The Summer of Silence

This is the fifth of several posts where I am revisiting CommonsWare, my long-timebusiness and current ���hobby with a logo���. I thought it might be useful to some tosee how all that came about, the decisions I made, and so on.

The series:

Waiting for a Chasm-Crosser Settling on a Business Model Dynamic Books Android or iPhone? The Summer of Silence

To recap: in early 2008, I realized that Android was the best option for me to divedeeply into smartphones, rather than iPhone. And I thought that a business model based aroundfrequently-updated books on rapidly-moving technology might work.

So, I started writing. I spent evenings and weekends coming to grips with thenascent Android SDK, writing book chapters and sample apps along the way.

I also started contributing on the two Google Groups that Google had set up forAndroid app development support. I knew that ���word of mouth��� was going to be key formy success, so I wanted to start early. However, in April and May of 2008,I was definitely helping more on thefringes ��� most of the attention in those groups were on the Google engineersworking on Android. Legends like Dianne Hackborn were active in the groups, guidingus in understanding thorny questions like ���WTF is a Context?��� and ���why does my activityget screwy after I rotate from portrait to landscape?���. There were perhaps a dozenkey Google contributors on those groups, and we relied on them fairly heavily.

And then in late May, the Google contingent stopped posting on those groups.

There was no ���goodbye���, or ���hey, we need to focus on other things for a while���,or any other sort of announcement. One day, they were just gone. Eventually, weheard via ���the grapevine��� that top management (presumably Andy Rubin) had screamed fairly loudly aboutGooglers being involved with the community, particularly with deadlines looming. That seems plausible (both the justification and the screaming), though I neverattempted to get corroboration for that story.

The reverberations from that lingered for years, as it seemed as though Google engineerswere prevented from even acknowledging that the community existed. I distinctlyremember an early Google I|O conference session, where Romain Guy was struggling not tosay ���ActionBarSherlock��� when tryingto answer a question about ActionBarSherlock, Jake Wharton���s legendary early UI framework.It was quite some time before whatever sortof ���gag order��� they were under seemed to lapse, and longer still before Android got a soliddeveloper relations team.

But, in May 2008, the net was that the vast majority of our Android developer support systemvanished without a trace. It was just a few of us independents left to help others, especially those like myself and Reto Meier,who were working on Android app development books. I re-doubled my support efforts, to tryto fill the gap. And, weeks after the summer of silence began, I released the initial edition ofThey Busy Coder���s Guide to Android Development.

The combination of the book and the support posts on the Google Groups started to establish my reputation as being a leading expert on Android app development.

This is where ���you make your own luck��� starts to come in. I did the work to identifya business model. I did the work to identify an area to apply the business model towards.I did all kinds of work to execute on that business model, starting with writing a book very quicklyand supporting the pre-hardware Android developer crowd. That set me up to capitalizeon the ���knowledge gap��� that arose when the Google engineers left the Google Groups.I did not create that gap ��� some Google executive did ��� but I was in positionto fill it. The phrase really should be ���you work to put yourself in a place to leverage luckwhen it arises���, but that���s a bit wordy.

Those Google Groups have long been ���resigned to the dustbin of history���, and evenold-timers like myself rarely think about them. I wound up being better known foranswering support questions somewhere else��� and I will talk more about that ���somewhere else���in the next post in this series.