Baus.net Podcast 1

I just finished my first podcast in the theme of becoming a "content production machine." It is pretty rough, but you have to start somewhere.

Here's a couple links that I mentioned in my podcast:

Randy Pausch Time Management Talk from 2007

Randy Pausch Time Management Talk from 1998

Dharmesh on Inbound Marketing

New Year's is one my favorite holidays as it comes with the least responsibility of all the major holidays. There is nothing to do except have a good time. No turkeys to cook or presents to buy.

K keeps a scrap book of mementos and looking back, even with all the economic craziness, 2009 was a good year. We traveled, went to a lot of shows, got some work done, and our families saw good health. Last spring, when the market melted down, I thought I would be out of a job. Fortunately that didn't happen, and in many ways our team came together which made us even more effective.

I'm optimistic about 2010. Although the U.S. has some systemic problems that we haven't come to terms with, our fundamentals are right. In times of crisis, it is best to embrace the fundamentals.

I appreciate the customary self critique of resolutions. A resolution doesn't need to be self deprecating, but a recognition that no matter how well things are going, there is room improve. My resolutions this year are a bit odd (sure I need to lose 15lbs, but that isn't anything new). My resolutions are to become a content production machine, and do what is important.

Become a content production machine

It sounds kind of strange to aspire to become a content production machine, but I wrote last year that I had started to take the internet for granted. I acted as if there will always be another day to express my opinions, but if history is a guide, that might not always be the case. I have more power of expression at my finger tips than in the entire history of mankind. That's not something to take lightly, as there are many places were the internet is already tightly control and freedom of expression limited. I am very fortunate to live in a country with a strong foundation in freedom of expression.

Also the ability to create content is increasing quickly. Writing is just the beginning. Video and (and to a certain extent) audio is going to be increasingly huge in the next couple years. It takes a lot of energy to write. I'm busy, I'm tired, I don't have the mental energy to write, but why limit myself to writing? It could very well be easier to just record my thoughts in a audio cast or video log. I definitely think doing something is better than nothing.

Do what is important

One of my biggest influences from 2009 was the late Randy Pausch. I was a late comer to Randy Pausch's work, but I've never heard anyone put the meaning of life in such concise terms. If there is one lesson I've learned from Randy, it is, "Do what is important."

While Pausch deservedly became famous for his Last Lecture, I've found his talks on time management to be even more pragmatic and possibly valuable.

When I'm driving (which I do a lot)I tend to put a familiar album on repeat and roll around the events of the day. This year I kept hearing Randy's voice in my head, "Do what's important. Do what's important." I'm bad at this. I do shit that isn't important all the time. Here's an example. With Randy's guidance, I did do something semi-important on my to-do list: I got my old Porsche out of the garage. That is something I failed to do for nearly 2 years as I became overwhelmed by the work it required. But getting the car on the road was important because everyday when I came home and saw it in the garage it sapped a little energy from me because in the back of mind I thought, "I need to get that Porsche out of the garage." It kept me from doing other more important things.

While the Porsche isn't important, getting it out of the garage was because it represented just another thing to do. But then I did something that wasn't important. I obsessed about the stupid thing. How much is this going to cost? How much is it worth? Is the suspension pan going to rust out? Is it going to need a valve job? Those are valid questions, but they aren't important.

And this is why I haven't reached Pausch's zen state of productivity. In retrospect, I should have done the important thing (get the Porsche out of the garage), and then moved on to the next important thing. But that's hard, and it is the reason Randy Pausch was Randy Pausch, and I'm not. Completing one important task threw me off course of my next task.

Even in his dying days, Pausch didn't claim that his work, and the fun he had doing it, wasn't important. It is clear that Randy put his family above all else, but he had a lot of pride in what he accomplished in his career. He said he made dreams come true, and he did. If I saw one thing last year that absolutely blew my mind as an engineer it is was the game by two of his former students, World of Goo. The entire game, including design, animation, musical score, and programming was done by two people with virtually no budget. It is a benchmark of what can be accomplished with a small team, and the interdisciplinary skill set it took to build it is mind boggling.

