Mock Integration

Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 09:55:02 +0200

Why I Don't Do Unpaid Overtime and Neither Should You:

Words that I definitely subscribe to:

As a programmer in the U.S. for 30 years now I have spent some of that time working more than 40 hours in a week, which is not all that common in this industry, and when I was salaried I rarely if ever got more pay.

No more, I now find the whole idea nauseating.

Keep Score on the Waitress's Service

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:52:46 +0200

Sometimes when I go out to eat, I will keep score on the waiter’s or waitress’s performance. They start out with a baseline of 10% and can earn or lose 1% at a time for extra good or poor service.

Today the waitress finished with 6%. Nothing remarkable happened that might have earned her extra percentage points. And she did four things to lose points:

Lunch menu entrees can come with bread, soup or salad. I ordered a salad, and she didn’t tell me that the entree that I ordered already included a salad. So I ended up with two salads (if I had known, I would have ordered something different). 1% off.
We finished out drinks and I asked her: “Can we please have some water”. So she brought on cup of water for me, and none for my wife. 1% off.
After we finished eating and she cleared off our plates, didn’t ask if we wanted anything else. We said that we were done, but she waited at least six minutes to bring us the check (and there wasn’t much going on at the time). 1% off.
The restaurant has these tiny little tasty candies that they give out to patrons when they are leaving. She didn’t bring us any (I took on my own). 1% off.

No matter what type of service you are trying to provide to your client, it is often the very small details that can end up creating a positive or negative impression (and can often end up costing you).

The NoSql Movement

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:13:39 +0200

The NoSql Movement:

Good (if long) article describing the common denominators among the different nosql platforms, how the needs of database consumers (both on the developer and on the client levels) have changed over time to make today’s environment one where a RBDMS might not be what is needed.

Chronic Palestinian Lying

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:27:07 +0200

Chronic Palestinian Lying:

There was a tragic bus accident this morning near Jerusalem — a Palestinian school bus hit a truck, causing the bus to flip over and catch on fire. The Palestinian Red Crescent hasn’t made up its mind yet about the number of casualties, but between 6-8 children were killed and dozens injured — some seriously.

Yet immediately after the tragedy, the Palestinian Authority’s Health Minister, Dr. Fathi Abu Morley called a press conference in Ramallah, blasting Israel for “not responding in time”

…

The Palestinian’s lie is simply and absolutely disgusting.

As a first responder medic for both Magen David Adom and United Hatzalah emergency response medical services, I received a MDA emergency pager message at 9:13 AM this morning, that a school bus had flipped over and a mass casualty incident was declared. Moments later I received an SMS from United Hatzalah, calling on all emergency medical personnel in the area to respond. I switched to channel 1 on my United Hatzalah cellular radio, and heard dozens of first responders announcing they were on their way to the scene of the accident. No one even mentioned that it was a “Palestinian school bus” — since that was completely irrelevant.

Only Israel gets Goldstoned

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:28:03 +0200

Only Israel gets Goldstoned:

Syrian guns can obliterate a field hospital; leave the wounded bleeding to death in the streets; and rampage through hospitals shooting rebel troops, while the world merely clicks its tongue in disapproval. But if Israel tries to move 25 Palestinian squatters from a shanty village they set up in a Jerusalem national park, the global protests will be loud and vociferous.

Amazon Reviews: Passion Natural Water-Based Lubricant - 55 Gallon

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:48:50 +0200

Amazon Reviews: Passion Natural Water-Based Lubricant - 55 Gallon:

One selected review:

As a Fertility Specialist for Pachyderms, this was exactly what we needed to help rebuild elephant populations all over sub-saharan africa. It’s not all just Medications and IVF treatments. Some times you need a loudspeaker, a Barry White CD and a 55 Gallon drum of Lube.

How Zoho Recuirts (School/Grades Not so Important)

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:46:10 +0200

How Zoho Recuirts (School/Grades Not so Important):

What we found over time was that there is a lot of really good talent in that pool, which the industry had overlooked. Based on a few years of observation, we noticed that there was little or no correlation between academic performance, as measured by grades & the type of college a person attended, and their real on-the-job performance. That was a genuine surprise, particularly for me, as I grew up thinking grades really mattered

More Homework Please

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:46:23 +0200

Me: Moshe, it is time to come to dinner now
Moshe (6 years old, 1st grade): But I want to do more homework
Me: You can do more homework after dinner, please come and sit with the family
Moshe: But...
Me: Right now!

[Moshe comes walking slowly to the kitchen, and whines to my wife]
Moshe: Abba isn't letting me do my homework!

(This conversation actually happened. Recording it now so that I can remind him about it in years to come)

Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:53:16 +0200

Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die:

Atwood leaves StackExchange … Coding Horror is resurected?

Although some meetings are inevitable, even necessary, the principle he’s advocating here is an important one. Meetings should be viewed skeptically from the outset, as risks to productivity. We have meetings because we think we need them, but all too often, meetings are where work ends up going to die. I have a handful of principles that I employ to keep my meetings useful:

No meeting should ever be more than an hour, under penalty of death.
The first and most important constraint on any meeting is the most precious imaginable resource at any company: time. If you can’t fit your meeting in about an hour, there is something deeply wrong with it, and you should fix that first. Either it involves too many people, the scope of the meeting is too broad, or there’s a general lack of focus necessary to keep the meeting on track. I challenge anyone to remember anything that happens in a multi-hour meeting. When all else fails, please keep it short!…

Brainstorming Doesn't Really Work

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:18:00 +0200

Brainstorming Doesn't Really Work:

The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given a series of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to follow Osborn’s guidelines. As a control sample, the scientists gave the same puzzles to forty-eight students working by themselves. The results were a sobering refutation of Osborn. The solo students came up with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” Brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group, but rather made each individual less creative. Although the findings did nothing to hurt brainstorming’s popularity, numerous follow-up studies have come to the same conclusion. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”

And yet Osborn was right about one thing: like it or not, human creativity has increasingly become a group process. “Many of us can work much better creatively when teamed up,” he wrote, noting that the trend was particularly apparent in science labs.

The larger lesson is that the increasing complexity of human knowledge, coupled with the escalating difficulty of those remaining questions, means that people must either work together or fail alone. But if brainstorming is useless, the question still remains: What’s the best template for group creativity?

The End of Wall Street As They Knew It

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:49:21 +0200

The End of Wall Street As They Knew It:

With all the major banks unable to wager their own funds on big bets, there’s a growing sense that the money that was being made during the Bush boom won’t be back. “The government has strangled the financial system,” banking analyst Dick Bove told me recently. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”
Of course, described a little less colorfully, reducing the risk in the system at a cost of a certain amount of the banks’ profits was precisely what the government was striving for. All this has meant that Wall Street’s traders have found themselves on the wrong end of the market—a predicament that many of them have never seen before.

High Scalability: Tumblr Architecture

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:34:24 +0200

High Scalability: Tumblr Architecture

Spolsky on Management

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:33:00 +0200

Spolsky on Management:

The “management team” isn’t the “decision making” team. It’s a support function. You may want to call them administration instead of management, which will keep them from getting too big for their britches.

For every Steve Jobs, there are a thousand leaders who learned to hire smart people and let them build great things in a nurturing environment of empowerment and it was AWESOME. That doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It doesn’t mean letting people do bad work. It means hiring smart people who get things done—and then getting the hell out of the way.