I’ve recently switched to a new role at MobME, and here are my initial impressions and a few lessons learnt in the past few months. This is a rather free-flowing account, but I want to write this down and codify before I forget.
Rule uno: people aren’t resources. There’s a constant management-level question I hear: “How many resources can you allocate to a particular product?” or “How much time and resources do you need to solve this problem?”. I don’t answer such questions at all, or when I do, I talk about the people I have in my team and their skills and limitations. I’ve strongly felt that no organization can grow without taking care of its people, and especially for small startups, to make attrition low and happiness high, this is a concern that should be addressed from the top. Rephrase these questions this way: “Can person X solve this problem?” and “Can person X and Y be reallocated to this task?”.
Following on, every person is special: they have different skills, learning speeds and communication capabilities. Every good person can improve, and they should constantly be pushed to do that. Nobody should be idle and static.
And nobody should do make-work. It’s not necessary because there are always real problems to solve. If anybody is picking up a new language or skill, after a few tutorial-level sessions and a max of two days, he should jump into the new role and start fixing bugs and solving real problems.
Good processes make a good team. At MobME, I’m implementing a few things I learnt while working at Uzanto: Daily End-Of-Day reports for the team, SCRUM in the morning, and constant communication via a small office and approachable managers. The work atmosphere is relaxed, and people are given time to learn. There’s no fixed time for lunch or a quick smoke. There’s an attendance register and people are held accountable for their work and leave.
At the end of the day, Work is Everything™. If there’s a deadline to be met, do or die, we meet it. People remain late in the office (till 1 at night is the current MobME record) and finish work before they go.
What you do when you’re not in office is none of anybody else’s business. Although as a rule, work hard, party hard.
When you lead a technical team, if you have problems you use technology to solve them. This is obvious, but I’ve so often seen this overlooked. You can’t find a way for developers to collaborate? Find an effective source control method. Project management? Bug tracking? Time tracking? A caveat: too many tools is a mess. Find effective and simple ones. We use Beanstalk and Lighthouse along with Google Apps for documents and mail.
As a corollary to the above, not every problem is technical. Instead of inventing one, try simplifying the product or the spec or going back to the drawing board. If it’s too much of a hassle technically, it’s the product pushing back at you, resisting crappy things being done to it. Hear it out and redo things. Redoing things the right way is a good thing. Take time out, fix stuff and it won’t bite you in the ass the next time.
Another gem: keep internal mail to a minimum. When everybody is in the same office, shout out to him (or take him outside) instead of firing off a mail thread. It’ll solve problems so much more efficiently. Having the management & technical wing in nearby offices means that for us, most problems are solved in a week. No network cabling in office? A quick discussion with my operations lead and I get work done. No firing off complaint mails.
Communication is key. Let everybody know your worries. Everybody includes the people under you. A lot of the time, they’ll end up finding a better solution.
The primary role of a technical lead as I understand it is to get work done. It’s not to go off to conferences evangelizing the product (although it’s a good thing to do). Meet the deadlines your boss sets for you. Make sure your people work hard and they learn lots of stuff in the process. Keep an eye out for new technology. Document your processes. When you find problems, fix it and ensure it doesn’t happen again. Get good infrastructure. Communicate problems with the management.
Everybody in sales, marketing, etc. should know more than a little bit of tech. Increase technical awareness and make the process transparent so anybody can ask questions no matter how stupid it is. Often a completely new way of thinking about a problem brings in new technical insights too.
When there’s a problem, criticize. This is hard to do initially, but good people realize that your criticism is for the work and not the person. If they still have issues after you talk it out, ask them politely to leave or toe the line. When you find people improving and processes becoming smoother after you’ve talked it out with the team, it’s a real nice feeling.
And at the end of the day, make people happy and be happy yourself. Which of the lot, is the hardest.
This is absurdly mixing up dates, but I thought I should put up my slides for my talk at Delhi here as well. It’s about caching, and how a simple solution can enable page caching (and its speeds) to be used in a lot of situations. You’ll need the audio of my talk as well. The title is inspired from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a brilliant novella by Philip K. Dick.
Sugar for your brain. Sig9, mine and Vivek’s (and Anoop’s and Sherin’s) dream creation was my first foray into any sort of news and community site. It’s history deserves recording, since it’s played a huge part in the last few years of my technical life.
Vivek came up with the name, and initially we designed it as a site to create some sort of technical enthusiasm in our class at college. Happily, our friends didn’t seem too taken up with the idea. I say happily, because that urged us to change it’s focus. It went through numerous avatars: a wiki-like site with a homegrown CMS, a mostly-static site that served articles (and which led to content stagnation) and somehow we ended up with a Drupal-powered blog, while at the same time serving targeted articles. And a couple of populararticles later, we were on our way to glory!
