What To Fix

Craigslist Spambot Attack

2010-01-26T15:25:33Z

A few weeks ago I put up my Jeep for sale on Craigslist.

Almost immediately I became a robot-magnet.

Robots were emailing me to tell me that I asked too little for my Jeep -- if only I clicked this link I could see how much it was really worth.

Robots were emailing me to tell me that there was another vehicle just like mine that was priced lower -- if only I clicked this link.

Geesh.

]]> Yesterday I renewed the ad with a lower price on it and within 5 minutes I got a new email.

"Hey man, do you still have that Jeep for sale?"

I emailed back "yes"

"I think you could get a much better price. Checkout this link"

Spambot.

A couple of hours later, the romantic spambots arrived.

Hows it going? nmy name happens to be Cristy

I looked at your post (rare jeep scrambler - $7000 (bedford)) on craglist and I'm located in roanoke too! I Wonder if its possible you are
on the dot the form of man I am have strong feelings for.

I 24 years old, clearly out ncomputer science school and not nattracted in anything nfast, just a nplayful friend ;).

You can catch my information and a ton of pictures on this date site I'm part of.
Few of them will show up some personal parts :-).

Somebody needs to set up a spambot dating site so all these robots can get together and sell each other stuff.

Finally this morning was yet another one

Hi,

Thanks for choosing our craigslist phone marketing program. In the next 2 days you will start getting telemarketing calls from our affiliates with some limited offers!

Maximum number of calls on a daily basis as opted by you :: 39

Preferable time opted by the applicant to get telemarketing calls: 12:15 AM - 5:45 AM roanoke

If you would like to unsubscribe from our list, click here.

You gotta give the last guy credit -- when I see I'm going to get 39 calls a day from somebody, you immediately have my attention!

Sadly, this is crippling Craigslist.I know guys who used to market using CL -- they were making good money everyday. But those days are over as now the goldrush has begun. Everybody and their brother are writing little bots to go out and try to sucker people into clicking a link.

Sigh.

The Existential Jesus

2010-01-18T22:18:05Z

What was the first-written book of the New Testament?

If you answered "Matthew", you might want to read up a bit on what scholars currently know about the bible.

Most scholars believe First Thessalonians was the first book in the New Testament written. What about the Gospels? Is Matthew the first Gospel written? Wrong again. The first gospel written is widely believed to be Mark. Mark -- without the extra verses tacked on at the end -- is considered one of the best sources we have of what early Christians had for a bible.

]]> Why didn't they just use a regular bible? Well because people didn't have bibles until almost 300 years after Jesus lived. Up until that point all that people had were letters that they shared and read.

So what was it like to live just a few years after Jesus was on Earth? You had the book of Mark written in Greek and perhaps bits of the other gospels. Probably lots of letters that aren't in the modern bible, like the Book of Thomas. Churches were informal groups of people without any of the church offices we have today. Some, maybe most churches hung on to Jewish tradition. One of the first things people had to figure out was: given this story of Jesus, what did it all add up to?

John Carroll, an unbeliever but expert in Greek, takes on the story of Jesus from this early perspective in The Existential Jesus

Going back far enough, you lose a lot of the current religious dogma surrounding the gospels -- for instance, the trinity was debated hundreds of years later. In Mark's Jesus there is no immaculate conception at the beginning, and there is no Christ ascending into heaven in the end. These things came in later books (sometimes decades later)

Instead you find a mystery. A mystery so deep that people have been striving for centuries to understand and expound on it.

I found this book to be very compelling and illuminating. Even for atheists, it's obvious that something very interesting and important to humanity happened in Judea in the early first century. I, for one, think that my atheist friends can admit that there probably was a person who filled the role of historical Jesus. Given that presumption, a logical question is what information early adherents had -- why was Jesus' story any different from any of the other apocalyptic preachers of that age?

For those friends, and for my Christian friends who are able to put aside dogma and strict rules of what to believe and not believe, I challenge them to read this book. In the end, I found a powerful story about existence, being, and purpose. Highly recommended.

Extreme Pair Programming

2010-01-08T00:13:40Z

People often ask me if I eat my own cooking. I thought this picture should prove that once and for all.

First, from the size of me you can obviously tell I've been eating somebody's cooking. Secondly, as you can see, pair programming is alive and well here. My partner and I work long hours making sure the code is exactly right.

I don't want to get into any kind of personality dispute, but my partner has a tendency to lose interest and fall on the floor quite a bit. He's obviously the brains of the operation -- the strong silent type. I figure after all these years of being both a high-level consultant and a code monkey, it was time to join forces with my logical ally, sock monkey.

And you can't beat the swank evening work area we have -- couch, TV, music, munchies, and pillows. Sock monkey doesn't talk a lot, but I can tell from the way he looks that he is really liking our coding crib.

You will fail

2010-01-02T20:03:46Z

I was talking to my good friend Jacques the other day and he asked a set of penetrating questions which all boiled down to -- do your realize that you're probably going to fail? Jacques and I have been studying and reading about startups for a long time and (I think) are getting pretty good at separating the BS from the real. Plus he's been helping me with my current effort, so he has a pretty good idea of what I'm up to.

