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All posts by moore - 16. page

“Run less software”

RunningThis post from the folks at Intercom makes some really good points about the benefits you can get from leveraging other software solutions. It’s an interesting article, but the source works at a company that offers a SaaS solution to help you help your customers (I’m a fan). You can read some interesting discussion at HN. An interesting quote from the post:

Choosing standard technologies is very similar to this, only in software. You need to constrain yourself to solving problems mostly, but not exclusively, with a small, specific set of standard tools. By doing this over time we become experts in them. Then, we are able to build better and faster solutions from them.

From my experience with small teams, having a standard software stack is a big win. It lets you reuse business logic and skills across your business. (The spread of microservices may mean this matters less in the future, though with a small team and product microservices may be overkill.)

However, I wish Rich had titled it “write less software” because that is really what he is advocating for. When I use AWS or Intercom or Gmail, I’m not really running less software. In fact, I may be running more. Since I don’t have insight into those applications, I really don’t know. But I’m not concerned about writing, reading and maintaining as much software, and that is the true win.

Programming | moore | | Leave a comment

AWS Quick Starts

StopwatchIf you are looking to stand up an application quickly, I often recommend the AWS marketplace. This service has thousands of vendor maintained solutions and is a great way to get going quickly. Note that some of the solutions have extra per hour charges, and if that is the case per second billing won’t apply. These solutions are focused on individual AWS EC2 instance images (so you can quickly stand up a phpbb instance or a redmine server, for example).

However, another good option is AWS Quick Starts. These are recipes for deployments, possibly of multiple virtual machines, and are aimed at handling larger business problems. There are over 80 listed on the Quick Start page right now, ranging from creating a data lake to a HIPAA reference architecture to running devops tools like consul and bitbucket. These solutions may or may not carry additional charges, so make sure review licensing and billing information as well as functionality.

If you are thinking about setting up a complex system in AWS, it’s worth some time to see if someone has put a reference Quick Start together. It may not fit your needs perfectly, but can be a good place to begin.

AWS Tips | moore |

Questions to ask interviewers

Person in suitI’ve been doing a fair amount of interviewing lately (looking for work, not hiring) and there’s always that moment when the interviewer asks “so, do you have any questions for me”. Here are some of my favorite questions:

  • How long have you been working at company YYY? This helps me understand their perspective on the company. If they are new, they’ll have fresh eyes. If they have been at the company for years, it’s interesting to understand why they’ve stayed. This can also lead to a discussion of turnover.
  • What is a typical day like for this position? This helps me understand what the company emphasizes. This can also lead to a discussion of the development cycle (weekly releases, etc).
  • Who are your typical customers? When talking to a company, I always want to know who they sell to. This shows I have an interest in the company beyond just the tech work I’ll be doing. I want to hear words like “wide variety of clients”, “we find most of our customers by referral” or “we’re focused on niche YYY”. Of course I can always do research and see how the company markets itself and see if what I am hearing from the interviewer is consistent with how the company presents itself.
  • What do you do when folks are on the bench (if it is a consulting company)? “The bench” is where consultants who aren’t making money for the company are. What kind of projects are they working on? How often are folks on the bench?
  • Finally, what is the worst part about working at company YYY? This is the inverse of the “what is your biggest weakness” question that is sometimes asked. But every company has its warts. I’m probably going to find out anyway, but it’s good to ask and get the interviewer’s perspective.

What are your favorite questions to ask interviewers?

Jobs Lifehack | moore | | Leave a comment

Management Debt

This post by Ben Horowitz is well worth the read as he discusses a few types of management debt, where a short term decision has long term consequences that you’ll have to expend energy to repay.

This quote stuck out:

Companies execute well when everybody is on the same page and everybody is constantly improving. In a vacuum of feedback, there is almost no chance that your company will perform optimally across either dimension. Directions with no corrections will seem fuzzy and obtuse. People rarely improve weakness that they are unaware of. The ultimate price you will pay for not giving feedback: systematically crappy company performance.

