fitness 16 Sep 2008 07:20 am
forgot to write it down, so recording it here:
Warmup
“Michael”
3 rounds of:
30:28
Uncategorized 02 May 2008 04:18 pm
From today’s Silicon Alley Insider:
Everyone knows that most Facebook apps are time-wasters, at best. But here’s statistical proof from FlowingData: A breakdown of the service’s 23,160 applications, via Facebook’s self-selected categories.
I don’t think time wasting is quite accurate. I think this is a better explanation for what’s going on over at Facebook.
Uncategorized 17 Dec 2007 03:00 pm
I found an old notebook from 2001. I was flipping through it to see what I was doing then and found some notes from a book I was reading this book on Clausewitz — some really good stuff that applies in lots of domains outside of War.
Bay Area Housing 02 Oct 2007 09:44 am
In it’s earnings report yesterday, Citigroup announced that it’s profits were down 60%. Apparently, this sent Cititgroup stock up because investors took it as a sign that the worst of the credit troubles might be over. Maybe the bad news is all priced into the credit markets now. Or, perhaps thats wishful thinking — after all, the worst of the mortgage rate resets are still ahead of us.
Business & Software Development 29 May 2007 01:02 pm
From my very first corporate software development project, I can remember thinking that there was something profoundly wrong with the way the software projects were managed - trying to set your plan in stone at the front, then manage your work to that schedule just always seemed impossible. It was never clear what value we were getting from our estimates and schedules — they were never accurate until the end of the project, and, as a manager it seemed like inordinate amounts of time went to revising the schedule and to reseting expectations with customers.
At Salesforce.com, we’ve transitioned to Scrum in the last year. I’d dabbled with some of the Agile methodologies in previous jobs, but this is the first time I’ve been part of a complete implementation of the practices. I have to say this is also the first time I’ve ever felt that things we do for project management all make sense and really add value over the course of the project. It makes us better at shipping product.
In the process here, I’ve read several books, but the one that I have found most useful as a manager has been Lean Software Development
Salesforce.com & Technology 07 Dec 2006 08:19 pm
As many of you know, I’ve been working at Salesforce.com for a year now as the product manager for the platform web services API. I just put my first post up on our developer blog about what’s new in our 8.0 release. Check it out.
Software Development 09 Nov 2006 08:57 pm
Based on some conversations at my present job, I decided to write up what I learned during my time at BEA. These are the things it takes to keep a large development team productive. It only really works when these things are built into the culture. You will need tools and infrastructure to make this practical, but if you instill this into your culture, your team will build what you need when you need it.
Just to be clear, the most important thing you do is check in new or improved code into the product. The things below are preconditions to checking in code, the things you do to be a professional developer. If you’re doing this right, these things will speed you up, not slow you down. These are not an excuse to decrease your sense of urgency about moving your project forward. Have you checked in code yet?
These are in order of priority:
If you want to break the build in the privacy of your own machine, that’s your business. The second you break the group build, the morale and productivity of every person in the product group dives towards zero. Unacceptable.
Here are the steps you *must* take in order to avoid breaking the build.
Tests are the teams safety net. Having all the tests passing all the time makes it dirt simple to figure out if you’ve broken anything with a change. When it’s dirt simple to figure that out, you will have more confidence in your ability to make changes safely — you will write more code and won’t shy away from refactoring or taking on changes in new areas.
Tests are your safety net, even for your own code. If you want to be productive, having tests that show something is working gives you a great sanity check on your code, but it also pays dividends over the long haul — your tests keep you from breaking your own code.
Tests are also your shield. If you write a feature and someone later discovers that some part of the feature that didn’t have a test is now broken, guess who’s going to have to fix it? You. Even if it was someone else’s change that broke the feature. The best way to avoid this is to have tests for every aspect of your code that matters. Then it’s everyone’s responsibility to keep that test passing with every checkin and you don’t have to worry about someone else breaking our stuff.
It is inevitable that at some point you will have to work in two branches of the code at once, usually because one release is ramping down while another is ramping up. When this happens, it’s important not to let the backlog of differences between the two versions build up. The sooner you integrate a change forward, the more likely it is to work and the more likely you are to remember what you changed and why.