So for all those entrepreneurs out there who are reading the self-help startup books and are excited about your new application, it's wake-up time.

You will fail.

I thought somebody should tell you that, because we don't talk about it enough. Odds are, you will fail. That's doesn't mean there's anything wrong with your team, your idea, your market, or any of that. Stats show that most teams -- even teams that are rated highly in all success criteria -- do not meet the expectations of founders and investors. In fact, most kind of fizzle out after a while. This is not my opinion, it's just stats.

This is why investing in startups looks so comically tragic from the outside: nobody really knows what will work or not, so at the end of the day it's intuition and gut feelings. Of course it's funny: at an early stage investors are writing checks for real money based on less information than the average horse better has. They just try to dress it up more.

But whatever you do, however, keep trying! The world needs you. Entrepreneurs in startups are going to change the future of mankind, and they're going to do it over the next decade or two. At this time in our history, being an inventor and innovator is the highest calling anybody can have in life.

Just be honest with yourself about the odds. And when you do fail, whatever you do, don't go on the internet and write a long tirade about how everybody else is to blame. Sure, it will feel that way. Worse than people not giving you an honest shot (which sucks if you are used to being a hyper-achiever) is watching other folks take your ideas and get funding and run with them. That kind of pain can last a long time, I know.

The best way to look at it? It's a numbers game, just like sales. Books and positive reinforcement and all of that exist to keep you motivated and playing the numbers. So try to fail quickly. Try to pivot from your original idea to something else. If you can fail at 40 different startup ideas in your life, you're going to kick-ass at one of them. Learn to laugh at yourself and others -- all while you're working as hard and as smart as you can.

Just thought I'd say that. I think a lot of times it's easy to lose track of reality in this business.

As for me and my startup? I'm going to keep plugging away. I'm in startups because I want to make the world a better place, I want to help people, and I want to create, not just consume. When I die I don't won't to look back on all the times I quit, I want to look back on all the times I tried. Sure, quitting is logical at some point. But lots of times I've quit before I even really gave things a chance, and I don't want to do that any more. I try because trying is good, noble, and honest. I'd trade a life full of trying as hard as I could any day for a life where I tried half-assed and hit it big on startup #1 and then never created another good thing for mankind. In fact, most guys I've seen that sold out successfully on a startup lost track of who they were, drifting from one half-assed investment to another, never able to devote themselves to any one thing again. After all, why pour yourself into anything? You might fail!

But I'm no fool, either. Life (and the market) is not a meritocracy, and simply because I work hard and am a good person doesn't mean that anything good is going to happen. I'm not doing a startup to cash out in five years. I'm doing a startup because that's who I am. You try hard, life kicks you in the ass, you learn more, and then you try hard again.

Just try not to do things you'll regret while doing it.

We must imagine Sisyphus as happy.

Logic Lunch Counter

2009-12-27T15:39:42Z

This post goes out to all of you logic junkies.

You know who you are: you're the ones with the list of fallacious argument types on a little index card beside your monitor. Heck, you might even have a web site dedicated to "clear thinking" or something like that. You're the people who make the first post under an article and allege "Ad Homimem!" or "Appeal to Authority" and then spend the rest of the day having people call you names.

It's gotten so prevalent that sometimes when I'm on a busy internet site I feel like I'm at a lunch counter where people are yelling out orders: "#15: Gambler's Fallacy!" or "#7: Red Herring!" or "#23: Affirming the Consequent!"

Boy do I feel your pain.

]]> I also am a logic junkie. As a programmer and somebody who is good at math and analysis, I see these fallacies, like the "No True Scottsman" one, used all the time on the internet.

But I have something to tell you.

Most of the time you have no idea what you are doing. Please stop.

Let me explain.

Your first mistake is viewing the English language as some sort of system of formal logic. "If p then q" does not match very well, or at all, to the nuances, slipperiness, and complexities of modern languages. Spoken languages are not formal, complete, or deductive in nature. Many times we yearn for statements like "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is a mortal"

Or to quote from the site I linked (which was picked at random):

Inductive arguments needn't be as rigorous as deductive arguments in order to be good arguments. Good inductive arguments lend support to their conclusions, but even if their premises are true then that doesn't establish with 100% certainty that their conclusions are true. Even a good inductive argument with true premises might have a false conclusion; that the argument is a good one and that its premises are true only establishes that its conclusion is probably true. [I disagree about the use of the word "probably" here, as I point out in the rest of this piece]

All inductive arguments, even good ones, are therefore deductively invalid, and so "fallacious" in the strictest sense. The premises of an inductive argument do not, and are not intended to, entail the truth of the argument's conclusion, and so even the best inductive argument falls short of deductive validity.

So you really can't "prove" anything in a conversation the same way you can prove, say, that the the relationship between a hypotenuse and the two sides of a right triangle is a^2 = b^2 + c^2. Natural language discussions are inherently about persuasion, not proof. This means when you're reading a text you're weighing various rhetorical devices, including logical fallacies, to come up with a reasoned opinion. You are not conducting a proof.

Does this mean that logical fallacies are pointless? Far from it! What it means is that every form of communication is going to be chock-full of these fallacies. Natural conversation by good, intelligent, open-minded, reasonable, and polite people has all kinds of logical fallacies peppered throughout.

