Baus.net Podcast 2

First off, I have to apologize for the spottiness of the baus.net uptime. I'm having problems with twistd after switching my site over Linode. I don't think twistd's event driven I/O model is working well with pyblosxom.

I finished my second podcast that I recorded on my iPhone yesterday. It is keeping with the theme to do what is important.

My general premise here is that working and running companies is important, and it is wrong to discount capitalism as evil.

Here's a couple links that I mentioned in my podcast:

Randy Pausch Time Management Talk from 2007

Notes from Ryan Carson's BoS talk

Baus.net Podcast 1

I just finished my first podcast in the theme of becoming a "content production machine." It is pretty rough, but you have to start somewhere.

Here's a couple links that I mentioned in my podcast:

Randy Pausch Time Management Talk from 2007

Randy Pausch Time Management Talk from 1998

Dharmesh on Inbound Marketing

New Year's is one my favorite holidays as it comes with the least responsibility of all the major holidays. There is nothing to do except have a good time. No turkeys to cook or presents to buy.

K keeps a scrap book of mementos and looking back, even with all the economic craziness, 2009 was a good year. We traveled, went to a lot of shows, got some work done, and our families saw good health. Last spring, when the market melted down, I thought I would be out of a job. Fortunately that didn't happen, and in many ways our team came together which made us even more effective.

I'm optimistic about 2010. Although the U.S. has some systemic problems that we haven't come to terms with, our fundamentals are right. In times of crisis, it is best to embrace the fundamentals.

I appreciate the customary self critique of resolutions. A resolution doesn't need to be self deprecating, but a recognition that no matter how well things are going, there is room improve. My resolutions this year are a bit odd (sure I need to lose 15lbs, but that isn't anything new). My resolutions are to become a content production machine, and do what is important.

Become a content production machine

It sounds kind of strange to aspire to become a content production machine, but I wrote last year that I had started to take the internet for granted. I acted as if there will always be another day to express my opinions, but if history is a guide, that might not always be the case. I have more power of expression at my finger tips than in the entire history of mankind. That's not something to take lightly, as there are many places were the internet is already tightly control and freedom of expression limited. I am very fortunate to live in a country with a strong foundation in freedom of expression.

Also the ability to create content is increasing quickly. Writing is just the beginning. Video and (and to a certain extent) audio is going to be increasingly huge in the next couple years. It takes a lot of energy to write. I'm busy, I'm tired, I don't have the mental energy to write, but why limit myself to writing? It could very well be easier to just record my thoughts in a audio cast or video log. I definitely think doing something is better than nothing.

Do what is important

One of my biggest influences from 2009 was the late Randy Pausch. I was a late comer to Randy Pausch's work, but I've never heard anyone put the meaning of life in such concise terms. If there is one lesson I've learned from Randy, it is, "Do what is important."

While Pausch deservedly became famous for his Last Lecture, I've found his talks on time management to be even more pragmatic and possibly valuable.

When I'm driving (which I do a lot)I tend to put a familiar album on repeat and roll around the events of the day. This year I kept hearing Randy's voice in my head, "Do what's important. Do what's important." I'm bad at this. I do shit that isn't important all the time. Here's an example. With Randy's guidance, I did do something semi-important on my to-do list: I got my old Porsche out of the garage. That is something I failed to do for nearly 2 years as I became overwhelmed by the work it required. But getting the car on the road was important because everyday when I came home and saw it in the garage it sapped a little energy from me because in the back of mind I thought, "I need to get that Porsche out of the garage." It kept me from doing other more important things.

While the Porsche isn't important, getting it out of the garage was because it represented just another thing to do. But then I did something that wasn't important. I obsessed about the stupid thing. How much is this going to cost? How much is it worth? Is the suspension pan going to rust out? Is it going to need a valve job? Those are valid questions, but they aren't important.