Fascination, passion, and the freedom to dream is what drives our society forward. The U.S. has a strong work ethic, but I don't believe work should be viewed as universally unenjoyable, because if virtue is found in doing unenjoyable work, the small things that make our working lives better will be not be considered valuable, even when the true costs are very small.

So this year I resolve to do what is important, but the hard part is understanding what is really important.

I just finished a significant upgrade to baus.net. I regrettably let the site atrophy to the point where I wasn't sure how it is was running. Baus.net felt like a messy desk. While I could get other work done, it kept nagging me every time I looked at it. While I haven't made any aesthetic changes yet, I did complete the following tasks:

• Download pyblosxom blog code to my Mac and get running in WingIDE.
• Get Subversion plugin that hosts my entries running on Mac.
• Make some code updates to take advantage of the Python Subversion API changes.
• Get pyblosxom core running under WSGI on twisted.
• Research re-enabling comments (decided to make it another project).
• Move static content to S3.
• Move image hosting to Flickr.
• Centralize code and content into a singly rooted Subversion repo.
• Load javascript libraries from Google.
• Upgrade from statcounter to Google analytics.
• Create CentOS VM on VMWare Fusion to stage deployment.
• Configure nginx to proxy to twisted and feedburner for my feeds.
• Upgrade memcached and libevent.
• Centralize logging for all services.
• Document the installation process.
• Write startup script.
• Provision new Linux VM from Linode.
• Perform installation on Linode.
• Update DNS to point to new installation.

This project ending up costing tens of hours of my personal time, and there was a point that I was ready to scrap the whole thing and move to WordPress.

But I'm glad I finished the project. I use baus.net to try out technologies in a pseudo production environment, and having my own personal content in total disarray didn't sit well with me. I also realized that my previous experiments with using Subversion to store my blog content had a direct impact on a project we are working on which uses Subversion as the back-end of a content management system. I had confidence that it would work after running baus.net this way for years.

I take pride that in my free time I've created a system from end to end including system administration, Python development, and some basic CSS/HTML hacking, which includes a pretty novel use of Subversion. That might sound silly for something as small as baus.net, but I think there is something to be said about building an entire system no matter how small. As a project manager responsible not just administration or software, but whole systems, at some point I have to walk the walk to maintain credibility. If all I do is go from one meeting to the next projecting ROI, discussing synergies, and saying absolutely have I added any real value?

After the Business of Software conference, I was reading over my notes when I saw on Twitter that Jason Calcanis was hosting his TWiST show at the BoS venue and was going to interview Matt Mullenweg of WordPress along with Joel, so I tuned into the webcast.

After Joel took the stage with Jason and Matt they started joking about how Matt, at 25, had done more that day than the rest of us will do in our lifetime, and Joel said something rather unexpected. He stated that he was "wrong" about the direction of one if his early products, CityDesk, which was a desktop content publishing/blogging system which Joel used to publish his own blog (and apparently still does).

After reading Joel for years, and having been a former CityDesk user, I was a bit shocked to hear this as CityDesk has been quietly swept under the carpet. The last official "News" item about the product was an announcement about Vista support from 2006. About a year ago in his blog forum he basically admitted that CityDesk had been unofficially end-of-lifed, which lead to the following comment by Mark Major:

...I used to visit the Fog Creek site twice a week - for !a year! after the last CityDesk version in 2003. Thinks me: "Any day now, any day now." "It's cool already, it's gonna be *so* cool when they fix that little complication with my article loops."

Such a shame that CityDesk ate the CEO's children, causing massive abandonment of the project, subsidence of world peace, etc. Now all we CityDesk users can do is stare at the glamorous office pictures and wish one of the much revered 'twenty power outlets at each desk' programmers gets tasked with a revamp for us.

Inspired by Rands BoS talk on improv, or "talking shit" as he would say, as Jason started taking questions for Joel and Matt from Twitter, I fired off the following tweet which he read on the show:

Warhol's future has come and gone. On the internet everybody is famous not for 15 minutes, but 15 secs, and I just blew mine. It's all down hill from here.

