Archives for October 2015

Silicon Valley: Beam Me Up Bono

October 20, 2015 Leave a Comment

When the TV show Silicon Valley debuted on HBO I knew that I had to watch it. It wasn’t that I wanted to watch it, I just had to. I often see the bizarre in this place that I now call home, and it felt like medicine to watch what others saw. The show is fun enough to enjoy, even if I also find it quite painful.

Knowing that there is a tv show about this neck of the woods flipped a bit in my brain. Now I can’t witness a crazy valley moment without thinking “this should be in the show!” It felt good to know that I wasn’t the only one, when I saw Blake Ross put an epic screen play out there, “Adult Supervision”. I know that Dick Costello hangs out with the writers, but they need to get Blake in there stat.

As I see my share of crazy, I am now taking notes for concepts, and why not publish them? Let’s start small:

Episode 332: “Beam Me Up Bono”

University Avenue is the main drag in Palo Alto. If you haven’t been here you may imagine a cute college town (Stanford) area with a view of the hills. That isn’t University Avenue. You need to go to Los Altos or Los Gatos for that. Strangely, Palo Alto is in the valley with no decent views from downtown. In fact, I have to admit that it is pretty ugly, but you wouldn’t get that from the housing prices!

The stores that open, die, and thrive on a main street can tell you about a place can’t they? University Ave has some stories. There are way too many persian rug stores to make sense. At first I assumed that they were fronts for money laundering of some kind, and then went on to learn about their role as VCs 🙂

There are many fancy restaurants and coffee shops. I am a fan of Philz Coffee, and not just because Snoop is an investor, but if you are visiting Palo Alto you have to go to Coupa Cafe. Here you will find pitch decks being shown all day long, and startups try to get their restaurant tech ideas in play here. For example, you can order with Downtown, and pay with bitcoin.

But the most quintessential shop front to open as of late is Beams. You may have seen some of these robotic skype-like stations, if not in person then on Modern Family, or as the body of Edward Snowden. They allow you to remotely control a video communications device on wheels so you can interact from afar. Do you have remote workers or multiple offices? Now folks can feel more connected.

But having a retail store is just kinda weird. I have walked passed this spot since it has opened and I have a bet with myself every time: will ANYBODY be in the store? My devil tends to win (rarely). Since no one is in the store, the robots on display have to come outside. This means that as you are walking past you have someone from St. Louis trying to engage you in a conversation in similar fashion to the Greenpeace activists across the street at the Apple Store.

What happens when that isn’t working? I have seen two things:

I have seen 4 of the robots in a circle looking inward talking to each other. Picture that for a moment. Imagine the four people sitting in cubes in St. Louis, communicating through this device that is sitting in Palo Alto!
They sometimes put candy on their heads. Yup, resorting to the same trick that an scary old man uses to persuade a minor to join him for his candy!

So, how could this be used in an episode of the show? Some ideas:

Have one of the characters at a startup event via the device (since they can’t make it in person due to breaking a leg or something), and have them run into Dean Kamen on a Segway.
Have a virtual bouncer at the startup event, to only let people in who are on the list, and then have the crew realize that they can just walk right past the thing
I was actually at an event where they used these as the bouncers!
Erlich notices that Tinder is doing well and wants to get into the dating business. He also notices that dating in silicon valley is tough, even for women when Monica notes that “the odds are good, but the goods are odd!” He puts this together and opens a virtual night club that mixes people in real life and beam robots from anywhere around the world. It is an awful experience but shockingly two robots do end up hooking up
At various times the device ends up in situations that don’t work, such as waiting for an elevator or having to deal with stairs. “HELP!”
Bono is walking around University Avenue and the Kansas City based greater starts to chat him up
I saw Bono walking up and down University Avenue two weeks ago. He was stopping in front of various stores, with a buddy. They were both wearing the same t-shirt that said: “I want to die on Mars!”.

Don’t you think this would fit in well with the show? Life in Silicon Valley, it sure is ….. unique!

YT? Reactive Working

October 12, 2015 Leave a Comment

Reactive is the new hotness. It can help you scale your backend, and keep your front-end complexity sane. It makes you dinner.

I was reading the fantastic introduction by Andre Staltz on the topic and for some reason my mind combined this stream with another thinking through asynchronous communication at work.

We tend to have a blend of synchronous and asynchronous communications, and sometimes we float between the two. I remember seeing a cool demo back in my webOS days where you would float between asynchronous and synchronous talking between parties. Imagine starting a conversation and going back and forth. Then at some point you and your mate happen to be available at the same time so the communication speeds up and feels synchronous. I am actually surprised that voice communications hasn’t allowed for this, other than silos (e.g. Voxer).