If you’ve read “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”, you’ll remember he talks about giving feedback all the time so that when you have to give feedback it’s not exceptional (he also talks about how this is not a normal human capacity). When you don’t set up systems for this feedback eventually you end up with a rudderless ship. There’s a reason that systematized feedback methods (the dreaded yearly review, among others) exist in almost every organization.

Business | moore | | Leave a comment

Book Review: Working With Coders

Woman with 1s and 0sSoftware is so integral to business processes and relatively inexpensive compared to labor that I believe every company is going to be a custom software company, in the same way that every company is an accounting company or every company uses paper. I happened on an interesting blog post and saw the author had written a book, “Working With Coders”. How non technical folks interact with coders is a topic of perennial interest to me, so I picked it up after reading the first few pages on Amazon. The book is written for clients, CEOs or project managers who are going to be working with developers to deliver applications that will provide business value.

Frankly, I couldn’t put it down.

The author, Patrick, is an engaging, opinionated writer. He breaks down complicated concepts into easily digestible pieces. Where there’s more to the story, there’s a footnote with a snarky comment or a link to more information. Patrick also provides nuts and bolts examples to show why something that seems simple to change is not (scaling text in a browser, for example). He also covers how big decisions like language, frameworks and library choices at the beginning of a project constrain freedom and choices further down.

Patrick covers what developers do, how they think, and why projects often fail. I thought his explanation of the benefits of agile development was darn good, and his explanation that even agile projects fail more often then they succeed was pretty depressing. He also discusses how the house construction metaphor for building software is just a big fat untruth.

I also enjoyed the section about testing in general, the various types of testing, and where they make sense. There’s also a section on finding coders, including a good explanation of why not to hire them as employees (you might be better off just hiring a development shop, depending on your needs). The chapter on how to deal with common issues (“the team hates each other”, “we’re behind schedule”) was worthwhile. His solutions won’t work for everyone. Maybe you’ll want to deal with these issues differently, but considering them before they happen will only help you prepare.

Of course, I also enjoyed the chapter on how to keep coders happy (continuous learning, quiet, a fast computer). In general the author is careful to avoid stereotypes, but does do a good job of covering common themes. I haven’t met too many developers who love working in bullpen environments.

I am definitely not the target audience. Neither is someone who is an experienced manager of developers. However, I am a subject of the book, so it resonated with me and I definitely found myself nodding along. There aren’t too many books I have wanted to distribute copies of (the two others are “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” and “Climate Wars”), but this is one.

If you work in a consulting practice with inexperienced clients or if you work in a product company with an owner or higher up that isn’t technical, reading this book will give you insights into their questions and thought processes. And if you can find a way to give them this book without being condescending (“hey, I found this book fascinating for helping facilitate conversation, maybe you will too”), both they and you will benefit.

Books Business Programming Technology and Society | moore | | Leave a comment

Are you working on the business or in the business?

Dog in a suitAs a business owner, it’s important to realize that the engine of the business (the people and processes that allow you to make the product or service, whatever that is) is as important, if not more so, than the product of the business. This changes over time, of course. When you are just starting out, the product needs to be made, otherwise you won’t have anything to sell. But over time, the other aspect, the business structure, will come to the fore. This is because as a business scales, you need to be able to recruit new talent, market your product, and spread knowledge throughout your company.

I was reminded of these facts by this post, “My Biggest Regret”, from Marty Haught, of Haught Codeworks. He’s kind of a big deal in the Ruby community, but reveals that he was a bit … lazy when it came to business development. From the post:

Apparently, I’m not the only one with this impression. You commonly hear that business owners need to work on the business, not in the business. I loved building software so much that I just wanted to stick with that.

That’s the perennial issue with building a business to give you freedom. Be aware that the bigger the business you build (the more successful) the more you’ll be taken away from building the product and the more you’ll be pushed toward building the business. (There are exceptions, but they require a certain scale. I’m aware of a couple of technical founders who stepped away from business management and focused on development/new initiatives, but that’s rare enough that it is worth commenting on and it also requires a team of about double digit size and margins to allow that to happen.)

