Shanti’s Dispatches

Every company says that they only hire the top 1%. Joel Spolsky has already ripped the credibility of this to shreds.

Apparently a local Bay Area company is either 1) so arrogant, or 2) really has the goods, that they demand their coders be “one of the best coders in existence.”

The site Coders at Work has thus saved recruiters for this company a lot of time, by compiling a list of the best coders in the world, or, in existence, if you will.

Some of the greats:

1 Peter Norvig Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI.
2 Alan Kay Inventor of Smalltalk. Coined the term “object-oriented programming”.
3 Guy Steele Co-inventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five. Currently working on Fortress.
4 Donald Knuth Author of The Art of Computer Programming and TeX
5 Gerald Jay Sussman Co-creator of Scheme and co-author of The Structure And Interpretation of Computer Programs.
6 John McCarthy Invented Lisp
7 John Carmack Founder of id Software; lead programmer of Doom, Quake, and others.
8 Joe Armstrong Inventor of Erlang
9 Dennis Ritchie Invented C and contributed to development of UNIX
10 Ken Thompson Inventor of UNIX
11 Brian Kernighan The K in AWK and K&R. Author of the original “hello, world” program.
12 Guido van Rossum Invented Python
13 Linus Torvalds Wrote and maintains Linux kernel. Wrote GIT version control system.
14 Steve Wozniak Wrote most of the original Apple II software.
15 Bill Joy Wrote BSD TCP/IP stack, vi
16 Simon Peyton Jones Co-inventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler.
17 Alan Cox One of Linus Torvalds’s main lieutenants. Wrote Linux TCP/IP code.
18 Larry Wall Invented Perl
19 Jamie Zawinski Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker.
20 Robert Morris Wrote the Internet Worm and co-founded Viaweb with Paul Graham
21 Theo de Raadt Founder of OpenBSD project. Original author of OpenSSH.
22 Ward Cunningham Wrote the first Wiki and FIT.

If you aren’t on the list but believe yourself to be, perhaps underrated by your peers, you can always send a note to brianna at expanxion.net about the position. (see below)

Amazing Software Engineer

Location:
- Downtown San Francisco, CA (SOMA)

Qualifications:
- Amazing coder who takes no prisoners. Master of all things Internet. One of the best coders in existence.
- Learn new languages extremely fast. We use Ruby on Rails … you can pick this up quickly.
- Intensely driven and proactive person.
- Extremely hard working. This is a start-up - team members work long hours.
- Quick learner and real doer. Err on execution over strategy.
- Thrive on working with A-players. Too good to spend long hours with B-players.
- Likeable person who garners respect on and off the job.
- Thrive on chaos, risk, and uncertainty.
- Should be easy to get along with, nice, fun, smart, ethical, and low-maintenance.
- Strong desire to build a more ethical society.
- Should want to live in or near San Francisco (relocation available if necessary)
- All levels of experiences should apply (0-25+ years experience).

Role:
- Build out ground-breaking features.
- Build algorithms to normalize data on over a hundred million people.
- Solve super complex engineering problems no one else in the world is working on.
- Change the world and make it more profitable to be ethical.

Ruby on Rails Developer

San Francisco, CA

This company is a social community for sports fans. Our company is funded and located in SOMA. We offer a great work environment and minimal hierarchy on our small but growing team. Our development approach embraces agile methodologies, refactoring, and TDD.

We’re looking for a Rails rock star who can take initiative but also be part of a team. Compensation will be a competitive package of salary, equity, and benefits. Dual monitors and comfy chairs are also part of the deal. And, yes, our office has plenty of natural light.