I was reading an article the other day espousing an opinion I support. In it, the author made resonable claims and advanced a thesis by use of example, deduction, induction, and observation in a spirit of what seemed to be even-handedness. In the middle of it, however, he said something which basically boiled down to "and the people that support my opponents are idiots"

Almost immediately the logic mavens popped out of the woodwork, pointing out that this was an egregious Ad Hominem attack on his opponent.

That's all fine and dandy, except it wasn't. It was an attempt to impeach supporters of his opponent. It might have been an attempt to assassinate the character of his opponent by association (which is a subtle form of Ad Hominem), but it was definitely not a direct attack on the ability of his opponent to speak.

Steve Forbes posted a piece on net neutrality a while back. Steve propped up Google and Congress as his opponents, and then proceeded to explain why they were all corrupt, out to make as much money as they can, and stifle innovation.

Almost immediately folks started crying "Straw Man! Forbes is making a Straw Man argument!"

That's all fine and dandy except for this: when you're writing an essay and want to include the views of people you disagree with, you have to make some sort of assumptions that don't work about the motivations of your opponents. I remember reading Paul Graham talk about OOP programmers as something like "they're the type of people who like wiring little pieces together. That's fine if you're that type of person". I immediately thought damn Paul! Straw Man much? But he was honestly just trying to point out the views of people that had different opinions than him.That's how essays work. Good authors quote their opponents, at length, or say they don't know for sure. Bad ones make sweeping statements (as Forbes did in this piece, which I found atrocious for a man of Forbes' background) or dress up their opponents in garb that even their mothers would find offensive.

That's the way these things work: persuasion is full of varying degrees of fallacies strung together. Good persuaders lull you into a kind of trance where they can slide by all sorts of zingers. Bad ones just punch you in the nose with them. If you agree with me I can sneak in more zingers without your noticing. If you don't agree with me (and are logically inclined) you're going to spot each and every slip no matter how minor or related to the larger argument I'm making. All articles are guilty of bad reasoning -- that's the way it's supposed to work!

The way I use these lists of fallacious argument types is really as more of a commentary on the style of a piece, not the quality of the overall public discussion one way or another. If I say "That's obviously just an Ad Hominem attack" what I mean is "This author is so bad that they're just pulling out easy rhetorical tricks instead of actually doing any work to make a case" And I've read some awful tripe on the net. I've read 500-word articles that were just long streams of how stupid, bad, corrupt, ugly, dumb, fat, etc the other people are and aren't we so glad we're not them.

So for all you guys who have taken a logic or debating course or found the websites and essays that tell you about logical fallacies? Congratulations! You're beginning to learn how to think critically. Now get over the pointless and self-serving labeling already and move to the next step where we can all engage material critically from multiple points of view to see if there's anything of value in there for all of us.

Agile Startup Tricks

2009-12-16T15:53:47Z

I've been busy working on my startup for the last month, and as an agile-big-corp guy, many of you are probably wondering: how am I doing in the micro-team startup field?

Very well, actually.

Here's a brain dump of things I've learned over the last month. As always, take what you can use and leave the rest:

]]>

FlipCam standups - Like team members everywhere, I need somebody to report to, to make commitments to. I've found the best way of doing that is taking out my FlipCam each day and doing a "daily stand-up", 2 or 3 minutes where I explain what I did the day before, what I plan on doing today, and what kinds of obstacles I might have. This sounds so completely stupid that I'm amazed at how well it works. Every day I know I have to "report in" at some point, and it helps keep me on-track and motivated.

Find advisers - I'm very lucky in that I have about a dozen advisers, many from HackerNews, a place known for startups. These guys don't participate at all in day-to-day work, but every week or so I send out and email with status, demos, and asking for advice. It's a great feeling to have such expertise in my back pocket! And all I had to do to get them was just ask. Once again, the things that sound completely simple and totally obvious many times are the most profound.

I don't think it matters who your advisers are. Obviously people who do something like you want to do are great, but the point is having outside eyes look at your work. Quite a few times my weekly updates have kicked off discussions about how my project and product looks to somebody not programming it every day. You can't pay enough for that kind of good feedback.

You gain attention span by practice - The hardest thing I found when moving from Agile Coach at BigCorp to agile startup team at me.com was being able to focus. Even though I have a deep technical background, I find working with people intensely leads to "interrupt-driven-attention-span", where you're always hopping from one thing to another. This way of thinking becomes so ingrained that eventually you start interrupting yourself, moving from one trinket of activity to another. At first I had a very difficult time settling down and fully engaging mentally in a problem.

Oddly, it's not always an attention problem. The second half of this was being able to realize when my brain is stuck. Immature programmers usually just bulldoze through their code when confronted with these feelings. I've learned that when this happens I've learned to......

Get out - I make it a point each week to get out of the office for a lunch or two. This probably sounds strange to those of you in the city, but in rural areas it's possible to literally lock yourself up for weeks on end. And as fun as that sounds, at some point your brain needs time to digest what you're doing. What better way of doing that then having lunch with somebody? You get to make smalltalk, see the sunshine, and get immersed in interesting stories. Plus, as I said earlier, any outside eyes are a good thing.

