TimeBridge and Behavioral Change

Users rarely, if ever, change behavior. It takes unprecedented genius or beneficial workflow changes to get us to change our ways. We're lazy... bottom line.

A service called TimeBridge/meetwith.me changed my behavior. I use it religiously now. What's surprising to me is that the service touches the "third rail" of scheduling/calendar products which are notoriously messy and hard to get anything right with. TimeBridge says they "make it easy for others to schedule meetings with you" and incredibly, they deliver on that promise, when hundreds before them have failed miserably. How did they do it?

1. Setup for you is pretty easy. The site's not perfect, and there were bugs in app/screen flow, but it amounts to wiring their app up with your calendar app (Google Calendar for me). You'll be using a calendar app that either "works" or "doesn't." If you fall into the latter category, cut bait and pretent TimeBridge doesn't exist.
2. Setup for people trying to schedule time with you is... well... there really isn't any, and this is the critical piece. There have been plenty of apps promising to make scheduling easy, but they've all required everyone in the workflow to go through a mess of setup. Guess, what, someone scheduling time with me has never heard of TimeBridge, and certainly isn't going to go through any setup with it in order to schedule time with me. So, they've solved this by not requiring any setup for the ppl trying to get on your schedule.

Some of the flows are buggy or a little unclear, so there's lots of room for refinement, but the use case that matters is absolutely nailed. Well done guys. I'm impressed.

Ignite Boulder: Morning After

Last night's Ignite Boulder was one of the better ones. It was the first held at Chautauqua's auditorium which is a great venue; though the audio was a bit off for the sparks (music sounded solid). I hope Andrew sticks with Chautauqua as a venue going forward (at least in the nice Spring/Summer months), it was nice to chill at the park before/after the event.

With increased popularity, the content feels like its starting to water down a bit. I want the edge back! Where's the heckling anymore?!? I do my part, but more often than not the ppl around me don't get it. The perils of mass mediaization; I wonder if you can ever get away from it en masse. If anyone can figure out the mix it's Andrew though.

A few of the talks struck me as particularly bad, and a few as particularly good. Some thoughts on the good ones.

Josh Fraser's talk on fear

Reminded me of Bowling for Columbine. We live in a culture of fear, and it's sad. Statistically everything's always going to be alright, yet we live with irrational fears that dramatically affect our behaviors. Why we do this is always a good question, and Josh got the numbers out there in front of us to laugh at. Nicely done.

Ryan's talk on selfishness

Should you be selfless or selfish? I've always lived my life as a selfish bastard, so I felt a little vindicated w/ this talk. Ryan's one of those rarities in life. Incredible ability to put the core of his being out there in front of everyone, and not in a lame way, rather in a way you connect with; he has true creative genius. Favorite line of the night [paraphrase/butcher]: "while trying to be selfless in trying to be what the one I love[d] wanted, I turned into something she didn't love at all because I lost my selfishness."

Ceci Ervin's talk on a trip to Poland for a surgical procedure to help/cure MS (which she has).

I'm not a sympathy vote kinda guy (back to that selfish thing), but she presented her quest in such a way that the faith and bravery simply tore through the screen and into the audience. Unbelievable journey with a happy ending. This kind of insight always makes me feel weak and useless, which then drives me to be more. Thanks for the perspective Ceci.

Can Google's Native Client SDK Fix The Web?

Modern life owes much to the Internet. Many proverbial thanks are due to the inventors at CERN (incl. Tim Burner's Lee) and to Netscape (Jim Clark; the money. Founding engineers; the know-how) for making it accessible to all of us. A recent visit to Google's Boulder, CO office brought back that aching question for me though; is this all the Internet has to offer?

What if it never happened?

Would traditional client-server computing have been able to push network infrastructure (modems, hard-wire networks, wireless-networks, fiber, satellite) as far as the graphical browser has? If we had given it the years that the Internet's had, would we have skipped over and evolved past all the advertising, porn, and shopping that has become our network? I have to wonder if we have simply over-sold/hyped ourselves over the past decade, and subsequently distracted ourselves from the end-goal; better overall human computer interaction. The web is a complete UI/UX disaster, and has severely stunted HCI (Human Computer Interaction) efforts that can only come to fruition with deep driver/hardware bindings (e.g. Oblong - a firm you've never heard of that has the potential to change everything). We're still wallowing around inside web pages, building applications that have awful authentication/authorization models (how many usernames and passwords do you have?), and HTML5 is our latest savior?!? Please.

