Blog, Cringely

Robert Cringely’s “I, Cringely” site has changed from a non-interactive plain ol’ web page to a blog format.

I can’t say that I care too much about the comments, but I do like the new page design.

Mostly I’m looking forward to more NerdTV interviews: “NerdTV is essentially Charlie Rose for geeks – a one-hour interview show with a single guest from the world of technology. Guests like Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy or Apple computer inventor Steve Wozniak are household names if your household is nerdy enough, but as historical figures and geniuses in their own right, they have plenty to say to ALL of us.”

Cringely does the best interviews I’ve heard – he has awesome guests (that you frequently can’t hear elsewhere) and asks great questions. The production of the first season of NerdTV was hit or miss – some episodes had barely audible audio – but I’m guessing that will be cleaned up a lot in Season Two.

A fantastic new graphic design company

Our family friend Anne Golliher just started a new graphic design company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s called “Gaddere,” and it is incredible. If you’re looking for wedding invitations, baby or wedding shower invitations, or invitations for any other celebration worth announcing, then you can’t go wrong talking to Anne.

Even if you’re not in the market, if you like great design you should take a look at the Gaddere designs portfolio to see some excellent examples of Anne’s work.

Oh yeah, and her husband Joe is the guy who told me about home roasting coffee beans, so apparently she married well too. 🙂

Edit: December 14, 2007, updated with new links.

Instant Coffee == Instant Yuck

I’m out of roasted coffee beans, bummer.

My caffeine habit won’t let me go without, so after scrounging around the kitchen I found some Folger’s instant. “Eh, how bad could it be?” I figured. Bad. Very Bad. Even heavily doctored Bad. After brushing my teeth twice I still can’t get the taste out of my mouth Bad.

Fortunately I have a home coffee roaster, aka an air popcorn popper, and some green coffee beans. 5 minutes of roasting later I have some incredibly fresh roasted coffee beans and a front porch full of chaff. (Chaff is the light, airy shell of the green coffee bean that comes off the bean while roasting and floats everywhere. It’s also one of the reasons that air popper roasting should be done outside.)

I learned about roasting your own coffee beans from a friend, who recommended Sweet Maria’s web site. They have a ton of good info about home roasting. It’s cheaper and better than a trip to Starbucks, and also a lot more fun!

Hot Wasabi, Hot Jobs

Conspiracy theory:

Joel posted his Language Wars and Wasabi posts on September 1, 2006.

He announced the new Joel on Software Jobs Board on September 5, 2006.

Hmm… Joel knew that his Language Wars and Wasabi posts would get a lot of attention, and perhaps some of that attention would last long enough to get a few extra people to notice the new jobs board…

Was the timing of those posts intentional? 🙂

(Yes, I know, Joel gets plenty of attention any time he says anything, but the Ruby comments alone seemed to generate more than the average amount of chatter.)

Smart Bear Software: Lightweight Code Review presentation

A couple weeks ago I saw a great talk by Jason Cohen, founder and CEO of Smart Bear Software about lightweight code review (pdf of slides).

A quick summary of Jason’s talk:

  • Up-front code review saves time and money by finding bugs earlier (backed up this claim with real world data).
  • Smart Bear has a product called Code Collaborator which “enables peer review of source code changes before or after files are checked into version control.”
  • His emphasis was on the process of code review rather than Code Collaborator, though he got plenty of questions about the software.
  • They did a big study with programmers at Cisco (“the largest-ever case study of peer code review”), talked about the results.
  • The most effective reviews are for less than 200 lines of code and take less than 1 hour.
    • Maybe you can do 400 lines and 1.5 hours, but that’s pushing it.
  • Positive social aspects of code reviews:
    • “ego effect:” knowing that someone else will be looking at your code may help you be a better developer immediately
    • you may learn a thing or two by seeing how others code
  • Create an atmosphere where finding bugs is good – whether you coded them or not. Bugs found here and now are much easier and cheaper to fix (and less embarrassing!) than bugs that turn up after you ship.

Jason was truly excited about this stuff, which helped made it a great presentation.

Jason (& company) wrote a book about lightweight code review called “Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review” – they’re offering it free (as in beer) from their website – that book title link will take you there. I just received mine in the mail and I’m looking forward to reading it.

(Yes, I read stuff like this in my spare time. I am, in fact, a geek. And proud of it. Of course if you’re reading this far odds are you too are a geek, so you’re not surprised.) I’ll write more as I read the book.

Herding Cats at Google

From an Information Week article about Google:

“Lots of small, short-lived projects mean traditional project management software based on task lists isn’t right for Google. For one thing, techies aren’t very good at cataloging how they spend their hours. What they are good at, it turns out, is writing up a few short sentences or snippets about what they do each day. Those get compiled in a database along with periodic updates from project leaders about a team’s deliverables.”

