There is nothing so precious as your time. I am only more convinced of this every day.

In the last 3 weeks, I listened to:

• Confessions of an Economic Hitman - even though I don’t agree with his conclusions, it is an excellent memoir. It was personally thought provoking to listen to a man’s entire career life unfold in 5 days on my work commute. Takeaway: life can be very exciting, and some people are very powerful. Move faster, driving for results.
• Banker to the Poor - fantastic book. If you don’t know about microfinance, this is your introductory course. Imagine in your mind what the marriage of finance and social justice would look like. I read it with friends–which led to great conversation–and scheduled a tentative meeting with the great folks at Kiva.org for my friend with an NGO in India.
• Travels of a T-Shirt in a Global Economy - So far it’s entertaining. It is a story telling format asking “where did your T-Shirt come from?” And the government-subsidy-enabled-irony of the cotton planted in Texas, woven and sewn in China, and imported back to Florida.

To effective time.

UPDATE (10/26): Listening to more of the last book tonight. Around the 3h 30min mark, I learn the key driver our present industrial economy: the Spinning Jenny. This was a big deal. One person used to have one spinner to make the yarn. In 1764 they suddenly had eight spinners: a tremendous productivity boost in an under supplied marketplace. By 1800, spinning jenny’s had 80 spinners. And by the 1830’s the price was 1/20th of the 1700’s price.

This breakthrough –mechanized yarn production– propelled the world into the industrial age, and brought consumers into expecting constantly improving technology and quality of life. To me the parallels of present day high tech are remarkable, and the “so what” factor noteworthy.

Two “so what” takeaways:

1. The invention of the spinning jenny came because of great bottlenecks in yarn production. In the 1760’s mostly farmers produced cotton yarn, and this was a cottage industry. When harvest time came the families were far too busy harvesting, and weavers had a great difficulties buying yarn. Often they had to walk six miles each day to gather up enough material for that same day’s weaving. This bottleneck –as all bottlenecks– created a great pressure. A pressure that burst forth in invention, and technological revolution.
2. In the face of such bottlenecks, Britain sanctioned a contest of which the spinning jenny was an entrant. An example from the past of how using prizes compelled innovation. See the X Prize Foundation for present day contests in medicine, automotive, education, or (Google’s just announced) Lunar X Prize.

A few weeks ago I was at a large web 2.0 social networking site working with selenium grid automation. They were great clients, fully receptive to automated testing. Next week I’ll be heading to another leading internet company to work triage:

1. Work on troubled teams whose code is poorly tested
2. Enable groups to test legacy code
3. Attempt to spread a pervasive test driven mindset.

I’m joining a senior team of ThoughtWorkers and in preparation I’ve thought of various arguments I’ve heard (or used myself) against testing code. I’ll be challenged working with these very experienced people, but I am eagerly looking forward to the experience.

Argument #1

Adding all these tests only makes more code to maintain, debug, and write. This can’t be good - I want less work, not more!

Rebuttal: Would you agree code and requirements often change? Would it be valuable if something could automatically and accurately catch bugs introduced with changes? How about if the original developers are no longer on the project? Testing can enable less work — in a dynamically changing environment. Immediately the work is greater, but over time it is less.

Argument #2

Ok, fair enough, there are some good reasons to do this. BUT, when I want to change something later, I now have two points of failure - the code I’m changing, and all the tests that depend on that code. I haven’t really bought myself all that much security, because if my tests don’t catch the problem well, I’m just as hosed as if I had no tests. ^{Source: first comment from here}
Rebuttal:

1. You get better and faster with tests the more you write them.
2. By writing tests you further understand the business domain and craft a better thought out solution.
3. Whenever making changes in the future you actually have 1 + n points of failure. That which you are changing plus the other interacting systems within the code. By writing tests you will automatically catch the interactions, as well as the initial point of failure. Sure the tests need maintaining, but now with two things to maintain, you catch (almost all) these failure points.

Argument #3

I generally think testing is a good idea. But I’m stressed out, I’ll get to it later… tomorrow I’ll add tests… as soon as I get this working
Rebuttal: Take a page from Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert C. Martin.. He argues for refactoring but since the two concepts are so tightly entwined, I think the argument applies here:

“Refactoring is like cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. The first time you skip it, you are done with dinner more quickly. But that lack of clean dishes and clear working space makes dinner take longer to prepare the next day. This makes you want to skip cleaning again. Indeed, you can always finish dinner faster today if you skip cleaning, but the mess builds and builds. Eventually you are spending an inordinate amount of time hunting for the right cooking utensils, chiseling the encrusted dried food off of the dishes, and scrubbing them down so that they are suitable to cook with. Dinner takes forever. Skipping the cleanup does not really make dinner go faster.”