What Sig9 taught me is how very different people can come together to have a focused site. I think it must from the second or third year on that Vivek’s interests and mine started diverging really fast, and while he posted articles on the arcane art of OS development and language design, I stuck to web design and development. Yup, from the very beginning, he was a Linux junkie while I argued for a Microsoft OS, but what happened I think, at the end is that we ended up influencing each other a lot. I use a Mac now (and I love it for the Unix underpinnings), and Vivek designed the current Sig9 layout. One very important lesson learnt: even if your interests are widely different, you can always learn something from each other. Towards the end, we had very strict rules for content quality. We didn’t want to be a link blog, so we asked every contributor to qualify the link with how it related to him personally, but we always had just one criterion for inclusion: the post should be “interesting”. Sufficiently vague, much like the definition of porn
And how very often, chaos is preferrable over organization. The ambitious Sig9 admin-wiki quickly stagnated because writing down every admin action quickly leads to more metadata than actual content. It might work for Wikipedia, but for smaller community sites, organization should naturally evolve from chaos with the bare minimum of fuss.
Did we succeed at what we wanted to do? Not really. Sig9 never had the level of interactivity or community that I envisioned. But I’m sure it taught us a lot.
Interestingly, Vivek is also joining a startup company in Bangalore: Montalvo (He left for Blore today, which is what precipitated this post). He tells me Sig9 played a large part in him getting the job. Now that we’ll be in very different places, and busy with our jobs and RL, will it ever revive itself? I’m pretty sure it would. It’s too interesting an effort not to try. We don’t have any definite plans now, but when we do, you’ll be the first to know.
The end of an era. And perhaps, the beginning of a new one.
I’ll be moving away to Delhi on the first of next month and joining Uzanto - the brainchild of Rashmi, Jon and Amit, and working on Mindcanvas and lots of other cool stuff, it’s going to be an exciting time!
I gave an AJAX talk at Dishaa ‘06 yesterday. It was attended by a few interested people and I managed to sum up and introduce the technology in around 45 minutes. Work on my other projects meant that I had to leave soon, and also not attend the cultural session either yesterday or today. I helped out from afar as much as I could.
People who want my slides from the show are welcome to contact me.
I’ve been working the past week on a project called Fastblood. It’s a scheme to connect blood donors to people who need it badly. Developed using OOPHP5 and an amazing Web 2-oh framework called Symfony, Fastblood aims to network all the blood banks in Kerala & serve as a one-stop solution for people who wish to request blood. I’ll be working on it in the coming weeks and add in sweeter features. For now, there are wireless and web tie-ins into the request interface.
There was a big launch today at Muscat hotel, with the inauguration of Fblood by the Chief Minister of Kerala and all; incidentally, that also led to me appearing in a couple of TV channels out here. If that gets to be a habit, I’ll start a Me on TV tag around here…
I’ll update this post later with an interim project report (technical) that I prepared earlier. Get that project report here. Due to some confusions while packaging, my laptop got exchanged with another today (hence no files), hope that’s resolved soon.
A few plans that I have for Fastblood:
Add in AJAX tie-ins
Opensource the project
Add in a community feature ala orkut
Browse over to Fastblood, let me know your suggestions.
Later, I’ve noticed that my big highs tend to be coupled with pretty big lows. Going to veg out with some movies. Take care all & wish me luck.
However, I’ve always wanted a portolio site. Head on over to Vish.in: it’s the first time I’ve crafted a design so elaborately, and it embodies a few things I’ve learnt since Vysnu. It’s also pretty heavily inspired by the work Ashok did for the Lafest souvenir (which btw is a work of art) - the sleek black and white design really got me thinking, and Vish is the result.
Allow me to vish it on you one more time ;-). Leave comments here.
Read this. A technical overview of something that I developed for an SMS Yellowpages solution that will hit my city soon.
Feeling a bit more energetic today, so decided to sleep a little less. All I’m seem to be doing these days is sleeping, reading (A good amount of John Ringo) and studying: ordered in the ratio 1000:1:0.1. Will see you guys when life returns to semi-normal.
An interesting idea yesterday night and three hours of work this morning led me to create Sig9 Words Usage.
The idea behind Usage is to create a simple page which chunks out real world usage instances of difficult English words, in cases where a simple Google Search isn’t enough.
This complements the excellent Sig9 Words created by Vivek, and if I can believe his plans this time Words is going to increase its database a lot in the near future :-D.
Vysnu has caught up with Sig9 in terms of number of unique people visiting the site every day (more than 170, average). In terms of bandwidth usage, this blog consumes more than 12 MB a day, to Sig9’s 9 MB. Vysnu seems to have a greater number of broken links resulting in about 4200 404 errors last month to Sig9’s 3000 [many of these are mis-typed urls or some other user-error so it may not be accurate].