If there is one writer I look up to as the standard bearer in the software industry its Joel (ok JWZ is pretty damn good too). He defined personal branding and what Dharmesh now calls inbound marketing while never talking about branding and talking very little about marketing. He just did it.

In a post from earlier this month Joel describes Kathy Sierra's brilliant concept that your job as a software developer is to help your users to become awesome. To take it one step further, the job of any company is to help their customers be awesome. Then the focus of Fog Creek is clear to Joel: "It's all about helping software developers be awesome at making software."

Joel, in a rare moment of self depreciation says the following:

"Our focus on helping developers explains why one of our early products, CityDesk, flopped: it had nothing to do with software developers."

But that doesn't tell the whole story. When CityDesk was developed Fog Creek didn't have a focus on developers. There was JoS sure, but there were no developer products. The focus came with the success of FogBugz. If CityDesk would have taken off, he'd be writing "Our focus on helping bloggers and content creators explains why one of early products, FogBugz flopped: it had nothing to do with content creators."

Joel, you are going to be eating your words in two years. Why? Because StackExchange is going blow the pants off of everything else you've ever done, and it is going to have nothing to do with developers, and everything to do with people on answering questions about their pet ferret.

After DevDays, I became convinced that Fog Creek is on the verge of hockey sticking. Fog Creek will become StackExchange (BTW, could I put a couple dollars on that?). The reason is that no matter how good you are at building developer tools like FogBugz, it is a tiny market compared to the main stream potential of StackExchange.

Imagine for a minute if Google would of come out with code search before their web search and declared themselves a "developer company." Then a year latter released their web search which immediately increased their market 1000x. That focus on developers would seem pretty irrelevant wouldn't it? That's what is about to happen at Fog Creek.

The reason why CityDesk wasn't a run away success wasn't because it was a bad product or that Joel couldn't market it or that it wasn't developer product. It just wasn't the right product at that time. CityDesk was content management system when the world was embracing blogging. It was a desktop app when web apps were just starting to come into favor.

If you don't mind Joel, let me offer you a bit of advice; I've been taking yours for years. You should write a entry titled: "City Desk: A postmortem. What to do when things don't go according to plan." In this article you should clarify the current status of City Desk, describe how you were "wrong" (your words, not mine) and how the experience made Fog Bugz a better product and Fog Creek a better company.

This is important because you, and others with whom you are associated (such as speakers at the Business of Software), have inspired people to change the way they do business. You are not just a product manager or software CEO. You are a community organizer with significant influence. Some of us will buy our developers two monitors. Others will make software less complicated, yet powerful. Some will make big bets on new products, and others will quit their jobs to pursue their dreams of being an indie software developer. And many of us are going to fall down and skin our knees, and it is going to hurt, and we are going to need your advice about what to do next. I believe the fear of failing or at least looking stupid is biggest hindrance to changing business processes or lifestyle, so there couldn't be a more important topic.

So Joel, If you are serious at helping developers become more awesome, you are going to have to address the difficult topic of failure, or what to do when things don't go according to plan, because they never do.

I'm winding down from Joel Spolsky's Business of Software Conference which was jointly organized by Red Gate's Neil Davidson. The conference exceeded my expectations from the food (they even fed us on the way out the door; I think I gained 10 lbs), the venue (the wifi worked even though my laptop didn't), the speakers (the Pecha Kucha was hilarious), and the support staff that was actually (wait for it) friendly and helpful.

But what differentiated this conference were the attendees who came from all corners of the globe -- some working in one or two person shops, some just setting out on their own, others who paid their own airfare and hotel. People came because they wanted to learn, and they paid their own way to do so. While I was fortunate that my registration was covered by my employer, I wondered if I would have attended if it wasn't, and I would honestly say, yes, I would.

The conference was like being in a classroom of 300 students were everyone was the best student in the class. On Monday morning, I took a seat and was immediately greeted with a "Hi, I'm Johh, and I'm here because I have[xyz business issue] that I would like to find a solution to." And that wasn't the exception. I've never witnessed anything like it. It is a tremendous conference.

