Category Archives: Work

Programming, Software, Web Applications, Work

Names are like genders

One thing I slightly regret in the data modelling that is done for users in Wazoku is that I bowed to marketing pressure and “conventional wisdom” and created a pair of first and last name fields. If gender is a text field then how much more so is the unique indicator of identity that is a name?

The primary driver for the split was so that email communications could start “Hey Joe” rather than “Hey Joe Porridge Oats McGyvarri-Billy-Spaulding”. Interestingly as it turns out this is definitely the minority usage case and 95% of the time we actually put our fields back together to form a single string because we are displaying the name to someone other than the user. It would have been much easier to have a single name field and then extract the first “word” from the string for the rare case that we want to try and informally greet the user.

My more general lesson is that wherever I (or we more generally as a business) have tried to pre-empt the structure of a data entity we have generally gotten it wrong, however so far we have not had to turn a free text field into a stricter structure.

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Work

Google Apps and App Engine

If you use Google Apps to provide you with email then you should also really be thinking about enabling and using Google App Engine as well. Internal applications are much easier to deliver to the business as a whole and having a ready-made platform makes it easier to try out ideas that previously would have been impractical.

The first advantage is that Google Apps that are bound into your domain allow you to create something that is easy to access for an existing user (no additional login is required) but also gives you peace of mind that you are exposing virtually zero surface area for attack.

The second is that for Python at least it is easy to access a very full featured environment with a minimum of code. Want to send emails, have task queues, access to memcache, serve static content? It is all a YAML configuration line or import away.

I love services like Heroku but a lot of internal apps have relatively light usage and benefit from the batteries included approach rather than combining various plugins. It makes it easy to switch between different approaches and react to different demands.

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Work

Is this really the manifesto we want?

Silicon Milkroundabout tried to produce a manifesto for why people should consider working at a startup. This is the outcome.

The first time I saw it I was very disappointed. While I cannot knock its authenticity it is a profoundly depressing document. While there are the standard statements about passion and having the freedom to make what you should rather than what you are told to; there is much more about poverty, tiredness and scarcity.

If I read this I would say that working for startups is a mugs game. You’re far better coming in during the expansion phase when salaries are higher and the business case better proven.

The many references to tiredness and lack of sleep is also revealing. What I have discovered is that tremendous pressure is put on you to deliver product in a technology startup and this should be resisted at all costs. Sustainable pace is more important in small organisations than in large ones. In a large organisation you can actually burn out a team to achieve a goal because you probably have access to the resources to replace them. In a small one, once you’ve wrecked a team (probably including yourself) you have no way of replacing them and a death spiral will inevitably set in as decision making becomes progressively worse. Remember that a startup should aim to deliver progress not product. Don’t work with people who don’t understand this.

Money, frankly seems to be the missing ingredient from this list of reasons. Maybe adding “because late-stage equity options are worthless” would ruin the overall tone. Many people, especially investors, are involved in startups because they offer potential massive returns in a low growth environment. Americans are much more open and brash (you might even say vulgar) about this with talk of flipping and sale valuations of millions of dollars (often farcical as in the case of Groupon who merely had the bad luck to be caught before their IPO).

Even then this reason is foolish because if what you want is money then you should go to the City. The money is guaranteed, guaranteed in fact by the government which not only underwrites it, bails it out but then charges off into Europe to protect it from legislation that might affect its lucrative tax haven and money “recycling” business. In contrast being involved in “entrepreneurship” is a rather romantic and significantly more challenging way to achieve wealth.

I do work at a startup though and I was at Silicon Milkroundabout trying to encourage people to join me in doing this.

My personal motivation is that for me a startup is a business that is complete but small enough that you can actually see and understand all parts of it. The interesting thing is that organisational dysfunction is actually just a likely in a startup as a larger firm. Often the problems are actually exactly the same, simply orders of magnitude less significant.

Being able to pull the curtain aside is fascinating. Working in the small also removes the mystique that gathers around things and people that generate large revenues. Once a certain number of livelihood’s become involved in a particular process or product you lose the ability to tinker with things or even to question why things are the way they are. In an environment with no money and no customers any change is either positive or at least neutral.

