my new job and why I think it's cool

I've been pretty quiet since mid-May, and the reason for that has been that I've started a new job.  I'm working for a start up called True Ability, and the 2 second pitch is "We provide a flight simulator for hiring technical talent."

The "Oh, I got your attention" pitch is that we do technical skills assessment by providing candidates with a series of tasks to complete in a virtual server.  It's basically a break-fix test on a VPS that allows non-technical people to gauge the ability of a potential hire.  Our ultimate goal is to get rid of the process of weeding through resumes and help recruiters narrow their search down to qualified, interested candidates as well as allow qualified and interested candidates to escape from getting weeded out for non-technical reasons.  Right now we're pretty much focusing on Linux administration, but should be moving into other areas in the not too distant future... I'm pretty excited to start expanding our offering.

The company itself is unbelievable.  It's one of those rare times you find awesome people with a truly complimentary mix of skills and expertise with a worthy goal and a clear roadmap to achieve it.  My job title is ostensibly "Linux Engineer", but in reality I'm working on the automation code for breaking the servers and evaluating the candidates' solution.  It's a funky hybrid role doing software development, but requiring a pretty good system administration base... kind of devops but without the drag of on-call duty. \o/

If you'd like to know more, hit us up.  The site's mainly geared for the recruiter types now, but we're planning on doing some cool stuff for the technical folks in the future.

And if you're wondering why I think this is a big deal, read on.

uml deadend or why your proprietary file format is a really, fantasically bad idea

So, I'm working on a project. Pretty big SQL setup, lots and lots of complexities. Good news is that the whole thing is described well with a "UML" document. There is also a tool in place to generate SQL-like stuff for MS SQLServer, but it takes advantage of some of MS SQL's quirks in the code it generates.

What I'd like to do is take the UML document as input, and have it spit out a bunch of ORM files for me in another language and just let the ORM's framework worry about the messy SQL details for whichever database ends up being used. Not only would this be (slightly) less tedious than manually building up the objects by hand, it would have the benefit of making the UML document a single point where the database could be managed in the abstract and I could get on with doing the stuff that's more computer sciencey and less data enterishy.

But. I can't. Because the UML file was created with a very feature rich UML editor that lets you draw really nice and really well annotated diagrams, but locks it all up inside of a very non-UMLish file format. And for the icing on the cake, the company that made the editor closed up shop in May and has decided to not only stop taking orders for their software but providing the free evaluation download as well.

From my point of view, this makes the file just as programmatically useful as a jpeg picture of a diagram of the database layout. The tedious grunt work of examining the diagram and manually hacking it all together is unavoidable, which means that now we've introduced the chance of documentation skewing away from the implementation. Inadvertent forks from last minute bugfixes or poorly communicated design changes are now on the table.

All because a software developer thought his method for storing UML data was better than just using simple UML, and that his clever method would assure him of job security.

Wrong on both counts, mang.

And now we're both hosed.

Just stick with the standards, people. Please?

amazon now offers cloud mysql

Just got some spam from Amazon announcing the availability of their RDS (relational database system). The idea is that they basically manage a mysql server for you, and data transfer between RDS and EC2 machines in the same zone is free.

Scratching out some rough numbers, that's about $85/mo for their low end db server.. backups included. They're also dropping the rate for linux EC2 instances, and that works out to about $63/mo.

no such thing as a free lunch

I think this guy was going for a Guinness record ponzi scheme or something.

He was basically taking cash from one client to pay off dividends to another customer. No one bothered to ask how, because, hey, who turns down free money and 12% returns, amirite? But now that the music has stopped, everyone's complaining about how there aren't enough chairs. $15,000,000,000 has already just disappeared, that could close in on $50B before all is said and done.

But the really sad thing? Think what $15B reinvested into your local economy to fund real startups (and I'm not talking about the "I have an idea for a website" crowd here) could have done.

change != innovation

innovation -noun
1. something new or different introduced.
2. introduction of new things or methods.

change -noun
1. a transformation or modification; alteration.
2. a variation or deviation.
3. the substitution of one thing for another.
4. variety or novelty.

In the push to differentiate products, marketing folks tend to confuse the two together. The hype for Windows 95 (and now, for Vista) is a good example of this. Although the product had a lot of modifications and at least the surface was transformed, it's not really a new product. Going from win32 (Windows 98) to win32s (Windows 2000) was innovation because that was the point that they actively switched from bolting crap on to the old DOS kernel and used the new NT kernel as their base.

Apple showed innovation by dropping it's old and rapidly aging MacOS for NeXT (aka Rhapsody, aka MacOS X). The iPod was innovation, not so much because of the hardware, but rather because of iTunes.

This is a small distinction, but it's an important one that anyone who makes a product (including software developers) would do well to remember because while innovation is an opportunity to create and grow into a new market, change is usually little more than an opportunity for your customers to leave you. This is especially true for Software as a Service type offerings where your customer doesn't have the option of ignoring the new version and sticking with the old one (ie, World of Warcraft expansion, changes to iGoogle, Facebook pages, cellphone apps, etc).

The reason for that is because even though you might give advanced warning, and even though you might give people a perfectly reasonable amount of time to test out the new interface, you are still ultimately causing them migration headaches on a date of your choosing, not theirs, for your own benefit, not theirs. It's a disruption to their routine, and if you're not careful about it they can easily decide that the added cost of simply going somewhere else isn't that much higher than the cost of upgrading to your shiny new 2.0.

where was that agile stuff?

Hackaday posted a link to waxy.org's online copy of Code Rush... a documentary about Netscape open sourcing Navigator and creating Mozilla. The amount of progress over the past decade on this code base is truly amazing when you step back and look at it from a historical perspective.

What I think is interesting is that you get a glimpse of the development process, which appears to be: controlled chaos. The only real metric they used was simply "are there any bugs left".

When I look at how much time we spend today fussing over which methodology to use or having to make "business cases" for the existence of software devs on the payroll, I can't help but wonder if the task of trying to explain and quantify software development in business terms isn't killing progress in getting-stuff-done terms.

Maybe getting to zaroo boogs is the only thing we should really be tracking because maybe that's the only thing that matters.