And this is why I haven't reached Pausch's zen state of productivity. In retrospect, I should have done the important thing (get the Porsche out of the garage), and then moved on to the next important thing. But that's hard, and it is the reason Randy Pausch was Randy Pausch, and I'm not. Completing one important task threw me off course of my next task.

Even in his dying days, Pausch didn't claim that his work, and the fun he had doing it, wasn't important. It is clear that Randy put his family above all else, but he had a lot of pride in what he accomplished in his career. He said he made dreams come true, and he did. If I saw one thing last year that absolutely blew my mind as an engineer it is was the game by two of his former students, World of Goo. The entire game, including design, animation, musical score, and programming was done by two people with virtually no budget. It is a benchmark of what can be accomplished with a small team, and the interdisciplinary skill set it took to build it is mind boggling.

Fascination, passion, and the freedom to dream is what drives our society forward. The U.S. has a strong work ethic, but I don't believe work should be viewed as universally unenjoyable, because if virtue is found in doing unenjoyable work, the small things that make our working lives better will be not be considered valuable, even when the true costs are very small.

So this year I resolve to do what is important, but the hard part is understanding what is really important.

I just finished a significant upgrade to baus.net. I regrettably let the site atrophy to the point where I wasn't sure how it is was running. Baus.net felt like a messy desk. While I could get other work done, it kept nagging me every time I looked at it. While I haven't made any aesthetic changes yet, I did complete the following tasks:

• Download pyblosxom blog code to my Mac and get running in WingIDE.
• Get Subversion plugin that hosts my entries running on Mac.
• Make some code updates to take advantage of the Python Subversion API changes.
• Get pyblosxom core running under WSGI on twisted.
• Research re-enabling comments (decided to make it another project).
• Move static content to S3.
• Move image hosting to Flickr.
• Centralize code and content into a singly rooted Subversion repo.
• Load javascript libraries from Google.
• Upgrade from statcounter to Google analytics.
• Create CentOS VM on VMWare Fusion to stage deployment.
• Configure nginx to proxy to twisted and feedburner for my feeds.
• Upgrade memcached and libevent.
• Centralize logging for all services.
• Document the installation process.
• Write startup script.
• Provision new Linux VM from Linode.
• Perform installation on Linode.
• Update DNS to point to new installation.

This project ending up costing tens of hours of my personal time, and there was a point that I was ready to scrap the whole thing and move to WordPress.

But I'm glad I finished the project. I use baus.net to try out technologies in a pseudo production environment, and having my own personal content in total disarray didn't sit well with me. I also realized that my previous experiments with using Subversion to store my blog content had a direct impact on a project we are working on which uses Subversion as the back-end of a content management system. I had confidence that it would work after running baus.net this way for years.

I take pride that in my free time I've created a system from end to end including system administration, Python development, and some basic CSS/HTML hacking, which includes a pretty novel use of Subversion. That might sound silly for something as small as baus.net, but I think there is something to be said about building an entire system no matter how small. As a project manager responsible not just administration or software, but whole systems, at some point I have to walk the walk to maintain credibility. If all I do is go from one meeting to the next projecting ROI, discussing synergies, and saying absolutely have I added any real value?

After the Business of Software conference, I was reading over my notes when I saw on Twitter that Jason Calcanis was hosting his TWiST show at the BoS venue and was going to interview Matt Mullenweg of WordPress along with Joel, so I tuned into the webcast.

After Joel took the stage with Jason and Matt they started joking about how Matt, at 25, had done more that day than the rest of us will do in our lifetime, and Joel said something rather unexpected. He stated that he was "wrong" about the direction of one if his early products, CityDesk, which was a desktop content publishing/blogging system which Joel used to publish his own blog (and apparently still does).

