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“Wave a magic wand”

wand photoThat was what a previous boss said when I would ask him about some particularly knotty, unwieldy issue. “What would the end solution look like if you could wave a magic wand and have it happen?”

For instance, when choosing a vendor to revamp the flagship website, don’t think about all the million details that need to be done to ensure this is successful. Don’t think about who has the best process. Certainly don’t think about the technical details of redirects, APIs and integrations. Instead, “wave a magic wand” and envision the end state–what does that look like? Who is using
it? What do they do with it? What do you want to be able to do with the site? What do you want it to look like?

Or if an employee is unhappy in their role, ask them to “wave the magic wand” and talk about what role they’d rather be in. With no constraints you find out what really matters to them (or what they think really matters to them, to be more precise).

When you think about issues through this lens, you focus on the ends, not the means.  It lets you think about the goal and not the obstacles.

Of course, then you have to hunker down, determine if the goal is reachable, and if so, plan how to reach it. I like to think of this as projecting the vector of the ideal solution into the geometric plane of solutions that are possible to you or your organization–the vector may not lie in the plane, but you can get as close as possible.

“Waving a magic wand” elevates your thinking. It is a great way to think about how to solve a problem not using known methods and processes, but rather determining the ideal end goal and working backwards from there to the “hows”.

Business Lifehack Useful Tools | moore |

The power of SQL–WP edition

lightning photoI’ve noticed a lot of comment spam lately, and had been dealing with it piecemeal. I have all comments moderated, so it wasn’t affecting the user experience, but I was getting email reminders to moderate lots of comments that were not English and/or advertising something.

WordPress lets you turn off comments for a post, but it is tedious through the GUI. So, I dove into the wordpress database, and ran this SQL query:

update wp_posts set comment_status = 'closed' where post_date < '2014-01-01';

This sets comments to closed for all posts from 2013 or earlier (over 1000 posts).  The power of the command line is the ability to repeat yourself effortlessly.  (The drawback of the command line is its obscurity.)

I should probably write a cron job to do that every year, as posts older than two years old aren’t commented on much. To be honest, the comments section of ‘Dan Moore!’ isn’t used much at all–I know some blogs (AVC) have vibrant comments areas, but I never tried to foster a community.

Blog Useful Tools | moore |

Twitversation: how much do you converse on Twitter?

twitter photo
Photo by eldh

You know what I said a few days ago?

I’d love to have stats on this to make myself more accountable, but I wasn’t able to find an easy way to show my Twitter usage (new tweets vs replys vs retweets)–does anyone know one?

Well, I didn’t find anything and thought it’d be fun to learn some of the Twitter API, a bit of Django, Bootstrap, and how to host something on Heroku.  So, I wrote an app, Twitversation, which gives you a rough approximation of how much you converse on Twitter, as opposed to broadcasting.  You can enter your Twitter username and it presents a breakdown graph and a numeric score (I’m 60 out of 100, whereas patio11 scores 78 and Gary V scores a hefty 83.

Twitversation only pulls the last 200 tweets, so it’s not canonical, but it should be enough to give you a flavor.  Sarah Allen has a post up about her score.

What’d I learn?  Among other things:

  • Heroku is super easy to get started on. And it’s free!  Perfect for your MVP.
  • Django has an unfortunate term for the C in the MVC (they call it a view).
  • You can create a pie graph using only CSS and HTML.
  • Side projects take longer than you think.
  • Picking a side project that doesn’t require any feeding is liberating.  Twitversation will keep running without any attention on my part, as opposed to my other side project.
  • Python’s dependency management is a bear for a newbie.  I didn’t have to do much with this project, because it had its own vagrant vm, but I saw some of the complexity out of the corner of my eye.  Makes me long for the JVM and classpaths, and I never thought I’d say that.
  • Catchy names are hard to come up with.

Hope you enjoy!