I'm currently reviewing my notes which should provide a lot of fodder for new entries. There was so much information in such a short period, that my neurons are just now finishing processing it all.

Before our recent trip to Kauai, I bought an HP netbook. I typically use hulking desktop replacements that are clunky, hot, and have a short battery life. They mostly suit me fine, but they are terrible for traveling.

It was kind of an impulse buy, and I went with what was locally available. I bought HP 110-1030 which uses the common Intel ATOM architecture. When the netbooks first came out, they mostly used a small SSD and ran Linux. Today almost all the netbooks available retail have 5400RPM hard drives and Windows XP (soon to be replaced by Windows 7). Apparently Microsoft has a licensing deal for XP that makes it cheaper to OEM if the device has 1 gig of RAM or less, so all the netbooks have exactly 1 gig of RAM (I installed two gigs of RAM, the max the 110 will support, before even booting it up).

Since I was looking for longer battery life, I made sure the device had a 6 cell battery. Unfortunately, I didn't realize was that the 6 cell battery is much larger than the typical 3 cell. With the battery installed, a round cylinder protrudes about an inch below the bottom, so the device sits at about a 20 degree angle when it installed. The battery is the biggest and probably the most expensive component in the system, and seems to be place to invest R&D dollars committed to the product. HP needs to find a couple of the hardware engineers they might still have on staff after Fiorina's gutting of the R&D staff and go back to the drawing board on that one. It is a detail that matters A LOT!

This is the first time I've bought a computer retail (I typically use throw away Dell's), and I was surprised by hard it was to get any sort of spec sheet for the devices I was looking at. Since the batteries are still quite expensive relative to the rest of the machine, finding out what battery was in the device was important to me, but the spec sheets on the devices were no where to be found. PC netbooks are like buying bullion. I want the most metal I can get for my dollar, as it is pretty obvious few of the manufactures made any significant investments in the design of these devices.

After spending 20 minutes on the first boot and install procedure (seriously 20 minutes to get the machine started?) I found that Windows XP insufficient for the small display. HP did nothing to make the configuration work on the small footprint. It looks like a standard Windows install, and I was surprised to get an error after first boot telling me that my resolution was set too low, even though it was set to the device's native resolution. The gum drop looking window frames take up half the screen real estate, and the device was loaded up with a bunch of useless trail software. This type of thing gives Windows a bad rap, and it isn't completely undeserved.

I promptly fixed the problem by installing Ubuntu's netbook optimized "remix" distribution. HP has a multi-card reader connected internally to the USB bus, so the cards look like USB drives to the system. I put in a 4 gig SSD drive, copied the Ubuntu image, and booted directly to the system installer. It went smoothly, but I invested a lot of time repartitioning the NTFS partition to dual boot Windows, only to find the NTFS partition corrupted. I gave up on that plan and went to Linux exclusively.

I'm pretty impressed with the Ubuntu distribution. Linux on the desktop (nettop?) has come long way. Ubuntu spent some time making sure their OS ran well on the netbooks. Apps start full screen, and there is a full screen shell navigation that makes sense as opposed to the tiny start menu on Windows. The days of wondering if X would boot and living without a suspend or sleep mode are thankfully over (note: I've recently had some problems driving the external monitor with Ubuntu remix). In most cases, Ubuntu just works. I'm typing this in emacs in full screen mode, and really isn't bad (cramped seats on the United flight excepted).

Conclusion: in my opinion the market for devices like this is going to continue to expand. For a significant amount of computing most people do, an inexpensive, low powered device with long battery life makes more sense than full featured desktop replacement. I could see how Microsoft's tablet PC concept would make a lot of sense for a device of this stature. Where Microsoft went wrong with the concept was marketing the OS and subsequent at premium over notbooks. Consumer won't pay the premium. In fact they would probably prefer to pay less for a low spec machine with a touch screen monitor. I think the iPhone makes it clear how key the touch screen is for these small devices. Browsing the web with a tiny touch pad is a surely a quick route to carpal tunnel. But for significant text editing (like writing this blog entry) the touch screen keyboard on the iPhone isn't optional. The keyboard is probably one of the biggest strengths of the HP offering, and I have no problem typing at a reasonable speed on the device. The mouse pointer is pretty difficult to use which makes old school text based editors like emacs a good choice for the device. I'm now using the netbook almost exclusively as an emacs machine.

