As I write this I have just less than a 3 days before my tenure with Compendium Blogware will come to its end. I will be leaving my post as VP of Product and leaving it in the capable hands of our new Director of Engineering, PJ Hinton, whom I had the pleasure of hiring back in December of 2007. I started with Compendium Blogware in September of 2007 and since then have had the tremendous pleasure to watch it grow into a truly amazing company.
When I started as employee 4 (or so) back in September of 2007, I was in charge of a department of 1 (myself). I had a software product that was still very much in beta mode sitting on a single server. We had a small handful of clients (less than 25) and our single server had some issues supporting them. We didn't really have a product development process, there was no unit testing or any other formal testing, and next to no documentation.
In two years the product team has grown to a team of 8. The product has not only removed the beta tag, but is better than 4 nines stable. Our platform supports hundreds of millions of page views, millions of pieces of content, and tens of thousands of blogs. It does all of this on a service oriented, RESTful, multi data center, highly available and distributed platform. We have extensive automated testing, a published and well documented API, and a repeatable well understood release process.
In short, I'm incredibly proud to have been a part of such an amazing team and have witnessed this kind of growth. I've been very lucky in my career and most recently at Compendium to be able to make such in impact in such a short period of time. I will be starting at local search company ChaCha on August 10th as their VP of Engineering to take on a new and different set of challanges. Despite this change, I remain committed both personally and as a stakeholder to the continued success of Compendium. I have no doubt that Compendium will see continued growth and I look forward to seeing where that growth takes the company.
I'd also like to thank all of my coworkers over the past two years for making Compendium such a dynamic and fun place to work. Your continued generous support of my various fundraising activities was also much appreciated. We raised more than $10k over the past two years for various local charities which speaks to both the caliber and nature of the people I have been working with.
You can always reach my through my personal site,
mobocracy.net which has all of my various contact information. Thanks again everyone and best of luck.
Links for 2009-07-22
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-22
Links for 2009-07-20
- Cracking the Code: Breaking Down the Software Development Roles - Software development is done differently at every organization, and in every home office throughout the world. The process that one organization or person uses to develop software may work for their specific environment and situation but may fail miserably in another set of circumstances.
It is, in part, the differences in environments which make it so difficult to quantify the process of software development in a single set of terms that all practitioners can agree to. As newer approaches appear on the scene, such as extreme programming and agile development the perspective of the world on what the process should look like changes slightly or dramatically.
- The Amazing Blog : Your Web Service Might Not Be RESTful If… - I like this article because for the most part it confirms good design on the Compendium Blogware API.
- Study Hacks » Blog Archive » The Pyramid Method: A Simple Strategy For Becoming Exceptionally Good - My answer reflects an observation that plays an increasingly important role in my understanding of the world: if you want to do something interesting and rewarding — be it writing a novel, becoming a professor, or growing a successful business — you have to first become exceptional. As Study Hacks readers know, I think Steve Martin put it best when he noted that the key to breaking into a competitive and desirable field is to “become so good, they can’t ignore you.”
- xkcd - A Webcomic - Estimation - Oh how I love XKCD. In this episode, the author of the windows file copy dialog visits some friends.
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-20
Links for 2009-07-18
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-18
Links for 2009-07-17
- Automated Web Services Composition with the Event Calculus - As the web services proliferate and complicate it is becoming an overwhelming job to manually prepare the web service compositions which describe the communication and integration between web services. This paper analyzes the usage of the Event Calculus, which is one of the logical action-effect definition languages, for the automated preparation and execution of web service compositions. In this context, abductive planning capabilities of the Event Calculus are utilized. It is shown that composite process definitions in OWL-S can be translated into Event Calculus axioms so that planning with generic process definitions is possible within this framework.
- The problem with using hardware to compensate for slow software | Royal Pingdom - HOWEVER, it is all too common that companies don’t take code optimization seriously enough and never go beyond step 3 above. The solution will more or less always be to throw more hardware at the problem.
In addition to this, a lot of programmers simply assume that it’s ok to demand more powerful hardware for their software to run well and don’t put much effort into doing more with the same resources.