APIs Side Project Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |

Mis en place

kitchen knife photo
Photo by Australian War Memorial collection

Professional chefs have a concept termed ‘mis en place’.  While I know very few professional chefs, the idea appeals to me.  It basically means ‘keep your workplace in order, before you start doing anything important’.  (Of course, you can read about ‘mis en place’ more on Wikipedia.)

I find that this is very true of software development as well.  If you don’t have your workplace in order, you will suffer.  Now, the definition of ‘workplace’ varies–someone building a webapp has a different work environment than someone building software that will run on ASIC chips.  I’ll speak to my workplace, but I challenge you to review your workplace and see what, if anything, is out of sorts.

I’m going to break this up into three different segments.  First is the physical, then organizational, then the coding environment.

First off, the physical workspace.  This includes your desk, your monitor and computer setup, your work environment (headphones, bull pen), and your view.  It also includes your body–how you are sitting, how often you move around.  My current physical workspace is a desk with perhaps a bit too much clutter on it, a desktop machine (I know! they still sell them, apparently.  And you can get a lot of machine for not much money), and a view outside.  My work environment, since I’m working from home, is alternately morgue like and circus like, depending on who comes down to the basement.

Then there’s the organizational component.  Since I’m now contracting, this is something I have less control over, but it is important to organize your working environment in terms of the organization as much as you can.  Are you working on the right things?  Are the right people on the team?  Are they spending the right amount of time on the project?  In business speak, is everything aligned?  If the answer is no, how can you fix this?

Finally, there’s the actual hands on coding environment.  This can include everything from having a continuous deployment environment to your shell aliases to your software stack to your IDE (if you lean that way).  This is what I originally thought this post was going to be about, because this aspect of the workplace is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak.

Problems with any of these can cause a project to fail.  So make sure your work environment as clean, ordered, and ready to go as possible before you start a new project, or if you are in the middle of one, take some time to clean things up as you go.  You’ll be happier and more productive.

Programming Useful Tools | moore |

GuideStar, or Find the Form 990

nonprofit photo
Photo by jurvetson

Tis the season!  You may not give as much as Bill Gates (in fact, I bet you don’t).  But, if you give money to any non profits, you should be aware that the IRS requires every 501(c)(3) organization to file a form 990. (This post is not going to be useful to my readers in other countries, but I’d be interested to know if there are analogous services elsewhere.)

That form 990 is required to be publicly available. You can request a copy as well.

But, you may be in the middle of making a donation, or you may not want to contact the organization to request a 990. GuideStar is a non-profit information aggregator, and they have 990’s for most organizations. You do have to create a free account, but that’s it. If you pay for a premium account, you have access to more years of 990s, but I’ve found that for the casual inquiry, what the free account provides is enough.

There is all kinds of interesting information in the 990. Here’s the 2013 990 for the New York City Ballet. In it, we can see that this organization:

  • has 66M of revenue and expenses
  • has millions of dollars of investment income
  • paid 3.4M in advertising
  • paid 20k for meetings
  • has a large number of directors who all work for free
  • pays the ‘ballet master in chief’ 800k in salary

And plenty of other interesting information.

If you are thinking of giving to an organization, you can learn a lot about it from the form 990’s it files.

Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |

Follow people on Hacker News, get new posts in your inbox

Ever since Jeff Beard introduced me to Hacker News, it’s been one of my favorite sites.  You can check out my profile here.

Justin Jackson pointed me to a useful tool which lets you follow activity on HackerNews: HNWatcher. This lets you set up searches for various terms, users or other interesting topics on Hacker News, and emails you the results regularly.

Right now, I simply follow a few users that say interesting things, but I could see it being as useful as google alerts for staying on top of certain topics.

If you’re an avid Hacker Newser, or are interested in what this demographic (startups, hackers, overindexed on Silicon Valley, overwhelmingly young and male) has to say, sign up for HNWatcher today.

Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |

Lessons from curating a link blog

link photo
Photo by StockMonkeys.com

I maintain a link blog about Colorado food and local food in general.  I use Tumblr, but I’m only incidentally interested in Tumblr traffic.  Tumblr hooks up to Facebook and Twitter, and pushes links there.  (I realize that I am missing interaction on Twitter and Facebook by using these networks as broadcast only, but I don’t have time to fully engage, so I thought a limited presence was better than nothing.)