Google Wave collaboration - I've been trying Google Wave as a form of collaboration. So far, results are mixed. Perhaps Wave just hasn't penetrated deeply into my circle yet. But it looks like an awesome collaboration tool, and I'm going to give it a year or so before I make a judgment one way or the other. For now, I think it's highly flexible and open to add-ons. Can't wait to see how it evolves.

Weekly drops - Each week I have something to show. My product does something of value it did not do the week before. Oddly, sometimes it does something completely different than I had planned, but it always does something new. Progress is always being visibly made. Not only does that give you a good feeling, it also gives you a sense of momentum. You begin to realize that no matter how big the problem, it's really only a matter of stringing together enough weeks with positive results.

Sharpen the saw - This past week I was feeling overwhelmed by cruft -- you know, the stuff that builds up in your code as you work towards a drop. So I decided to do something very anti-agile: I took the week and just worked on finding how cruft was getting in my code and eliminating it. As a result, I made more progress this week than in the two weeks prior! No matter how hard you work on sawing the tree, you get much more done not by sweat, but by sharpening the saw and letting it do the work.

Auto Code-Gen is good, up to a point - As part of my "sharpen the saw" week,. I pulled out my old standby code generator, CodeSmith. CodeSmith is the crack cocaine of architect astronauts. Once you start doing code generation, you can fall into this world where you spend more time on the code generator than the actual problem! It's a very bad place to find yourself, and it's all too common for architecture-minded coders. But, on the other hand, code generation also serves a very good purpose sometimes. I am working on the Microsoft stack, so there's a bunch of junk involved with getting things out of persistent storage and putting them back in there. This is the perfect thing for CodeGeneration, because all it's doing is being a code-writing monkey so you don't have to be.

At the end of the week I have a project that generates about a five-hundred lines of F# to manage persisting data. Not only is this mindless code, it's also code where people have a tendency to make lots of mistakes. Plus when I change my data structures all I do is push a button and continue working on the larger problem. So auto-generation is all good -- up to a point.

Keep an open mind - I think probably the toughest thing I'm learning is how to keep an open mind. I've found that action comes first, then motivation. What that means is that the more action/activity you spend in your project, the more motivated you're going to get about it. Especially in the beginning. This is a good thing because it keeps you working long hours, but it's also a bad thing because it can prevent you from seeing vital pivot points as you encounter them. However you see your app, the customers are going to have another, unexpected view of it. When that happens, you have to be able to hear the customers and respond quickly. My strategy to deal with this is to keep things as absolutely simple as possible I have a theory about the need for my product. My program should address that need and that need only. In this fashion I don't get attached to all the other little things that are not important

There's the brain dump from the past few weeks (unedited). Hope it helps some of you other guys out there like me leaping into the startup-world.

Happy Startup Holidays

2009-12-10T02:15:16Z

A Venture Capital fund called First Round Capital put together this neat video holiday card. It really reminds me why I like startups so much!

First Round Capital 2009 Holiday Card from First Round Capital on Vimeo.

Hamburger Casserole Recipes?

2009-12-08T14:45:16Z

Over the last few months my wife and I have been doing a bit of real-estate prospecting. It's not like the usual stuff, where you look at listings, do a lot of calculations, walk the site, and then start the financial work -- this has all been on the web. We've been investing in small web properties.

So, for instance, the next time you're looking for hamburger casserole recipes, hopefully you'll hit one of our sites. (If you go there you'll find there isn't anything salacious or untoward: it's just sharing some of the best recipes we have for hamburger casseroles to people who are looking for some)

This has been an eye-opening experience, so I thought I'd share a bit of what I've learned.

I've become a bit of a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) freak. Not a spammer or anything like that, but somebody who is beginning to understand how different pages get ranked different ways on different search engines. I'm starting to learn, for instance, how Google knows how to sort the results of your search.

I now understand why my blog will always be 3rd or 4th string: I have no focus. Or rather, I write like a normal person writes in their diary and not like a targeted money-making machine. There are guys who can do this: find a small niche and write the heck out of just stuff in that niche.

I am not one of those people.

I get bored easily, and the blog is mainly for me. So it's always going to be a mishmash of whatever I like. Cross out the plan for world-domination through blogging.

]]> Part of the trick in investing in web real estate is to create properties people want to advertise on. The web is a huge series of tubes, and unless you're on the right one nobody is going to want to put their billboard there, and it's all about billboards and eyeballs.

From looking at advertising lists, advertisers basically want to sell you insurance, houses, and have you file a lawsuit. So if you have an accident while looking at a new house? The web is your friend. And if you have a DUI on the way there and/or contract Mesotheliioma? Even better.

There's more than that. There's quite a bit of hosting services, lasik eye surgery, mortgage refinancing (yes, looks like still a bit of that going on), and of course, payday loans.

(And no, I am not trying to target those words in this article!)

But I was surprised at how big of a play lawyers are making in the keyword advertising business. There must be a really competitive market out there for them. Who knew? Lawyers are the door-to-door salesmen of the internet age.

On the search side, I have spent countless hours pouring over what the average person searches for. And it isn't pretty: as far as I can tell, people use Google to tell them everything except when to go to the bathroom. They probably use it for that, too.

