Kyle Cordes

Node is a combination of Google’s V8 JavaScript implementation, and various plumbing and libraries. The result is an unusual and clever server programming platform. Node is in a fairly early development phase, and already has a remarkably active community: ~9000 mailing list messages (as of June 2010) and many dozens of projects and libraries. I’ve spent some time digging through Node code and writing small bits of it, and was pleased with what I found.

Why is Node worthy of attention?

• JavaScript is a Next Big Language, it is everywhere. It is probably the most widely used programming language ever.
• I know a few things about asyncronous server programming, having done a lot of it in 1990s IVR software; it is very well suited to serving a large user population.
• Node is accumulating libraries at an impressive rate, indicating momentum.
• There are significant advantages in developing a whole application stack (server and client code) in a single language. For example, this makes code and business logic sharing works across tiers. Using Node, a JavaScript-HTML tool, a JavaScript-CSS tool, JSON, etc., it is possible to develop a complex web application using only JavaScript.

Node is not all unicorns and roses though.; my most serious misgiving about it is that it does not (yet) have a great strategy to make straightforward use of many-core servers. We’ll have to see how that develops over time.

Node Knockout

The team at Fortnight Labs is putting together Node Knockout, a 48-hour Node programming contest. I am a fan of such contests. I’ve offered to help out by being a judge, and I’ve also signed up Oasis Digital as a sponsor.

As a judge, I can’t be on a team; I’ve like to see a team or two form here in St. Louis, though.

Tags: contest, javascript, node.js, programming

For today, a “day job” topic:

Oasis Digital (my firm) is a custom software development shop. It is not a staffing or recruiting firm; there are many good firms in those businesses, and I have no desire to join them in that market. Oasis Digital doesn’t offer contract-to-hire, it doesn’t charge a percentage of a hire’s pay, and does not recruit in for customer placement.

Nonetheless, we do occasionally help our customers hire.

Really?

I’ve heard customers and our own team members express surprise at this. Isn’t it against our own interest to help a customer with a direct hire, who might end up doing some work instead of Oasis Digital doing it?

In a short-term, trivial sense it is perhaps against our interest. If we wanted every project to go on forever, using 100% only Oasis Digital staff, then we would make sure to never help any customer with any hire at all. But that is completely unrealistic. There are millions of software developers (and sometimes it seems almost as many software development firms). We are in a competitive market. Our customers have a choice, they can do business with us or have someone else write their software instead, regardless of whether we help them with hiring.

Therefore, the real question is whether to be greedy for the short term, or visionary for the long term. We choose the latter. Our policy is that we are happy to help our customers hire direct staff. We believe that this will, in the long term, lead to success for our customers and for Oasis Digital.

We assist with hiring in 3 ways.

Direct Assistance with Hiring and Onboarding

At Oasis Digital we have a somewhat unusual hiring process: in addition to the usual interviews by phone, in person, and otherwise, we ask (and pay) prospective developers to write some code for us based on a short specification. The resulting code, and conversation about it, provides a great opportunity to get to know someone (and to assess the results they will create) very quickly before hiring them. We assess technical skills as well as teamwork / cultural fit. We have a high bar to hiring and a defined process to reach that bar. At the same time, our process respects potential employees, by not asking for sample work to be done for free.

A good hire, though, is not the finish line. It is the starting line! During the first months of a new developer’s work we have an onboarding process in which the new developer sets up a work environment (mostly by referring to project documentation), then implements tiny changes, then small changes, then medium changes, then finally can begin work on large, important tasks. Throughout these initial months, the new developer works with more frequent collaboration and code/change review than will be needed in the long run. We have found that with our hiring and onboarding processes (described above at a very high level), we have a high success rate.

The first and most direct way we can assist our customers, therefore, is to simply execute these processes for them: assist with interviews, sample projects, and lead the onboarding effort.

Same Standards

When working with a mixed team consisting of Oasis Digital staff as well as customer staff, we hold everyone to the same high standards.

I’ve seen teams that work the other way: accepting a lower standard of work from a customer’s internal staff. It ends badly. We would rather lose a customer, than ship bad software. Our reputation matters more than the next dollar.

