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High school had coaches. What do you have now?

by Jason on September 13, 2011 · 0 comments

coaching whistleAfter too many years comparing my current abilities in the gym against my high school athletic glory days, I’ve finally figured out why I’m having such a hard time improving to even a fraction of the endurance levels I once had.

It’s not because I’m older (there are lots of people older than I am doing amazing things.)

It’s not because I have less time (I’m in the gym 6 days a week.)

It’s not because it’s not important to me since I don’t race (I’d love to be race-worthy, actually.)

I’m pretty sure it’s because there’s something missing from my current training that I mostly took for granted back in the day: coaches.  There were people whose actual job (during practice, at least) was to make me better, faster, stronger, and all that.  This went beyond accountability (i.e. if you don’t show up you’re cut from the team) and covered specific exercises to improve areas where I was weak, which I think is key.

In athletics, I’d say there’s a difference between personal trainers and coaches, at least at the general level, but I think that’s due to the mindset of the person hiring them.  If you know where you want to go, you can find someone who has either done it herself already and can guide you, or better still someone who has a track record guiding people to that point already (the ability to do vs the ability to teach and all that.) If you’ve got that, your trainer is a coach, at least from your perspective, and not just an accountability partner.

That goes for business, finances, relationships, and other areas of life too.  This year I hired a few business coaches, and it was well worth it, though in hindsight I could have gotten more value if I had a clearer vision of where I wanted to go – in school, the goal was to win the race, and the coaching reflected that, but in business, I had too many areas I wanted to explore and so many areas that need improvement (and I still do, but at least they’re different ones,) that it was hard to design a program to get me to a specific point.

The funny part? You can get coaching for goal definition too.  More later.

When doing what you love can hurt you

by Jason on August 17, 2011 · 1 comment

Concept I Rowing Ergometer

As the photo might suggest, I’m trying to reconcile my differences with the Concept II rowing machine, after many many years of us not speaking to each other (I rowed competitively in high school.) You’ve got to love a machine that’s called an erg, short for ergometer, or Thing that Measures Work Done. It’s almost SEO for the gym. Also, you say “erg” a lot when you use it.

I also love running.  Well, I love the idea of running, anyway.  Especially when it means I can get out of a session on the erg. So yeah, that’s why I found myself limping home with a sore ankle the other day (though in nice weather.)

I knew the run wasn’t going to get me the same gains as an equivalent amount of time on the erg, which works all the major muscle groups.  I also probably knew that there was a risk I’d hurt myself to a degree that I’d be unable to exercise for several days, increasing my risk of dropping out of a routine altogether. (I’m fine, by the way.)

But I really wanted to do that run, and more to the point, I really wanted to do something other than row, because even though it’s the best path to results, it’s way harder and makes me want to puke.

This happens in business a lot. Every day, there are things I know, deep down, that I need to do, and there are some other things I haven’t taken the time to figure out yet, but these things are slightly out of my comfort zone, so I fall back on the other stuff pretending it’s productive work.

Except it isn’t.  It might get me somewhere, but it won’t get me to where I really want to be as fast as the other stuff.  And it might distract me to the point, like an injury taking me away from exercise, that I never get where I’m trying to go.

The kicker? Sometimes planning the “tough stuff” is just another escape activity.  It’s hard to tell.

For my fitness, I’m starting a “stop doing, until” list, because just “stop doing” is too heavy on the “forever” for me, and I know I’m going to cheat. But for now? No more running, at all (unless chased) until I’ve finished at least a month of regular stretching exercises to loosen my legs up and lost some decent weight to take the load off my ankles.

And in business? Another stop doing list. That list is way longer, but that’s cool – I could really use the extra time saved by stopping all the crap.

Secure passwords don’t matter much if your friends have common names

by Jason on April 13, 2009 · 0 comments

So I was resetting my NY Times account password so I could read the article for my last post about hyperlocal websites, and they had one of those “tell us something unique about yourself so you can reset your password later” questions.  Here are the options:

NY Times password reset question

What am I supposed to do with this?  I swear, I’m going to start trying to hack friends’ passwords, no because I want to do anything with them, but I just want to know if I’m their best friend.

Seriously, what’s wrong with the usual email reset link flow?

I get Disqus now

by Jason on November 18, 2008 · 0 comments

Very briefly: in the near future, smart people will switch from “can you link to me” to “can you comment on my post?” – both weak invites, but my point is that the comment will be noticed by more of the early adopters who are active in social networks who actually track key influencers on this level.  Static links and banners and buttons will still have a place, but getting involved in the conversation is going to require… getting involved in the conversation.