Working in a startup for non-cynical reasons means creating something that is of profound personal interest. I really am interested in trying to remove friction from the process of turning ideas into reality. Wazoku is a product that I do believe in and what I was saying to a lot of people at Silicon Milkroundabout was try the product. If you are interested in solving the problem and the solution in turn solves some of your problems your work is satisfying at all levels. If there is not a satisfactory solution already in progress for your problem then a startup is the only way that you can initiate that process of moving to a more perfect world.

Working for a startup is a last resort; need should be part of your motivation; ignore idiots and their advice; make sure you get enough sleep.

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Work

Silicon Milkroundabout Roundup

Interesting time at Silicon Milkroundabout this Sunday. There were kind of three levels of activity going on, first of all there was the element of developer goofing off with arcade machines and free stuff. Then there was the opportunity to network, first of all between the startups and secondly between the developers (although I am not sure how much mixing between different dev teams was actually going on).

Finally there was the recruitment activity. Unlike the first event this really was more of a milkround with a younger, less experienced audience. The format did seem to be pitching for talent which is interesting as I am not convinced that people are going to find the best role by going with the best sales pitch. There has to be a better way of understanding the culture of the firm you are potentially joining.

The different streams of activity make the event quite weird in its nature and purposes. It feels like there is a need for a kind of startup expo to allow startups to see and meet one another without the pretext of seeking to employ people. There is also a need for a kind of elite coder event on a quarterly basis that is maybe a little select, a bit like a mini-conference, that allows for networking and swapping of intelligence and gossip on what is really going on at various firms.

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Work

The Pretentious CTO

I currently use the title CTO in my job despite the fact that I only directly manage two people. A classic example of the “fake” CTO. So naturally I felt a little defensive in a recent discussion with Jon Hartley about why I feel that the title can be justified by people who work in small businesses.

Let’s start with an entirely pragmatic answer: the job title is something that is well understood. While the majority of my activities day to day would be adequately covered by the title “lead developer”, the truth is that technical authority and decision making resides solely with myself. The easiest way to convey that to suppliers and recruitment agents (and stop them seeking to go over my head to my non-existent boss) is to use the most commonly understood title.

I find it ironic that I have managed much larger projects with a much junior title. In terms of experience I do not feel a particular gap with other startup CTOs but obviously there is a bigger gap as you move into the equivalent role in larger organisations. A lot of those people come from non-technical backgrounds reflecting the greater need for people management at larger scales. The number of people who have technical backgrounds and have managed groups greater than a hundred people strong onshore are probably pretty small.

For me the key differentiator in my current job is that I do hold a technology portfolio within the management and report on the whole technical area to the management team as well as the board and investors (although to be honest the latter too are not that bothered so far). I would happily concede the “Chief” as I have no other senior technology reportees but I think it is a different kind of pretension that seeks to do down the unique aspects of a role you have in an organisation. I am an officer of the company and I do make the key decisions for technology and I am held to account for them. CTO is the common title and I am comfortable using it.

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Web Applications, Work

Using SVG in the modern website

Using SVG when you are putting together a new website is a pretty sound decision, it’s over a decade old, well-supported by browsers and the ability to scale images accurately via CSS is pretty compelling when you are rapidly trying out different layouts and proportions.

Of course until recently IE has been the bugbear but IE9 actually has pretty decent SVG support. It is now worth thinking of using SVG as the general case and IE8 as the exception which can be switched to PNG via Javascript. The first iteration of Wazoku Idea Spotlight used SVG exclusively and the second iteration will do a Modernizer based switchout for IE8 but essentially still be SVG based.

Therefore I was pretty confused when I was taking a random check at the app in IE9. Instead of displaying alt text or the images instead there was just whitespace. Quickly opening the images revealed that IE was quite happy to render them at full window size and that there was no issue with loading them.