- Don Eyles, a 23-year-old self-described "beatnik" who had just graduated from Boston University and was set the task of programming the software for the Moon landing. : programming - A few years ago I watched a Dutch documentary about Edsger Dijkstra. He tells several anecdotes about his experience with software quality. One in particular stuck in my mind: shortly after the first successful moon landing, Dijkstra spoke to the head of development for the module software:
"How did you produce so many lines of perfect code?"
"Huh? We had a bug a few days before launch, it accidentally calculated the moon as repelling rather than attracting."
"Wow! Those guys were lucky to make it alive, then!"
"Yes, lucky..."
- YouTube - AsiaBSDCon 2009:The OpenBSD Release Process: A Success Story - Twelve years ago OpenBSD developers started engineering a release process that has resulted in quality software being delivered on a consistent 6 month schedule -- 25 times in a row, exactly on the date promised, and with no critical bugs. This on-time delivery process is very different from how corporations manage their product releases and much more in tune with how volunteer driven communities are supposed to function. Developer and testing laziness is mostly circumvented and leader frustration is kept to a minimum. The reasons, mechanics and social workings of our process have never been detailed outside the project, but now will be, hopefully providing some insight to others who face delays and quality issues with their own product lines.
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-17
Links for 2009-07-15
- A Calculus Analogy: Integrals as Multiplication | BetterExplained - Integrals are often described as finding the “area under the curve”. This description is misleading, like saying multiplication is for finding “the area of a rectangle”. Finding area is a useful property, but not the purpose. Integrals help us combine numbers when multiplication can’t.
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-15
Links for 2009-07-14
- Dynamic Perfect Hashing: A hash table with constant time lookup in the worst case, and O(n) space. : programming - Interesting discussion on dynamic perfect hashing and TST
- Robust Software: REST – a quick summary - A nice summary of RESTful Web Services (which is a book I love). And, another convert to the school of thought that says PUT is used if you own the URI, POST otherwise.
- Soft updates, hard problems [LWN.net] - If a file system discussion goes on long enough, someone will bring up soft updates eventually, usually in the form of, "Duhhh, why are you Linux people so stupid? Just use soft updates, like BSD!" Generally, there will be no direct reply to this comment and the conversation will flow silently around it, like a stream around an inky black boulder. Why is this? Is it pure NIH (Not Invented Here) on the part of Linux developers (and Solaris and OS X and AIX and...) or is there something deeper going on? Why are soft updates so famous and yet so seldom implemented? In this article, I will argue that soft updates are, simply put, too hard to understand, implement, and maintain to be part of the mainstream of file system development - while simultaneously attempting to explain how soft updates work. Oh, the irony!
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-14
Links for 2009-07-08
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-08
Links for 2009-07-07
- Simply Scheme: Introducing Computer Science - The entire 'Simply Scheme' book online. This is an excellent book for the beginning schemer.
- Tom Williams: Hired by Apple at 14. His full story. | Derek Sivers - I was recently in Vancouver Canada for a week, considering moving there, when my friend Ariel Hyatt said, “You have to meet this amazing guy Tom Williams. He got hired by Apple when he was only 14. I think the company had to, like, legally adopt him to do it. He’s a go-getter like you. Plus his wife, Jessie is an awesome country artist.”
I met Tom for dinner, loved his story, and wanted to share it with everyone.
Especially in this environment of 10%-25% unemployment, his story and philosophy have some inspiring lessons about how to get a job or make huge deals despite a lack of experience.
So I recorded a phone call and let him tell his tale in his own words:
- A Comparison of Open Source Search Engines « zooie’s blog - Later this month we will be presenting a half day tutorial on Open Search at SIGIR. It’ll basically focus on how to use open source software and cloud services for building and quickly prototyping advanced search applications. Open Search isn’t just about building a Google-like search box on a free technology stack, but encouraging the community to extend and embrace search technology to improve the relevance of any application.