I can see why Apple is gaining market share in consumer devices. Engineering details (like a battery that allows the device to sit flat) that can be amortized across an entire production run, matter. It is going to be difficult to differentiate a product in this market with something that feels like an Intel engineering prototype. HP invested almost nothing, if anything at all, into the software shipped with this product. The Linux distribution that I downloaded for free was actually better than the default software that shipped with the product. How can HP expect to compete against a small form factor product that Apple is surely cooking up? HP can only go so far competing on price, and long term they'll never beat Taiwanese companies like Asus and MSI on price. I think there is a future in these devices, but right now it feels like we've barely gotten past the prototype phase. If Apple develops a bigger iPhone type device with a keyboard, they will dominate the portable space. My question is what is everybody else waiting for? A tablet device with a 10" touch screen, retractable keyboard, GPS, and wireless connectivity will surely dominate this space.

Jay Farrar (Uncle Tuplo, Son Volt) and Ben Gibbard (Death Cab For Cutie, Postal Service) recently collaborated on the sound track for a Jack Kerouac documentary, "One Fast Move or I'm Gone", and performed together with a small band at Bimbo's in North Beach last night.

Bimbo's is a tidy, classic, theater with plenty of acoustical dampening, a quaint bar, and seating for dinner. The contrast is stark when compared to the shows we've attended at the Fox Theater in Oakland. While the Fox has benefited aesthetically from a recent renovation, the sound, to put it bluntly, is awful. It echos like a gymnasium from the floor to the balcony, which was particularly troublesome with the act we've seen there including this week's Echo and the Bunnyman.

Ben Gibbard looks like a new man. He's lost weight, grown his hair out, dropped the glasses, and got his jaw line back. Jay Farrar: he's a bar room rocker in a cowboy shirt.

I saw Jay Farrar with Son Volt at the peak of their career in Deep Ellum in Dallas, TX. They were big in Texas at the time, and the humid, sold out show stands out in my memory as a highlight from those days.

I like the hard edge of Farrar's voice and guitar, although his writing style tends to stuff lyrics into phrase with little regard to meter. His track "California" is prototypical of his recent work, so it isn't surprising that he was able to set Karouac's words to music -- he makes words fit even when they don't.

As Gibbard develops from his iconic boyish pop sound, working with Farrar was a smart move. For longevity he needs, for lack of a better word, more masculinity. Farrar's potential for rock star status has long passed, but his I-drank-one-too-many-bourbons-before-coming-on-stage style will net him a long carreer; it ages well.

This weekend, I missed the first snow in Tahoe this season, but I did unexpectedly catch a speech by one of our Senators. I found the topic somewhat disconcerting, and for awhile I thought I was alone in that thought, but I took comfort afterward in learning I wasn't.

We spent yesterday at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass with about 300,000 of our closest friends, and found Marty Stuart was worth the price of admission, which was free. I always find irony in the fact that Warren Hellman, who pays for the massive three day festival with his own private funds and is often revered by the artists who play there, made his money as a Wall Street financier -- the profile that the same bands often hold in contempt, sometimes in the same set.

But the end result, an arrangement between the public and private sectors, is a great festival and an example of how far private philanthropy can go. I respect Hellman for doing something with his funds rather than hording them to his death.

I've been refilling my reader with blogs, both old and new. It is a discussion for another day, but I miss blogging and believe the medium is due for a renaissance of sorts. While refreshing my reading list, I scanned an article by Matt Mullenweg that caught my attention. Matt considers starting his own bank.

From a professional standpoint I read two types of blogs, technical and financial, and only at the fringes do they meet. So when a decidedly technical blog takes on a financial topic, I take note. As a bit of a disclaimer, I am techy, and my current work does not involve traditional banking per se.