*Required: Ruby, Rails, MVC, REST, MySQL, Trac/SVN, Migrations, Unit/Functional/Integration Testing, Great Personality/Sense of Humor

*Preferable: XHTML/CSS, Javascript, Prototype, ORM, Apache, Mongrel, Unix, Capistrano, RJS/AJAX, Amazon Web Services

*Bonus: PHP, XML, C++, Perl, Python

Let’s say you visit this page but then are prompted to login. I’ve already got an auto-login Greasemonkey script which takes out the hassle of clicking the submit button…

…but then Facebook simply pops me onto my Fb homepage instead of redirecting me to the visited URL. $15 billion valuation and they don’t do this?!? I’m sure they have their reasons but it sure would be nice (it happens to me a bunch).

the above will change into a rotating kiva banner once Ruby’s loan has been fully funded

Rubi Amayi Makhanu is a client who is requesting her second loan from PEMCI. She started her business in 1997 with the equivalent of $600 in the town of Malakisi. Her husband is a tailor and is a member of a group who also works with PEMCI.

She is married and has three children - one boy and two girls. All three are out of the home and married. In addition to running a shop, she also sells new materials and maize in the open air market. She happily explains that the proceeds from her first loan enabled her to buy two goats and assisted her in starting to sell clothes and materials. With a second loan from KIVA through PEMCI, Rubi plans to increase her stock of new materials and maize, which are in high demand in the Malakisi market. Her business is sometimes challenging during times of hunger, such as from January to March. However, she tries to overcome this by increasing the amount of maize she has on stock.

Loan as little as $25 here through Kiva.org If the loan is successfully paid back, you can either continually reinvest the returns or withdraw your money at any time (that it is not in loan service).

So many articles focus on how to find your great idea, or what to do with it once you have found it. The more difficult question of when to move on to greener pastures goes largely unaddressed. Wil says,

If you’re not moving fast, it’s probably time to move on.

So true. There are two strategies one can take though: Big Bang or Gradual Evolution

Chances are you will find out much more quickly if you’ve got the Right Stuff by taking the Big Bang approach. More risk = greater opportunity for bigger rewards (that can potentially come more quickly).

Everyone’s favorite word is, of course, their name. People just love hearing their own name for some reason. Or perhaps it is that calling someone by their name, gives them a sense of familiarity, as if we are old pals.

Morgan chimes in on this thread on email invite open rates:

At Friendster, we did test emails to thousands of users when we were first putting out our newsletter (which contained a lot of dynamic per-user content, and was designed to re-activate our old users), and we discovered that the top response, by far, in terms of open and click through was putting the users first name in the subject line of the email.

Specifically, the best performing ones were:
Morgan, by request: See what’s new at Friendster
and later:
Morgan, Your Friendster News

It works better if, like Friendster did, you legitimately have their first name. Email that contains my email address as a salutation gets roundfiled pretty quickly. But putting the users real name and the company’s name in the subject helps engender trust that it’s regarding their relationship with the company.

That said, this was many years ago, and email users may have become more sophisticated (or jaded) since then.

It seems pretty obvious to me that this would be the case, but I’ve had debates before and the idea is that “Shanti, …” might come off as too spammy sounding. I guess it depends on how sophisticated your target audience is!

When I get an email with the subject line, “Shanti, …” what I assume is that at one point I have either given them my name & email legitimately OR someone who I have given this information to legitimately, has compromised it.

99% of the time, spammers seem to just have your email address, and can thus only attempt to guess your first/last name based upon that address. If your email is “john69@aol.com”, you’re pretty much screwed.

Traffic to one of my sites after a moderate second-page showing on a popular social news site today:

The power of social news sites is pretty incredible. Traffic also drops way off after a few days.

If you are like many a modern knowledge worker, your email inbox quickly gets overloaded if you slip even a day or two behind on trying to keep it cleaned out.

Some people have had to declare email bankruptcy because this problem got so bad.

While I’m not nearly that popular, I do get a lot of cruft in my GMail inbox.

Quick Steps to a Near-empty Inbox

1. Identify all the actionable emails that you can respond to in under 2 minutes. Respond to these now.

2. While you’re making this pass, keep an eye out for those that you’ll need to address later. (actionable, but would take longer than 2 minutes to address)

3. Hit Select All. Now go through and uncheck the messages you need to answer later, or would like to keep in your main inbox (flight itineraries, etc).

4. Click the “Archive” button.

…Repeat as necessary for your whole inbox!

I just emptied 84 / 89 messages that had piled up that way.