Pass It On

Lastly, our processes aren’t a deep secret; the key is not the ideas, it is the execution. We are happy to teach our way of working to customers (and everyone else, in blog posts and talks). Even at the price (free to read, normal billing for customer work) it is a hard sell, though: hiring is often deeply embedded in how companies work.

Stay Tuned

I’ve summarized here at a high level; expect future posts and talks with many more details.

Tags: hiring

On Feb. 27 at St. Louis Innovation Camp 2010, I gave a talk on the SaaS business model. I posted the slides, handout, audio, and transcript soon thereafter. Here, finally, is a video of the 44-minute-long talk. Why did it take over three months to get online? Read on below.

This is an x.264 video, shown here initially with a Flash-only player (FV Wordpress Flowplayer). The video file is served by Amazon’s CloudFront CDN, which is trivial to sign up for without any sales process or minimum service cost. Later I’ll replace this Flash-only widget with one that offers HTML5 video (for iPad use, in particular), when I find one that works sufficiently well.

That’s the easy part, though. Getting this video to you here was an adventure, and not in a good way. Three recordings were made of the talk:

1. We hired a professional videographer to record the talk. When I say professional, I mean it only in the most literal way, i.e. the videographer charged money. They showed up with a nice camera and a wireless lapel mic… but somehow produced a broken video recording (the first 10-15 minutes were intermittant video noise). In addition, the mic gain was turned up way too high and thus the audio is awful.
2. Dave Blankenship recorded the talk on his consumer camcoder; he was not paid for this, and he did a much better job. This video is usable all the way through, but arrived in an oddball format produced mostly by some models of JVC camcorders. The audio was not so hot, because he used the mic built in to the camcorder from the back of the room.
3. I recorded the audio using a $5 microphone plugged in to an iPod Nano, sitting on a table at the front of the room. It’s a bit noisy, but with a few minutes of work with Audacity (Noise Removal and Normalization), the results are much better than either video attempt.

Armed with this, I set about to somehow combine the video from #2 with the audio from #3. I send emails describing this mess to several videographers I found on Craigslist. Most of them didn’t reply at all. I finally got a cost estimate from one, of many hundreds of dollars or more, and not much assurance of results.

Now I’m willing to spend some money to get good results, but spending it without confidence of results is less appealing; so I set about trying myself instead.

First, I cleaned the audio in Audacity as mentioned above.

Second, I watched the video and listened to the audio a few times, to get the approximate starting timestamp in each one of the moment the talk actually started; each recording had a different amount of lead-in time

Third, I grabbed ffmpeg, the swiss army knife of command line video and audio processing. After reading a dozen web pages of ffmpeg advice, and a number of experiments (with short -t settings, to quickly see how well it works without waiting to transcode the whole thing), I ended up with this command to produce the encoded video:

ffmpeg -y -ss 40.0 -i Recording-3-audio-only-clean.wav -ss 95 -i Recording-2-video-ok-audio-bad.mod -shortest -t 18000 -vcodec libx264 -vpre normal -b 700k -threads 2 Cordes-2010-SaaS.m4v


I then noticed that the MacPorts installation of ffmpeg omits the important qt-faststart tool, and found this helpful version of qt-faststart and used it instead, on my Mac; later I switched to a Linux machine with an ffmpeg install including qt-faststart. Without the faststart step, the metadata in the m4v file is arranged in a way that prevent progressive/streaming play-while-downloading.

The results are good but not great:

• The video has some motion/interlace artifacts; these were present in the original recording, and I’m not aware offhand of what to do about them
• The video camera used rectangular pixels; the pixel aspect ratio is 3:2 while it is intended for display at 16:9. I wasn’t able (at least in 20 minutes of learning and experimentation) to get the 16:9 output working correctly, so if you grab the underlying m4v file you can see the aspect ratio a bit off in the shape of the clock on the wall, for example.
• The audio-video sync is adequate (and plenty good enough to follow along) but not perfect. Clearly using the audio track on a video recording is much better than putting them together in post-processing.
• The audio is not as good as if I used a lav or headset mic, though I think it’s quite remarkably good for a $5 mic plugged in to iPod.
• I’ve no idea if ffmpeg complies with any of the relevant copyrights/patents/whatever in video production, though it seems hopefully safe to use for a one-off non-commercial video like this. (Normally I use Apple’s iMovie for my videos, and I assume Apple has taken care of such things.)