Celebrities are big; really big. But mostly celebrities in trouble. When a celebrity gets in trouble, we want pictures. The old Jon Stewart joke about "naked famous people" is still very true. If you have a pictures of naked celebrites screwing up, you are going to have have lots of internet traffic.

Oddly, there isn't a demand for for advertising on those keywords. Or in other words, the traffic from those pictures probably isn't desperate to buy a lot of stuff in a competitive market. I'm not sure, but "Famous Naked People" is probably more of a volume play. In other words, it's more like watching American Idol than attending a time-share presentation.

Lots of folks are looking for jobs on the net. Or money. One popular search -- and I give this one away to anybody who can make anything of it -- is "free printable fake money." Lots of folks each day ask Google for free money.

Not sure how the Secret Service would feel about the site, but you gotta give people credit. They think Google can do anything.

Of course, my wife and I try to keep on the up and up, finding little pieces of information we can reshape, improve, and publish to people looking for it. Nothing spectacular. For instance, one of our sites, What Is Diabetes? presents lots of information that you can get elsewhere and from better sources, but we try to organize and rework the information in a much more accessible format for folks (and point them to authoritative sources as well)

So the question you're all asking: are you making any money off of this? After about ten sites, yes, we are. Would I recommend this as a hobby business for others? No, I would not. It's a freaking lot of work, to begin with, if you are really looking to provide useful and quality information. If you're just looking to spam, perhaps that's another set of criteria. I know an affiliate marketer who told me six months ago that after just a few months he was making over $3K per day, but that kind of stuff isn't the type of business you want to explain to mom. For what we do, it's beer money. I think most folks would find the time-spent/income ratio to be very painful.

It's also getting to be a highly-competitive business. Companies are using advanced algorithms to determine exactly which subject areas have the most lifetime value for advertising and creating lots of material around them. It really has the feel of the stock market when computers got in and changed everything. Yes, you can still have a very profitable niche. Heck, I have several ideas about moving up to the next level. But these guys play hardball over pennies-per-day. Any newcomers should know that before getting in.

There's also no guarantee -- you could work your butt off this month and have all your work wiped off the search engines next month because somebody better came along. Or even worse, because one of your competitors used a link-spamming program to promote your site, thereby getting Google to dump the entire site from the search results. And good luck trying to find somebody at Google with a sympathetic ear to explain that problem to.

Or Google could just change the way they rank results. Ouch.

Having said that, we're probably going to keep it up. Every week we get emails from people we have helped with our sites, and that's really neat. There's something about having recurring income that makes you go "Wow!"

It's a good feeling.

EDIT: For all of those folks who are ready with a knee-jerk response, like "You, sir, are what's wrong with the internet" -- hold on a minute. Write something lucid and engaging or don't comment at all. This isn't reddit.

There is only so much information in the world: most writers will tell you that there are a limited number of plot lines for TV episodes, for instance (which is why everything kind of looks the same after years and years of TV). There is, however, a very large subset of various audiences looking for information, and each audience needs information in a different format. You wouldn't tell a six-year old about weather in the same way you'd tell a college graduate, although the base information is the same.

We take information, lower it to a 6th grade level, mix in multimedia presentations, and target only that material that the casual user wants. This is different from, say, a organization's website which is targeting a different audience and providing information based on other factors.

I've seen spam sites, with invisible text, hundreds of keywords, the meta description loaded up with garbage. We are definitely NOT writing spam sites. The reader comes first. If we didn't believe we were providing something valuable to the web reader we wouldn't be doing these things. As I said, there are guys making thousands of dollars a day from trash sites. We definitely do not want to do this. And if you think this is what we're about you are mistaken.

Unethical Programming?

2009-12-03T16:58:17Z

The recent story about FaceBook's Farmville having more traffic than Twitter got me thinking: is there such a thing as unethical programming?
I know many of you will say that Farmville is harmless because it takes people away from boredom and provides them with entertainment. And, after all, they choose to do it.

But there is an undeniably addictive nature to these games. Each game not only competes with other games that a person might play when bored, but it also competes with stuff a person should be doing.

So -- where's the line? Would you write a game that "entertained" doctors in surgery? (Put another way, if you were designing medical software, would you add game-like hooks to keep people's attention focused on it as a way of competing with other medical devices?)

Would you write a program that people would rather play than have lunch? A game that millions of people spend 40-hours-a-week on, like Wow? FaceBook's games are using players to perform hours and hours of menial, mindless tasks as they market and sell to them and other FB users. At what point do you cross the line between simply entertaining people and harmfully manipulating them and using them?

Managing Technology Means Being Wrong a lot

2009-11-28T17:20:57Z

A friend yesterday twittered and posted into FaceBook a status update about Kanban and programming teams:

"list of electronic tools for lean and kanban teams http://bit.ly/6WW8cS #kanban"

(Kanban is a way of doing work where you use a board to show a "flow" of work and limit the number of activities in any one stage to a certain number)

To which a friend of his replied:

"Yeah, the whole idea of managing the pipeline in a structured way makes a lot of sense. In fact, strange as it sounds, I can see how you could apply the principles to a larger enterprise waterfall of iterative project[s]. You could use it to focus the team on the immediate pipeline...

Yikes!

