Stay close to the customer

High performing sales people tend to make orders of magnitude more than the engineers who built the product that is being sold. Bandwidth providers are struggling to stay afloat, but Google is making billions. Unix vendors are becoming non-existent, but Mac OS is booming. A rule to live by is stay close to your customers. Building the interface is more important than the infrastructure. If you're building an API, developers better be your customers OR you better be building the API in such a way that developers will extend your product while allowing you to stay close to your customers. I bring this up now because I'm working on "twitlicio.us" a service that combines twitter and del.icio.us. It's just a fun project, and I'm building it as infrastructure right now: set it up once and forget about it. This is a great approach for twitter and del.icio.us. I'm adding value to their services, which is the whole reason they released APIs. However, it's a pretty bad approach for me personally. This is ok for now. Infrastructure is less work. The point of the project is for it to be a lightweight personal experiment with Google's App Engine. However, the lesson remains true, and it's something I don't want to forget in the future.