LunarLuau

Laughlitmus Alpha Release

Friday was somewhat of a busy day in that I was watching an early torch relay in Stanley park, the Olympics were opening, I had a day of work, and there was a “90’s Party” later in the night.  However, another thing I managed to sneak into my day was an “Alpha release” (let’s be honest, people just say that to cover their ass because they haven’t thoroughly tested or haven’t made the UI pretty yet) of my latest side-project.

The new site is call laughlitmus, and it’s basically a funny tweet ranking site.  It actually uses a lot of the whichishotter code as you could probably tell.  The basics of nominating a tweet, voting on them, displaying leaders, and outputting the ‘best’ to the laughbot are all working.

I’m especially happy with the nominating interface.  You’ll need to have a twitter account and be logged in to authenticate to it.  However, it gives an easier way of picking a tweet than anything else I’ve seen.  Give it a whirl, I’d love feedback.  However, keep in mind that the Olympics are going on here and I probably won’t get to any new features or bug fixes until they are over.

This is actually going to be my last “fun” side-project.  Once this is in a kind of stable state I’ll promote it on my popular twitter feed and see where it goes, but I won’t be starting any new projects that don’t have any real commercial value.  This and WIH will still get some dev love, but I need to start thinking about things to prototype which could really go somewhere.  By April, I’d like to be deep into prototyping something that could be a contender to be “Ian corp”.

Anyway, I’d love to hear your feedback.

Resolutions from 2009 and New Ones for 2010

This time last year I made a list of new year’s resolutions and I wanted to take them really seriously.  I promised myself I’d review how it went, otherwise it becomes one of those generic, meaningless, resolutions like “I want to be more active”.  Anyway, let’s take a look.

1. Cooking, This one didn’t really go that well.  I was suppose to cook something interesting every week, but that kind of went downhill by May.  By August I tried to either “cook or do a home improvement”, but that didn’t really last past October.  I think I’m going to renew the “cook something or make a home improvement every week” for 2010 since I wasn’t happy with the 2009 results.
2. Workout, This one went fine.  The goal was to do at least 4 1000+ calorie workouts a week.  Between Rugby early in the year, cycle commuting through the spring, summer, and early fall this wasn’t really a problem.  More recently I’ve been trying P90X to carry me through the year since I don’t really bike anymore.  I’m really happy with the result here and plan to keep going through 2010, but I don’t feel the need to keep it as “resolution” status.
3. Creative, The goal here was to make something that was more significant than the phonebooking.com phenomenon.  Originally, I was hoping it would be the “Which is Hotter?” site I created in Rails through the year.  Although I’ve learned a lot about web development and social media marketing through this, I can’t really say it’s been a huge success in terms of internet impact.  More recently, on a whim, I made Sustainable Tips on twitter, which has already grown to 2300 followers in a little over a month.  I figure it would need to crack 17,000 to be bigger than phonebooking.  17k being the number of hits in the initial traffic spike back in 2004.  The second wave had 60k visitors (although I don’t have the log info for that, so I’m remembering rough numbers), but I figure a “follower” is more significant than a hit, so it should even out.  Growth seems to be completely dependent on how funny the tweets are, so maybe I can hit this in 2010.
4. Reading, I was suppose to read one coding-oriented book a month.  I did a brief write-up of each one so I have a good idea how many I read.  I only got through 7 though.  Grantit, good programming books are pretty big so I think I overestimated my ability to read things as big as Code Complete.  I’ll keep going with this until I get to 12.  (and yes Porter, I’ll get Code Complete back to you eventually).

Of course, recycling and wrapping up some resolutions from 2009 doesn’t make for an ambitious 2010, so I’m going to add a few:

1. Reading, In addition to wrapping up the 2009 books on coding, I’m going to read one business-oriented book a month for 2010.  These tend to be a little easier to digest than the programming books and still are useful to me professionally so I can probably accomplish this a lot easier.  Examples being “Good to Great” and “Crossing the Chasm“, which are notable on tech business reading lists.
2. Make $100 Online, Either ads on whichishotter or some other entrepreneurial means, I want to make $100 of cold hard online profit.  Making a gag twitter site or videos of guys beating each other with phonebooks is cool and all, but it’s not really an enterprise.  If you think this is a low goal then you clearly haven’t tried to earn from Google ads or selling t-shirts online.
3. Grouse Grind, With the assistance of Mr. Strickland I got my time down to 55 minutes this year on the grouse grind.  My personal best may have been lower than that, but when Strick was acting as my personal trainer getting up that hill the timer failed so we couldn’t get an accurate measure (I would have been enraged, but I was too close to death for that to happen).  The 55 comes from the time after where I wasn’t so near death at the end.  For 2010, I want to get it down to 50 minutes.