Skipping testing does not really make software development faster, because changes are guaranteed. (You’ll have to cook another dinner eventually). Without an easy way to baseline and build upon existing code, time is spent bugfixing that could instead be adding features or writing new tests.

Argument #4

I’m awesome. I don’t write bugs. So I don’t need tests.
Rebuttal: Great. I’m excited to be working with you. I’m sure I’ll be able to learn a great deal. I imagine you like fresh challenges. And in six months or a year this current project won’t be as interesting to you as it is today. In fact, you’ll be on to something more challenging and worthy of your awesomeness.

So that means someone else — possibly a junior developer — will be maintaining and working on this code. Without tests, they will be frequently seeking your assistance and guidance to prevent bugs. This is not what you want, is it? You want new challenges, not constantly being hassled by old code. So write the tests now to ensure your ego and intellect can move forward to bigger and better things.

Elaborating and paraphrasing, Neal Ford argued at eRubycon 2007:

Now I look at not testing as professionally irresponsible. I’m paid to create software, to deliver on a client’s business needs. If I don’t rigorously and automatically ensure I have accomplished this with the minimum amount of bugs — I am committing malpractice.

What arguments have you encountered, and how have you responded?

Rizr launched this for you to play with it as well. And here is the original paper: Seam carving for content-aware image resizing [20 MB PDF]

Very cool!

I believe working full time, with great people, and doing my own projects on the side will be vastly more productive than having full time for my own projects.

After leaving FeedBurner with the Google acquisition, I gave myself 2 months of running my own business full time. After that period, I would either be hiring folks, giving myself a few more months, or getting more experience at a startup or consulting.

Second Valley’s revenues are up a healthy 25-40% compared to May. I’ve been spending time in Ruby on Rails, and have started rebuilding the full ecommerce and delivery platform for one of Second Valley’s sites. But I missed the smart coworkers.

My decision Wednesday was to email ThoughtWorks and continue my interview process I started prior to joining FeedBurner. Well, thanks to the amazing Carrie McComb, I interviewed Thursday and had an informal offer that night. Friday morning I signed and it’s official.

In 10 days I’ll be off to India for ThoughtWorks Immersion training, and then I’m relocating to San Francisco.

Photo credits: meaux, and artview (my previous trip to India)

Note: this is a technical post, it assumes you’re interested in, and familiar with Rails.

Rails wants to be RESTful. Many sites and books go into depth explaining REST. Last year’s Railsconf keynote by DHH can give you the big picture of CRUD and RESTful applications. (Be sure to follow along with the pdf slides, while you watch the video).

Look at an existing mature project (Beast) to learn how to make RESTful models

Nitty gritty RESTful implementation details have been hard to find. So I started searching out open source projects that are known for good design. And I read the code.

Beast is a forum program written in Rails by Rick Olson and Josh Goebel. Best of all, it’s a great example of a REST application.

I’m a visual person, so I created the chart below to help me get the hang of what the Models and relationships look like in Beast. Big bold squares are actual database backed objects. Dotted squares are just regular models.

Please contact me if you catch an error or omission.

Here’s how you use the diagram

Right now, browse here: http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/beast/trunk/app/models to the Subversion source of Beast. Back already? My you’re fast. Read over the different model objects. See how they relate. Think about what’s been abstracted into additional Resources, rather than creating actions willy nilly in the controllers.

Then check it out and run it in your local environment. Even if you couldn’t care less about the (quite nice) forum software that it is, it’s good to learn by taking it for a spin.

But I think I need more actions than CRUD gives me!

As DHH said in the 2006 Railsconf keynote, sometimes you think you need another non-CRUD verb to your controller. Say you have a Forum that has Users and Topics. Some users want to monitor topics. At first blush, you may want to add an action to Topic. You’d then post to /topic/monitor/123 to start monitoring topic 123.

There is another way.

Relationships, events and states can all be models. When a new topic is to be monitored, you’ll GET to /monitorships/new to get the new Monitorship object form. Then POST to /monitorships to actually create it.

Models are more than things.