]]> This reminded me so much of a friend of mine who is big into Scrum (He sits on the Scrum Alliance Board). To him, every problem is solved by some combination of Scrum. If you're running 20 teams on a program, you need a scrum of scrum. If your division has 120 teams you need a scrum of scrum of scrum. Got 500 teams in your huge enterprise? Well you need so many scrum-of-scrums that I lost count.

As technologists we are always looking for simple metaphors to handle complex systems. Simplicity is good -- we should always strive for it. The goal in creating a large system, whether a computer system or a system for managing programming, is to make it as brutally simple as possible, and not a bit more.

Of course, the very next question should be, how do I know when I've gone too far either making things too complex or too simple?

The answer to this is 1) small steps, 2) err on the side of simplicity, and 3) have a very responsive system that measures feedback and changes course

When I look at the ClimateGate emails, what strikes me the most is people actively trying to prevent the error-correction system -- open data and methods, honest peer review, critique -- from happening. This sets off big alarm bells. I got the same feeling from my Scrummy friend: whenever something didn't work using Scrum, his answer was always "well it wasn't being done right", not "we need to challenge our beliefs here"

Scrum just doesn't work that well at the program level. I'm not saying it can't work well at all, but I'm saying that you don't just take the way things happen on a co-located team of 5 and somehow "expand it" or blow it up like a big balloon and end up with something that can effectively track and manage 20 projects. It'd be nice if it worked like that, but it doesn't. (And don't take my word for it. Feel free to try it and find out for yourself. After all, the point of this article is that you have to take small steps and adapt, not that others can do your thinking for you)

The same goes for Kanban.

At Agile 2009 I went to a session on making better Story/Kanban boards. The guy started out with a simple board with a couple of columns. At the end of the 2-hour session, each of our teams had created this color-coded, post-it-tagged system from hell. It looked like something a serial killer would have created in the back room of his dank apartment -- if a serial killer wanted to build a new e-commerce application.

How did it get like this? Everybody worked in a vacuum and we all used intuition as to what might work or not. And intuition will commonly fail you when working with technology.

I'm going to repeat this in case you missed it: Intuition will commonly fail you when dealing with technology.That's why good technologists are also good scientists: looking for patterns, forming hypotheses, and coming up with reproducible tests.

That ResizeableArray that worked so well dealing with 400 people at your school is not going to scale to 400K people. The functional programming style used by you and three other guys probably won't scale to 50 off-site developers with varying degrees of competence. The offshore system that worked wonderfully well on your last project isn't going to work at all on this one -- even though it's basically the same type of project. The state management system you used when running on one box is going to flake out on you when you've got 100 boxes. I could go on. And on.

So we take little steps, we measure, and we adapt quickly. Whatever we do, from creating little pieces of functionality to creating Kanban and story boards to creating bug-tracking sytems, we take little steps, measure, and adapt quickly. Every team, every industry, every company is different, and unless we get good at those basic skills, we're just working from book knowledge and seat-of-our-pants thinking. Architecture Astronauts are not just architects. We have a little one inside of each of us.

Once you've lost your ability to be wrong, it's time to leave the game.

There is no do, only try

2009-11-23T16:56:52Z

I was reading a technology forum the other day when somebody asked a question that kind of went like this: "I am a programmer. I've noticed lately that my attention span is getting shorter and shorter. Could you guys provide me with quick advice on how to make my attention span longer?"

I suppose something in the form of a XKCD comic or a couple of sentences might not be too much?

On one hand, I really feel for the guy, as evidenced by my own struggles with distractions. But on the other hand, something's out of whack.

]]> A blog I read a year or two ago put it kind of like this: "Somewhere there is a 300-pound man in the latest running gear -- expensive shoes, clothes, cardio equipment, etc -- sitting on the couch eating Doritos and reading the latest "Runner's World" magazine article about how to improve your marathon times. This man has not ran for twenty years and will not go running any time soon."

It's the drive-by, magpie, spectator-in-the-sky thing again. Let me pick up this little shiny bit of information -- it gives me joy to collect shinnies -- and imagine for a moment that one day I actually might be doing something where I would need it. This imagining gives me a brief sense of satisfaction without any of the pain that would go into actually doing it.

My response was to quote Yoda: "There is no try, only do." which means either do something or don't, but even begin to fool yourself into thinking that collecting little easy-to-eat bits sparkly of wisdom is actually doing much of anything at all.

I'm working on a server deployment issue right now -- trying to cram F# into a web hosting provider that doesn't want to run anything in beta -- and I was thinking about what a pain that's been over the last couple of days. Why does everything have to be so complicated? So late last night I posted my question over on HubF#. The guys over there are awesome and I had many replies by the time I got up.

None of which were very useful, unfortunately. But it's not their fault.

One guy was doing something completely different, but my words sounded kind of the same to him (perhaps he was just scanning because of a lack of attention skills?) so he posted his link where he solved a different problem. A couple of guys gave a blanket answer that you would have picked up from any Microsoft sales pitch over the last ten years.

Actually I used the post as sort of a negative indicator -- there is no obvious easy answer. So I assume that means it is doable, just frustrating. That's good news! Means I'm a bit ahead of the curve. So today I set about doing it.

