Archive for the ‘General’ Category

How much to scratch your own itch as a Startup?

Posted: August 25, 2012 in Concept, General
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Let me first define the itch concept – the itch here on in will refer to how far to take of your own opinions and desires of how a piece of software should operate.

So the question is from the title:

Q: How much to scratch your own itch as a startup?

Let me answer this right up front:

A: The correct amount.

Off the back of the Thursday night WDYK event, some Startup and User Experience talking points were raised that I wanted to discuss. I started off by trying to fit it in to the last post, but it didn’t quite fit there. I’m working in a Startupesque environment right now and just wanted to put some ideas down on ‘paper’, so here goes…

Scratch?

The statement that sent me off on this thought path was “don’t just scratch your own itch“, it’s good that Joel reminded the audience of this. Often as software developers we inject too much of our own usability ideas into the software being built. This falls over when we eventually realise this is not how typical users of our application would like to use it, even if they are other software developers. What I’m currently working on is not a core software engineer’s tool, say like bug tracking software. It is targeted at a specific type of user and process. But of course we developers often put our ‘application user’ hat on as we build features. Knowing that we’re building the system for someone other than ourselves doesn’t inhibit members of our development team from having strong opinions on how it should operate. This isn’t a bad thing…

Start scratching

There is something in the argument of “scratching your own itch” being beneficial – it is a reasonable starting point to turning your idea into a functioning application. But you always need to keep in mind your needs aren’t going to be exactly those of the customer. There’s a fair bit of this kind of opinion floating around on blogs: “Focusing on our own problems doesn’t necessarily mean we’re solving other people’s problems, or solving problems that matter at scale“- Ben Yoskovitz, source.

When subject matter experience/expertise comes in to play in building the application, you possibly are focussing on your interpretation of the problems that do matter. You can’t always get the cleanest/best problem definition from your users. So you go on to manage the itch combining the expertise and opinion with some user experience analysis. Your team probably has a vision of what the application will be about, heading towards hopefully at least one killer feature/aspect that makes your product stand out. So you go forward combining your ideas and refining with some user testing, now days focussed around the users experience and flow through the application.

Scratch right

This is how you get to that magical place which is the correct amount of scratching your own itch. Have the application be capable of (within reason) all you desire, but reign that in to simpler flows refined by actual results of real users navigating through the system to achieve their normal expectation of work supported by the system.

When my reaches that magical place, I’ll share what it took to get there, but for now it’s just an objective off in the not too far distance.

Scratch well

Joel describing his own start-up raised some great points about not needing venture capital, and how your product would likely be better off without it. There’s no financial pressure from the investor wanting to cash out sometime down the track. The way you do this is by:

1. Make something people want,
2. Make it better than what is out there,
3. Tell people about it.

That last point was a great theme to touch on, Mark had his ideas on this which were about going out to find your users, and not just shouting as he put it (a company blog, a company twitter account). Finding and engaging with users is critical. This is what it will take to get the widest range of feedback to help build your application. But it needs to be guided into a solution that’s not something that has come out of a very large handful of a ‘committee design meetings’.

As an FYI; Joel was Joel Friedlaender – Founder at Red Guava and Mark was Mark Mansour – Founder at Agile Bench

Web Directions South – What Do You Know? Night in Melbourne

Posted: August 24, 2012 in Conference, General
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Last night Thursday 23rd August 2012, I went along the What Do You Know? event held at The Appartment a great little place I used to frequent when I was working on Exhibition Street.

Earlier this year I was at the Web Directions South Code event, so anything put on the Web Directions South team is great and you should attend. In particular the up coming conference in mid October 2012, Sydney.

So back to Thursday nights event. There were 12 lightning talks, each 5 minutes long, I’ll list them off with links to what was most interesting / their entire presentation.

I wanted to talk about a few that stood out to me, mostly because it’s relevant to what is happening at Picnic Software at the moment.