1. I left the botique enterprise content management software consulting company, Technology Services Group. ^[1]
2. I joined FeedBurner, as an engineer in February.
3. I did some really cool ad serving optimization code. My IE degree let me do some fun multivariate linear regressions to prioritize ad serving into their feed ad network. The code base was great to work in. Plus the team was great and I’ll really miss them. This leads to #4.
4. Thanks to the Chicago PHP users’ group, as well as my Chicago tech event calendar site Techsocial, I was able to attend php|tek. The presentations are now available. ^[2]
5. Google acquired FeedBurner in July. I don’t have much to say here, other than I learned a ton living through the acquisition process.
6. Meanwhile, I incorporated a side business that I’ve been working on since 2003. It’s been profitable since the launch in September ‘06. The entity is Second Valley, Inc, but I”m operating under another name. ^[3]
7. I pretty much had the perfect opportunity to ramp up my business by working on it full time. I’ll spend a few months at marketing, product development, (more) SEO, statistical analysis enhancements, and rebuilding the PHP app in Ruby on Rails.

Notes:

• The CPI came out higher than expected for January (we’re on track for high 2% inflation in 2007, not the Fed’s expected 2 to 2.25%)
• Everything else was pretty quite. Oil pushed over 60, unemployment claims were trending steady, and a few signals peaked out for a slowing housing market.

Listen now, it’s mighty powerful and short: under 2:30. Although it is not my awesome editing mix-down skills that got it that short. I just switched to a mac this week, and I’m still getting used to everything. The first several I recorded didn’t work so this one is brief.

Download audio file (2007_02_20-23_Economic_Week_In_Review_Jawspeak.mp3)

Reference: Briefing.com

Friedman’s take on how the world is even flatter now

Friedman recently gave a talk to the US Naval Academy. Upon returning home he had an email waiting for him from his daughter. She knew where he was giving his talk, because she just responded to a midshipman’s facebook friend request. After Thomas’ talk - in which he mentioned his daughter was at school in New Haven, CT - one of the men looked her up on facebook and befriended her.

“When the world is flat, whatever can be done will be done. The only question is will it be done by you or to you” - Thomas Friedman

Thomas and his wife were on an eco-tour in Peru with Conservation International. The guide was sharing with Friedman a story of how a Peruvian merchant was selling his dish ware on the internet. Yet, that was not the startling part.

“The Peruvian dish maker recently discovered he could manufacture his Peruvian dish ware in China cheaper than in Peru. He now sells Peruvian dish ware on the internet, that is manufactured in China.”

He was recently in Budapest, Hungary at a conference. His cab driver was returning him to the airport and asked “Mr. Tom” to give him any referrals he may know that could use a cab driver in Hungary. The cab driver proceeded to share with Friedman that he had a website in Magyar, German and English - with music - and it features services for diplomats, tourists, and more.

Brian Behlendorf says Open Source is fundamental to the flattening

Brian is CTO and co-founder of CollabNet, a software company with products including the source code collaboration tool, Subversion. He has also been involved in the Apache web server project from the very beginning.

Open source is a natural continuation of the trend that started 20 years ago in open systems, open standards, and now open source… [It] is a reaction of dissatisfied customers rebelling against poor software in the 90’s… People are working with each other, building off each other’s code, and adding real value.

One of the very prolific contributors of Subversion, Peter Lundblad from Sweden, has worked on the open source project for half a decade, yet is blind.

Tim O’Reilly on web 2.0 flattening

Web 2.0 is enabling more and more flattening of the world.

Web 2.0 is building systems that harness network effects so the systems get better as more people use them.

Other non-web places where businesses can look for web 2.0 innovation are vast databases, ripe for harvesting:

• How could a company use what their customers type in a piece of software to help automatically fill that similar information in for subsequent users?
• For mobile phone companies, how could they use your call logs and turn that inside out to a network address book that would help retain customers?
• How could credit card companies share with you your purchase information (which they already monitor) back to you in a useful way?lan
• Intut’s QuickBooks is doing this via a partnership with Google AdWords. They look at your inventory and list them using Google’s marketing tools. In TurboTax when you donate items, they look up the tax write off value based on eBay prices.

“What are we monitoring?”

“How can we get collective value out of that?”

What we saw in the open source communities (people submitting bugs, fixing bugs, contributing code) is also happening in other marketplaces. O’Reilly Media just hired a contractor who was a prolific commenter on Tim’s blog. That communication relationship transformed into a monetary relationship. Only a few years ago this never would have happened.

Devin Wenig on flattening 2.0

Devin is COO of Reuters.

Flattener 1.0 was companies moving from the US and western Europe to industrializing nations for simple wage arbitrage advantages. It was a clear cost cutting play. The Flattener 2.0 is a radical shift in the traditional roles of producers and consumers. Traditionally someone goes and produces [software, news, products] and then throws it over the wall and hopes people consume it. Now we are getting real time on the fly communication with customers… The roles of publishers are now as moderators. Co-innovation is 2.0.

