at my main job, meeting with venture capital investors in California. Sleep was not in my deck of cards.
It was a long process, but the vision was clearer every time we told our story. We chose 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 this type of business). I quit my job for this risky undertaking and began to work bringing in 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 ourselves. Since April, 17 teams have worked tirelessly on what we believe 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 supported, more projects such as CM Account, Privacy Guard, Voice +, a new version of the supervisor and secure messages. We have greatly improved our infrastructure. We make more bug fixes, create more features, work on improving feedback. We think the time has come when once again your mobile device really belongs to you and we want to bring this idea to everyone.
Our goals today are simple and straightforward:
* Organize, lead and support our community
* Create a terrific interface aimed exactly at YOUR way of working
* Really working security solutions.
* Retain commitment to adding features that users need.
* No spam
* Constant updates
* Accessibility for each device and user
The biggest obstacle we want to get out of the way is a terrible installation process. Today, there are more open and unlockable devices on hand than ever, but they all have their frills and a wild set of installation methods. We did our best to document the process for each device on our wiki, but for non-geeks it’s still difficult. This state of affairs is unacceptable - the installation process needs to 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 in the Play Store in the coming weeks.
So what exactly does this all mean to the community? What I wanted to do first of all, when I realized that we are actually doing - it will share with everyone. But when you open a company, you need to keep in mind an extended picture of events. This means do not announce anything until the right time, so that the entire internal kitchen of the project is in order and that there is something to show.
I saw open source projects come and go, some were sold and closed, others were blown away and dropped on the sidelines. I do not want something like that to happen to CM.
In all this hectic, there were still projects that were developing harmoniously, while simultaneously 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 must be an answer to the question of motivations and causes. New products created by us should convey to you the idea of ​​our motivation, where we are going.
What will change is our abilities, our speed and our magnitude. I am not the one who allows something to 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 more questions than I can tell you. We will do Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) later today, 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 the article by Steve Kondik (aka Cyanogen). I found this material interesting (especially Steve’s personal memories) and I decided to translate it into Russian. It is surprising that so far no one has translated this interesting article, and on Habré and specialized sites only reviews / impressions of journalists.
I think this post will help novice developers (not only Android) pay attention that it is better to release new versions of the product faster, even if you don’t feel like a cool pro, as well as the importance of participating in communities where they will always tell you which direction to look for and help with testing.
')
For all inaccuracies and errors - please in PM. Pictures are not specifically copied into the translation, because they have already become familiar several times (especially the dude with blue hair and the dog).
New chapter
To all users, participants and fans of CyanogenMod:
The following describes the real events. Names are not changed to protect those involved. Let's start from the beginning.
May 25, 2009 was a day when everything seemed completely routine, radically changed the course of my life. This was my first post on XDA, which was dedicated to the new firmware for the T-Mobile G1. It is difficult for me to give new names, so I just added the word “mod” to my nickname and was like that. I was a complete noob and expected to be mocked at the forum, but I still did it. I was happy with all this and even though I didn’t do anything fundamentally new, but put together my build based on the work of the legendary JF, I thought that someone might find it worthy. 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 a new version of the firmware, hundreds of people instantly installed it, sending feedback on each step of the process. “This is exactly what 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 some really interesting things, it was amazing to be able to see the results of our work in real time. Sometimes I downloaded several versions per day to fix bugs. The race against time was frantic - a lot of original work - the fashion of your fashion, and the fashion mods of your fashion. It was fun. We all shared a common idea - a product, such as we wanted, no one would have written, so we have to do it ourselves at any cost. This idea became a peculiar ethos of our community.
Almost immediately after the release of the first version, I put all the uploads together and uploaded the changes to GitHub for use by other members of the community. I have always been an ardent supporter of free software, so this step was logical. Some people who also made their firmware decided to send me patches, which I quickly did. Some really cool features were born in this project that you would never get anywhere on and on just one selling phone.
Mobile OS created by users - for users
I woke up one morning and found a message about thousands of new followers on Twitter, which I hadn’t even used. How the hell did these guys find me? And Twitter was soon registered in the list of my hobbies.
Staying up late for hacking something was my usual behavior since childhood, and fortunately, my wife Stacey is very cool, she lets me. One day, our neighbor Val came home from work and told me about some dudes in her coffee shop talking about CM. She voiced the thought: “This thing will be very cool, dude. I'm serious". I laughed not really paid attention. I had no idea how many people actually use this thing, or what will come out of it, and I didn’t even believe that my creation merges into the “real world”.
People appeared from nowhere to work on this project. Google completely sawed out a whole sector in the industry, making Android open source and SM became something like an underground revolution opposing the players of the industry clinging to an old idea, trying to push you a one-time phone every couple of years, twisting premium amounts for trivial functions. We all know that these are no longer just phones, but powerful machines with tremendous performance and we can make them work as we please.