Getting Serious (again)

My recent conversation in the Google cafeteria challenged some base assumptions that I, and most of my colleagues, make; namely that web-apps are "it." That lunch discussion is well represented in a talk two of the key engineers gave at Google I/O 2010; Programming the web with Native Client SDK". When we were talking, what was initially described to me was something I could neatly, and conveniently, fit into today's browser plugin APIs. "Why not just use NPAPI; why re-invent the wheel?" I asked. I got a response that only someone with the know-how, and the resources could give; "because this [web as we know it] can't be it." I left skeptical, but it's been a month or so, and I'm there.

We'd be nowhere without the tubes that have been built. From a gazzillion miles of various types of cable/wire being laid all over the world, to IP/HTTP ubiquity. However, consider them a simple, yet crucial, layer in the client-server software model stack. Sure it's taken us 15 years to build it, but what if you chalk it up as "done." What's the next layer in the cake diagram that you'd pursue?

If we'd had this layer complete 15 years ago, the kings of client-server software at the time (Microsoft and IBM) could have started building highly distributed applications then, as opposed to trying to do so now (IBM quite successfully in more of an industry consultancy role, and MSFT arguably flat out failing at it). With Native Client, Google is trying to answer the question of what should software look like now that the connectivity layer is "done?" It's a cool question if you think about it and are able to extract yourself for a moment from our day-to-day web-app construction, and browser engineering realities; we have a hard time seeing the forrest from the trees.

It has a very long way to go, but a new way of executing "native" code through our "tubes" could open the door to a new generation of software. One that can harness the power of our hardware and the most important part of the Internet, namely the "tubes." While a train-wreck, recall the confines Microsoft tried to break out of with Microsoft Bob; knocking down the four walls of the traditional rectangle window managers that none of us exists without. Imagine networked software that can talk to your hardware to obtain identity information (something that requires a hardware component; you). These are things that we shouldn't be dreaming about, they should just be.

While Google's Native Client SDK goals seem audacious, they are also admirable, and if there's one company out there right now that has the power to pull something like this off, Google's it. Good luck.

Development Process

Tonight I was asked some high-level questions about development process. I wound up responding w/ enough material that I thought I'd share the thoughts here for broader consumption.

Hey guys,

Please feel free to ignore this email but I'd extremely appreciate some advice if you have a couple of minutes. I am trying to compare best practices for teams over 10 programmers to determine what software development methodology has been the most productive for your company but at the same most fun for your team. If you have time I'd appreciate answers to the following:

1) Software Development Process used (i.e. Scrum, XP, custom)

"agile" (no scrum)... weekly iterations/sprints (no standup). have driven/done xp (pair programming mix) as well; I'd only go this (xp/pairing) route again if I were in a more supportive ecosystem (e.g. SF).

2) Do you track # of hours programmers work in a project?

never. bad idea IMO.

3) Do you have a QA team, if so how many?

no. though I've considered one or two QA folks... it'd definitely be nice to objectively do white/black box testing outside of dev. we're pretty close to TDD, so we've convinced ourselves we "don't need it." I go back and forth.

4) How often is your release cycle?

we deliver code to production once a week.

5) Who is allowed to deploy code into production?

we rotate who does the deploy (everyone on the team, including me, is capable of doing it). we run a shared responsibilty/exposure shop in order to reduce/eliminate the "john's the only one who knows that code/process" scenarios. my general philosophy here is if you're not hiring engineers that you don't trust well enough to do a deploy... you're liking hiring the wrong folks.

6) What project management tools do you use?

http://pivotaltracker.com . in the spirit of agile... we're very light on process/tools. never document something in more than one place (e.g. in the "story"), and even then be light.

7) How accurate are your release predictions?

eh. having tried (as mgr and individual contributor) everything under the sun... I no longer believe numbers folks toss out ("we're 90% on time" etc). I've found everyone's (mine included) numbers are BS, and if you dig into what actually transpired after the release... enough corners were cut, enough brilliant engineering ideas employed, and enough requirements were relaxed during the release cycle, that you never end up with what you started with anyway, so the A to B comparison and judgement of "on-time" is never valid. your mileage will vary though. it all comes down to the "unit"... the "team"... their cohesiveness, experience working together and trustworthiness amongst eachother. that said, if you handed me a green teem of folks that never worked together, I'd drive it agile-style with one to two week iterations/sprits (and production deploy) cycles with goal-level commitments (e.g. team committing to having x y and z done by date 'a'... and working as hard as they can to meet that commitment).

I'm Done Recycling...

... at cafe's at least; sorry. I thought this get here, but after years of recycling I'm fed up. At home I can control the separation between compost, mixed materials, and trash/landfill. But... cafe's had made it impossible to recycle or compost anymore. Some provide compostable straws/lids/cups/napkins, but some don't; telling the difference between the two is all but impossible. The end result... I don't spend the extra 30 seconds it takes to figure it all out.