Email Time-savers

1. Not printing out receipts.

I used to print out almost all of my receipts… now when the Tax Man cometh I will simply use e-copies and paper statements to figure out how much I need to deduct for various business expenses I accumulated over the year.

I tag items with “Receipt” using gmail’s tag feature, for easy printability in case of audit.

2. Not tagging messages in all but a few cases.

I really like the idea of tags in theory — I used to tag just about every conversation, including auto-tags for certain people I worked with on various projects, etc.

But I found that I would hardly ever go back and click the tag links (too much noise now), so tagging pretty much became useless except for the inner Librarian in me. (who just loves to have things neatly organized into some semblance of a taxonomy)

I do still enjoy the auto-tagging feature. For receipts, I use gmail’s auto-tag feature using pre-defined rulesets, so I rarely have to manually tag receipt emails.

3. Using GMail’s archive feature instead of deleting one-offs.

I used to delete everything that I did not want cluttering up my inbox. I still do delete some things (alerts, spammy newsletters, etc), but other borderline things I think I’ll just start using the archival hack above to get em out of my inbox in large swaths.

4. Following the simmer rule.

The simmer rule is this — if you’ve let something simmer for too long (two weeks, two months, whatever), and have not come back to it, archive it for some possible future use.

It could be an idea or pursuit that you started but later ran out of time to pursue, or simply lost interest (perhaps momentarily). If you really want to remind your future self about something, consider using Backpack’s alerts feature. (I just used this to send my future self a note in a year!)

Not following the simmer rule is one of the biggest causes I’ve seen for people who are not able to get organized. They have all this stuff lying around (in real life — on tables/desks, virtually — in their inboxes, etc), that just “simmers” in a messy soup of complexity.

This applies to code (when programming) too. It’s all too easy to let crufty or unused code “simmer” in the codebase.

Large blocks of unused (or commented out) code should probably just be deleted. (and use version control to travel back in time as necessary) Leaving a comment like this for yourself can do the trick:

## Delete the following commented out code by 10/15/2007. We may need access to it quickly until then in case we we have to rollback the Foo Bar upgrade, but otherwise it can be deleted.

Hope these tips have been helpful!

Justin.tv is offline again for me. I’ve been getting sporadic 500 Internal Server Errors these past few days.

They haven’t advertised this fact much, but it appears Justin.tv is powered by RoR. Can’t wait for another RoR can’t scale blogstorm!

Btw - anyone catch the softcore pr0n action on one of the Justin.tv channels last night? I’m sure their potential advertisers are excited about that kind of thing going on there! It was bound to happen eventually, but who knew so soon?!? (first weekend after launching)

Paul Graham was speaking at the FOWA Summit in London going on this week. Stephanie Booth was there to take notes for those that couldn’t make the trip across the pond.

Notable notes:

Hackers actually like to make stuff, they’re not in there for the money. So actually, if you let them make stuff, you can pay them less! Big companies are paranoïd about their brand, they should be less scared about releasing stuff. Companies are judged by their successes, not the crap stuff they might have released (look at Google). Just let developers release stuff to the world.

Google’s 20% time idea is probably one of their biggest achievements. I hear it’s actually a lot harder to wrangle that 20% time into your schedule, but just the fact that that’s an official policy is pretty cool.

Another PG quote, on hackers being assimilated into a big company after acquisition:

Talked with a guy who had his startup recently acquired by a big company. From a “lines of code cranked out”, they were 1/13th as productive after the acquisition. Something about big companies that just sucks the energy out of you.

Sean Tierney of Grid7 has a podcast online with Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston.

Just registered for Startup Weekend SF. Tyler Willis, who’s organizing the whole shindig, emailed me and asked if I might be interested in participating in a Startup Weekend here in the Bay Area.

While I still think small teams are probably the way to go if you want to get something launched quickly, the social aspects should be pretty neat for something like this.

I’d imagine Ruby on Rails developers will be in the minority at something like this, so I may just take a backseat on the coding front and try and contribute in other ways.

If you are in the Bay Area, you can find more info here!