The user base grew, we built some infrastructure, the fans gave us build servers and traffic, we made a website and a forum. Later, everything came close to 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 interfere with 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, as they were the same ones that were pre-installed in the phones. We already had about a quarter of a million users, so it was no surprise that Google had to do something. There were and there are small offices selling super-cheap devices with unlicensed versions of these applications, and maybe we came under the distribution with them. In this I am still not sure. We settled the situation simply refused to 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 put on led to more attention to our project. Although the installation process is very confused, the user base has rapidly increased.
We increase our team and user core
New devices came out, for the most part variations of the iron G1 and I quickly released versions of the CM 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 source code, the recovery opened up a wide path for hacking. Later, I met Kouchik Dutta, who made a CM version for this device and shared the code. Koush believed that my custom recovery was junk (true) and wrote my own much better, which helped our build system tremendously. In the end, I met Cauch personally when I was Seattle and he looked like he had been for a few days. He showed me the 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 CM, on your device, soon became a top on the Android Market and lasted there for quite some time. People really wanted this thing and the easier the installation option was, the better.
Our community was quite strong, we wanted to be able to better support our product. Our group - I, Chris, Kayan, Jeff, Cauche, 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. Together we met on the Big Android BBQ every year and came off to the fullest. We split up into teams working on different parts of the project and tried to stick to organization. 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 a little away from the project, then my wife and I moved to the other end of the country, to Seattle, in order to start a new life. I did not have enough time to work on the 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 is no exception. I really began to see the potential of the mod - a mobile OS that is actually designed by people who use it.
Several million people around the world used the SM at that time and innumerable amounts of different modifications. Dvizhuha getting steeper.
Raise the bar: the birth of a company
Fast forward to the end of 2012, when I received a letter from Kurt McMaster, who had ambitious ideas about the future project. They opened my eyes. Not only good ideas were invented, it was the development of the very essence of CM. All the existing developments in the SM simply could not develop otherwise - a huge community gathered and did an amazing thing that hadn’t been there before because it was necessary. We had significant growth costs, and scaling up the organization for this type of explosive development was incredibly difficult. What could we build if all the obstacles were removed and we could devote all of our development to the project? I learned from Cauch, he would like to help me to make the project even more, and he agreed. Kurt introduced us to some possible investors in Silicon Valley, after which we began to hoe our site. The first meeting was held on December 13, 2012 in Palo Alto, the company Cyanogen Inc. was born.
At the same time, my wife was expecting a baby by early January. My little Emmaline is all in dad, when it comes to timing (as soon as right away!) Decided to make her grand appearance earlier, on December 12, 2012 (the best birthday ever). 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 the memories, the knowledge of fatherhood, hard work at my main job, meeting with venture capital investors in California. Sleep was not in my deck of cards.
It was a long process, but the vision was clearer every time we told our story. We chose 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 this type of business). I quit my job for this risky undertaking and began to work bringing in 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 ourselves. Since April, 17 teams have worked tirelessly on what we believe will be the next mobile revolution and as a result, today we are ready to inform the world about this.
By providing the Cyanogen experience to everyone
As you probably noticed, the pace of development has increased very much in the past few months. More devices supported, more projects such as CM Account, Privacy Guard, Voice +, a new version of the supervisor and secure messages. We have greatly improved our infrastructure. We make more bug fixes, create more features, work on improving feedback. We think the time has come when once again your mobile device really belongs to you and we want to bring this idea to everyone.
Our goals today are simple and straightforward:
* Organize, lead and support our community
* Create a terrific interface aimed exactly at YOUR way of working
* Really working security solutions.
* Retain commitment to adding features that users need.
* No spam
* Constant updates
* Accessibility for each device and user
The biggest obstacle we want to get out of the way is a terrible installation process. Today, there are more open and unlockable devices on hand than ever, but they all have their frills and a wild set of installation methods. We did our best to document the process for each device on our wiki, but for non-geeks it’s still difficult. This state of affairs is unacceptable - the installation process needs to 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 in the Play Store in the coming weeks.
So what exactly does this all mean to the community? What I wanted to do first of all, when I realized that we are actually doing - it will share with everyone. But when you open a company, you need to keep in mind an extended picture of events. This means do not announce anything until the right time, so that the entire internal kitchen of the project is in order and that there is something to show.
I saw open source projects come and go, some were sold and closed, others were blown away and dropped on the sidelines. I do not want something like that to happen to CM.
In all this hectic, there were still projects that were developing harmoniously, while simultaneously 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 must be an answer to the question of motivations and causes. New products created by us should convey to you the idea of ​​our motivation, where we are going.
What will change is our abilities, our speed and our magnitude. I am not the one who allows something to 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 more questions than I can tell you. We will do Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) later today, you will have the opportunity to ask all your questions.
Exciting times ahead!
Link to the original - www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/a_new_chapter
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/196236/
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