A few morals of this story:

• Get some powerful tools, and learn how to use them.
• Be willing to pay for professional work, but be skeptical. Just because you pay, doesn’t mean it will be quality work.
• Have a plan B. If I had assumed that at least one of the two videos would get decent audio, and skipped my own audio recording, I’d not have been able to deliver the acceptable audio here. If Dave had assumed that my professional videographer would produce results, and turned off his camera, we’d have no video here at all.

Tags: ffmpeg, money, saas, video

This is yet another story that I’ve told dozens of time to individual and groups, and now finally written down. Here is a short video talk:

As usual, the vimeo page offers it for HTML5, non-Flash platforms like the iPad.

Back in 2004 I co-founded Mobile Workforce Management, a vertical market SaaS firm. For the first 6+ months, I was the entire development team, while my co-founder was the entire analysis, support, and customer happiness department. Over the course of a few years, we hired developers, a very-senior developer / leader / general manager, support staff, and more. In spite of these hires, as of 2007 I was still in the loop for numerous critical processes that had to happen every day or week to keep the doors open – not a great situation.

Around that time I was inspired to take a month-long family vacation, far longer than any past vacation. My family made arrangements to spend 3 weeks in a house by the beach, 1000 miles away, in the summer of 2008; these arrangements must be made far in advance, as such houses tend to fill up. I’d be away for approximately an entire month, allowing for travel time and stops along the way.

With that hard date in hand, my notions of ironing out the business processes “someday” were swept aside, and I set about tracking, automating, documenting, and delegating any of the work that involved me and had to happen at least monthly.

• accounting / bookkeeping / payroll
• production sysadmin
• development sysadmin
• system monitoring
• management processes
• customer relationship processes
• vendor relationships
• design and code reviews
• much more

It took months of hard work (by myself and others) to build up our company ability to handle all of these things well in my absence. As of the vacation date, all of this was set up to run smoothly either entirely without me, or with a tiny bit of remote input from me.

This worked, in fact it worked so well that our customers didn’t even notice my absence.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, the work I did then to increase our organizational process maturity was a turning point in the life if the business, enabling its eventual sale. Before that work, I’d have been a bit embarrassed to say “organizational process maturity” in public. Afterward, I have lived (rather than just learned about and talked about) the notions of working on-rather-than-in a business, of building a business with a life separate from that of its owners.

In retrospect I’m calling that trip a Strategic Vacation – a vacation taken both for its own value, and to drive the accomplishment other critical goals. If your business needs you every single day, that’s a problem. Create some pressure on yourself to solve it, by scheduling a strategic vacation, then go make it happen.

Tags: commentary, delegation, money, top

Round 1, 2007

Back in 2007 I read a few articles about the merits of stand-up desks, in regards to health and productivity. According to the New York Times and other sources, standing desks have been not quite common, but neither terribly uncommon, for many years. Sitting all the time is apparently quite unhealthy. Famously, Donald Rumsfeld used one, and maybe it helped him come up with this?

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

(This quote got a lot of chuckles, including from me; but it is actually a good and important point. I wish someone less politically charged had popularized it. Many commentators suggest that Rumsfeld’s phrasing and concern for unknown unknowns came from Werner Erhard, himself a very smart but somewhat odd fellow.)

Inspired to try out standing up at work, I set up perhaps the world’s ugliest standing desk:

I took an old and already-ugly normal desk, and put it on primitive stilts constructed in about 30 minutes for about $10. This was marginally acceptable for the out-of-the-way room I was using as a home office at the time. To make the most of things, I took the photo above with plenty of semi-obsolete technology and ample wiring in view. Looking back at this photo, I observe that my wife is an amazingly tolerant and loving woman.

