Juixe Techknow

From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe and I’ll be sure to follow back.

Software Development

• Worst than coder’s block is coder’s shiny tech infinite loop.
• I got 99 problems and a bug ain’t one.
• I’m a rockstar ninja guru mofo byte code copy editor.
• If you could Myers-Briggs test your code what type would your code be and what type of developer would that make you?
• Are you test driven or bug driven development?
• Spiderman had his spidey sense and I have my buggy sense and it is tingling.
• Software bugs can byte my shiny metal ass.
• Code is a continuum.
• Mo data, mo problems.
• Let there be APIs.
• “Hello, World” is a programmer’s first program. Blog engine is a web developer’s first web app. Consultant’s first product, time management application.
• Duh, #debugging.
• Code is never complete.
• Code less, debug less.
• I’m a bandwagon programmer!
• This is not the code you are looking for.
• I break for bugs.
• My code runs more than you.

Team Dynamics

• Passion is not a fruit, it’s a seed.
• Pitch your passion.
• Self help gurus first help themselves.
• If you are waiting for tomorrow you will always be waiting.
• In the evening be exhausted, in the morning exhilarated.
• Great ideas don’t join country clubs.
• Inside a large risk is a large reward, you just need to know how to unwrap it and then monetize it.
• Meetings begets meetings
• It’s not how the ball is pitched to you, it’s how you hit the ball, duh #winning.
• Replace “what if” with “when and how.”
• The way you think of a problem affects the way you think of the solution.
• Everybody lives in there own bubble, expand yours.

Product Placement

• I’m confused as to which photo service we are all supposed to use this month, flickr, picasa, twitpic, instangram, picplz, plixi, color, etc
• Color app seems like Bump for pictures.
• Why is the director of the FBI emailing my AOL email account from a io domain?
• 3G forecast: partly spotty with chances of AT&T fail.
• Out of all of Apple’s products, Jobs’ best revenue generating product must be the iPhone earbuds. At $30, it has $.50 of material.
• I’ve lost count, would Google Circles be Google’s third or fourth social networking attempt?
• Outlook should have a Save As option to save as a Word document.
• What Google giveth Google taketh away with one change in their algo.
• Ikea has made a killing by selling designer cardboard.

Quotes

• Standards are paper. I use paper to wipe my butt every day. That’s how much that paper is worth. – Linus Torvalds
• Seeing companies promote their Facebook fan page in advertisements reminds me of when companies promoted their AOL keyword. – @bencasnocha
• Every software package expands until it can send email. – Zawinski’s Law
• One great rock show can change the world. – School of Rock

Questions

• How many tweets does it take change a light bulb and start trending?
• Do you live in the moment or in a hurry to get to the next moment?
• Is #SXSW the equivalent to #Woodstock but for social media experts and tech hipsters?
• Forget Scientology, what Hollywood religion is Charlie Sheen practicing where he is a warlock and lives with goddesses?
• If William of Occam worked at Gillette how many blades would Occam’s razor have?
• Is Chris Brown the next Dennis Rodman?

The Valley

• There is a “lifestyle business” bubble.
• To VCs, startup founders are like dogs to be sorted by pedigree.
• Is it a bubble if you can’t afford to invest in a seed round?
• Everybody is scared of a little bubble.
• Forget about building a better mouse trap, think about building a better people trap.
• Some party like a rock star, I party like a VC.

Technologist

• Single sign-on is something that should be native in the browser.
• Love thy neighbors, like thy Facebook friends, and retweet they twitter followers.
• People like liking.
• Tell me what smart phone you have and I’ll tell you everything about you, especially of you have it unlocked.
• Terms of Service do not void your constitutional rights.
• Love thy neighbors, like thy Facebook friends, and retweet they twitter followers.
• If there ever is a a zombie attack just remember that the Googleplex has the biggest brains, Hollywood and Washington not so big.

Tweeple

• Mr. Zuckerberg, tear down this walled garden.
• Mr. Jobs, fix my iPhone.
• I think Aaron Sorkin should write a treatment for a movie based on Stuxnet.
• Jeff Bezos to serialize his brain and store it Amazon’s cloud and allow developers to access it via an API.

Japanese Earthquake

• My heart goes out to the Fukushima 50 and all the search and rescue workers.
• I have the same feeling, level of disbelief and sense of magnitude, about Japan now as I did about New York after September 11.
• Earthquake + Tsunami + Nuclear + Meltdown = (Me Praying for the People of Japan)^8.7
• Wow, the Japan quake at 8.9 is 700x stronger than the Haiti earthquake.
• There is no match to the “shock and awe” that Mother Nature can produce in matter of minutes.
• I <3 Japan
• Stay strong Japan! If there is any country that can recover from two nuclear bombs, multiple Godzilla attacks, and a 8.9 quake Japan can.

