Scaffolding Culture

Flexible Work Hours Inspires Performance

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:40:32 -0800

During the first ten or so years of my professional life I worked for a company which had “flexible” work hour options. Let me break down what this really meant from my experience of pushing these rules to the limit over the years.

Getting reminded every morning when I walk in what time it is
Getting phone calls or emails every time I’m rushing to make it in by 9:30
Having to ask if I can leave at 5:00
Not getting paid if I did not make up for the hour when leaving at 5:00
Having to ask to work on weekends
Working on weekends without asking, but not getting recognition in any way
No work from home option, had to take full sick day
Had to log billable and non-billable time in daily

So realistically those are not flexible work hours. Actually, they are pretty restrictive for such a small technology company. Fast forward to now, and my flexible work hour structure works like this.

I can come in at any agreed upon time, considering I get the work done
We never count anything on units of time
I do not have to ask anyone to leave early, no matter the time
I do not get docked any pay if I leave early on a specific day
I can work all I want on weekends, but never required
We can work from home any day we want
No time tracking

I honestly think some technology companies got it all wrong. The whole point is not about rewarding employees based on time spent on a task. You are then punishing those who can get three times the job done within the same amount of time. Instead, focus on providing the most flexible and efficient way to allow employees to get the job done and done well. Statistically it’s proven that providing a more flexible environment actually drive a higher performance.

Why Flexible Hours Inspire Performance

All of the time, energy, stress and overall employee morale lost on this process is such a waste. I think we calculated about twenty hours lost per year on the time management process.

1200 = 5 * 5 * 4 * 12

5 minutes a day, 5 days a week, 4 weeks a month, 12 months a year comes out to approximately 1200 minutes of lost time per year, or 20 hours.

Such a shame. Let’s instead spend our time delivering real products and being innovators.

Karma Police

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:33:00 -0800

So over the past six months or so I’ve had to defend remarks I’ve made both on Facebook and Twitter. Most of what was said was taken out of context in extreme ways, but what I got to thinking about more was about how things are interpreted online these days. One outburst among some people was a remark regarding the removal of the former CEO of HP Léo Apotheker noting that maybe he was not hip enough to understand today’s digital youth. Sheesh.

Context

With the internet today it seems the understanding of context is fading. When I used to spend time on IRC back in the late nineties and early dot com era for hours on end, making quick witted cracks, jokes and wise cracks online was common place. No one took anything offensive and if they did they were not as quick to jump on the issue. It seems these days, context is thrown out the window. Indeed, it is difficult to gather context just by what someone says but it’s really next to impossible now since we are moving more and more away from normal day-to-day interaction with each other as humans anymore.

Negativity

I notice that whenever a celebrity, popular Twitter user, musician or anyone even slightly steps over the wrong line with their online persona everyone is locked and loaded to bring them down. What gives? Who cares if a person has a specific opinion on a sports team, or if they prefer Mac vs. PC or if they like a certain brand. Everyone is excited to find every moment to tear someone apart online. Back in the days, the only people that were like this were called “trolls” and went out looking for this trouble. Now it’s everywhere. TMZ is a big instigator in this.

Social Networking

Maybe the rise of a social network for everything has taken over as the norm for typical human interaction and conversation. There exists many people who prefer to use their social network of choice as their personal soapbox to vent their personal opinions, especially ones you may not have known before adding them as an acquaintance online. I have many times in the past jumped in the middle of someones personal Facebook post and hijacked it because of something I didn’t agree with. But maybe it’s not my job to tell someone what they can and cannot say within their own social ecosystem. Who is the internet etiquette police? Definitely not me. Maybe this is why Facebook is a bore these days because everyone is afraid to really express their feelings anymore.

Go: Agile Release Management

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:14:47 -0800

At my current company we are moving towards a much more automated continuous delivery model. This reflects more of what some companies such as Facebook are doing to allow a very rapid deployment and integration cycle, such as rolling code on a daily basis to production.

But before you can do this, you need a few things in place from the infrastruture side of things. One of those in my opinion needs to be a good and efficient release model, which allows you to hook in your integration gates through some sort of pipeline flow. For this we use Go by ThoughtWorks.

Workflows

One really awesome feature about Go is it’s purely driven by a pipieline workflow system. So this allows you to configure each pipeline stage within your environments, and push a batch of code from one end down to the other. Usually the latter is a production system which makes this automated process very easy to use.

Realtime

Another great feature is the interface is very easy to use and realtime. So as your pipeline is running, you can see what the progress is at each state within the pipeline. This is handy to quickly catch errors or stages that are not passing acceptance.