The 4 presentations that stood out as very relevant to what we’re doing at Picnic Software were:

  • Mark – 5 Simple Things You’ll Forget When You Start a Startup
  • Joel – DevOps for Startups: Tales from the trenches
  • Matt – What the $%&# is UX Design?
  • Will – The User is Drunk

I started off by trying to fit it in to this post, but it ended up longer than I expected so it’s here: How much to scratch your own itch as a Startup?.

Summary of the event with links, in order of appearance:

The State of Our Web Performance Union
John Bristowe, @JohnBristowe

Content being deliver over the web is getting larger faster than bandwidth increases. Aim for performance. Have a look at a data trends httparchive.org

DevOps for Startups: Tales from the trenches
Lucas Chan, @geekylucas

Monitor and be ready for spikes. Uptime is critical. Don’t build what you can rent.

What the $%&# is UX Design?
Matt Magain, @mattymcg

Watch this on YouTube and check out uxmastery.com

A whirlwind tour of D3.js
Tony Milne, @tonymilne

It’s very powerful, check it out d3js.org/

A brief introduction to the Gamepad API
Anette Bergo, @anettebgo

html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/doodles/gamepad/

Getting Sourcey with Javascript
Michael Mifsud, @xzyfer

Source Maps are the future of debugging the web – html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/sourcemaps/

Startup Myths Debunked
Joel Friedlaender, @jfriedlaender

Named some common myths that are all likely wrong; failure is high e.g. 9 in 10 Startups fail, your idea is worthless, you need venture capital, the only costs are your time.

CSS checkboxes and the ridiculous things you can build with them
Ryan Seddon, @ryanseddon

cssn.in/ja/wdyk2012

50 handy things you’ve never heard of
Charlie Somerville, @charliesome

charlie.bz/presos/50resources/

From zero to superpimp mobile web app using Tres
Julio Cesar Ody, @julio_ody

Julio amazingly wrote some non-trivial JavaScript using Backbone.js and his library:
tres.io

The User is Drunk
Will Dayble, @willdayble

Good UI is ‘not there’, say things twice (icon and words), you can’t beat over the shoulder testing (watching your user).

5 Simple Things You’ll Forget When You Start a Startup
Mark Mansour, @markmansour

Marketing (is critical and not easy), Product (focus on benefits and customers), Promotion (talk to customers), Price (Tiers and known costs for customers), Place (don’t shout at your customers, go find them)

Automating IIS actions with PowerShell – Create Multiple Sites

Posted: August 23, 2012 in General, Tools
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I’m working towards a more complex SignalR based post, but in the mean time part of the work on that involves setting up a few ASP.NET web apps.

If you’re after a more comprehensive guide check out this post on learn.iis.net by Thomas Deml. I’ve summarised the steps required to get some basic .NET 4 web applications deployed.

Objective
To create N identical websites in local IIS, each with an incrementing name Id. Each linked to the same application directory. The exact reason as to why will come in a future post, for now consider it an exercise in manipulating IIS via PowerShell.

s1.site.local
s2.site.local
…

Step 1 – Ensure you’re running the scripts in x86 mode.

Which seems quite common a problem, with a stackoverflow question. I haven’t worked a way around this yet, but this is the error when not running as x86:

New-Item : Cannot retrieve the dynamic parameters for the cmdlet. Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {688EEEE5-6A7E-422F-B2E1-6AF00DC944A6} failed due to the following error: 80040154.
At line:1 char:9
+ New-Item <<<< AppPools\test-app-pool
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidArgument: (:) [New-Item], ParameterBindingException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : GetDynamicParametersException,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.NewItemCommand

Step 2 – Import-Module WebAdministration
This loads the IIS namespace which allows you to just navigate in the same way you would the filesystem

> CD IIS:\

Step 3 – Create & Configure App Pool

    New-Item AppPools\test.pool

    Set-ItemProperty IIS:\AppPools\test.pool -name "enable32BitAppOnWin64" -Value "true"

    Set-ItemProperty IIS:\AppPools\test.pool -name "managedRuntimeVersion" -Value "v4.0"

NOTE: here I didn’t have any luck storing the app pool path in a variable then using Set-ItemProperty, hence the repeating.