Interestingly enough, a couple of weeks ago the same amount of frustration would have probably stymied me -- as you solve problems, you build up "problem muscle" that you can use to solve even more problems. Eventually you're like "okay, this is going to be very painful and frustrating, but I'll work my way through it. I always do. Let's start!"

One of the things I notice when training technology teams is that good team are always making up excuses to succeed whereas poor teams are always making up excuses for why they can't. That's why when I'm coaching the critical thing I look for is how the team solves problems, and the critical thing I provide is a way for the team to increase their "problem muscle"

The fascinating part of this is that it does not depend on success. I very well may work for a few more days and never be able to solve the problem. But still I benefit from the attempt. It's a no-lose situation, but it requires action and not speculation.

Yoda was wrong, but he had a good point. There is no do -- accomplishing a goal is what you focus on but it's not the real reward. The real reward is being able to try -- to execute -- better and better each time you move towards a goal. Want a better attention span? Go make yourself do something that requires it. When you're done -- even if you fail -- you have a better attention span.

Want to learn how to improve your marathon time? Get off the couch and try running to the mailbox.

There is no do, only try.

Work at Home Heaven

2009-11-21T16:38:40Z

People look at me strangely when I tell them I run my own business from home. Mostly they smile and go on with our conversation, but there's this little look of concern that passes over their face for just a minute. It's like I've said something that just doesn't fit into their mental model of how the world should be.

If you're 24 and working on your startup with a couple of other college friends in a garage in SV the world is your oyster. But it gets complicated at 30, or 40. A lot of that has to do with being a high-tech worker living in a rural area. A lot of it has to do with having a family. When I talk about startups, or web applications, or SEO, or link arbitrage, or Angel capital, or social media, or hosting, or functional programming -- I might as easily be speaking in Greek for all the good it does. I simply don't live in a 21st century business culture.

So I play along.

]]> My FaceBook status updates are usually along the lines of "big traffic on the way into work today! I saw three squirrels!" or "If this day got any prettier I think I'd have to take the afternoon off!" or "if you name the spider that lives in your home office cubicle, does that make him a pet or a coworker?"

It's never "Need to get to work tonight instead of watching TV. I can probably get seven hours in if I work through supper and skip the news." or "I've spent two days working through design questions. Am I wasting too much time with this? Or are there real issues I should be addressing?" or "I wonder if I should just get the office cot out and sleep up here instead of spending all the time of walking to the house and getting in bed?"

People ask me what it's like to work for myself. It's great! Only the boss is an asshole.

But that's the way it has to be when working by yourself from your home office on your own business: if you don't put pressure on yourself nobody else is going to.

We live in a world where everything we own tries to take our time away from us. My Tivo is full of stuff that either I or my wife decided at some point would be cool to watch (I watch little regular TV, but do Tivo political programs and movies that look like they might be interesting) My web browser boots up with 15 pages of web content that continuously generates interesting stuff to spend my time on. I don't even get out the XBox or other game consoles because they passed from being curiosities to being actively addictive many years ago. My cell phone can do so many cool things I could spend a month just downloading and playing around with all of them. And then there's those handheld GPS units I've been meaning to get out and program...

There is this great weight of inertia, both from the surrounding culture, my status in life, and the technology I own to prevent me from actually doing anything. This inertia must be battled, must be overcome, and on a daily basis, for me to make progress.

Being aggressively self-motivated is a lot tougher than it was ten years ago.

We've become magpies, flirting here and there, picking up little shiny bits of information before flying off somewhere else.

So today's Saturday. I get up around 8, make breakfast while I surf the news quickly on the web. There! A great discussion on the leaked emails concerning Climate Warming! It's got all the stuff that turns me on: philosophy of science, how technology teams think, the politics of global warming, how paradigms change, etc. Plus there are real, live people on the internet who are wrong!

And it already took up two hours of my time last night while I was watching Stargate with my son (one of my fatherly duties -- doesn't that say something about modern life?)

Must. Resist. Posting.

Over on FaceBook, there are two are three interesting threads started up by friends. Marc Danziger has another one of his provocative posts over on Winds of Change. Marc, man, you can really write a lead and a hook! And then there's the healthcare vote in the Senate that threatens to blow up the deficit and has been bugging me for a week, and there's an awful lot of foreign-language editorials I'd like to read over on Watching America and ...

And heck, it's Saturday! I'd like to go outside! Mow the stupid grass, play with the dogs, take a hike in the mountains. Go out and live.

So slowly I make my list of stuff to do today on post-its and stick them on my monitor. Blogging makes a nice transition from web surfing to programming and I must feed the blogging monster. I have my DSLR with me so maybe I can get some fall shots from the office before walking back to the house.

I don't mean these last couple of posts to sound like whining -- if anything I feel extremely lucky to be able to work on my business from home. But there is a certain amount of misunderstanding that goes with working from home. It's not really paradise. In fact, it can be a lot more of a struggle than working from an office is. Ever have sick kids and a problem with a production app at the same time? Ouch. Ever miss a major family event because of a self-imposed impending deadline? That makes you popular. Struggle between picking up work on the side that doesn't meet your goals or selling something you like in order to continue forward? How bad does it hurt?

