Shanti’s Dispatches

I recently tried signing up for a site via OpenID. After going through the rigamarole of remembering my MyOpenId.com password and signing in there, I then proceeded to “signup” using OpenID at a site.

Instead of magically being signed up through the awesome power of OpenID, I was presented with this after I got through telling MyOpenID that “yes, this site is legit and can access my 411″:

How exactly did that transaction just save me any time?

The Americans and the Japanese decided to engage in a competitive boat race. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance. On the big day, they both felt ready.

The Japanese won by a mile!

Afterward, the American team was discouraged by the loss. Morale sagged. Corporate management decided that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be found, so a consulting firm was hired to investigate the problem and recommend corrective action.

The consultants’ finding: The Japanese team had eight people rowing and one person steering. The American team had one person rowing and eight people steering.

After a year of study and millions of dollars spent analyzing the problem, the consulting firm concluded that too many people were steering and not enough were rowing on the American team. So as race day neared again the following year, the American team’s management structure was completely reorganized.

The new structure: Four steering managers, three area steering managers, and a new performance review system for the person rowing the boat to provide work incentive.

The next year the Japanese won by TWO miles!

Humiliated, the American corporation laid off the rower for poor work performance and gave the managers a bonus for discovering the problem.

Via: presscue

The Facebook App Free Gifts is quite the viral application.

I’m not sure if this was intentional or not, but pretty much the entire application is available for perusal / download via pastie, a tool commonly used by developers to share code snippets.

Some of the app code mirrored below:

// includes
require_once('/fbExchange/code/fbApps/coreLib/globalConfig.php'); // hard code to live config file, NOT beta!
require_once('facebook.php'); // from coreLib
require_once('/fbExchange/code/fbApps/freegifts/lib/lib.php'); // needs total rewrite

//Some facebook stuff
$facebook = new Facebook($api_key, $secret);
$facebook->require_frame();
$appUrl = "http://apps.facebook.com/freegifts";
$callbackUrl = "http://freegifts.fbexchange.com";

...

//Determine the page
if (isset($_GET['to']) && isset($_GET['from']))
	$page = "giftToGift";
else if (isset($_GET['from']))
	$page = "sentGifts";
else if (isset($_GET['to']))
	$page = "receivedGifts";
else if ($_GET['action'] == "single")
	$page = "singleGift";
else if ($_GET['action'] == "valentines")
	$page = "valentines";
else if ($_GET['action'] == "track")
	$page = "track";
else if ($_GET['action'] == "stats")
	$page = "stats";
else if ($_GET['action'] == "settings")
	$page = "settings";
else
	$page = "default";

Update: Zach from Free Gifts sent me a note explaining the situation. I’ve removed my mirror. This kind of thing can happen to the best of us. It’s also just a small portion of the app, not the entire thing.

I stumbled across the code via this Google search.

A little word to the wise: don’t pastie your entire application’s code… unless you intend for it to be open source, that is.

The ’simple’ mantra has been put forth in recent years by companies like Apple and 37 Signals.

But that doesn’t mean that all humans are perfectly rational creatures. A thread on reddit recently talked about how companies (or purchasing managers) will make decisions based on feature-lists, not the features that actually end up being used.

So your application might need to have the XML Widgets Technology © with SalesForce.com Integration (Siebold/Peoplesoft/Oracle Compatible) feature, even though chances are 95% of your users will never even use it.

Joel has talked about this before:

A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20″ rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.

Ok, so how does one address this?

An Open Source Case Study

Sure, it’s a lot harder to pull this off when you have to deal with a real UI and your target market isn’t programmers… but here’s how I dealt with this problem in the backup_fu rails plugin.

The only thing the user needs to touch is a 6-line configuration file. Here’s the default:

# The app_name is used as the backup filename prefix
app_name: replace_me
# Note: please create this bucket (whatever yours may be) externally first:
s3_bucket: some-s3-bucket
aws_access_key_id: --replace me with your AWS access key id--
aws_secret_access_key: --replace me with your AWS secret access key--

This gets the user just to the point of being marginally useful. They can backup their database & sync it to Amazon S3.

Modifying 4 lines in a config file doesn’t seem all that scary, does it? Of course, if you opened up this monstrosity, it might be a little more daunting.

To reveal the full power of backup_fu, one has to peruse the README to uncover the advanced configuration options available.

As you can see, I don’t 100% buy into the simplicity mantra. Yes, simple is nice for something like an iPod where the form factor dictates how limited one is when it comes to functionality.

But for a web application (or rails plugin), I believe there are often ways to keep the simple aesthetic (which is what people really like about Apple, 37 Signals), while still giving the power & flexibility of greater or more enhanced functionality.

The software program which most comes to mind here is Quicksilver:

Just had to share this one. Via reddit.

And completely unrelated…

Fresh off the presses: backup_fu Makes Amazon S3 Backups Redonkulous.

This article reminds me of the little war of attrition I had with one lady in my last office environment.

Here was the setup when I first started there:
* bull-pen style - think cubicles only without the cubicle walls
* someone sitting right behind me about 4 feet way (it drives me crazy when people peer over my shoulder all the time when I’m trying to work, but eventually I got used to this)
* sometimes another guy sat at about a 40 degree angle from me (also several feet away), so if I tilted my head the wrong way, we would lock eyes (he was a nice guy, but I didn’t like him *in that way*)

Once you got used to it, it wasn’t all that bad at all. Cubicles are the worst. The people next to you always seem to have guests that stay for hours on end and never quit gossiping.

Since I have finely tuned Spidey-sense hearing, I can hear people whispering from 2 cubicles away. Headphones also do not work for me — I can still hear the noise, and the music (even wordless techno or smooth jazz) interrupts my thought patterns at times.