After some confused Googling I found out that the issue was that the previous generation of SVGs were generated straight out of Adobe Illustrator where as this set are going through Inkscape where I am tweaking the colour, size and so on. Inkscape does not allow you by default to specify a property called the viewbox. Instead this is only created if you export your file as an Optimized or Plain SVG. It is an outstanding feature when you go looking through the Inkscape bug list but it is a really obscure bug (hence this blog) to track down. The reason the images were appearing as blank is that without a viewbox IE9 crops the image to the CSS dimensions rather than scaling it. Firefox and Chrome scale it as you would expect. Essentially I was seeing the top-left 32 pixels of an image that IE9 considered to be 640px square, overflow hidden.

Having found the problem I then converted a test image to Optimized SVG, who doesn’t love Optimized things after all? Well the answer to that is Chrome. Firefox (probably due to having the longest SVG heritage) did the right thing in both cases and IE9 was fine with the Optimized version. Chrome stretched the image out on the vertical and via the Developer tools it was possible to see that the Dimensions value for the image was completely incorrect with a letterbox set of dimensions rather than a square.

In the end the thing that worked everywhere was Inkscape’s Plain SVG format. Something I am fine to live with. It would be nice to be able to set a viewbox from Inkscape’s Document Properties though and I will be keeping an eye out for it on the release notes in future.

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ThoughtWorks, Work

Why didn’t I get into ThoughtWorks?

I had an interesting conversation with a recruiter recently about the difficulty of the ThoughtWorks recruitment process. It’s true that the majority of applicants don’t make it through, but then that it is true of most recruitment processes. The ThoughtWorks one is perhaps more drawn out and longer so you feel that more effort was invested if you don’t go through.

One thing that is quite interesting is that being really smart is not the only criteria if you want to work at ThoughtWorks. Candidates who fail the process often go on to join other very prestigious companies. Why did you turn down this person who went to this other company?

In most cases the answer is that the company they ended up joining was not a consultancy. Consultancy is, unfortunately perhaps, not just about raw smarts and programming ability. Unlike a lot of companies ThoughtWorks doesn’t really have a codebase, the job is mostly about working with and helping people improve their own codebases.

Coaching, persuading and analysing code is quite different from writing good code. My favourite example of this is a code submission that solved all three of our problems in probably one of the shortest sets of solutions I’ve seen. The candidate correctly identified each underlying abstraction and applied the standard solutions in a concise powerful way.

An automatic hire then? No, sadly not, because while the candidate had the time to solve all three problems they didn’t bother to write a single test. If you look at what they did they really just proved their own superiority and left nothing that helped explain, maintain or develop their code base. You could already see that this person wanted to be the hero of the piece, not the collaborator.

In the three years I’ve been at ThoughtWorks there have been several times when I could have produced a much better solution to problems than what was actually created in collaboration with my clients. I would like to think that instead of the best solution we were able to produce something that our client teams understood better than what they had previously, was more productive that what they had previously and was more reliable that what they had previously.

All these things are more valuable than an individual being a better coder than their peers.

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Programming, Work

The beauty of small things

I am very interested in the idea of “constellation architecture” and microapps as new model for both web and enterprise architecture. It feels to me like it a genuinely new way of looking at things that can deliver real benefit.

It is also not a new way of doing things, it is really just an extension of the UNIX tools idea and taking ideas like service-orientated architecture and some of the patterns of domain-driven design and taking them to their logical extreme conclusion.

If I take ls and I pipe it through grep, you wouldn’t find that particularly exciting or noteworthy. However creating a web application or service that does just one thing and then creating applications by aggregating the output of those many small components does some novel and slightly adventurous to some.

SOA failed before it began and the DDD silos of vertical responsibility seem poorly understood in practice. Both have good aspects though. However both saw their unit of composition as being something much larger than a single function. An SOA architecture for payments for example tended to include a variety of payment functions rather than just offering one service, authorising a payment for example.

There is a current trend to look at a webpage as being composed of widgets, whether they be written as server-side components or as client operated components. I think this is wrong and we need to see a page as being composed of the output of many different webapps.

Logging in a web-application whose only responsibility is to authenticate users, the most popular pages are delivered by an application whose responsibility to determine which pages are popular.

This applications should be as small as we can make them and still function. Ideally they should be a few lines of domain code linking together libraries and frameworks. They should have acceptance/behaviour tests to guarantee their external functionality and that’s about it.

