Life of a Software Engineer in Pittsburgh

Early in the movie ‘Moneyball’, Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill) explains to Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) the epidemic failure in baseball thinking…

Okay, people who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins and in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.

Most employers think when they hire an employee the are buying time. Be in the office at 8:30 and leave a 5:00. That’s medieval thinking. (Or at least industrial revolution thinking.) You shouldn’t buy time, you should buy productity. The time you buy from an employee in and of itself isn’t worth anything. It’s productivity you want.

Measuring time is a poor proxy for measuring productity.

Here’s a good discussion on Hacker News about hotels that inject content into web pages as their customers surf the web.

The root cause of this bad behavior is the thin margins that hotels must operate in today’s Priceline and Hotels.com price-pressured environment. The New York Times detailed the increased pressure that consumers, armed with their mobile devices in hand, are putting on retailers.

How will businesses survive? It won’t be by suppressing technology. Embracing technology, innovation and customer insights is the recipe for success.

In this nice recap of SXSW Dino Talic mentions the problem of trying out app during SXSW.

it’s impossible to get a good data connection in downtown Austin with 250,000 geeks vying for valuable data packets. With GPRS speeds on your iPhone, it’s difficult to download the app let alone get an optimal user experience.

Could this be a reason to optimize performance of your app? If you have any intention on trying to make a sizable splash, it might be a good idea.

Internet dust-ups are my guilty pleasures. Here’s a recent one:

Shay Pierce writes about turning a Zynga employment offer down after Zynga purchased his employer OMGPop–maker of Draw Something.

CEO of OMGPop calls Shay out as being a weak employee.

SFGate tries to figure it all out.

And as an aside bonus, an amazing video of the OMGPop offices.

I’ve seen this pattern a couple places in controllers where looking for optional information:

int id;
string idString = [via a param or getting it from the url query string]

if (!int.TryParse(idString, out id)) {
    // idString is a valid id
} else {
    // id string is missing
}

Two states (the id is there or it is not) so we’re all good? Or are we…

Url: /MyController.aspx/mymethod?id=24922%20ForceRecrawl:%200
HTTP_USER_AGENT : Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

Sometimes bots or bad mobile browsers (I’m looking at you blackberry) will add junk to the url. Just checking the to see if the id parses isn’t enough to know the state—there are three states here: the id is there and is valid or invalid or the id is missing. The code required probably needs to look more like…


If ( !string.IsNullOrEmpty(idString) ) {
    if (!int.TryParse(idString, out id)) {
        // idString is a valid id
    } else {
        // id string contains an invalid id
    }
} else {
    // id string is missing
}


Most of us know the story: Steve Jobs got a look at what was going on at Xerox Parc and took those ideas to create the Macintosh. Suprisingly Malcolm Gladwell’s article (abstract-only) on innovation contained a couple new facts (at least to me). For example, I didn’t know that Jobs paid for access to Parc (in the form of Apple stock) and that it was Apple that made the mouse affordable. (Parc’s mouse cost $300, Jobs needed one that cost $15.)

Galdwell uses the Apple/Parc story as a jumping off point to discuss the difference between invention (the creation of an idea) and innovation (the application of the idea that changes things). Yep, Parc created the mouse (invention) but Apple used the mouse to bring computers to the masses (innovation).

Gladwell’s article caught the attention of Parc (they still exist?) and Parc responded (or as other say, fired back). But the Gladwell article and Parc’s response are merely complementary. Gladwell sets up the problem (how can inventors move past the idea phase) and Parc responds with a solution (open innovation).

More and more I’m starting to think that using open innovation is the key if your battlefield is mature or crowded. Fighting over each percentage of the market is hard–using inventions for innovation, that’s where the easy money might be.

Branding, personal brands, brand spanking and so on. You’ve probably had it up to your ears with branding branding branding.

Most people associate indelible marks most closely with branding–logos and colors associated with the product. But as Apple has proven, branding also includes other factors, such as a great user experience or a great design.