He continues with the second wave of flattening, which is more about revenue growth, collaboration, and tight feedback loops. Real time feedback from customers and prospects.

Only two years ago “the story” was what a journalist wrote in the paper or on the web. Now with user contributed content, interactivity, and collaboration, the story is a discussion from all across the world.

Three things Friedman thinks enabled the world to be flat

1. The PC. It allowed individuals to become the authors of their own content, in digital form.
2. The Internet, browsers in the Dot Com boom. The world was over-wired with fiber optic cables. Now such a large number of people could electronically connect.
3. Software and transmission protocols. People could collaborate with others in their content.

In a provocative statement, Friedman sees the flat world as “net worried.” When Infosys is competing in a flat marketplace, so is Al-Qaeda. He later recants this and declares everything a very exciting and promising future.

Tim O’Reilly asks Friedman if corporations will become more important than nations in a flat world

Clearly, we are still very early in this flattening, says Friedman. Yet he does not thing sovereignty of nations will diminish in the importance of people. In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he writes how the Olive Tree instincts: religion, society, cultural norms are still very strong, and won’t be overthrown by the Lexus… not just quite yet.

He then continues sharing his stance on free trade:

I used to be a free trade advocate. I am not any more.

Now I am a radical free trader.

No surprise here, Mr. Friedman.

Every employee is a volunteer

Today people do not stay at the same company for a lifetime. Many do not even stay for five years. Peter Drucker has said this before, and the panel takes off and highlights how in a flatter world employers must recognize this. When employers know those they hire are really volunteering, they will more aggressively seek to captivate, challenge, and retain employees.

Truly profound productivity only occurs when people are passionate about what they do. If you are an employer, how can you help your volunteers stay passionate? (Discussed more in The Mythical Man Month.)

The world is flat and education

So how does education change when the world is flat?

What is the new middle class? And what jobs will people be doing in a flat-world middle class?

How will learning environments need to change for children?

These questions and more are asked and some answers are touched upon. The conversation was very interesting to listen to and ruminate upon.

If you enjoyed this post, consider:

The following video between Bill Gates and Tim O’Reilly at MIX 06 conference.

John Seely Brown is the Chief of Confusion at Xerox Parc and he has quite a few interesting papers and videos related to transforming Education in a flat, highly digital, world. Here’s one of his talks he gave at MIT on education in a long tail, flat world. Kathy Sierra also has a post about how awesome John Seely Brown is. Jim McGee covers one of Brown’s more interesting education papers.

FundRace.org - a mashup of political campaign spending and contributions with your locality. TheyWorkForYou is in the UK and it shows how every parliamentary member voted (and if they voted), so now more are needing to show up because people are monitoring their activity through this website.

And other ideas: how can you use government data and mash it up with say google maps and create a participatory democracy where voters can see and drill down through how their tax dollars are spent and how bills influence their communities.

How can India -in a flat world- export not natural resources, but intelligence and innovation?

What would a world look like where our best friends were in other countries?

Another book that may intrigue you is Democratizing Innovation by Eric Von Hippel.

What if a device existed in your phone that could scan products at a store and it would show where it has been. How would information of the manufacturing facilities, worker conditions, or carbon permits involved in this product change buying habits? That idea was explored are discussed in the How The World Works column on Salon (I didn’t find that exact post).

The flat world, Thomas Friedman says, will be a right brain world. Everything left brained will be done by a computer faster, or an Indian cheaper. (No offense intended for my Indian friends, I just share this from Friedman). Interested? You might like this book: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.

The FOMC’s Chairman, Ben Bernanke suggested they are disinclined to raise interest rates. This buoyed market sentiment and the S&P 500 saw two days of double digit gains. Underlying economic data was not so rosy, though. Retails sales were flat in January, industrial production slowed, and housing continued to slow (starts in January were down 14.3% from December).

Download audio file (2007_2_12-16_econ_week_in_review_EconTechBlog.mp3)

References:
Vanguard and Briefing.com

• Consumer credit increased less than expected in December.
• The ISM Non-Manufacturing index rose to 59 (from 56.7 in December). The services sector is showing greater strength than the Manufacturing index I spoke about last week.
• The earnings reports produced good numbers (Cisco, Disney, Prudential and others reported.)
• Nonfarm productivity bounced back in Q4 2006, growing at an annualized 3.0%. Overall for 2006 productivity growth was only 2.1%, the lowest since 1.6% in 1997.

Listen now, under 7 minutes

Download audio file (2007_2_5-9_econ_week_in_review_EconTechBlog.mp3)

References: Vanguard, Briefing.com.