Freshly coined word

While on a series of conference calls, I came up with this new word: “mutelag.”

It’s the delay between someone being asked a question, and their answer, because they forgot they were on mute (in a conference call, or on a cell phone).

Great article on code rot

OK, this is waaay more technical than most of the things that I reference, and I apologize to those of you who are innocently reading along, expecting my usual software engineering from the management perspective entries and links.

…but this is really good. Read the gist of it; if you are involved in software, you really ought to know: code rot is real, challenging, and is all about unmaintained and unreleased code.

http://wordaligned.org/articles/code-rot

Thanks to Bruce Rennie for pointing this out at work.

Dak

Building teams: Developers, not Programmers

If you aren’t in the software development business, this post is not for you.  These aren’t the droids you are looking for.  Move along!

Once upon a time, it was Good Enough to have wicked good coding skills.  Master programmers would hand out assignments to the rest of the team, who would code up the concepts and go their merry way.  However, those times are long gone; not only are coding skills regularly taught in high school (all over the world), but even the higher level skill of programming to specifications, not designs, has become a commodity.

I personally believe that the best answer to the commodification of skills is refactor jobs and skill sets.  With this in mind, I am thoroughly convinced that people who were once content to be “programmers” need to be “developers”– consumate professionals able to solve the “whole problem” and take a design task from concept to production.

The fundamentals of business and career growth remain the same: find a need and fill it.  However, there’s no longer a need for 100% code jockeys.  That’s OK; solving the real problem is more fun, and pays better.  (Anyone who I have worked with over the years will recognize that I’m consistent on this point…and most of them have moved on to bigger and better things.  If you are reading this, do drop me a line or post a comment.)

As always, best regards,

Dak

When all hope is lost…that is the bottom of the market

We’re not there yet, folks. I’m thrilled about the upturn in the market for the past three days (and you should be, too).  At this point there’s a horde of people panicked to get their money out.  They will.  This will drive the market down.  That’s completely natural.

This will happen a few times before the next great bull rush.

Don’t worry about it.  Relax.  Dollar cost average your way into the market, and keep in mind:  up or down, in 5 years or so, this will have been a very good time to invest.

Dak

The market shock, and panic mongers: a call for truth, clarity and integrity

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting REALLY REALLY TIRED of hearing “consumer purchasing down 2.3% in a TOTAL MELTDOWN!  Consumers are under water!  No spending money at all!”

Well,  y’know, if someone has lost their job or their house, they probably are a little restrained in spending their disposable income.  Might actually account for 2.3% decrease.  Ditto the panic over an increase in unemployment and restatement of previous months.  (‘Financial press,’ you WERE paying attention when those businesses crashed?  And now you are “shocked, shocked” that there’s unemployment?  It’s not news.)

Come on, people.  There’s no need to be panic mongers.

The fact is:  the destruction of loans, even odd-ball, ‘financial wizard’ dark pools of liquidity, removes money from the money supply.  It is going to take a while for all of this to wash through the global financial system.  In the meantime, stop, think about your investments; pay off your debt, keep the quality investments, ditch the stocks with no future, and keep the good stuff.  A diverse portfolio of strong stocks with great management teams that can weather troubled times will statistically pay off.  (Yes, some will crash; the great companies (sorry, GM, not talking about you) that can clearly weather the storm will prosper in the long run.

Mind you, I’m talking about in 5 to 10 years.  There’s no easy way to wealth…and there never was.  (Yes, you could have made a fortune in each bubble…and likely would have lost it again, and be taxed for your efforts.)

Good luck.  Don’t panic.  Cover your margins, pay off your credit cards, and rebalance your debt paydown schedule.  You don’t have as much disposable income as you thought you did.

Fond regards,

Dak

The ongoing evolution of technology…Cameras

Digital cameras continue to evolve very rapidly.  (VERY).  Back in April, I passed on a link about a high-speed digital camera, reviewed by David Pogue of the New York Times.  Since then, the field has evolved to the point of having a DSLR that is capable of shooting movies. (And thanks again to Chris Schmitt for sending this along.)

Er, wow. This elevates the DSLR from the ‘better image quality, and, by the way, status symbol’ camera to a real, high-value imaging tool.  It’s also a brilliant move on the part of Nikon:  leverage camera owners existing lens investment; this is what marketing folks call ’stickiness.’