In spite of the poor aesthetics, I enjoyed this desk for many months, and noticed an increase in my productivity and focus, discussed more at the end of this post. At the same time, some minor backaches and pains went away, and I slept better. (Be warned though, that it takes some getting used to, the first couple of weeks are tough.)

Functionally speaking, the only weakness of this arrangement was that the monitors were not high enough relative to the keyboard height.

This first-generation experiment fell into disuse when I set up a new home office with tasteful solid wood furniture and other decor, in a prominent front room of my home, at “only” 10x the cost of my old home office. The desk above went to the offices of my old firm where a couple of people tried it out, then eventually discarded it. (My new home office is not pictured here; it looks approximately like a page in the catalog of a furniture store – nice, tasteful, boring. It also contains much better hardware.)

Round 2, 2010

Inspired again by further press coverage, I’m trying out a standing desk again in 2010. I looked around at various power-adjustable desks from GeekDesk, Anthro, and Relax the Back. These have several problems:

1. While I’m willing to spend what it takes, power adjustable desks are a bit costly for an experiment. None of them are a model of desk I’d want anyway for sitting.
2. They only solve the keyboard height problem (the main desk surface height), they generally don’t address the height of the monitors at all. (However, Anthro has solutions for this.)
3. They are much deeper than I need.

Instead, at the beginning of May I set up another homegrown (and slightly less visually offensive) arrangement:

This setup is also quite cheap, around $150 total. It is a metal shelf/rack, with an extra protruding MDF shelf screwed on to form a keyboard/mouse surface. The shelves are all adjustable, so I moved the top (computer/screen) and middle (keyboard/most) shelves up and down a few times to find the most comfortable heights: I look straight ahead at the screens, and my elbows at at 90 degrees (wrists straight) while typing.

I wired up some leftover accessories (display, keyboard, mouse, etc. – my good stuff is in my home office, try not to laugh at the use of a spare low-end Microsoft mouse and small monitor with my MBP). This includes a very old printer that I pulled out of storage, partly as ballast and partly to just see if it still works. (It does, but an HP LaserJet 1100 is terribly slow by today’s standards, and I may replace the whole thing when my toner on hand runs out. A personal printer at my desk is more convenient than the better printers a short walk away.)

I located this at my “work” office away from home, so as not to re-test the tolerance of the above-mentioned wife. My time is split between home and work offices, and occasionally cafes, so I stand perhaps 20 hours per week on average. Even when at the standing desk, I’ll grab a nearby chair to make a phone call.

The Standing Experience

Relative to sitting, I’ve noticed a number of benefits:

• I focus more completely on my work, with less tendency to become distracted.
• More specifically, I write more (text, code) and read less.
• My back, and whole body feed better, aside from that first week.
• I move around, shifting weight, standing on one foot for a moment, etc.; I experience no stiffness or aches that sometimes result from hours of sitting.
• My urge to go buy a new chair went away; I already have a good chair in my home office, and rarely sit while at work.

In summary, this seems like a fairly substantial win, one month in to the experiment. I’ll report back later this year.

A bit of commentary: lots of people talk about their standing desks with some degree of bravado. That is entirely unjustified; outside of office workers, a large portion of the workforce spends most of every day standing and working. It’s the traditional sitting office worker who is doing something unusual.

Tags: commentary, standing

I’m not a big social media guy. I’m certaintly not a social media consultant, nor a maven. I never used MySpace at all, and I was not among the first to use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. But I do find all of those useful to keep in touch with a bunch of people using all of the above, and I’ve grown quite frustrated with the sorry state of the client applications I’ve tried. Even those whose features work well and look good, don’t really go after the core problem we all either have it or will hit: information overload.

Here is what I really want in a social media client application for “power users” who receive a lot on their feeds: follow a lot of people on Twitter, have a lot of friends on Facebook, 500+ on LinkedIn, etc. Today, these are power users. Over the next few of years, this will be “everybody”. Most of these features make a lot of sense for a business managing its presense.