Step 4 – Variables

    $sitesToCreate = 10
    $path = "C:\dev\project-x\App.Web"
    $appPool = "test.pool"

Step 5 – Create Site & Link AppPool Loop

For N(10) to zero:

  • Create a new site
  • Set binding info and physical path
  • Set the app pool
    while ($sitesToCreate -gt 0)
    { 
        $siteName = "s" + $sitesToCreate + ".site.local"
        $siteWithIISPrefix = "IIS:\Sites\" + $siteName
        Write-Host "Creating: " $siteName
        
        $site = New-Item $siteWithIISPrefix -bindings @{protocol="http";bindingInformation="*:80:" + $siteName } -physicalPath $path
        
        Set-ItemProperty IIS:\Sites\$siteName -name applicationPool -value $appPool
        $sitesToCreate--
    }

Note: ‘appPool’ is a text variable, not the ‘Get-Item’. Set-ItemProperty operates on a path not a variable representing the item.

We’re done

One last note, to get these to resolve correctly on your local developer machine you’ll need to modify your hosts file.

IIS multisite

The complete code up as a Github Gist.

Life should be a Picnic

Posted: July 2, 2012 in General
Tags:
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Today I officially became part of a new Melbourne based software company called Picnic Software.

Nick Josevski Picnic Software

We’re all about building high quality software here. Stay tuned for more exciting things I’ll now have a chance to talk about.

Follow the expansion of Picnic on Twitter and on the Picnic blog.

We’ll have some hopefully interesting things up in our Picnic Basket on GitHub soon too.

Web Directions Code Melbourne 2012 – Day 2

Posted: May 24, 2012 in Conference, General
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web-directions-code-logo

After a great 1st day at #WDC12. The small end-of-day-one-party was hosted at LaDiDa, with some booked dinners around Melbourne with some of the locals (which sadly I wasn’t able to attend). None the less we got right into it with an interesting start to day two.

Dmitry Baranovsky
JavaScript: enter the dragon
This was quite an eye opening and scarily entertaining motivational address by Dmitry. The phrase ‘You Suck’ was uttered the right number of times to motivate an audience full of developers to strive to be better at JavaScript, software development in general and even physically fitter.

The forced take away was to be aware of the intricacies of JavaScript by actually reading the language specification PDF link and (annotated here) and to build your own JavaScript six-pack:

  • Types and type coercion
  • Operators + ==
  • Objects and primatives
  • Functions and constructors
  • Closures
  • Prototype

Jed Schmidt
NPM: Node’s personal manservant
For those familiar with the .NET world, Jed is a Hanselman grade presenter, with great delivery of a comedy element to deliver a presentation as funny as it is educational. Jed introduced many concepts around package management for node (NPM) he built a small demonstration framework to walk us through various concepts, the readme file contains a complete list of everything he covered.

dinkumizer

Jared Wyles
Removing the gag from your browser
Jared delivered a very usefully technical presentation around effectively using the Chrome Developer Tools to trouble shoot, analyse and track site performance. The most important take away was being aware of all the network timing elements for your site when it’s served to a user for the first time, and ensuring items are cached correctly for subsequent visits. He covered using the memory and CPU snapshot and measurement tools to trace any memory leaks and code inefficiencies in particular around interrogating/traversing the dom.

Anette Bergo
Truthiness, falsiness, and other JavaScript gotchas
Anette took the audience through some of the stranger parts of the JavaScript language where it’s likely anyone who hasn’t experienced any of those particular bug prone approaches may run in to trouble. Some key ones to be wary of that you may expect to not really cause problems were:

  • ParseInt()
  • Operators and coercion

Damon Oehlman
The main event: beyond event listeners.
Damon gave us an introduction to eve – an eventing library, just check it out.

Mark Dalgleish
Getting closure
Mark covered “Immediately Invoked Function Expressions” and some of the benefits like protecting against unwanted global variables, and ensuring scope, along with explaining the closure concept. His detailed slides are up on his blog.