It seems to me that the only way we are going to get good large-scale functionality is by aggregating useful, small segment small functionality. Building large functional stacks takes a lot of time and doesn’t deliver value exponentially to the effort of its creation.

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Software, Work

Comparing Jabber servers

I recently had a trawl around the available Jabber servers looking for something that was suitable for use as a messaging system for a website. My first job was to do a quick review of what is available out there. The first thing that was quite clear that is ejabberd has massive mindshare. There was a definite feeling of “why would you want to try other servers when you could just be running ejabberd?”.

Well there are kind of two answers; first there is inevitable Erlang objection. This time from sysops who felt uncomfortable with monitoring and support. It is a fair point, I feel Erlang can be particularly obtuse when it’s failing. The second was that ejabberd stubbornly refused to start up on my Fedora test box. Neither the yum copy nor a hand-built version cut the mustard. Ironically I was able to get an instance running in minutes on my own Ubuntu-based virtual machine (hand-built Erlang and ejabberd).

Looking a JVM-based alternatives I looked at OpenFire and Tigase. Tigase has lovely imagery but also seemed to have spam over its comments and the installation was a pig that I gave up on quickly. OpenFire is one of those old-school Java webapps where you are meant to manage everything via a web gui. This makes some kinds of  tasks easy but you have to write your own plugins to get programatic access to the server. I didn’t want to setup up an external database (why on earth would I want to do that?) but the internal HSQL store left me with no way of easily tweaking the setup of the server, a command-line tool would have been ultra-helpful because… OpenFire is annoyingly buggy, by this I mean it doesn’t have a lot of bugs but they are really annoying. After running through the gui setup process I tried to login. This was the wrong thing to do. What I needed to do was stop the server and restart it. Now the server was fucked and I needed to manually delete data and tweak config files to allow me to do the setup again.

Once it was running there was also some fun and games getting the BOSH endpoint to work. Do you need a trailing slash or not? I don’t remember but get it wrong and it doesn’t work. If you try to HTTP GET the endpoint then you get an error, this is technically correct but leaves you wondering whether your config is correct or not (if you know the error message you are looking for perhaps it is helpful but I didn’t so it wasn’t). ejabberd (when I got it working) is more helpful in giving an OHAI message that at least confirms you have something to point the client at.

OpenFire did what I needed but seems to make an implicit assumption that there is going to be an admin working at screens to configure and monitor everything. It feels more like a workgroup tool than a workhorse piece of infrastructure.

One oddity I found was Prosody, it sensibly used the same defaults, urls and conventions as ejabberd but is written in Lua and was gloriously lightweight. It absolutely hit the spot for development work and actually felt fun. I was able to script everything I needed to do via its ctl script. Of course if Erlang (a big, serious infrastructure language) is a bit of an issue the hipster scripting language might be too.

What the hell, if it was about doing what I need to do quickly and without fuss I would use Prosody and worry about any infrastructure issues later.

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Software, Work

The Joy of Acceptance Testing: Is my bug fixed yet?

Here’s a question that should be a blast from the past: “Is my bug fixed yet?”.

I don’t know, is your acceptance test for the bug passing yet?

Acceptance tests are often sold as being the way that stakeholders know that their signed-off feature is not going to regress during iterative development. That’s true, they probably do that. What they also do though is dramatically improve communication between developers and testers. Instead of having to faf around with bug tracking, commit comment buggery and build artifact change lists you can have your test runner of choice tell you the current status of all the bugs as well as the features.

Running acceptance tests is one example where keeping the build green is not mandatory. This creates a need for a slightly more complicated build result visualisation. I like to see a simple bar split into green and red with the number of failing tests. There may be a good day or two when that bar is totally green but in general your test team should be way ahead of the developers so the red bar represents the technical deficit you are running at any given moment.

If it starts to grow you have a prompt to decide whether you need to change your priorities or developer quality bar. Asking whether a bug has been fixed or when the fix will be delivered are the wrong questions. For me the right questions are: should we fix it and how important is it?

If we are going to fix a bug we should have an acceptance test for it and its importance indicates what time frame that test should pass in.

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