The business principles of the solo consultant apply to big companies too. Doing the work is only part of building a business. Ignore that fact at your peril.

Business | moore | | Leave a comment

Fun with golang

Prairie Dog
Yes, it’s not a gopher, but they are related.

I’m writing a small piece of work in golang. It’s been fun to learn a new language. Initial thoughts:

  • I love the strict compiler. It saved me from making some dumb mistakes. It’s annoying at times (when you are cleaning up after println debugging you have to remove the log import statement).
  • I love that go fmt is built right into the language. No more formatting wars.
  • The standard library has some testing support but it’s pretty primitive.
  • It was weird that you have way to mark methods as private.
  • I did a small bit of concurrency work and go seems like a great fit for that.
  • The docs are great. I spent a lot of time on the Tour and the API docs.
  • The name is too general, but when googling, I was able to search for ‘golang’ and retrieve good results.

I have a few friends that rave about go. I can see why.

Programming | moore | | Leave a comment

Podcast Pick: A16z

I have been enjoying the A16z podcast for the last couple of years. It’s regular, dense content on a wildly varying set of technical subjects. I love hearing Benedict Evans talk about, well, anything–I find him quite insightful. But the podcast is not so dense I can’t listen to it on 1.4x speed.

I tend to listen to the more software specific episodes on APIs and on B2B2C business models (which seems to have been deleted). But every so often it’s nice to be jarred out of my world and listen to an episode about product or space or investing.

You can listen to past episodes here and get the RSS feed here.

 

Business Podcast | moore | | Leave a comment

AWS documentation now open source and on Github

TypewriterThis was announced recently. The AWS docs are now available on Github for everyone to review and improve. I love documentation (have for years). I think it’s great that AWS is now allowing PRs against their documentation. Some products have not yet uploaded their docs, ahem. It can only improve the speed of change.

I think it will also give a good glimpse into usage stats of AWS services. If a service doesn’t have any PRs or issues opened, it’s unlikely to be widely used (or, alternatively, it could be totally stable, or have users that don’t use Github). It’d be a fun project to pull the number of contributions to these repos via the Github API and publish that data.

I still feel that guides like og-aws have a place in the world of AWS documentation–opinions and real world stories fit better there than they do in official AWS documentation. And this is still too new to know if PRs and fixes will be pulled into the docs in a timely manner. But it’s great to see the AWS teams experimenting with ways to improve their documentation at scale.

AWS | moore | | Leave a comment

Useful Tool: Intercom

Intercom In WallIntercom has been extremely helpful in allowing targeted messages to help users gain knowledge of The Food Corridor application. (Thanks for the recommendation, OTL!) What I’ve found most useful about Intercom is that it allows non technical users to build rulesets to target specific messages. This helps you help your users uncover new functionality, but only at the moment when the functionality is useful.

For example, if someone has signed up but not created a booking in TFC, we can send them a message a week after they sign up with a helpful link. This message can be via email or an in-app message, and if they respond to the in-app message, it notifies customer support just as if a chat was started any other way.

As a developer, all I had to do to get this data (which lives in our database) up to Intercom was to craft a javascript object. I added a method in the application_controller and have it cached for a while, because we ended up sending dozens of attributes up, and they are slow changing. From then on, the message targeting is done entirely within Intercom, where the non technical user can build rules based on this custom data plus any data that Intercom collects by default (last login, etc).

If you do want to target messages specific web pages (only pop up a message on page XXX, but not page YYY) you need an understanding of regular expressions. Depending on how comfortable your non technical users are and how complicated your site is, a developer may need to write the first regular expression and then have the other users extend it.

I’m skipping over other pieces of Intercom, including a knowledge base and in app synchronous chat. I think those are valuable as well, but the real win for me was allowing non technical users to control in app messaging with minimal software development investment.

Useful Tools Web Applications | moore | | Leave a comment