Distributed Agents

As your organization grows and more users begin using the system to automate more deployments, the use of agents is what drives the parallel processing of each pipeline job. So everything is distributed so you do not get queued in waiting for your deployment to run. This is very nice, as you can scale these to your needs. Also, you can configure different agents for different purposes, so if you have pipelines that need Windows and some with Linux, you can configure appropriately.

nAnt

Another very helpful feature is that each job can be configured to run an nAnt script. So you can configure each process within your pipeline to fire a seperate nAnt task that can be implemented at your own discretion. For example, a task to run unit tests against your solution or another to automate a xcopy process. This is extremely powerful.

Overall, this is an extremely powerful system not to mention done by some of the industry leaders in the agile space. You can download it now and give it a try, I highly recommend this software and will continue to find uses for it going forward in my own time.

Penetrating the psychological startup barrier

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 17:30:33 -0800

I’ve read a few great books lately about living your dream to launch your startup idea or just pushing yourself on executing your idea. One of the common key points each author makes is just get out there and do it. Stop making plans; stop thinking about it; stop trying to get everyone together to figure out the next big thing.

If you have something you’re passionate about and love, just go do it.

I absolutely love this approach. It’s one step they always leave out when explaining in school how to be successful and start your own company because people have a psychological barrier. In todays world, especially the tech startup one it’s extremely easy to cut a lot of the initial fat out of forming your own company. No longer do you need to spend thousands of dollars on marketing and legal fees, and having to form your complete business plan before writing one line of code. The idea here is to ship fast, ship often and learn to pivot.

Now I’m off to work on that idea.

Getting Things Done with Evernote

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:46:26 -0700

In the past few weeks at work since my role has changed I’ve been actively trying to maintain all of my notes digitally. This process will allow me to easily go back and search or filter on previous notes I had taken or to recall notes from a specific sprint planning session.

I originally went with Microsoft OneNote. It’s a decent piece of software with most of the features you’d expect from a fancy note taking application. But I have found some definite flaws with this software.

First, how it synchronizes my notebooks. You never have the notion anything I ever being synchronized. Ever. I have to manually click the sync panel and either see it being synchronized or manually sync it myself. This isn’t the most obvious interface and is a bit confusing.

Also, sharing a notebook with someone is very tedious. If I want to share something easily I need to first enable the notebook to publish to the web (see above) then I have to enable the notebook in SkyDrive if this is even an option. Again, a huge pain. Sharing does not seem to be the focus of OneNote. One nice feature to have would of been the ability to integrate into Exchange deeper with the ability to share directly with someone within our Active Directory.

So I started looking into Evernote again. I used this product years ago and it has dramatically evolved. Really great sharing functionality. Great mobile app support. The ability to define tagging, you can use a browser and best of all it’s free.

The OneNote interface is not my cup of tea and I’ve converted all of my notes over to Evernote for now.

Finally, Google Analystics Goes Realtime

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:49:59 -0700

Google is finally introducing real-time analytics with their Google Analytics product. This sounds like a serious competitor to other real-time analystical apps that track data from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. I’m curious to know if this will begin getting into the untapped market share those companies have deserved for quite some time.

If interested in trying out the new features check out Google’s blog post on the subject.

Amazon Kindle Fire Sounds Intriguing

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:42:11 -0700

I have been reading into and thinking about the new Kindle Fire Amazon has announced. Comparing this “Android iPad Tablet Killer” device to every other one out there one thing really stands out: integration. It integrates very nicely just like the iPad with all of your other Amazon services right out of the box so it’s a very seamless experience.

So for $199 Amazon is really delivering a comparable device. We’re talking:

7” touch display
Blazing fast dual core processor
Integration with Amazon Books
Integration with Amazon Video on Demand
Integration with Amazon Streaming
Integration with Amazon Music w/17 million songs
Ability to use Amazon Cloud so you can upload all your music and listen anytime you want

So already this device to me looks comparable to the Apple iPad. But what I start thinking about is now Amazon has their own device that integrates with all their products is what new products will they introduce that it will support? I’m thinking stuff along the lines of:

Book rental store; with your prime membership you get to read books and digitally return them like a library
Spotify like music service that comes with your Amazon Prime membership
Hulu competitor (probably difficult though)

These are the two I could think of that would give them a huge lift over Apple right now since as far as I’ve heard they are not introducing a subscription music service anytime soon. I have no pre-ordered one yet as I want to wait to read the initial reviews but at the price point of $199 I’m definitely not scared of trying one out soon and see how it goes.

Then again, a second version may be around the corner.