(That link is from page 4 of 5, fyi.)

What’s more important to a non-consulting / hourly billing company – (A) tracking the number of hours employees work or (B) tracking the actual work done?

Hmm, let’s see:

  • (A) Tracking the number of hours worked doesn’t necessarily tell you how much work was done. It may give you a hint, but what if you’re having a day like Joel sometimes has?
  • (B) Tracking the actual accomplishments tells you exactly how much work was done. You know where the project stands relative to its milestones.

From a “how is the project doing” point of view, option B seems to make a lot more sense. Getting Things Done is what makes money. More hours will probably lead to more work being done, but why use a second order measurement when the first order measurement is available?

Plenty of people who are smarter and more eloquent than me* have discussed why you can’t just measure “techies” by the number of hours they work. I’m glad Google is doing something better. Meow.

* I’m not even smart enough to know if “me” or “I” is the right word there.

Svec on Joel on Software on Language Wars

I was hoping to cash in on the popularity of Joel’s post, but then I noticed that everyone and their computer-illiterate grandmother who doesn’t have electricity has already commented on it, so I’ll just throw in some links:

Okay, I’ve got to throw in my 2 cents:  Joel drew a line in the virtual sand (silicon?) – not a very thick line, a medium “I stand over here” kind of line – and people started hurling themselves on one side or the other.  It’s interesting to see how many people seemed to be threatened by Joel’s post as if it was a personal attack against their professional way of life.

I think Joel was simply being honest – and because his company is successful he knows he’s right.  Sure, he makes some generalizations that might be a bit exaggerated (though not much, says I), but he’s got the results to back up his rhetoric.

Thoroughly entertaining – an excellent way to start a 3 day weekend!

Fast, Cheap, Good

“Tradeoffs: Fast, Cheap, Good – Pick Two.”

That saying is usually depicted with a triangle – each edge or point of the triangle has one of the words on it. Kind of a binary (or ternary?) thing:

  • You can have Fast and Cheap, but it’ll be lousy.
  • You can have Fast and Good, but it’ll be expensive.
  • You can have Cheap and Good, but it’ll take a long time.

The simple Pick Two decision implies that your project will be lousy, expensive or will never be completed in the first place – in other words, a failure. I think the choice is not that simple – nor should it be.

Vivid Media has a nifty interactive slider graphic that is more realistic than the Pick Two scheme (and it’s so much cooler than a plain ol’ triangle, too).
Each Fast, Cheap and Good slider moves a bit up or down as the other sliders are moved – it’s not strictly an ON/OFF relationship. There is more granularity than simply “fast or slow,” “cheap or expensive,” and “good or lousy.” These degrees of choice should be considered as a continuum of interrelated options – I think this is a much better way of thinking about the “What are the tradeoffs?” question.

Edit: Niksilver.com has some interesting comments on “good.”

Online calendar Kiko sold on Ebay

As you may have heard, the online calendar site Kiko was sold on Ebay (edit June 11, 2007: auction has been aged off of eBay) for $258,100. Kiko authors Richard White and Justin Kan blogged about why they sold Kiko (click their names for their posts), Richard explains more here.

From the first of Richard’s links:

“I am actually proud of this exit strategy in a way. While it’s not the one we envisioned going into things, I still think we are doing our best to satisfy the two most important stakeholders in Kiko: our investors and our users. We do care about our investors’ money and instead of just burning through the rest of the piggy bank trying to get our groove back we are trying to recoup their investment (we stand to gain little from the auction). We have also put in place both iCal export and account deletion so our users can take their data with them over to another calendar service if they so choose (or stick with Kiko while we find an acquirer).”

I don’t know how their investors will feel about this sale, and who exactly gets the proceeds from Ebay, but it does seem like this was better than just “burning through the rest of the piggy bank.”

I am very impressed by their attitude to their customers: let them take their data with them and/or delete their account. You can’t ask for much more from a free service. I suppose they could have open sourced it or donated it to someone, but I bet Kiko would languish and die if they did that. Hopefully making someone pay a non-trivial amount for it will help it survive, since the purchaser spent good money on it. Of course Google Calendar has a lot of momentum due to their sheer Google-ness, but there may be a space yet for Kiko.

Dharmesh Shah of onstartups.com comments on Kiko – he says:

“I just wish all that talent had been spent doing something that was almost as fun and cool – but would have actually created something of value.”

While Kiko didn’t skyrocket to a multibillion-dollar-Web-2.0-Google-is-jealous-and-O’Reilly-writes-a-bunch-of-books-about-them type of success, I don’t think you can say they didn’t create something of value. Their users apparently thought there was some value there, even if they delete their accounts today. And the Kiko developers probably learned a ton from doing it – there’s a huge amount of value there, even if its final incarnation isn’t Kiko itself.