It is inevitable that bugs will sneak through even the most exhaustive testing suite. The unfortunate part of this is that these bugs always come up after you’ve moved on to something else. This is not an excuse to tolerate bugs, however. If you put off fixing the bug until “someday”, chances are you won’t fix it or that it will take you a lot longer to fix then than if you just fixed it today.
Business 17 Jul 2006 12:23 pm
I went through a phase of reading books that related economics to biology. If you think about it, when you’ve got a really good theory of economics, it should help you explain the things we observe in nature (animal behavior, evolution, etc).
During this time, I ran into this “law” — the cost of to produce a unit of any thing declines on an inverse power law relationship with the number of units produced (on a global basis). And it turns out this is true for many things, including such basic things as eggs. This was first observed by Kenneth Arrow, in his 1962 paper “The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing”. I ran into it in Bionomics by Michael Rothschild.
You hear a lot about Moore’s law and Metcalfe’s law. I’m always surprised you don’t hear more about this one, since its at least as profound in its impact on new technologies.
Bay Area Housing 21 May 2005 12:38 pm
From the Wall Street Journal: The Fed Starts to Show Concern Over Bubble.
But there has been a little more concern creeping into his commentary in the past few months. “We do have characteristics of bubbles in certain areas, but not, as best I can judge, nationwide,” he told a House committee in February. Mr. Greenspan speaks to the Economic Club of New York at lunchtime tomorrow. If housing comes up in his remarks or if he is questioned on the subject by one of the prominent economists there, look for the Fed chairman to mention — as Fed Governor Donald Kohn did recently — the upturn in people buying vacation homes, second homes or other homes on the risky bet that housing prices will continue to rise as they have lately.
Mr. Greenspan hasn’t yet hit the “irrational exuberance” gong, the phrase he used to warn about the stock market in December 1996. The Fed and other bank regulators, however, this week warned banks to take more care with home-equity loans, noting that such loans are “subject to increased risk if interest rates rise and home values decline.” (Did you say decline? Gulp.) Even a slowing of the pace of increase in housing prices probably would dent consumer spending, which, for the past couple of years, has been helped by Americans tapping their home equity.
Other Fed officials have begun to express some anxiety. In a speech last month, Mr. Kohn said, “A couple of years ago I was fairly confident that the rise in real-estate prices primarily reflected low interest rates, good growth in disposable income and favorable demographics.” Mr. Kohn was a longtime adviser to Mr. Greenspan before his appointment to the Fed board.
No longer. “Prices have gone up far enough since then relative to interest rates, rents and incomes to raise questions; recent reports from professionals in the housing market suggest an increasing volume of transactions by investors, who…may be expecting the recent trend of price increases to continue,” Mr. Kohn said.
Interestingly, the one place I saw these speeched headlined, the headline was “Greenspan say no real estate buble”. I guess the story is the improbable rise of real estate, not the risk of the real estate market.
The thing is that Greenspan only ever speaks about the national market in the aggregate because that’s his job. Its not his job to manage regional economies (in fact, that might interfere with his management of the national economy). When he finally recognizes a real estate bubble, it will only be because it has reached national proportions.
Technology 21 May 2005 11:00 am
From John Battelle’s Searchblog: Wikipedia and Search
A ranking of all Web sites based on the total volume of traffic received directly from search engines placed Wikipedia at 146 in June 2004. But in September 2004 it jumped in the ranking to 93; 71 in December 2004; and in March 2005, it was the 33rd most popular site in terms of visits received from search engines.
That means Wikipedia is impacting not only the trivial results of our Internet searches, but increasingly what content we consume and the types of answers we find to larger questions. This is a profound statement for anyone competing in the marketplace for attention to content and ideas.
Interesting. Wikis took off like weeds at work last year. The thing that’s been most valuable about the team wiki is that’s been a quick place to host a page that you need to share and possibly collaborate on. We *didn’t* get a a beautifully tended garden like wikipedia. I think it helps that wikipedia its modelled on an encyclopedia — the structure is simple and clear and there are clear ground rules for what an entry should look like.