Ryan Seddon
Debugging secrets for lazy developers
Ryan‘s theme was automation, get as much of your repeatable tasks scripted. He walked through using headless browsers via Travis-CI, but reminded us that will only get you so far you need to test in real browsers too. An exciting little project of his is a port of the Yahoo Yeti tool, to work without the YUI test runner, his is called Bunyip and should be available soon.

Tony Milne
Party like it’s 1999, write JavaScript like it’s 2012!
Tony covered an issue with dependencies in JavaScript when your chain of references gets larger, and how ideally the responsibility to link required JavaScript files should exist in a better place than just the html files. He mentioned Require.js is great for in browser use, but the really great ones exist for server side JS.

Tony Milne 2012 style JS

Tim Oxley
Clientside templates for reactive UI
Tim was a another entertaining presenter with some choice phrases to compare and contrast developers he admires and frameworks that support development of thick-clients. Tim had a sweet spot for 3 templating frameworks Dot, Jade and Handlebars.js (where Handlebars > Hogan > Mustache )

Rob Hawkes
HTML5 technologies and game development

Rob stole the show in terms of general inspiration and being uplifting with his love of games and how it helps build better online experiences in particular in browser technologies. The vision he presented was a world where the browser platform, in particular on mobiles extended the gaming experience from the desktop world instead of only partially emulating it. Rob mentioned a few interesting APIs/concepts/products worth checking out like; WebWorkers and PointerLockAPI and TinkerCAD. Rob works for Mozilla the not-for-profit software foundation that gets so much amazing stuff done with only 600 employees only half of which are developers, so if you want to see what’s coming up check out Firefox Aurora, or what’s being worked on right now Firefox Nightly and if you want to get in touch with anyone at Mozilla find them on IRC.

The conference wrapped up at The Carlton down Bourke Street in an awesome after party where beer fueled discussions could run rampart.

Web Directions Code Melbourne 2012 – Day 1

Posted: May 24, 2012 in Conference, General
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I spent today (23rd May 2012) at Web Directions Code first time attendee of the Web Directions conferences, and this is the first Web Directions Code (at least in Australia or Melbourne).

web-directions-code-logo

It was a great day, a combination of great speakers, face chocolates (see below) and a single track taking out the stress of selecting which presentation to go and see. It’s a 2 day event so I’m quite excited to be going back tomorrow. (Here’s my Day 2 wrap up).

Face Chocolates & Eat Play Code

Faruk Ates
The Web’s 3rd Decade

Key take-away is this slide, with the important message being better tools are clearly what’s missing right now that’s making web development not productive as it should be, we should be further along in terms of getting more of the basics done. This comes about from achieving the other 2 items – more involvement along with making it clearer how to use and integrate existing frameworks and or tool sets.

Dave Johnson
Device APIs: closing the gap between native and web

Dave spoke about technical challenges in building PhoneGap. The most challenging being those around; security, sand-boxing, privacy permissions, and performance. Basically its hard work, many devices many lacking features, in particular around new HTML based video and audio.

Damon Oehlman
HTML5 Messaging

Damon covered off a lot of technical details around messaging in HTML 5, listing two main types: ‘Post Messaging’ and ‘Channel Messaging’ stating that post messaging is simpler to get going with. He went further to discuss web-sockets and some example frameworks like Socket.IO and Sock.js. He demonstrated posting messages via his presentation and created a web socket connection to twitter to receive messages as soon as they arrived at twitter. Then briefly touching on Web Intents.

Andrew Fisher
Getting all touch feeling with the mobile web

Walked us through the basics of touch, with some nice demonstrations and a walk-through of how common touch mechanics we’re all familiar with work.

Silvia Pfeiffer
Implementing video conferencing in HTML5

Had a very impressive setup of some node.js server logic coordinating 2 browsers connecting to each other to perform a video conferencing call on stage between her and the audience.