In this entry Matt outlines a reasonable, if optimistic, model for starting a new bank. Outside some notions about how the FDIC insures deposits, he approaches the problem as most internet technologists and entrepreneurs would: by assuming that the industry is dictated by market forces. What I think is telling is the tone of his own commenters, many of whom discussed the regulatory hurdles involved in starting a bank.

Even if Matt, with what I assume is a sizable book of contacts, could overcome the hurdles needed to start a bank, it is safe to say his initial vision would have to be scaled back significantly. For instance it is difficult to envision how he could pay market rate interest by keeping much larger reserves than all his competitors (who are also FDIC backed). This is why I feel compelled to revisit my arguments against regulating the internet.

Warren Buffet in the last few years has made significant investments in railroads as he has believed the fundamentals of the industry had improved as a result of deregulation in the 80s and 90s (disclaimer: I own a small position in BNI). But if an internet tycoon decided to switch careers start a railroad, I believe he or she would be shocked by the regulatory roadblocks, dating back to the railroading heydays of the late 19th and early 20th century, that they would still face. During the dot com boom, the valuations of many internet companies were compared to the early days of the railroads. While many scoffed and claimed the "new economy" (boy does that term now seem dated) was different, the analogy was pretty reasonable. I believe we are now entering the maturity and regulation phase of the internet and will face many of the issues that the railroads faced in the post war 20th century.

As someone who deals with the implementation of financial regulations day in and day out, I find myself in agreement with Peter Schiff's recent comments regarding the opening of his first mutual fund. While I can find reason in some of the regulations, a lot, and I think many who work in the industry would have to agree, have resulted in increasing costs and decreased the amount of unbiased data that is available to average investors.

Again this is why I caution against regulations on the internet. While many of us are quick to request increasing the regulations on other industries (such as health care), I think we would be appalled if the same level of regulation was applied to our business. While the price fixing regulations on the railroads had a lot backing in their time (and surprisingly still do), they basically put the entire industry in bankruptcy, and the same thing could happen to network providers.

But overall Matt's proposition gives me hope. Hope that successful internet entrepreneurs will want to apply the same techniques they've applied to their businesses in other domains. That they will see their propositions as adding value and not taking away value, which will ultimately lead to a switch in view point. Regulation doesn't always provide the most value for the most number of people, and innovation will continue beyond the technology industry.

Over Labor Day I spent some time ranting about how the quality of jeans and many consumer goods has been on a steep decline as U.S. companies have aggressively outsourced production. It would be easy to write the discussion off as an abnormal geek obsession. Ok that's true. But I do believe that the recognition of quality and craftsmanship is important if you, yourself, want to produce a high quality product.

Joel recently released a talk he gave at last year's Business of Software Conference. When discussing the importance of aesthetics in software he made the following comment:

You can hire a graphic designer, but unless you actually know how to even evaluate what an artist produces, then you are going to do the Microsoft thing where they apparently hire graphic designers but the stuff is still ugly.

Yes. That is exactly it. Microsoft pays a small fortune every year on graphic and product design, but it is very clear that the culture of the company prohibits producing products in good taste, which reminds of the classic MS iPod package design video.

Contrast this with Apple and Steve Jobs. Even Steve's wardrobe exudes simplicity, functionality, and good taste, and that aesthetic is visible in their products.

In his 2005 Stanford commencement speech Jobs had the following to say regarding his education:

Reed College [which Jobs briefly attended and dropped out of] at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

It is clear to me that Jobs not only appreciates the aesthetic qualities of the products he markets, he understands the details, such as high quality typography, that separate a high quality product from failure. If you don't recognize, appreciate, and pay for the details that go into the products you use every day, how can you create a great product?

As I've headed into product and project management, I've become not only a producer, but a consumer -- a consumer of human capital. I have to know what I want and how to get it. So yes, obsessing about the details and manufacturing of the products I use might be uncommon; but I believe the ability to recognize the details is essential in creating high quality software.

Obsessing about quality can enable small companies to compete against giants. The established companies in any domain often have a level of breadth in their products that a small vendor cannot match. But small companies can compete on depth by creating very narrow, but extremely well executed and detailed products. But to do so, you have appreciate quality in your own work and the work of others.