Shanti’s Dispatches

John Battelle’s Searchblog: First Excerpt of his new book:

When he was twelve, Gross lived in an apartment building in Encino, California, outside of Los Angeles. There were hundreds of kids in that complex, Gross recalls. ?We all roller-skated together, played baseball together, swam together, did everything together,? he tells me. And when they had saved up enough money, they all made the pilgrimage to a local pharmacy, where they?d buy their fix of candy.

Whenever I keep hearing about a book, from multiple trusted sources, it’s always a clear signal to me that I should check it out.

This was the case with Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

It appears on Joel’s Book Recommendations page as well as the newly revised Personal MBA list by Josh Kaufman.

After reading the first third of the book, I’ve developed a nauseating feeling… thinking back on all the times I’ve been unwittingly duped by psychological mind tricks. (whether the parties knew they were using these or not… most likely not)

… that, as well as noticing all the times where I’ve attempted to use such techniques, not fully knowing what I was doing at the time.

This generally relates to working with people, such as our Human Capital Investment Group, Menlo Park 2.0, the Niner Niner weblog network, and other various ventures that involve recruiting, building and championing a team.

More and more… especially after reading this book, I’ve realized that I don’t want to have to resort to any mind tricks. (consciously or not)

I just want to do a few things, and do them well. These are:

• Build Something That People Love
• Build Something That People Use Regularly and Willingly (duh!), and Love to Tell Their Friends About
• Keep Making It (the Something) Better and Better Over Time

There. No jedi mind tricks. Just a simple formula…

… that’s incredibly hard to achieve in practice.

Assert(Simple != Easy);

I hate to say it… but my little baby is one ugly website (design-wise).

It was one of those “let’s knock this out in a few weekends” kind of deals… that I never really developed. Not that I could even begin to knock out an excellent design. That’s why my main man Gabriel was so instrumental in getting Niner Niner off the ground with some kick-ass designs.

WLTM.com’s traffic consistently hovers at 1,200 - 1,600 unique daily visitors, with 2,000+ daily pageviews. Not bad for a few weekends of effort, though it hasn’t nearly brought in the kind of dough that Popdex used to bring on a consistent basis.

Rick Nooner reports on garbage collection languages (like Ruby and Python) vs. compiled languages (like Java and C++), and what it can mean for your bottom line:

When I first came to XXXXX, I was asked to build a system to collect performance and usage metrics from all of our network gear via SNMP, both for capacity and planning purposes and for a new usage based billing system. We had tens of thousands of switches and routers in our network spread across the US, Europe and Asia. I had to collect samples from each device every 5 minutes.

I was hired because I said that I could do this job in a couple of months. Everyone else claimed that it would take a year or more to do. My secret weapon was Python. There were no SNMP bindings at the time for Python but it was easy to add that capability via the CMU SNMP libraries. I finished the first working version in less than a month.

Rick continues…

We wrote this application internally, even though commercial alternatives, existed because we were quoted over $20 million dollars for an equivalent system by more than one vendor.

… So… one proficient Ruby/Python Hacker ~= $20 Million in consulting fees for Java/C++ programmers?

Only, the Ruby/Python hacker gets the job done in 1/12 the time!?!

Even if he’s 10x off the mark, that’s a lot of dough, and a lot of time saved.

It gets better:

The second part of this story is the central collection system that collects the data from each host in the network and does long term trending and analysis.

Our original collection and analysis system used SAS, which costs roughly $300,000/year the way we were using it. I rewrote the entire collection and analysis system in Ruby during a six month period, saving the $300,000/year and increasing performance by an order of magnitude. The Ruby based system also uses Postgres to store the data it collects and analyzes.

I’m going to go out on a limb and bet his software doesn’t do 100% of what these packages / outside services would have provided.

Even still…

The implications are pretty clear from Moore’s Law, etc. that the limiting factor is and will be developer / development time.

Is Ruby and/or Python 20% slower than Java/C++?

Does it matter, if an extra wintel box only costs $600 for load balancing, while saving $80K per year for each C++/Java coder you don’t have to hire.

Ever since reading Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree a few years ago, I’ve had a new appreciation for the complexities of globalization.

The masked anti-globalization revolutionaries, tossing bricks through Starbucks’ windows, seem kind of ironic to me.

Like hipsters who wear Che Guevara T-shirts (purchased from a friendly neighborhood hipster store for $17.95), without a trace of irony.

I’m reminded of all this because the Christian Science Monitor has come out with a great piece on so-called “sweatshops.”

CS Monitor:

We examined the apparel industry in 10 Asian and Latin American countries often accused of having sweatshops and then we looked at 43 specific accusations of unfair wages in 11 countries in the same regions. Our findings may seem surprising. Not only were sweatshops superior to the dire alternatives economists usually mentioned, but they often provided a better-than-average standard of living for their workers.

Read more here: Don’t get into a lather over sweatshops

I confess…

My name is Shanti… and…

I’m addicted to registering domain names for random ideas that I’ll eventually abandon.

There, I said it.

So I now have this superstition… that I should wait before registering a new domain until I have actually made some significant progress on the idea (generally, a web app).

Then again, it sucks to have a domain name registered right under your nose after you’ve come up with a cool idea for a new webapp. Anyone else out there have a similar domain name registration obsession?