Aside from being extraordinarily cool in its own rite, this is an important reminder:  innovate, or die.  If you aren’t working to obsolete your product line, rest assured, your competitors are!

Camcorders are now just waiting to shuffle off this mortal coil, in my humble opinion.

Regards,

Dak

A brilliant management two-for-one

There are two excellent ideas in this posting on ZDnet, aside from the observation that you can scale Ruby on Rails if you avoid hitting the disk farm for static content:

1) Have a team devoted to rapid scalable prototyping.  (LinkedIn Light Engineering Development)

2) Use free apps for both proof of concept testing and marketing.

Read and enjoy.

Ruby on Rails: scaling to 1 billion page views per month by ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett — While a lot of attention has been focused on Twitter with questions about whether Ruby on Rails scales, LinkedIn has been quietly running a RoR application on Facebook that is beating down around 1 billion page view per month. Bumpersticker, a relatively trivial Facebook application that allows you to create a cartoon that you can [...]

Best,

Dak

‘Free’ is always good for business

Now that I’ve got your attention, the next best thing to FREE is painless and predictable. Flat rate, as we know from telephony and other similar business models, reduces ambivalence about using a service, and increases the rate at which people BUY.

I received this in email today, and frankly, WOW.

Canada has, relative to the US, a low adoption of mail-order and therefore internet-order business models.

This is a pretty innovative way to get people over that hump. Good work, Ebay and Canada Post

Dak

Why morale matters

The McKinsey Quarterly has a good interview with Brad Bird (director of The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille). I’ve been following Pixar with great interest over the years, partly because I have a couple of old friends who work there (Hi guys!), and partly because I really believe in what they are doing (changing from being a software vendor in a niche market to being a major motion picture studio: brilliant!). In my opinion, Pixar is the poster child for the “eat your own dog food” school of management, and deserves their success. (How good is Renderman? Well, it’s good enough that we’ve won Oscars with movies we’ve built on it!)

In my experience, THE key issue on the performance of teams is to get the morale and the synergy of the teams going. This involves selecting the right people, keeping the great players in the team, and keeping the ideas flowing.

Here’s a great quote from the interview:

The Quarterly: It sounds like you spend a fair amount of time thinking about the morale of your teams.

Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

Brad is being very low-key here; the emphasis is mine. In my experience, this is exactly correct.

Read the rest of the interview for how and why Brad worked on morale.

What are you doing to increase the morale of your team (and your family, and the broader group of people you work with) TODAY? I’m talking about hugs and compliments; what are you doing to recognize people as individuals, to listen to them, and to make them feel listened to?

More later in the blog, on building a team of “Developers versus Programmers.”

Have a great weekend,
Dak

Canada Revenue Agency extends e-filing deadline to 06 May 2008 due to website submission problems

That’s today’s news, and I ran into it myself. All of the Canada Revenue Agency sites are Sllllllooooooooooow today. Moving the filing deadline off is the Right Thing To Do from a tactical standpoint. However, you still have to pay any owing amount today. (PUBLIC SERVICE REMINDER: do that through your BANK, the government’s website is too slow to look this information up there!)

This problem does raise some interesting questions.

Did they do volume testing, optimization, or load balancing? (Do you?)

Are their pages set to gracefully degrade in the face of large loads (clearly not; for the most part, the actual HTML (XHTML, a tip of the hat for a nicely structured page) loads, but the linked images do NOT), and the pages are set not to cache, even for purely presentational, ‘nothing to see that has changed here’ pages. (Do yours?)

Moreover, when you actually try to submit the ‘netfile’ .tax file, the page doesn’t load. The announcement that the deadline has changed is on a separate news page, that’s behind a submit button, and it too takes forever to load.

Wow.

This is a solvable problem. Anyone care to weigh in on opinions as to how to solve it? I’ll do a follow-up summary and share some of my own thoughts later in the week.

Have you tested this sort of load with YOUR application? Does it matter?

(In my strong opinion: yes, it does matter, and you’d best be able to prove that your projected load is something you ARE handling, every day. You better also understand how your system will degrade under unexpectedly heavy load…like a million people clicking on the submit button multiple times because it didn’t respond fast enough

Best,
Dak