With bull-pen style, you are forced to take calls & do your gossiping in the private offices (that are available for anyone to grab) or in the kitchen area.

Thermostat Police

But anyway, the thermostat police happened to be this 90lb girl who couldn’t comprehend how someone with 2x+ her body mass would be sweating in the office when she was just comfortable in her jeans & T-shirt.

If she liked it freezing cold in the office, I have no problem throwing on a fleece to work in an office if that’ll keep everyone happy.

But to force other people to be uncomfortable, just because you don’t want to have to wear a long-sleeve shirt, is just a little annoying to me.

Programming can be very intensive thought work. If just one element is off (noise, tempurature, interruptions, etc), your productivity is shot.

When you’re working from home (as I am again these days), you can set the thermostat to 60 degrees, or 75, whatever your preference, and not have to answer to any thermostat police about it either.

A lot of non-technical people throw around the term IT, assuming it encompasses all realms of technical employees in companies, including both network admins and programmers.

But usually, network admins and programmers report up the food chain through two distinct hierarchies. (this isn’t always the case, but it seems to be, generally)

Network folks report up through operations, usually. Programmers report up through the Development side of the org chart. They might eventually meet at the top where the CIO sits. A CTO usually indicates the head of a Development org structure.

This great anatomy of an IT horror story brought back a few memories from dealings with the network admin side of org charts in the past.

The two cases I’m thinking of are fairly opposite but both still had the same problem because of the way their orgs were structured. One was at a Fortune 50 company, the other had only 15 employees.

First a disclaimer: I understand people on the network admin side of things have a job to do. People do all kinds of stupid things if you let them run hog wild with a system: accidentally install spyware, get infected with viruses, etc.

But my problem with them was, as the article indicates in his case as well, that they often do not serve the interests of the business. Or, they believe they are the One True Gatekeeper preventing malicious activity from happening on the network & company computers.

Taking away developer admin rights is a sure-fire way to demoralize your dev team and grind productivity to a halt. That’s just the beginning, too.

Ego & Power

That’s really what the problem boils down to, imho: some network admins are addicted to the de facto power they have over the system.

OR

The company has a CYA (cover your ass) culture which justifies all kinds of behavior because of “What if…?” thinking that attempts to solve problems before they ever materialize. OR, one person does something they shouldn’t and suddenly some policies are put in place that ruin it for 5,000 other people.

Productivity Case Study: Startup vs. 15 Employee Co

I can go to LayeredTech.com and have a linux server provisioned and ready for me within 48-72 hours, for about $100 / mo. Or a VPS from VPSLink which can be provisioned for me within as little as 2-4 hours.

But at another place I worked (15 employees or so), the admin was a smart guy but it was neigh impossible to get a linux box setup.

I’ve got several dedicated servers now running throughout the net. I have root access and am used to being able to install whatever I like onto them.

So it’s a bit off-putting to go into a new company and be like, “so… you’re saying I can’t whip up this quick internal management app because there’s no linux box in the entire org?” (it was a bit of a windows shop)

That kind of boggled my mind. It took about 8 months before that admin moved on; the next guy was much cooler — he setup the linux box in an afternoon.

The Wrong Tool for the Right Job: Pointless?

Because the devteam didn’t have access to a dedicated linux box, the network admin just installed Mantis for us on one of his *nix boxes (we couldn’t get root) because he could do it in a few keystrokes using whatever distro it was. If you’ve used Trac and have seen Mantis (kinda like Bugzilla) you’ll know that Trac (and similar alternatives) are about 100x better. So we were stuck with this lousy bug tracking software, which was fine for a while at least.

But then one day the network admin revoked my Mantis admin rights. Which meant I couldn’t add categories or features or milestones or whatever it was that made that software tolerable and remotely usable to begin with.

It was all this huge debacle anyway so I just said screw it and stopped reporting bugs or tracking completed milestones.

The Lesson?

Maybe the solution is to empower your teams to take more of a hydra-based structure. Don’t let Command & Conquer rule the day.

Give teams a small budget (under $300 / mo. should do) to blow on whatever they see fit: servers, books, online subscriptions (Safari, etc), geeky gadgets (external HDs, nerf grenade launchers), etc.

Even if you’re not a startup, it probably behooves your organization to act more like one in some areas.

Could Yahoo Learn from this Lesson?

Just one example: there are thousands of engineers at Yahoo that could’ve built del.icio.us.

Even doing a covert Google-style “20% time” to get it built, wouldn’t have been a problem, imho. The problem (and I’m just spit-balling here as an outsider) would be getting through the bureaucracy and approval process to get something even as basic as del.icio.us launched there.

I hear Google can be pretty brutal about this too (these days), but at least they have a recognized pathway to get your 20% idea to see the light of day.

I just experienced the awesome synergy of GMail + Google Apps firsthand.

If someone has sent you an Excel spreadsheet, and you want to convert it to a Google Apps spreadsheet, simple click “Open as a Google spreadsheet”.

All of the formatting, etc. was retained quite nicely from the original Excel document. With just another few clicks, the online spreadsheet was shared with a collaborator and we were off to the races!

No more emailing back and forth .xls and .doc files, not in 2008!

Barack Obama will be attending a rally in downtown St. Louis tomorrow (Saturday night). I’m looking forward to seeing him live. The man is perhaps the most gifted orator we’ve seen since JFK or Martin Luther King.

More 411:

Edward Jones Dome
701 Convention Plz.
St. Louis, MO
Saturday, February 2
Doors open: 7:00 p.m.

The event is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required but an RSVP is strongly encouraged.

For security reasons, bags are not allowed inside the event. Please limit personal items. No signs or banners are permitted.