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-07
Links for 2009-07-05
- Postini: Google's take on e-mail security | Security - CNET News - To identify and block spam and viruses, the automated Postini system looks for key words or phrases that indicate it's an ad or something dangerous, as well as looks at the structure of the e-mail message and the headers, said Kevin Lund, a software engineer who developed a lot of the code the Postini system runs.
The system scores each message on numerous combinations of criteria, assigning a weight to each and then comparing the score to those in a database of several hundred thousand message types that have been flagged as good or bad from Postini honey pots and customer spam reports. The system identifies and blocks more than 99 percent of the spam campaigns, according to Lund.
- What Is Keyword Density? | LazyTechie - Keyword density is the ratio between the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page to the total number of words contained on it. The normal range of keyword density is around 4-5% ,but it varies among search engines.
- Compas Pascal: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance - Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance. Jeff Atwood likes referring to his blog post about Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive. where he writes: "Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law, when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always."
I totally disagree, of course, but here is why
- Brewer's CAP Theorem - The three requirements are: Consistency, Availability and Partition Tolerance, giving Brewer's Theorem its other name - CAP.
- What does a CEO do? A CEO Job Description by Stever Robbins - What do CEOs do? A CEO Job Description.
Responsibility, duty, and all that…
* Part 1: A CEO Job Description
* Part 2: Measuring Success as a CEO
* Part 3: Pitfalls and solutions for the CEO
* Part 4: Coaching tips to stay sane and skillful at the top of the heap.
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-05
Links for 2009-07-04
- Work and meaning - In introspective from a former HP manager on the 20-20-60 rule.
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-04
Links for 2009-07-03
- ongoing · Slow REST - To summarize: For any and all PUT/POST/DELETE operations, we return “202 In progress” and a new “Status” resource, which contains a 0-to-100 progress indicator, a target_uri for whatever’s being operated on, an op to identify the operation, and, when progress reaches 100, status and message fields to tell how the operation came out. The idea is that this is designed to give a hook that implementors can make cheap to poll.
- Lessons Learned: How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis - In the lean startup workshops, we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the technique of Five Whys. It allows teams to diagnose sources of waste in their development process and continuously improve, reversing the usual trend of teams getting slower over time. With Five Whys, teams can accelerate, even as they scale.
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-03
Links for 2009-07-02
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-02
Links for 2009-07-01
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-07-01
Links for 2009-06-30
- Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google - Local company ChaCha made the list, as well as some ones that I hadn't heard of.
- The Quarterlife Crisis - IDENTIFIED FOR THE first time in 2001, the Quarterlife Crisis has been written about most notably by Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner in the New York Times best seller Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties.
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-06-30
Links for 2009-06-29
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-06-29
Links for 2009-06-25
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-06-25
Links for 2009-06-24
- MetaWeblog - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - The MetaWeblog API is an application programming interface created by software developer Dave Winer that enables weblog entries to be written, edited, and deleted using web services.
The API is implemented as an XML-RPC web service with three methods whose names describe their function: metaweblog.newPost(), metaweblog.getPost() and metaweblog.editPost(). These methods take arguments that specify the blog author's username and password along with information related to an individual weblog entry.
- UIzard - Web Based Ajax Development Tool - uizard is an in-browser web application development tool.
- Let's make the web faster - Google Code - From building data centers in different parts of the world to designing highly efficient user interfaces, we at Google always strive to make our services faster. We focus on speed as a key requirement in product and infrastructure development, because our research indicates that people prefer faster, more responsive apps. Over the years, through continuous experimentation, we've identified some performance best practices that we'd like to share with the web community on code.google.com/speed, a new site for web developers, with tutorials, tips and performance tools.
- Face detection in pure PHP (without OpenCV) - Maurice Bloggue - Some PHP sample code that can do face detection.
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-06-24
Links for 2009-06-22
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-06-22
Links for 2009-06-19
- Abakas: Verifying a Bug - I probably would have titled this post: 4 types of fixed. As someone that does QA for part of their job, you recognize the 4 different types of 'fixed'. 1. It all works great, and nothing else broke. 2. It works great, but something else broke. 3. It does the same thing it did before. 4. It does something different but still not right.
This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-06-19
