Pete On Rails

This week was one of the toughest I’ve had to go through at work. Here’s a completely random set of things that have made me smile in the last 24 hours.

Fruity Cheerios. - It’s like eating Froot Loops, but they’re called Cheerios. All of the pleasure with none of the guilt.

Yo Gabba Gabba! - It’s a slightly ridiculous, but amusing kids show. Today, I curled up with my kids on the couch and ate fruity cheerios with them while watching the “Party In My Tummy” episdoe.

Punk Rock HR - Laurie Ruettimann used to work for Big HR, but after becoming unemployed a year ago, she started writing a blog about opting out of the corporate rat race. It contains such gems as “The Punk Rock Employee Handbook” and some refreshing quips like:

- Team building is for suckers.
- Office Speak is for Suckers.
- “You’re not cool and ironic. Trust me. You’re not.”

I think she likes to call people “suckers”. But in any case: read her stuff. Very amusing.

Fred WIlson makes a great point today about howblog comments can be as important as blog posts themselves. In this post, he says:

I want to be able to easily reblog onto my front page any and all great comments in a format that shows that they are comments and a link to the post the comment is from. I want to be able to easily reblog the comments I make on other blogs to my blog. I want services like techmeme and friendfeed to understand that comments are as important as blog posts (friendfeed is on its way with disqus and intensedebate integration). And I want commenters to have their own blogs that are simply aggregations of the comments they leave on the web. That’s happening too, here’s my disqus page.

Great stuff. I agree. I often paraphrase my comment back onto my blog as a new post. And, my disqus page is almost a blog on its own. However, I’d really like to have the option in either my blog software or on my disqus page to “Reblog this comment as a new post” on my main blog page.

The Disqus API should make this kinda trivial to support in most blog software. But how do we get the maintainers of Blogger, WordPress, Typo, and the dozen other blog providers to support it? I can tell you from experience that getting it into Typo as a patch will take more time than writing the code itself.

So how about a javascript badge that will do it? That shouldn’t be too hard. Who’s working on it?

Have you ever found yourself explaining to a co-worker or a boss the intricate details about why something CANNOT be done?

In working as a software engineer, a product manager, an agile practitioner, a pragmatist, and a director of a tech startup, I’ve often found myself responsible for introducing a “healthy dose of reality”. Often, stakeholders will cook up great ideas that are difficult or costly to execute on.

After reading Fred Wilson’s blog post on Words Of Wisdom, I had to reflect a bit on the balance between healthy pragmatism and “being a roadblock.”

As a practicing Scrum master, I know one of my jobs is to be realistic about what can be achieved, and to say, “No, you cannot have the world in two weeks. But you can have a little piece of it.”

As an engineer, I know one of my jobs is to point our that “If you build a house out of cards, it’ll eventually fall down.”

But as a signatory to the Agile Manifesto, I am also responsible for placing value on “responding to change over following a plan.”

It’s easy to dismiss “change” (or new ideas) that threaten a well designed plan. But be careful. Don’t be someone’s roadblock. Be the way around it.

This is an extension of an article I wrote on my Livejournal a couple years ago. Since many Rails developers work for small startups or are themselves starting up a business, I thought I’d update it with some reflections from the past couple years I’ve spent working in a scrappy startup.

Top 10 Startup Lessons

1. There is no better way to ensure attendance at a 7:00 AM conference call than to schedule it yourself, invite your employees, and discuss something important. At my startups, we held a daily briefing. It lasted 15 minutes. We got a lot done in 15 minutes.

2. Skype, GotoMeeting, Vonage, VirtualPBX, and other services are incredibly cheap ways to get big company communications services quickly. And they tend to just "work."

3. Accountants, Lawyers, and Benefits Administrators cost so much because they are worth it. Outsource everything that is not related to growing your business. Corollary: In the startup days, don’t buy anything you don’t absolutely need unless it makes strategic sense to do so. You generally don’t need recruiters, expensive server software, top of the line new machines, or a country club membership to woo clients. You do, however, need the best people you can get, tooling, basic processes, and the facility to encourage innovation.

4. Hire slowly, but fire quickly.

5. Get an Advisory Board Get one. Make sure they are successful people you can trust. You don’t have to know them terribly closely. FOAF is adequate.

6. You can start a business working half days. Whichever 12 hours you want.

7. Small business professional services is about babysitting. Employees, clients, partners, vendors, etc. They all need babysitting from time to time.

8. Everything you learned in B school was wrong, and it was also right. Because you see, it depends. I often found myself asked by my partners for the magic bullet they taught us in B school that would solve problem X. The magic bullet is a myth. They simply made sure we know how to think in B school. Or, at least, I think that was the point.

9. Don’t underestimate the power of your network. But don’t overestimate it either. Or, put another way, start a business, and you will quickly find out who you can count on. Don’t hold it against your friends if they can’t help you. After all, business is business. Friendship ought not be business (even though a version of it is the oldest business model around). And, don’t be suprised if you get a 6-figure contract from someone you had on your 5-th round call list. If that does happen, move that person up in your CRM system. Oh, and use a CRM system. Preferably a free one.

10. There is no reason to shower and change out of your pajamas for a 7AM conference call. Unless it’s a video iChat and you forgot.