After reading Joel for years, and having been a former CityDesk user, I was a bit shocked to hear this as CityDesk has been quietly swept under the carpet. The last official "News" item about the product was an announcement about Vista support from 2006. About a year ago in his blog forum he basically admitted that CityDesk had been unofficially end-of-lifed, which lead to the following comment by Mark Major:

...I used to visit the Fog Creek site twice a week - for !a year! after the last CityDesk version in 2003. Thinks me: "Any day now, any day now." "It's cool already, it's gonna be *so* cool when they fix that little complication with my article loops."

Such a shame that CityDesk ate the CEO's children, causing massive abandonment of the project, subsidence of world peace, etc. Now all we CityDesk users can do is stare at the glamorous office pictures and wish one of the much revered 'twenty power outlets at each desk' programmers gets tasked with a revamp for us.

Inspired by Rands BoS talk on improv, or "talking shit" as he would say, as Jason started taking questions for Joel and Matt from Twitter, I fired off the following tweet which he read on the show:

Warhol's future has come and gone. On the internet everybody is famous not for 15 minutes, but 15 secs, and I just blew mine. It's all down hill from here.

If there is one writer I look up to as the standard bearer in the software industry its Joel (ok JWZ is pretty damn good too). He defined personal branding and what Dharmesh now calls inbound marketing while never talking about branding and talking very little about marketing. He just did it.

In a post from earlier this month Joel describes Kathy Sierra's brilliant concept that your job as a software developer is to help your users to become awesome. To take it one step further, the job of any company is to help their customers be awesome. Then the focus of Fog Creek is clear to Joel: "It's all about helping software developers be awesome at making software."

Joel, in a rare moment of self depreciation says the following:

"Our focus on helping developers explains why one of our early products, CityDesk, flopped: it had nothing to do with software developers."

But that doesn't tell the whole story. When CityDesk was developed Fog Creek didn't have a focus on developers. There was JoS sure, but there were no developer products. The focus came with the success of FogBugz. If CityDesk would have taken off, he'd be writing "Our focus on helping bloggers and content creators explains why one of early products, FogBugz flopped: it had nothing to do with content creators."

Joel, you are going to be eating your words in two years. Why? Because StackExchange is going blow the pants off of everything else you've ever done, and it is going to have nothing to do with developers, and everything to do with people on answering questions about their pet ferret.

After DevDays, I became convinced that Fog Creek is on the verge of hockey sticking. Fog Creek will become StackExchange (BTW, could I put a couple dollars on that?). The reason is that no matter how good you are at building developer tools like FogBugz, it is a tiny market compared to the main stream potential of StackExchange.

Imagine for a minute if Google would of come out with code search before their web search and declared themselves a "developer company." Then a year latter released their web search which immediately increased their market 1000x. That focus on developers would seem pretty irrelevant wouldn't it? That's what is about to happen at Fog Creek.

The reason why CityDesk wasn't a run away success wasn't because it was a bad product or that Joel couldn't market it or that it wasn't developer product. It just wasn't the right product at that time. CityDesk was content management system when the world was embracing blogging. It was a desktop app when web apps were just starting to come into favor.

If you don't mind Joel, let me offer you a bit of advice; I've been taking yours for years. You should write a entry titled: "City Desk: A postmortem. What to do when things don't go according to plan." In this article you should clarify the current status of City Desk, describe how you were "wrong" (your words, not mine) and how the experience made Fog Bugz a better product and Fog Creek a better company.

This is important because you, and others with whom you are associated (such as speakers at the Business of Software), have inspired people to change the way they do business. You are not just a product manager or software CEO. You are a community organizer with significant influence. Some of us will buy our developers two monitors. Others will make software less complicated, yet powerful. Some will make big bets on new products, and others will quit their jobs to pursue their dreams of being an indie software developer. And many of us are going to fall down and skin our knees, and it is going to hurt, and we are going to need your advice about what to do next. I believe the fear of failing or at least looking stupid is biggest hindrance to changing business processes or lifestyle, so there couldn't be a more important topic.

So Joel, If you are serious at helping developers become more awesome, you are going to have to address the difficult topic of failure, or what to do when things don't go according to plan, because they never do.