As long as your going to be thinking anyway, think big

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 23:14:18 -0700

So this week I was asked to take on a lead role in another team at work. As I always look at every situation with a potential challenge, I still find my career and what I do extremely fun.

When you work with a team of intelligent and talented people it can make your job a very pleasant place to be. It allows innovation, increased productivity and creative output. This is what we’ve pushed with our team since I started ten months ago and it still shines today. As we continue to innovate and push the bar with programmatic freedom, we still meet the goals of our team and our product owners each sprint. This is what makes my job both awesome and fun.

Back to my original point, I am really excited to work with the new team. We all know each other already very well, so this fact alone proves that everyones strengths are a great asset that if harnessed correctly can make a product work. Some people are faced with challenges in life, so they get bored or give up. Personally I try to find the best solution to solve a problem but am always open minded when it comes to other opinions.

With that said, I can’t wait to put some brilliant minds together and see what comes of it.

Best commercial ever.

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 22:14:36 -0700

Best commercial ever.

MongoDB: Intro

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 11:00:06 -0700

A while back I started reading into some of the NoSQL options for quick and dirty data storage. While there are plenty of them out there now days, I really liked MongoDB which serves as a document based NoSQL data store.

The beauty of this is that instead of thinking in a relational model, you store your data on a document level which is much more friendly to a programming if you ask me. For example, say you have an object like so:

var user = {
“name”: “robert”,
“age”: 31
};

First thing you notice is the syntax looks exactly like JavaScript, well that’s because it is. MongoDB document engine is built on top of JavaScript with a JSON type syntax called BSON; very cool. So that means you can already elverage your existing skill set at this point. Anyway, back to my point.

The awesome thing about this is instead of thinking in a relational mindset where if you had relational storage like a user and address you normally would have to create two tables. Since MongoDb uses a dynamic (or schema free) design there is absolutely no need to define this. Check out how easy this is:

var user = db.users.findOne({ “name”: “robert” });
user.address = {
“street”: “1234 Street”,
“city” : “San Francisco”,
“state” : “CA”
};
db.users.update({ “name”: “robert”}, user);

And that’s it. No modification of schema, no dropping tables and re-creating, nothing. Obviously this is a short example of the power of MongoDB but really shows the power of this sort of schema-less design.

I’m in no rush to run out and attempt to migrate all of our databases to a NoSQL approach but for things like logging, simple storage, statistics and so forth why not. By the way MongoDB supports replication sets and sharding automatically out of the box which makes scaling out horizontally a breeze.

One of the biggest advantages as far as performance goes is that MongoDB writes really, really fast. When doing writes to the database it’s basically an instantaneous write, where the client doesn’t wait from the server for a response, the response is essentially an “OK”. In my opinion this is why MongoDB is perfect for things that don’t need to have high availability with their data like when charging a credit card with the need for transactional support. It does support safe writes but this is another topic.

Since this is my new fascination I predict some more posts based on Mongo, my new love child.

Twitter Bootstrap

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 22:57:21 -0700

Twitter Bootstrap:

I love discovering new css and development frameworks, and today Twitter has released their own called Bootstrap. It provides you with a nice grid framework, layouts, lists, tables, forms, buttons, navigation, you name it.

The probability of me using something like this is pretty high, as it really encompasses many elements other frameworks don’t provide.

It also uses Less which is a powerful CSS preprocessor. Check it out!

Now your grandma can code

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 17:51:00 -0700

Now your grandma can code:

Check out this nifty little site that teaches you the basics of programming. I definitely think it’s a great little tool to show your nieces, nephews or heck event grandma the basics of programming.

Patently Stupid

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 22:02:24 -0700

Being a software engineer, I tend to stay up to date on latest tech news especially in my industry. Over the past year it seems as if the amount of patent lawsuits in the tech industry have skyrocketed. This is a scary thing, since in my opinion most technology patents do more harm than good.

Some recent examples can be found here, here, here and here.

Among these are numerous other examples of companies becoming patent trolls which is completely killing off innovation within companies. This needs to change. If companies continue at this rate, anyone attempting to start a small business will be more scared of being sued into the ground because of some obscure patent purchased by a company from twenty years ago. If the government was to protect small businesses and innovation within this company they would reform this whole process from the ground up. It does nothing and it’s completely damaging.

I believe patents are the wrong answer to protect intellectual property. Copyrights allow a much more flexible model to protect intellectual property from ones work, and would allow new companies to develop simliar, although completely different business models.

But hopefully some of this is going to change. Google has recently called for patent reform now that the patent wars have heated up dramatically. Also, recent discussions on patent reform have stalled due to the debt ceiling crisis.

I’d like to look back in ten years and hope all dreams of having the creative freedom and innovation of a software engineer is not crushed by patent trolls.