When your main avenue of brand creation is a web property, first and foremost your brand should start with ascetics. Make the site look great, make it look modern, make it look clean. Focus on the main interaction and remove anything that doesn’t contribute to core goal.

This past week Amazon lauched MyHabit.com–Amazon’s high fashion daily deal. I love the simplicity of the site, super clean and focused on viewing the products and making the purchase. I haven’t made a purchase but I’ve visited the site each day–anyone who understands the attention economy knows the importance of that.

Thinking of launching a web site–start with ascetics. No one ever complained that a site was just too beautiful.

In Tony Hsieh’s book “Delivering Happiness”, Tony details the business lessons he learned from playing poker (excerpt on HuffPo). This weekend it was chess, not poker, that illustrated a business lesson for me.

The Pin

A pin is a tactic in chess where a defending piece can’t move without exposing an attack on a more valuable piece. In the picture above, one white bishop is pinning the rook to the king while the other bishop is pinning the knight to the queen.  Neither the black rook nor the black knight can move without black suffering damage. (By rule, the black rook can’t move even if it wanted to since you can’t expose your king to a check.)

In one game over the weekend, I pinned my opponent’s knight to her queen using a bishop, much like in the picture above. My bishop was safe and since the knight couldn’t move, I devised another plan of attack that I thought would win me a pawn. The plan had several steps and I started down the path.

A few moves into my plan, my opponent moved her knight exposing her queen to attack from my bishop. But I was focused on my plan to win a pawn and didn’t realized I could capture her queen. I pushed a pawn, realized my mistake and watched her queen capture my bishop.

It’s important to have a concise and well thought out plan of attack. But it’s equally as important to review your plan at each step of the way to make sure that it still makes sense based on the current conditions.

Set aside some free-thinking time to review your plan and make sure that it still makes sense. You might end up with a different plan and a shorter game.

Hacker News had a link to a great story of how two software engineers gave up typical start-up persuits in order to create a snap together trebuchet.

Among the lessons learned they mention “do something you believe in, even if it doesn’t make business sense, and don’t listen to feedback.”

I would make one small change to that statement:  ”do something you believe in, even if it doesn’t make business sense, listen to all feedback but do what you feel is right .”

Mentioned in the article is another nugget of wisdom regarding feedback “what your users say doesn’t matter. It’s how they say it.” Troo Dat.

Making business decisions based on user feedback is tricky. When users say “I don’t have the time to use your product” what are they really saying?

“I don’t believe the benefits your product provides are important”

“The time I spend using your product it’s worth the benefits”

Depending on what your user is saying, it’s a big difference in the how you might change your strategy. If they don’t think the benefits are important, you have to convince them otherwise. This is probably only a tangential product problem. But if it takes too much time to reap the benefits, time to work on making the product easier to use.

It’s a holiday in Pittsburgh.  Businesses that only close on Christmas will be closed today.  The streets will be empty and bars will be filled as Steeler Nation watch their team try for a seventh Super Bowl victory.

The Steelers’ Super Bowl run had a bit of personal relevance to me this year as one of the co-creators of keiselbeardme.com (kbm).  Two weeks watching the site grow from 1, 500 visitors on day one to 25,ooo visitors in a single day filled each of us with amazement. Each day the site exceeded our expectation for traffic as we held our breath watching the “little web site that could” serve up over 100K page views on a single day.  Highlights include getting to talk to New York Times reporter John Branch and one of our co-creators father’s sending a heartfelt message to his son using the site.

On this Super Bowl Sunday I’m reminded of the thrill of being a creator and not just a consumer.  Kbm had a high fun to effort ratio–it was fun for a ton of people but only took us some 40 hours of effort.  I can imagine the next creative project I undertake will be much more effort and attract far less attention.  But that should be okay–the creative process has value alone.

One shouldn’t let success discourage future endeavors.  And I have to remember that every time during kbm’s run when we thought we couldn’t possibly get more traffic, we did.  You just never know how success may find you.