Anson Parker
The HTML5 History API: PushState or bust

Gave us a neat little round up of the History API and how it works, Anson took the opportunity to remind us that companies like twitter with their hash-bang urls are breaking the expected behaviour of the web. He gave an example of how much data is delivered regardless if you’re requesting to view a single 140k tweet versus their tweet stream (typically paged at 10-20 tweets). He wrapped up with a cool demonstration of a site he’s in the process of building, that looks very promising kahzu.com

excessive twitter download

Tammy Butow
Fantastic forms for mobile web

Tammy walked us through the basics of building suitable input forms for mobile devices, taking advantages of types such as ‘tel’ to bring up only the numeric keypad for input, all the tips are up on slide share.

Max Wheeler
Drag and drop and give me twenty
Walked the audience through drag and drop concepts.

John Allsop
Getting off(line)

John overwhelmed with a flood of information about the complexities and pitfalls of working with appcache. He walked us through sessionStorage and localStorage and the tradeoffs of what you can store, how much space is available, and security concerns (in particular when browsers crash). He covered a great deal so here’s a link to an older version of his presentation from a previous web direction conference (I’ll update with a new one when I find it).

Developing with AppCache

Divya Manain
Designing in the browser

Divya made a very clear and strong case for having a process that involves designers writing code, and building prototypes sooner rather than later (or not at all). Advocating moving from very initial rough paper sketches straight to prototyping using a fair few useful tools (note this is still rough notes, I’ll follow each up and link directly).

Tools / resources for prototyping

designing in the browser

To top off a great day we got a gift each from Blackberry a PlayBook.

blackberry playbook

One last thing the graphic of the day to get the most reaction (excluding courage wolf ones).

eating clag

Error message 800704a6 as part of creating an instance of the COM component

Posted: January 10, 2012 in General
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This will be a very short post, and comes from rage against Windows Server and the Windows update system. Because there were outstanding Windows Updates requiring a reboot, a particular build script of ours was falling over without suitable information as to why exactly.

The cryptic error was:

Creating an instance of the COM component with CLSID {0002DF01-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} from the IClassFactory failed due to the following error: 800704a6.

The answer (at least for us):

Reboot!

There are windows updates getting in the way of instantiating new COM objects.

You’ll see a lot of people having a similar problem, not sure if reboot is the answer for them all, but make it your first step, and memorise the error code 800704a6. Unable to verify this but it looks to relate to the text code of ERROR_SHUTDOWN_IS_SCHEDULED.

The ServerFault post that helped most:
serverfault.com/q/ie8-script-error-800704a6

Stackoverflow Questions

stackoverflow.com/watin-nunit-and-cruisecontrol-net-error-message-800704a6
stackoverflow.com/tests-fail-sporadically-using-cruisecontrol-net-with-nunit-error-800704a6
stackoverflow.com/setup-method-failed-while-running-tests-from-teamcity
stackoverflow.com/tests-fail-sporadically-using-cruisecontrol-net-with-nunit-error-800704a6
stackoverflow.com/failed-due-to-the-following-error-800704a6-while-trying-to-read-data-from-a-text-file

Generic Personality Tests For Software Engineers

Posted: December 28, 2011 in General
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I rarely rant on my blog, but when a friend of mine brought up that he had to take a personality test as part of the interview process (a step prior to being given an offer), it just frustrated me so much. So at this point dear reader you may move along if this isn’t of interest as this is all my opinion on personality tests for software engineers.

Summary and Disclaimer
Unless your organisation has thought long and hard about designing a personality test specific to software engineers, don’t subject candidates to a generic personality tests. It reflects poorly on your understanding of software engineers.

If you use a generic personality test…

Q: Do you care about hiring and retaining the best software engineers?
A: test A resounding – No.

Q: Do you understand what it takes to be a good software engineers?
A: A clear – No.

Q: Does your organisation care about the previous two questions?
A: If no, then fair enough. Continue using the test, and move along.