Enums from Hell

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 14:45:00 -0700

Enums from Hell:

When I read articles like this I just cringe, then laugh. Some people just don’t deserve to be in the business of software. I can’t say I haven’t seen worse in my own personal experiences of reading others’ code.

Dreams of a Startup

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:41:00 -0700

While sitting idle tonight I started to think about if I was to launch my own startup from a fresh clean slate, what technologies and stacks would I use? Most people don’t get this opportunity so it’s actually a really interesting question to think about.

My first thought is being from a Microsoft background, would I want to go this route or learn something new. Using something like Python or Ruby would be fun don’t get me wrong, but in reality I’m wanting to launch a startup not spend my time learning new languages. Even then, after being out of a super stealth mode this is completely appropriate and probably applauded.

So here’s my ideal architecture. I actually have some ideas brewing in my head so these are based on the needs of these ideas.

Fx

ASP.NET MVC3
C#
jQuery
Backbone

Storage

Redis for Session State
MongoDb for structured document data storage

Services

Events

NodeJs

Cloud

Amazon EC2
Amazon S3
Amazon SQS

IoC

Unity

Testing

nUnit
Selenium or Visual Studio Test Suite

In a nutshell the above is probably what I would begin focusing on and working with. It’s definitely a mixture of both Microsoft and non Microsoft technologies but I think that’s what makes things great; you shouldn’t lock yourself into one technology and should be flexible enough to adopt what’s best. I’m still probably need to update a few items here and expand reasoning but it’s a start. Also, I’m torn on the testing tools because honestly I think Microsoft’s suite of test tools that you can get with Visual Studio 2010 are not bad. It allows really nice integration but then again from what I understand, you need to use all of their tools to really make use of these components.

This is a new mix I put together after about seven months.

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 23:52:00 -0700

This is a new mix I put together after about seven months.

Spotify

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 10:47:00 -0700

So Spotify finally launched in the United States after much anticipated wait. This is something a lot of us have been waiting for because the issues here in the US regarding streaming music is a mess. We have a few options, such as Pandora, Last.fm, Slacker and so forth for our free, streaming options. But it’s time to graduate from being cheap and get real with our streaming music options. Gone are the days of having to pay $0.99 for that one song that I want out of a whole album which really detours me from even buying music. The fact that music has gotten so bad is my excuse of why I refuse to hand over any money to most of these artists these days.

But why has it taken this long? Why did’t we have Spotify five or six years ago? Well we did. I used to be a huge fan of Yahoo! Music which had a decent collection of music for about $7/month. But the catalog wasn’t as big. We also had options with Napster and Rhapsody.

Honestly, I think people just haven’t been ready to understand the concept that the RIAA does not want anyone to own their music anymore. No one wanted to pay a month premium for music they don’t own physically or can’t touch. That’s always been the old mentality. People wanted to to be able to own that CD so they could rip it to their hardrive, make copies, whatever. It was theirs.

With the explosion of mobile, we can now still have our music when we want, how we want these days. If I want to listen to music on my computer at work, I just login to the app. At the gym? Just fire up the iPhone app. At home? You can purchase many of the speaker systems like Sonors that have these services integrated.

Now we’re at this state in the music industry where for a small premium we can have all our music when we want, how we want and where we want it’s here to stay and you can kiss your old music collection goodbye.

Google+

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 17:12:12 -0700

I’ve been away from blogging for a few days because I’ve been playing with the new Google+ social stream.

I have to admit I really dig it and loving the set of features Google has introduced. The fact I immediately define a circle that a user belongs to upon adding them is a nice touch, which is opposite of how Facebook interacts with Lists.

In my opinion Facebook has really lost a lot of value as far as the useful information I absorb from those on my friends list. The updates are very one sided and typical are just rants or complaints. I feel I’m getting a much higher level of context with Google+.

Google+

MoviePass Netflix for Theaters

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 21:43:38 -0700

MoviePass Netflix for Theaters:

I wonder if this will catch on. Basically pay $50/month to watch any movie whenever you want. I’m not sure that I even want to see enough movies a month to warrant $50 but lower price options are definitely something I’m interested in.

Television Networks Are So Fail

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:13:12 -0700

Television Networks Are So Fail:

These TV networks don’t get it. Imagine if to hear a song on the web you have to provide proof that you originally bought the CD. This is what TV networks want. INstead of providing alternative means of getting access to content even in a paid way they would rather people still cattle through traditional methods such as a cable box or satellite dish and pay for 90% of the content they do not want. This makes me even more frustrated and unwilling to pay for cable.

When will they ever get it.