Another interesting tidbit… The most visited page on the site is not the home page, but a koal story: The Adventures of Me and Martha Jane, with more than 2300 clicks coming by lieu of Google Searches and external/internal referers. That’s how popular erotica is on the internet ;-). 40% of these users refer back to the home page, or to other pages inside the site, which means that it was not a bad marketing ploy… guess you have one of the answers on how to make your website more popular
I’m also pretty proud of what Sig9 has achieved in the 10 months it has been online: many of the google searches that I do now frequently turn up Sig9 results, and the amount of specific and diverse content available on the site (mostly courtesy Vivek and Anoop) is amazing. A pat on the back is always nice, especially when you have to twist your arm to do it
I’m working on four different projects right now and one is soon to become mature; I’ll announce the status of that soon. Another one is of course LOBAglobal, which should see a minor increment very soon, and a good update through the next ten days. There is of course my mini-project for this semester and I’m slowly brushing up on my C++ skills to be up to speed with Vivek. And then there is another semi-secret project that’s been my baby for a week, whether the world will come to know of that is still being hotly debated =). Oh I so love being secretive
Oh, there is also the matter of the books I’m reading… expect some updates on that front too.
A few personal observations… The people skills of our contacts there was amazing, and somehow I can’t stress this enough. I haven’t met many people who could convert an unresponsive and lethargic crowd into interested listeners, and they did that well. Altho the Longhorn video helped a lot
Two other things that I found personally interesting… they do coach people on their language when you join Microsoft, and part of that involves something called “mother-tongue stripping”. Unlearning can also be fun sometimes I guess =). Also, the ratio of male to female employees is something like 4:1, part of the reason (I was told) is that the Support Center work is often at night, and Indian women don’t work that hours.
This is a note to all ex-loyolites who stumble on this page.
As you may have heard on the LOBA e-newsletter, I’m taking over the LOBA web presence. On the cards is a rewrite of the code to make it XHTML and Mozilla-aware, minor tweaks to the interface, and much better innards. Post any suggestions that you may have here, or forward a mail to webmaster .AT. lobaglobal.com. Although I won’t be aiming to bring about the radical change that Ashok and Abhishek brought out, it should be a steady evolution :-D.
Personally, I’m excited at the prospect because lobaglobal.com allows me to play over an SSH terminal, a luxury I don’t enjoy here. Once I figure out how to work the connection, I will be excited long enough to make interesting things happen.
I’ve begun writing a column for the Old Boys Association of my school. A truckload of thanks should go out to Ashok for inviting me to write for the website.
To develop mini-projects in this vein, we’ve also created a new project at Sarovar: Sig9works. Check our CVS repository (under /sources/C/) for the latest versions of these files.
Over at Sig9: Function Pointers for Newbies: Part One, which serves as a quick introduction on how to pass functions as arguments and Part Two, which illustrates how function callback works (in its most primitive form). Download the sources and play with it.
Very interesting layout - the starting diagram and the Logo take only times nearly the whole side. To the second [..] and only if one [..], one comes to the information. But the interesting Design always makes up for that!
Rahel’s site also has a very nice header logo, and if I were able to read German, then I would return the favor =)
Read the Towers of Hanoi post over at Sig9 Forums. Vivek’s solution is followed by my implementation in Python (which turned out to be insanely easy to do) and some great links on the matter. A must read.
This is a while ago, but it’s only been a short while since I set up the statistics, so I discovered this while checking the logs. Vysnu.com is a well-designed weblog at Larsholst.info, which itself is one of the most suave designs that I’ve found on the web.
Twitter: Performing surgery to get Kannel to install on OSX. Every other program seems to choke on a nonstandard MySQL location ala Macports. 1 week ago
I’ve started a new tumblelog to keep track of the snippets that pop into my head. It’s all about a sequel to Harry Potter now (set way way in the future), but that’ll change soon. None of it is probably going to take a coherent form anytime soon, but I find that nowadays I don’t have the energy to finish up a work, so at least this will scratch that itch.
I’ve just noticed that people who’ve been trying to contact me via my sent.com email address haven’t been reaching me. This is distressing because at one time I thought Fastmail would rule the world. Now they can’t even forward mail properly. I’ve changed my email to Google’s solution wherever relevant.
DP has roped me (again) to give a talk in school. I’ll be giving a short and to-the-point talk tomorrow (6th June) on creating websites, with a specific focus on the Lafest website. My dear aniyanmare, prepared to be bored (again)
I’ve uploaded the Tatwa Web/Programming contest files up here, anyone interested may take a look: Programming Prelims, Finals; Web D Finals (design photo)
I’ll be hosting the web designing and programming contests at Tatwa ‘06 tomorrow and day after. (Nishagandhi/Palace Hall) Interested people should be there, I’ve prepared something unique