If these seem like easy problems -- problems you can solve by pulling out some moral lesson you learned on a TV show or with some easy slogan -- then this work-at-home heaven is not for you.

The Lure of the Paycheck Stub

2009-11-14T19:04:05Z

Got a paycheck stub? Then consider yourself lucky, or at least some folks say. With that little piece of paper you can purchase cars, get loans for unforeseen expenses, apply for jobs -- even play paycheck poker.

I was thinking about this magical piece of paper today as I worked on my start-up. It's a beautiful day here today -- temps in the mid 60s (15C), low humidity, clear blue skies, and gorgeous autumn views. It's Saturday. All my "normal" friends are out shopping, spending time with their family, hiking, or otherwise enjoying the day.

I'm up at my office, with the flu -- a fever, sore throat, and stomach ache -- banging away at a hunk of code that, if I'm lucky, might one day show somebody sometime that somehow, someway, I have an idea that's worth pursuing. If I'm really lucky, it might actually provide some value to some users somewhere. But most of the time getting to profitably isn't as simple as hacking out some code; it's a multi-step process, of which an piece of code is only a very small and replaceable part. So it's extremely unlikely that one piece of code I write today is going to change the world. It's as absurd as working at a pig farm hoping to breed flying pigs.

]]> As I sit here, I'm reminded of what a long-time criminal said once about getting rehabilitated in prison: "It's not so much that you change your mind and give up your old ways," he said, "it's that you just get tired. After a while it all just wears on your soul."

But a funny thing happens with start-up ideas.

It used to be that I thought that the emotion comes first, then the action. That is, first you get really excited about doing your startup, then you go through the pain of trying to make it work, pulled along each step of the way by your excitement.

Unfortunately, cognitive science tells us that it doesn't work that way. Instead, you act first, either developing the idea further on paper, with friends, or in code, and then that action makes you more energized. In fact, if you're really excited about an idea after only a few seconds it's probably a counter-indicator. People are notoriously poor predictors of future emotional results.

So while you're kicking around that next great idea with your buds, remember that the kicking around part is the part that makes you motivated: the more you test and work through an idea -- using code or not -- the more attached you get to it. Action comes first and then emotion.

What does that mean in a start-up world? It means that simply because you are not excited about an idea is no reason to give it up. Sure, if you kick it around and work with it and then you're still not motivated and getting bad feedback from your users, there's something wrong. But even then I'd argue that a lot of really, really boring ideas get very sexy the first time you get a check in the mail. The idea doesn't have to sell itself to you -- that's completely backwards. It's your job to validate the idea. (One of the reasons we have this backwards is that we're swamped in "business porn", but I digress)

It means that start-ups are always going to be like pushing a rock up a big hill. At first it's just you and the rock, but you keep pushing. Sometimes you make it to the top -- ramen profitability perhaps -- only to see that you've really got a much bigger hill ahead of you. And a bigger rock.

So if you're working on that next big startup somewhere, like I am, take heart in the fact that you act first and feel it later. That the purpose is to take ownership of you and that rock and to push it with all you've got.

Speaking of that other great rock-pusher, Sisyphus, Albert Camus said once,

Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Is it absurd to sit around writing code while sick in the hopes that you make something that will help people, knowing that the odds are stacked overwhelmingly against you? Yes, it is absurd. But absurd and valueless are two entirely different things.

I've Changed My Mind

2009-11-11T17:44:00Z

The advice for people with startups has always been "ideas don't matter, teams do" -- that means that great ideas with bad teams will always tank while even bad ideas with really great teams have a chance at becoming extremely successful. Or think of it this way: good teams always change and adapt and end up figuring out what works. Bad teams have a hard time adapting to the customers.

So I've always been very generous with ideas. Whenever I have a good idea (about startups) I share it with others. Who knows? Maybe somebody can do something with it. I know I can't -- I have a dozen ideas a year and, because of my location in the woods, have so far been unable to form any team at all, much less a good or bad one.

But this past week I had a good idea. I mean a really, really good idea. This thing could rock! It's one of my top 3 ideas of the last ten years and I don't fall in love with ideas that easily.

So I thought about it: should I share my idea over on, say, HackerNews, where other startup founders can come by and critique and offer a helping hand? That's what I usually do -- I love the atmosphere over there where everybody (mostly) is trying to help each other out.

But then I thought -- heck no. My problem is that I can't execute at all, not a lack of ideas. If I share my ideas all I'm doing is throwing away ideas that I might be able to execute to teams already formed who can execute immediately. That's like making bullets and giving them to your enemies to shoot at you.

So I've changed my mind: at least about this one idea. This time I'm developing a prototype, then slowly sharing the idea with folks in an ever-expanding circle. If there is an execution gap between me and my possible competitors, I'm not about to give them a head-start.

Maybe I'm wrong -- maybe I'm just being short-sighted and looking at this the wrong way. But from my vantage point if I don't build it and somebody else does and it really takes off, I'll feel a lot better if I didn't help them doing it. At least not until I give myself first shot at it.

For Today

2009-11-11T14:20:38Z

For Veteran's Day
Half a league half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack & Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke,
Shatter'd & sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse & hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

The Charge Of The Light Brigade
Alfred, Lord Tennyson