Coders at Work

I finally got around to finishing Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming.  I bought it a while ago but due to certain career upheavals of late, reading it kind of got backburnered.  Actually, the way the book is structured makes it really easy to do that.  Each chapter profiles a famous programmer who has made a great contribution to the field.  It’s actually a pretty wide-ranging field from Brad Fitzpatrick (guy who made livejournal) to Ken Thompson (Unix) and Donal Knuth (if you don’t know, stop reading this post now).

This book actually flows similar to Founders at Work, which I read last year.  It actually has the same publisher and seems to be the start of a series of sorts.  Although, I did find Founders at Work a little more interesting since it had a more general scope of startup business rather than just the craft of programming.  Founders at Work also had some more recognizable subjects being profiled.  Although semi-obscure programmers may be of some benefit, there was talk of a job interview question for techies of being able to show a candidate the list of 15 people interviewed and ask them what the contributions of each person were.  Before reading, I’d only be able to recognize 4 of the names and their significance.

The only real person who I thought should have been interviewed but what not was John Carmack.  The guy behind games as Wolfenstein and Doom.  Though, I remember a bit from the author saying he tried to get in contact but couldn’t make it happen.

There is only one woman on the list of 15 interviewees, but I think that’s more of a reflection of programming in general rather any bias on the part of the author.  THAT discussion is bigger than any one book, so one can easily give the author a pass on the subject.

The most interesting question the author asks all the interviewees has to be the whole “is programming a craft, science, or engineering discipline”.  I’ve always struggled with that myself.  When I was a grad student, I didn’t mind calling myself a “computer scientist”, but now it’s a little more vague.  I really don’t so research anymore and that seems to be necessary to have “scientist” in one’s title.  In Canada, the word “Engineer” is a little more restricted.  Although I find it funny when people who have engineering degrees who don’t have a P.Eng, call themselves “Engineers” but then get uppity when someone like me uses the term “software engineer”, because technically they aren’t suppose to have the ‘E’ word in their title either.  In the US it’s a little more loose.  At Google I had the “E” word in my title.  In the end, I don’t really care that much about title or categorization.  “Software Developer” is fine.  A geek by any other name and all…

Bachelor Parties Are Irrelevant

After talking with Keith earlier today, we realized that getting married really doesn’t impede any male freedoms anymore.  Given that most couples co-habitate before getting married, the various freedoms have been removed long before a guy gets married.  Thus, what exactly does a bachelor party celebrate the end of anymore?  Would your significant other be any more or less accepting of events that take place at a *good* bachelor party the day after you are married as the day before?  Of course not.

I can’t really think of any good reason for it aside from getting guys to buy into the bridal-industrial complex.  It would probably be more appropriate to have a party just before a guy starts “going steady” (yes, I’m using that term, it’s retro but good) with a girl.  However, that can happen a lot and throwing a rager every time a guy starts a relationship could get a little taxing, especially for some guys I know.

To deal with this, I propose throwing a party in celebration of a Man’s impending loss of much greater freedoms which can be tied to a very specific date for which freedoms exist one day and are gone the next: the birth of his first kid.  Yes, a knock up party if you will.  Think about it, in a relationship, the other party is a grown adult who can be reasoned with; with fatherhood the other party is a loud, needy, dependent whom you are genetically programmed to love no matter what irrational things they do.  Tell me THAT’S not the real loss of freedom.  In a relationship, going out for drinks requires an ‘okay’ over a phone call; with kids, going out for drinks requires an available babysitter, a constant ear to a cell phone, a hard curfew, and a drinking limit.  The beginning of a relationship sees happy people; the beginning of kids sees excessively tired people.  You get the idea.