Table Stakes – The Basics

Support the Big Three (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook)

… and hopefully several more. But don’t even come to the party without the big three. I’m looking at you, Twitterific on the iPad, which I otherwise enjoy (and use every day, and paid for).

Ideally, RSS feeds would also flow in, and perhaps email and SMS too. But I don’t want this to be a “unified inbox” to replace an email client; this information would appear here as context for smart reading.

Run On Many Platforms

Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, Android, Linux, maybe even BlackBerry. It’s not necessary to start with all these, but the target should to end up with all of them and more, with the core features present everywhere. I’m not looking for crappy ports though. Native, good citizens.

Keep Track of What I’ve Seen

Keep track of what I’ve seen, automatically. Don’t show me again unless I ask. But the act of closing the app should be meaningless, in that it should not mark all data as seen. An example of what not to do is TweetDeck, which has various settings for this, of which I can’t find any combination that does the Right Thing.

Next, the less common ideas:

I Paid for a Lot of Pixels – Use Them

Single-column feed display GUIs? Great idea for a phone. Silly on a PC.

Like most PC users, I have a wide, high resolution screen. Like many power users, I have two screens on some computers. I payed good money for all these pixels because I want to use them. Therefore, when I’m trying to catch up with all these data/tweet/etc. feeds, I want software that makes good use of those pixels. Show me a rich, dense screenful of information at one. Make it look like a stock trader’s screen (or screens).

Our Eyes are All Different – Give Me Knobs

I don’t want extensive customization. I don’t want a whole slew of adjustments. I don’t want a Preferences dialog with 82 tabs. I don’t even want themes. I want a good, clean, default design… but with a few well-considered knobs. Perhaps something like so:

• font/size knob – because my eyes might work a bit better or worse than yours, and my screen might be higher or lower resolution than yours.
• information density knob – because sometimes I want to admire a beautiful well-spaced layout, and something I just want to pack more information on there.

Aggregate Across Networks

Many of the people I follow, post the same data to at least three social media outlets; then a bunch of other copy/paste or retweet it. Please stop showing me all that duplication!

Instead, aggregate it all together, like Google News does for news sites. Show me each core message once, and then show a (dense, appropriate) display of who/how the information came in. Include a sparkline and other charts to show the continued re-arrival of that same data. This way, I won’t have to endure the duplication directly, and I can more clearly see how information traverses the (underlying, human) social network.

Some Tweets are More Equal than Others

In an ideal world, every Facebook update, every Tweet, would be a precious flower, to be admired in depth. We don’t live there. Instead, there is a lot of noise; an example fresh in my mind as I write this is the TV show Lost. It may be a great show, but it’s not one I watch, so to me all the Lost chatter is noise. I’ve probably scanned/scrolled past a couple hundred of them (some of them duplicates) over the last few days.

Therefore, a good social media client will make it trivial (one click) for me to tell it which bits I am interested in and which I’m not. I’m not talking about a scoring system, just a simple up/down arrow, for a total of three bins:

• Important
• Bulk / default
• Junk

Apply some automatic classification mechanism (like the naive Bayensian that’s been common for several years now in email spam filtering) to learn from my votes and apply those to future data. By default, highlight the Important, show the Bulk, and hide the Junk.

I Have Several Devices – Sync Them Now

I might look at this river of news on my Mac in the morning, then on my iPad at lunch, then on my Linux netbook in the evening, then sneak an iPhone peek at bedtime. Keep all that “what I’ve seen” and “what’s important” data in sync across them. This means that my dream social media client needs a backend service behind it. It is not necessary for the data feeds to flow through the backend system (thought it might be useful); just the user’s attention metadata.

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I believe that most or all of those features will be common in a few years. But I’m annoyed by the tsunami of social media feeds now. Is something like this out there? Where?

I could build such an application (with some help!). I’ve worked with APIs of all flavors. I’ve done mobile. I’ve created GUIs that elicit a “Wow”. I understand servers, and asynchronous operations, and scalability, and SaaS. But if I built it, would anyone *buy* it?

Tags: commentary, design, facebook, twitter