No one has time to read long rambling text. One of the great things about Twitter is that it has a 140 character limit, it forces people to be concise, precise, to the point. It is so much easier to follow someone twitter than someones blog. This is also true for corporate communication. Within a team, the best way to ask short question is through instant messages such as Skype. The one draw back to instant messaging systems is that people expect instant responses. But for quick yes or no questions this is the best approach. More detailed questions can be escalated to email. But always be short and precise in emails. Always stay on point when emailing someone. If you are making multiple points separate them to their own bullets or paragraphs. Don’t intermix different ideas in the same paragraph. Always outline and simplify key points to one line bullet points. When asking for something, be clear as to what you are requesting or asking and always outline what you have tried, research, or done prior to asking.

Effective communication is a skill. There are tools, habits, and best practices that can help maximize the results of your team communication efforts. One of my most effective tool in communicating is to keep to the Three Sentences practice. One way to successfully achieve reply within three sentences is to never answer the same question twice, to refer to existing documentation, wiki sites, and other resources.

The folks of 37signals have written on Years of Irrelevance that years of experience is not a good enough indicator to hire people. Marissa Mayer and Joel Spolsky recommend to hire people that are smart and get things done. From my years of experience, and irrelevance, I believe this to be true. People that don’t get things done, will somehow delegate it to someone else that is most likely already getting her own work done. I my career I have seen people that don’t know how to get their stuff done (practice) but can talk a good game (theory) and are therefore promoted to manage people instead. The problem is that if they couldn’t get their work done, how can the manage others to do theirs? I’ve seen teams waste time, energy, and opportunity by not working smart, asking the wrong questions, and focusing on the what is not important.

Here is another more concrete example that I experienced this week. I recently closed a feature request and the bug tracking software we use emailed the requester back with the status. I immediately received a forward from the requester asking if the feature will be available in the next release. Replied replied that it would be available in the next beta release. I then got another email back asking a second question, if there was anything required to test this feature. I reply back with the location of the documentation, our testing procedures, and installation process. Then I get a another email saying, “Perfect. You rock!” With those words I knew I should brace myself for a screw up.

As predicted, right at 7:30 PM the feature request was rejected, no update or comments were given, just simply rejected. I immediately knew what the problem was, step in the release was not run, the database wasn’t migrated. This is what happens when you don’t hire smart. You will spend needless hours emailing back and forth one question at a time, back and forth like email ping pong.

If you don’t hire smart, you will find yourself repeating yourself in emails what is already in documentations, processes, systems. This is how you can easily spend all day in building, installing, testing and find out that you have to do it all over again because someone missed one step out of three.

Hire smart, not experience or seniority. Hire people that get stuff done, not have elaborate reason why it doesn’t get done. Hire those that work the smartest, not the hardest. Some people compensate working smart hours for long hours, they will stay long hours doing repetitive mind numbing tasks and not think of ways to automate, streamline, or reduce those tasks. You don’t want someone to reinvent the well, you need someone that makes it turn.

Reinventing the Wheel by Doviende (http://www.flickr.com/photos/doviende/)

No explanation required, here are some random thoughts that occurred to me during the past month. These ideas were either to long to force into 140 character limit of Twitter but not fully develop to belong on their own post.

No surprised that Borders bookstore filed for bankruptcy and is closing several of its stores. I went to one of the Borders store locations that is closing, in Silicon Valley, to see if I can find any great deals. Even with the 25-50% off the cover price on books at Borders, Amazon has a better deal on most of the books I was interested in. Amazon typically sells books somewhere between 30-45% plus add the 9% you save in sales tax and free shipping.

Every pitch deck should have a slide that describes the team as: Lean, agile, organic, grass-fed, locally grown, acrobatic, gluten-free, hungry, rockstar, gurus.

Team Description for Your Pitch Deck

Law of Software Envelopment states… “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” In my experience, this should also including reading an Excel document, generating a PDF report, execute a VBA macro, sync with your Outlook contacts, fix end user printer problems, auto generate blog posts, …

when you have to share documents between two different Windows machine, you can either use an FTP site, email documents around, or use a shared folder. I hate all of the above options, especially when I am the administrator to both machines and I am currently logged into both computers. In the case where you are administrator to both machines, you can just open Windows Explorer and type the following to get access to the whole C:\ drive.

\\REMOTE-COMPUTER\c$\

Just replace REMOTE-COMPUTER with the actual name of the remote computer you are trying to connect.

I was surprised that a senior developer didn’t know this so I thought I share it with other folks.

There was a great flame war over at Hacker News about what entrepreneurs should aspire to when they start their business, a lifestyle business or a VC funded multi-billion dollar valuation company like Facebook, Zynga, Google, YouTube, etc. It all started with a angry rant by Justin Vincent about how VC “holds us back from our true potential.” He rambled on to say that the idea of being the next big thing is keeps us, entrepreneurs, occupied and keeps them, I guess VCs and tech pundits, in business. My favorite line of the article is the following…

If every developer was to focus on the very achievable goal of building a lifestyle/micro business – the entire house of cards would crumble.

Another choice quote is…

The absolute truth is that each and every one of us can build a business that can support us. We don’t need to build a million dollar business to survive. We just need a regular paycheck.