Otherwise:

You have to be kidding me. When a professional organisation subjects any reasonably qualified software engineer to the same type of tests they subject potential employees in their specific field to then they are not concerned about hiring and retaining the best, or they have been ill-informed on how to recruit top software engineers. What got me fired up about this information was that the type of questions he described. They were so broad and irrelevant to what it would take to do his job. This frustration was further compounded when it was apparent that this test carried some significant weight in the recruitment process. They didn’t even bother to undertake more suitable programming/problem solving exercises that an Engineer would actually do in day to day activities in this job role.

At this point you may counter my argument with, a general statement such as “why not just use any and all tools available to help make a decision“. To this I answer: such questions are not relevant enough to accurately judge a good software engineer, and do more harm than good.

Here are some categories we derived from the discussion after he sat the test, and we analysed the questions that invoked the anger that’s feeding this post.

  1. Questioning the norm.
  2. Long standing ideas.
  3. Repetitive routines.
  4. Breaking rules.
  5. Data analysis.
  6. Being creative.

Here we are both speculating a bit, but the type of questions that represented the first 4 categories seemed to attempt to discover candidates that would be deemed as rebellious. As a software developer answering these questions you have to completely put aside what makes you a good software developer. I would give credit if the organisation was actively seeking ‘rebellious’ software developers ready to challenge the norm and bring improvements. But based on their sector, and other information this seems highly unlikely. The questions that matched the last 2 categories seemed reasonable.

A very brief search uncovered this reasearch paper; very SDLC and waterfall focused analysis of personalities (pdf), there didn’t seem to be any concept of applying Computer Science knowledge/research into this personality test. In fact several questions were difficult even to interpret for your typical software engineer.

If I was subjected to such a test as part of an application where the test wasn’t clearly justified as relevant to engineers, it would be safe to say right there an then to avoid stress I would decline and withdraw my candidacy.

Take away: treat your engineers with a bit more respect.

Perfect Password Paragraphs

Posted: September 11, 2011 in General, Tools
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Over the last few months at least in the streams of information I typically consume, direct issues: Security Now topic of Password Haystacks, xkcs’s comic, Coding Horror, and indirect: Scott Hanselman one and two. Have all commented on the issue around passwords and strength and the need for better passwords.

In this post I am putting forward a novel approach: which as an homage to GRC’s Perfect Paper Passwords and accordingly have titled my approach:

When high entropy 16, 32, 64 or even 128 character passwords are just not secure enough!

Let’s jump right in with a sample, here I’ve mocked up the very familiar facebook interface with a nice large textbox to put in your Perfect Password Paragraphs™.

Perfect Password Paragraphs facebook log in modified

Disclaimer: if you’ve gotten this far and haven’t begun to appreciate the humour I’m so sorry, please don’t send me hate mail.

Features:

  • A big text area where with probable difficulty you have to type 100+ words to authenticate.
  • Typographical errors are ok as long as they are consistent for you.
  • A flow of sentences following a theme/style just needs to sound like the individual attempting to gain access.
  • “Sound Like” is a trademark (patent indefinitely pending) of Josevski Research Corp, is the flux capacitor grade specialty of this authentication system.

Comparison metrics:

  • Writing style
  • Choice of punctuation, frequency of commas, periods, ect.
  • Grammar choice.
  • spelling (American vs British English).
  • Consistency of spelling errors.
  • Choice of tense (present, past, and future)

Future Features based on demand:

  • International support.
  • 1337 sp34k.
  • Baby talk.
  • Obscure localised slang.
  • Pig Latin.
  • iOS, Windows Phone 7 and Android Support.

Alpha product coming online in 6-8 weeks ;)

Getting to know your machine, by building it

Posted: August 27, 2011 in General
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Back in September of 2009 after a fair few months of thinking about what to put in to a new PC, the stars aligned and along with some friends of mine decided to take on a small project of building our own PCs. At that point I had never done the activity on my own, as in assembling everything from scratch, but was well across how the hardware did connect, and what the steps were.

The systems back there were Core i7 920s @ 2.6 Ghz, with 12Gb of RAM (6x2gb), 2x 1TB drives, 2x NVidia GTX 275s 892MB. At this point it’s obvious these machines were to be gaming rigs with some nice SLI action in the GFX department. These machines are CPU overclocked to run at 3.5Ghz and have been running well for just over 2 years now.