To further complicate things, everyone has their own cute recycle station with paragraphs describing what to put in which of the, at least three, bins. Guess what, I just hunt for the trash/landfill bin so I don't have to hurt my little brain by figuring out what is in my hand, and which bin it should go in.

I started recycling and composting long before it became popular/trendy, and have voted for every legislative measure to promote recycling over the past couple of decades I've been able to vote over. However, I hate to say it, the regulations around what can go where have turned me off. Humans are generally lazy and dumb. American's (of which I am one) like to throw unbelievable amounts of things away. Combine the two with today's recycling measures and I predict we're taking a step backward.

Once fairly clean recycle streams are now polluted with materials that don't mix and the energy it takes to clean the stream counters the benefits of recycling at all. Here's a decent writeup on the stream problem, and plenty have been written about Boulder County as well.

We need to mandate the production of compostable materials (cups, straws, bowls, forks, spoons, knives, etc) so, as consumers, we don't have to think about what we're about to "throw away." This should all be easy.

Take 2: Amazon S3 file deletion FAIL

The S3 bucket key deletion saga continues. I had two Ec2 XL instances running 24/7 for about a month, running ~150 parallelized DELETE requests on s3 bucket keys (each machine), and dented my S3 usage by only 10%. I spent ~$1,500 (money went to Amazon obviously) on those dedicated XL instances in the process, while only reducing my S3 bill by ~10%, and that doesn't include the operational/engineering overhead to manage the deletion software/machines.

I'm left with only one option to wipe out the data on S3 that I don't need anymore; closing my Amazon account, and opening a new one. While I have high hopes that I'll be able to use the same keys/tokens/secrets in the new account, I'm doubtful. Thus, I'll incur several thousand more dollars re-wiring Gnip's vast network of machines, and RightScale, to work w/ the new account.

Lesson here is that you have to be very conscious when dealing with very large data sets on Amazon's S3.

Twitter's Ad Model; It's All In The Fraud Baby

It's taken Twitter a long time to get where they are, and knowing some of their backstory has made watching the journey from the outside quite entertaining. A few things haven't changed: Biz pontificates and paints the "Twitter is a triumph of humanity" picture (exceedingly well I might add), Ev leads the flock with jagged thinking & speaking, and Dick is the one saying "no guys, really, we need to focus and make some money, here's how we're going to try to do it; no more goofing off." Ryan Sarver has his head squarely around the outward facing platform implementation and needs; he's an asset. Jason Goldman... I still can't figure him out.

On Making Money
Dick's pitch was pretty good. The idea is that tweets themselves are the commodity. Rather than some new model in the system, e.g. a formal "ad," the Tweet structure as we know and love it today, will be the item that is bought/sold. "Promoted" tweets, as Dick kept referring to them as, will float to the top of distilled tweet pages (like search, or top tweets, or trending topics, etc). The "float" algorithm will be affected by 1) whether or not someone's paid for a tweet to float up and 2) whether or not it resonates with users. #1 is obvious and will result in a marketplace for pricing/bidding/buying/selling (ala Google's ad model). #2 isn't as simple (not that the former is simple to begin with).

Resonating
I argue that the dirty little secret on the network today is that current ad models on the web are a sham; a house of cards. We've all made plenty of money on the backs of click fraud, and it'll eventually collapse. Twitter's trying to "do it right" by influencing a promoted tweet's visibility based on whether or not a promoted tweet resonates with users. Whatever your platform, when money's involved, it gets gamed. Whether it's bots doing re-tweeting, clicking, forwarding, generating, whatever, the bots will do their thing. When bots can't do it, cheap humans will be employed to do the machine's bidding.

"If a promoted tweet doesn't resonate, it will go offline." That statement was spewed, in one form or another, over and over again by the Twitter crew. I love the idea as a user, but if Google had squashed ads that weren't resonating with users, they never would have had a business to begin with (and arguably they wouldn't have one now if they moved to this glorious idea). It's all in the fraud baby.

The chicken and egg problem Twitter faces with an ad model is that you need many producers to build a marketplace, yet you need the marketplace to draw the producers. If you do the righteous thing and only display ads that resonate with users, guess what, you won't have many ads to show. Though users would benefit, ad prices would be so high (both in cost and quality) that not many people will pay for them. As a result, resonance is de-emphasized in order to stoke the overall marketplace.

Traditional Internet ad models are fairly simple pyramids folks... the bottom many subsidize the top. Both in terms of quantity, in order for the marketplace to exist, and the dollars.

The picture Dick painted was a pretty one. As an end-user, the notion of only being exposed to "resonating ads" (errr "promoted tweets") is a treat. I hope Twitter can change Internet ad history and actually pull it off.