It makes more sense to celebrate the final days of not being responsible for the welfare of another human being than celebrating the dropping of a couple grand on a wedding party and making it marginally harder to break up because of legal costs.  It also has the added benefit of people never having to deal with the awkwardness of deciding whether to have second bachelor party for your second marriage, since you can only have your first kid once.

So yes Chris, if Mel pees out a plus sign in May we’re going to Vegas.

Lessons Learned in Software Testing

The latest book I’ve finished on my “read a tech book a month” plan was Lessons Learned in Software Testing by Kaner, Bach, and Pettichord.  Since I spent the early part of 2009 pitching a QA program at Pulse, so I figure I should retroactively learn how to do it.  Testing is also a huge part of the software development process so I think it would be good to know what some of the experts think about it.

The book is setup as a 293 individual lessons for testing software over a number of sections.  I guess it’s setup such that you can skim very easily by checking the tip and seeing if it’s worth reading the explanation of it.  I read them all for completeness but some of the sections weren’t entirely relevant; ie. “Your Career in Testing”.

A lot of the lessons are actually pretty straight forward but I’m finding that a lot of the good books in various disciplines are really more about getting everyone on the same page.  There really isn’t that much that is controversial in terms of methodologies but it is an older book.  Although, one could easily the books that have the most influence are the ones that seem the most obvious several years down the road.

We give this book to any new testers at work.  This really is their training program in terms of software testing since we don’t have much time to train them otherwise.  Also, we tend to (very intentionally) hire testers from outside the programmer realm to get a broad view of our software so giving them a time tested book about testing gives them a decent place to start work.

There are a couple of gems in there.  I wish everyone actually believed the one I found most relevant to my current situation: “Bug counts are, at best, worthless measures of the effectiveness of your staff.  They’re misleading and demotivating, and they allow you to think you know a lot more than you know.  At worst, they make the wrong people look good, and the best people look incompetent.”

The Dollar-a-Day Advertising Strategy

A while back I heard about Eric Reis’ five dollar a day strategy for driving traffic to his site.  He was talking about it when he visited us at SEG.  The gist of it being that you shouldn’t really have a “launch” for a webapp, rather, just let it grow and adapt to your users in a more organic fashion by spending $5 a day on google ads to drive a small number of people to the site every day.

It’s actually a smart idea, because it drives a steady stream of people to the site and allows you to see how they use the site and see what bugs they hit along the way.  This is in stark contrast to simply getting a massive spike of traffic like we did with phonebooking back in 2004.  In that case, anything that was wrong with the site was seen by the thousands of people who visited it from the CollegeHumour link.  The bulk of the people saw the site as it currently was and didn’t come back.  It was very much a flash in the pan (not that I expected that joke to have any staying power, there are only so many humourous ways to assault a friend with a large book).

Applying this to whichishotter, I’ve been using a dollar-a-day advertising strategy on Facebook.  The idea being that I pay Facebook a dollar a day to show an ad for the site and this gets be about 5 or 6 random visitors a day.  The ads are targeted at Canadian women under 21.  It used to be 20-somethings in Vancouver, but Ray Lai had an interesting theory about how social media expands that we’re trying out.  This gets a small trickle of new users who vote on things, click on stuff, and break a few things.  I have a few users who are really good beta testers, but they are people I know.  The average user will not be someone I know and I know really technically competent people.

This allows some of the sites shame to be more private.  The first random user I had trying to signup actually hit an error when doing so; something quite embarassing.  Fortunately, any landmines hit are seen by a small number of people.  I can also track how many comparisons people vote on, which ones they hit, and there isn’t so much data to absorb that it’s like drinking from a firehose.

All-in-all, I’m going for the slow growth.  I’d rather respond to how people use the site rather than force them into certain behaviours.  Like, right now, I’m learning that people are hesitant to post comparisons of themselves.  Perhaps because they haven’t thought of anything interest at that second, or perhaps it’s not easy for the user.  These are the little things I can tweak as we go along.  It makes for slow growth, but I’d prefer that to flash in the pan.  Although, I don’t mind the occasional spike to move things along like with what happened when I posted the UW logo comparison.

The slow strategy also means I have more free time to enjoy the warm Vancouver weather   Site overhauls can happen when it rains.