How can domain knowledge scale?

by Jason on October 21, 2008 · 0 comments

If you develop multiple web sites and host them on the same boxes, you might be familiar with this pattern:

So you start off with a site for a client, or maybe yourself, and you grab yourself a server or set of servers on a rack somewhere.  And then another client comes along or another idea hits you, and now your company is looking at running two applications.  Neither has particularly huge traffic, so you just add another virtual host to your current server environment and move on.

And another site comes along, and another, and another.  Those $5.95/month web hosts put hundreds of sites on the same box, so why should you be any different?

Eventually, you’ve got, say, a dozen sites on the same rig that used to host one.  Maybe it’s all on a single box, maybe you’ve got balanced front ends and replicated databases, but either way, eventually you’re going to run into a problem with space.

Maybe one app gets popular and starts taking up so much resources that the other apps are starving.  Maybe all 12 of your sites get equally busy.

(12 is just a number I made up, by the way)

Eventually you’re going to need more room.  You can either spread the apps over more servers, or if it’s one app that’s busy, you can shard it into a new environment, but either way, you need more servers.

If you’re in an environment that doesn’t happen to have empty rack space above or below your boxes, you’ll have to deal with downtime for all 12 sites while you move to a different spot in the data centre.  That’s assuming that the data centre has room, of course, otherwise you might have to move to a new data centre altogether.

And then you wait for the pattern to happen again.

Cloud computing is supposed to fix a lot of this.  We’ll see, of course, but for now, let’s assume the model works for what you’re doing.

Now, compare the physical resource issue with the intellectual resource problem.  This is a lot more common, and I don’t see a lot of good solutions:

So you start off with a developer or two for that first app.  Maybe a contractor.  Then you get two.  Working on new sites is fun, but the old one needs some love now and then, and sometimes gets cranky.

Extend that scenario to 12 sites.  That’s 12 sites that you need to have someone on board for who can remember how the thing worked, what the business constraints are, and how to push out a patch if necessary.

That server move I mentioned above? You need to have people on your team who know how to migrate and test each of those applications.

Oh, and when all 12 sites have independent bugs pop up on the same week that 8 clients have requests for changes to thir sites?  Yeah…

Typically, most companies seem to follow one of three strategies for dealing with domain knowledge (this applies to desktop apps as well, by the way):

1) Have a body or two assigned to each site.  Even if it doesn’t need any attention that week.  It’s inefficient as hell, you won’t find star developers that way because there’s no room for innovation, and every time someone quits you have to decide whether to rehire/retrain or move that app to model 2:

2) Have each person responsible for multiple sites.  It’s more efficient, but I rarely see a lot of redundancy here, and it gets crazy when the feature requests come rolling in.  The old adage of “if you want something done, give it to the busiest person” tends to apply, and your former stars get bogged down with more and more baggage to the point where they don’t want to take on any new projects because it’ll be more to maintain, and new stuff was the whole reason they started developing code in the first place…

3) Outsource the work to contractors, and hope they’re available to make changes when required.

As a developer who’s been involved in all 3 situations in the past, the best answer I can give is 4) don’t do more than 1 project, but that’s rarely an option for anyone running a consultancy-based model.  I’ve got a few ways to mitigate the pain, which I’ll cover in upcoming posts.

When will desktop mashups be as viable as web ones?

by Jason on October 20, 2008 · 0 comments

This happens all the time, and another example came up this weekend when Ange was merging some photo collections:

“I love how Bridge lets me search for photos by so many great criteria, but iPhoto’s events are killer and the scrolling is so much faster.”

In the online world, the solution would be a mashup. (With the proliferation of APIs, do we even call them that anymore?)

Will there ever be a desktop equivalent? I can’t believe I’m pining for the promise of COM…

Walk Score highlights neighbourhoods with nearby amenities

by Jason on November 19, 2007 · 0 comments

Via Joel – Walk Score will tell you how “walkable” a neighbourhood is.

Of course, the first thing I did was compare my work address vs my home address, and it was a tie! Oh, and the record label that we used to share office space with is a bar, apparently.

That said, I’m a little bit afraid of whoever put this together – I’ve been known to walk further than many people, but some of the addresses were further than the distance from my home to my work, which is a half hour bike ride away.

My home score, on the other hand, had everything relatively nearby.

The point is slightly moot, of course, when one considers that I’m posting this as a way to kill time while awaiting feedback on a software patch. Work or home, if I ever manage to leave a building, I’m running, not walking.