The same thing happens with text; whether it be sms, email, or chat. It gets interesting when you add in the social rules of engagement. If someone sends you a “yt?” message on work slack do you feel like you have to answer within 5 mins?

Actors

Now think of yourself as an actor. You are subscribing to a slew of streams right now, and you need to manage their SLA 🙂

At the end of a productive day you feel like you managed your time well, moving grabbing tasks (events), dealing with them, and then putting them back onto another stream. On these great days I feel like I spent the minimum time possible to move the ball (but no less!). Any thread locks (aka meetings) were productive in that decisions were made and the multiple threads (people) were unblocked.

When the ball doesn’t feel like it is moving we tend to solve via meetings. “If we all just get together and hash it out we will be good to go!” This can sometime work, but much of the time it doesn’t. It tends to go best when people are equally up to date, or able to get up to speed with the latest context quickly and have thought through their side of things.

On the flip side, when you are solving by asynchronously nudging GitHub issues, where people each take time to think through their side of the communication, it can be hard to know how things are going. Grabbing one item and “finishing” it feels productive, but nudging 12 items may actually be more impactful even if it doesn’t seem to be the case.

We have all seen the worst case scenario. That bug that now has 3000 comments and hasn’t been fixed for years. It gets nudged, but not actually towards the goal.

Nudging in the right direction

Maybe that is the key. If the work is moving in somewhat the right direction, then keep pushing and playing the multiple games of chess at the same time. If you notice the work is just being shuffled back and forth like a seasoned bureaucrat? Maybe it is OK to join the threads and use that opportunity to make a large change.

Do you track the velocity of your work? The more I learn about how the conscious brain tricks you, the more I feel like I need to be wary of some gut feelings.

Hard work is Good work

For example, it turns out that science has shown us that you need work to be hard to actually learn efficiently and effectively. The problem is that this hard work may make you feel like you aren’t learning as quickly as you would like. These tricks have very bad side effects for us all.

How often have you gone through the following situation: a certification test occurs once a year, so a week before the next one you cram to be able to pass it. The problem? you have tricked the test, but also yourself and people who depend on you. You now have a false sense of confidence of the material. The cramming helped get some knowledge into memory but probably not durable memory.

What should you do instead? Be a life long learner and test yourself as frequently as possible during the year. When the certification test comes up you will be rightfully confident, because you have proved to yourself that you have a certain level of knowledge. You will also be able to use this knowledge in your job all year round. Oh, and it will take you less time this way by using spaced learning!

If you interleave your learning you will also start to make more connections between your work. Maybe this is why I connected reactive programming with reactive working? YT?

Nagging and the nuclear option

October 7, 2015 Leave a Comment

I enjoy the Kindle platform, but man the Kindle for Mac product is weak. It feels like it is written using Tcl/Tk bindings or some weird cross platform solution.

I recently got into a strange flow around updating to a new version of the Mac client, and then had to giggle when I saw the following:

I kept picturing the product engineering team sitting around having the following discussion:

Igor: “I really want to be able to turn off support for v1.2.3 of the client”

Jonathan: “Why can’t we force them to upgrade?”

Igor: “A lot of our users didn’t get the app from the Mac App Store and don’t check for updates”

Jonathan: “Isn’t there a way for us to nag the user?”

Igor: “Hmm, not really. We don’t have the client talking to us in a way that lets us send a nag message”

Emily: “Wait, I think there is a way. What do we have is a client that asks for the list of books that the user owns, and 93% of them sort based on new-ness. So….. can we create a fake book called “Kindle update required” that has contents showing the user how to upgrade to the latest version?

Jonathan: “Huh. That is damn ugly but….”

Igor: “Ship it!”

Bian: “UPDATE books SET … WHERE clientVersion < 1.3*

The Configuration Service

How often have you seen folks, especially those who have grown up in the Web world where you can change a lot in real time, forgetting to put in the switches and services to enable you to tell your mobile app what to do.

If you don’t have a clear path to talk back to the apps that your customers install then you will run into an “oh crap” moment. Your launch check list should cover the three legged stool that is: analytics, A/B testing, and confirmation management. Feature flag all the things and give yourself the ability to slowly role out a feature to your user base.

For those moments where you really want to get people upgrading you can start the clock with a nag option that pesters them to upgrade by telling them what they will get for the trouble.

Ideally you will never have too, but you should also always have the nuclear option at the ready. The ability to basically turn the app at a particular version to just tell the user to upgrade. If you ever have to use this option it is an epic fail, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have it at the ready.

You don’t want to be sitting in that room discussing how to desperately get a message to your users on getting them to update, like Kindle for Mac!