Having maintained this link blog for over two years, I have learned a few things.

  • It is easy to start a project like this, but hard to finish.  There’s always more to do.  I think I’ll stop when it stops being interesting.
  • Deciding to do this is a great way to gain a broad understanding of a field while providing some value (via curating).  As you find more and more sources of links, videos, articles and audio content, you’ll gain a sense of what is happening.  Even if you don’t painstakingly read every article, you’ll still get a sense.
  • Speaking of sources, Google alerts is your friend.  I get emailed alerts on a variety of searches, and about 25% of the results are worth posting.  Facebook and twitter are additional great sources of links.
  • An RSS reader can help you if you are really diving in.
  • Giving someone notice that you’ve referenced their article via an ‘@’ mention will get you their attention.
  • Queuing up posts on Tumblr is a life saver.  This lets you stack up posts and portion them out one per day.  I typically have between 15 and 30 posts in my queue.  This makes timely posts more difficult, but frees me up to forget about the link blog for weeks at a time.
  • A link blog like this is a great use of your in between time, especially if you have a smartphone.  In five minutes I can scan and post two or three links, where five minutes is barely enough time to think of a regular blog post.  The Tumblr app is very good.
  • A linkblog is a great resource for other content generation.  I have a newsletter about local food as well, and a key section of that is interesting links.  Those are almost entirely drawn from the Tumblr.

The linkblog approach is very similar to Twitter, but differs in a few crucial ways:

These attributes make a linkblog a fine complement to Twitter.

There are some problems with this model, however.

  • Limited interaction with followers, either on Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter.
  • I’ve found that engaging on Twitter and Facebook directly is far more effective if you want content to be viewed or links to be clicked.
  • A linkblog like this is not truly building my tribe

So, if you have limited time, want to gain insight into a particular area of interest, and are OK with the drawbacks, create a linkblog.

Content Useful Tools | moore |

Lob Postcard Review

A few months ago, I wrote a Zapier app to integrate with the Lob postcard API. I actually spent the 94 cents to get a postcard delivered to me (I paid 24 cents too much, as Lob has now dropped their price). The text of the postcard doesn’t really matter, but it was an idea I had to offer a SaaS that would verify someone lived where they said they lived, using postal mail. Here are the front and back of the postcard (address is blacked out).

Lob Postcard Sample, address side
Lob sample postcard, address side
Lob Postcard Sample, front
Lob sample postcard, front (from PDF)

Here is the PDF that Lob generated from both a PDF file I generated for the front (the QR code was created using this site) and a text message for the back.

A few observations about the postcard.

  • The card is matte and feels solid.
  • The QR code is smudged, but still works.
  • The text message on the back appears a bit closer to the edge on the actual postcard than it does on the PDF image.
  • The front of the postcard appears exactly as it was on the PDF.
  • It took about 5 business days (sorry, working from memory) for delivery.

So, if I were going to use Lob for production, I would send a few more test mailings and make sure that the smudge was a one off and not a systemic issue. I would definitely generate PDFs for both the front and back sides–the control you have is worth the hassle. Luckily, there are many ways to generate a PDF nowadays (including, per Atwood’s Law, javascript). I also would not use it for time sensitive notifications. To be fair, any postal mail has this limitation. For such notifications, services like Twilio or email are better fits.

In the months since I discovered Lob, I’ve been looking for a standalone business case. However, business needs that are:

  • high value enough to spend significant per notification money and
  • slow enough to make sending mail a viable alternative to texting or emailing and
  • split apart from a larger service (like dentist appointment scheduling)

seem pretty few and far between. You can see a short discussion I kicked off on hackernews.  However, they’ve raised plenty of money, so they don’t appear to be going anywhere soon.

But the non-standalone business cases for direct postcard mail are numerous (just look in your mailbox).

APIs Business Technology and Society Useful Tools | moore |