Fast forward to August 2011. Almost 2 years on, and I’m at it again, but this time to build our primary software development machines at work.

This system consists of Core i7 980 @ 3.2Ghz, with 24Gb of RAM (6x4gb), OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, 1x NVidia GTX 560 1Gb.

The following is just a summary of my experience, and those who took part in the builds with me, your millage may vary and in no way is this a definitive guide, there may be some useful tips and insights, either way this is to be an entertainment post, full of hardware pictures.

Choice of parts
“Bang for buck” is obviously your best bet, which translates into purchase what is important in your budget. This being 2011 very much the year of the SSD, this is where your first bit of attention should be.

In 2009, an SSD was well out of our price range, in particular with 32Gb models being the most popular and still not very affordable or even reliable yet. In 2011 this is not the case, and with budgeting to ensure a great SSD we ended up with 240Gb OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS drives. These were of the top end of the SSD spectrum, the only thing typically more expensive was larger capacity 500+Gb which had just come out, and some other specialised SSDs.

ocz vertex box and on case tray

Ensuring part capability
This just takes research as there isn’t much that can go wrong. The main concerns typically revolve around the capabilities of the motherboard, after you clearly select the motherboard that’s appropriate for your CPU chipset. Also of concern to double check on is physical space inside the chosen system case. This did bite us when early 2010 we decided to build a similar spec’d machine as the 2009 machine, but chose a newer and physically larger GFX card which did not fit the 2009 cases.

2009 Case -> Cooler Master CMStorm Scout
2011 Case -> Corsair Graphite 600 (black)

I found just searching for reviews and combinations people are bench-marking online make a good guide to compatible choices.

motherboard Gigabyte G1.Guerrilla

Purchasing
Shop around for any discounts if buying a larger quantity, combined order. We went as far as to choose to shop at multiple locations to obtain the best prices, and to ensure all the parts we wanted could be acquired exactly when build time came around. This may be a negative as if there are issues with multiple parts then you have to deal with 2 or more business for parts exchange. Luckily in both the 2009 build and the recent build there were no issues requiring travelling back to the store.

graphics card gtx 560 1gb

The Build
A quick checklist of the order of configuration, in both times, even trying both combinations, I found that at least for our cases, it was easier to assemble almost everything on the motherboard with it on the build table, and not in the case. This is the order that worked well for us.

  1. Install the RAM onto the motherboard.
  2. Lock in CPU with thermal paste.
  3. Add your CPU heat sink, plus any rear of motherboard mounts.
  4. Wire up CPU fans into motherboard.
  5. Clip on RAM cooling fans (wasn’t a feature on my 2009 machine).
  6. Screw-in feet for motherboard into case.
  7. Bolt motherboard down into case.
  8. Insert GFX card.
  9. Run SATA cables for SSD/HDDs, BluRay/DVD roms
  10. Link up any case based connections (HDD lights, fans, power button, etc)
  11. Tidy up cables now and as you go.

Cable Management
I’m of the opinion you should attempt to get all the internal cables tucked away as neatly as possible to help with airflow, and general appearance, in my machines a strong touch of OCD helped get them in a near perfect state of “out of the way”. Zip ties, twisty ties and making use of the case are your best friends here.

Cooling
Fans, fans and more fans. Here I don’t believe it’s necessary to go that overboard with advanced alternate tech cooling. But to each his own.

In both the 2009 and 2011 systems, we chose to go with an aftermarket heat sink for the CPU, this was clearly the right choice in 2009, but when we saw the stock fan that came with the Core i7 980 it looked like it would do a good job. None-the-less dual fans and larger grill section on the Noctua NH-U12P is what’s cooling the overclocked 920s and 980s.

noctual cpu fan, and corsair ram fan

Testing the configuration
Double check nothing is out of place, and turn it on. Good luck! ;)

case assembly complete

Play
Start using the system. After you have your Operating System installed that is.

monitors

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