If I could paraphrase the rest of the article, Justin believes that not all startup founders will have a multi-million dollar exit in so instead of shooting for the moon we, as entrepreneurs, should shot for Milwaukee, that is a $10k/month small business. So, if you know you won’t come in first in the race, complain that the Olympic commission is corrupt, that the judges take brides, and instead go play Wii Sports because you there you will get a participation badge.

The tone in article reminded me of something that Jason Calacanis complained about millennials. In This Week in Startups #47, Calacanis said…

Participation means nothing, your fulfillment means nothing, nobody cares if you are fulfilled, nobody cares if you participated. You were lied to. There is no trophy in life for participation, except your tombstone.

Things got a little heated in the Hacker News comments for this article. Paul Graham, who goes by pg on HN, said that if every developer worked on their lifestyle/micro business “the whole world would crumble, because we wouldn’t have any technology bigger than could be built by lifetstyle businesses.” After this, things got a little more interesting when Alex Payne, username al3x on HN, said the following…

There’s a middle ground between web application “lifestyle businesses” (like duping credulous customers into overpaying for a time-tracking tool styled with this month’s CSS trends) and trying to start the next Facebook. … There’s nothing wrong with being a small software company. People have been doing it for decades now. It’s boring, but there’s nothing wrong with it. Don’t expect anyone to celebrate you for doing it, though.

At this point some “lifestyle” business operators took offense, most notably Amy Hoy, username ahoyhere, took offense in the above statement since she is mentioned in the original article and has a time tracking application that uses the latest JavaScript and CSS trends. After that Amy went on a dogmatic crusade against what she called the “dominant paradigm.”

In one side of the argument you have people that believe that as long as a business covers operating costs and brings in anywhere from $10k to $100k a month and you don’t have to do much to run the company you have the leisure of a lifestyle business. Such a lifestyle business affords you time to spend with family, participant on your children’s school activities, join a community organization, take time off to travel, in addition to being your own boss and making your own rules. I can’t knock someone for having a gig like this. People in this camp might subscribe to Tim Farris’ book the Four Hour Work Week and in the folks behind 37Signals who wrote Rework. I remember Jonathan Coulton describe on an episode of This Week in Tech (TWIT) about his music business. Jonathan has a strong following as a singer/songwriter in the self-described geek community. On that TWIT episode he said something to the affect that if you have 1000 followers willing to pay $30 for a premium experience or content then you can make a decent living (he probably doesn’t live in California).

An income of $10k/month pre-tax, pre-health insurance for a family of four and a home mortgage in California is not a “lifestyle” I would like to aspire to. Ramen profitable is only profitable if you in college. Some critiques of the Four Hour Movement rightly ask that if someone can bootstrap a business with only working four hours a week, how much more profitable will the business be if they spend more time into it? The truth is that there is a generational gap in the way of entrepreneurs think and a bubble of some magnitude in every aspect of the industry, including in the “lifestyle” businesses.

I can’t find the source but recently I read a tweet where someone said something to the effect, “You know there is a bubble because every tech conference is sold out.” The conference circuit is one popular business with “lifestyle” crowd, in particular the tech, startup, social media conferences. You know there is a conference bubble with the large number of regional and national conferences, seminars, webinars, master classes, ninja training dojo summits, product mastermind madrasas available online. For example, 37signals runs a one day workshop for 37 people at $1k, that is $37k for one day’s work, especially you can reuse the same material many times over for different batches of students. I’ve been involved for the past several years as an organizer for a non-profit which puts on a one day conference for students that nets $50k in profits.

There is nothing wrong with running a small business, especially if you can get paid by non-technical folks for a calendar with last year’s JavaScript and CSS trends or for a one day training on how to use Twitter and Facebook. I mean, if someone would pay me $1 for adding up any two single digit numbers to support my lifestyle I would outsource that shit to India and work from some mojito island somewhere. But there is something to be said about aspiring to build something great. I want the narrative of my work to speak for itself; I’ve worked in some great companies that have had lofty goals such as understand the human genome and possibly curing cancer. Those goals can’t be meet with someone working for four hours a week and $10k/month.

This country will move in the opposite direction in the socioeconomic standard that we have enjoyed if we listen to such advice, if we don’t strive to build the best businesses we can. These millennial web 2.0 designers might not even remember how there was a time before 1999 were their predecessors could have charged anywhere from $30k to $100k for a website design. Economic pressure has pushed the price of a web design down to $300-$1000 for a awesome design from some kid in Russia. Even now, these small time “lifestyle” operations are under threat by solutions from the developing world, where $3/month can afford developers there a very lavished “lifestyle.”

One of my favorite quotes from Robert Frost is the following.

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. – Robert Frost

I believe in hard work, not easy baked cookie cutter one trick unicorn project that some folks are calling a business. You got to put in the time, differentiate your product, and think big if you want to be a successful business. It is widely known that somewhere around 50% of small business fail after 5 years, don’t let the reason you fail be because you didn’t take opportunities when they presented themselves.

In the end, everybody is free to run their business as they want and the invisible hand of Google’s search algorithm will be the judge.