meJoe.com

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Note: The views I express here are mine and do not represent my employer, Rackspace.

The classics never go out of style, even in technology.

I just read The Art of High Technology Management (unfortunately its not free), a little excerpt from a technology management text book, circa 1984. Authors Maidique and Hayes highlight what successful tech companies are doing right, and aptly dub it “an art”. Their analysis was sound, a definite piece of the alphabet in the language of technology management. That however is not what evokes my entry. The haunting part of this read, was the sense that I was peering over the shoulder of a youthful Rackspace senior executive. Before me lay part of the blueprints of the near billion dollar company I work for today.

Authors Maidique and Hayes followed a number of companies in biotech, pharmaceuticals, computers, semiconductors and aerospace of various sizes ($10 million to $30 billion). They wanted to answer one question: “What strategies, policies, practices and decisions result in successful management of high-technology enterprises?” The answer to their question uncovered a challenging paradox: continuity and chaos. These two words aptly describe the dichotomous workplace I live every day. The article expands on the polarity of continuity and chaos through six themes. These themes hauntingly mirror Rackspace’s CORE values.

Continuity

1. Business focus - The drive behind continuity is discipline.  Discipline in technology specialization, focus on core competencies, consistent organizational objectives and real business results - the traditional work values that our grandparent’s generation embodied through companies like Ford and it’s Model T. At Rackspace we call this Results first, substance over flash.

2. Organizational cohesion - At the heart of continuity is people and their relationships. A strong tech company emphasized collaboration, communication, job rotation, multidisciplinary projects, and long-term employment. Executive open door policies at companies like IBM, generated a sense of hierarchical flatness and equality–permitting a free flow of ideas. Cross-pollination of knowledge and relationships occur as employees move throughout the organization into different roles and projects. My fellow Rackers refer to this as Treat fellow Rackers like friends and family.

3. Sense of Integrity - Hi-tech companies exhibited a values system that held ethics and trust above profit. Humility and self understanding are also characteristics that were encouraged throughout. Today I had an encounter with our Chairman Graham Weston. I asked him for some assistance and information on an issue.  Within 20 minutes I had everything I needed. Graham pioneered the strengths based culture at Rackspace. Every employee receives an analysis of their natural talents and is coached on how to develop them in both their professional and personal lives. During tough times, we exercise full disclosure to our customers and each other - Keep our promises. Bad news first, full disclosure.

Chaos

4. Adaptability - Change is the name of the game. Great tech companies knew when to change strategy and had the organizational flexibility to make the tough changes. In my four years at Rackspace, I have worked in three different roles, for 3 different VPs in 3 different buildings — all these changes occurred at different moments in time. Adopt change for excellence.

5. Entrepreneurial culture - Small scrappy teams, decentralized R&D, and FAILure tolerance are pillars of success. Everyone in the company has to feel ownership, a sensation that their work will “save the company”.  HP and Texas Instruments regularly split divisions into small groups. On the topic of decentralization, “IBM has found that rebellion can be good business.”, commented an executive about a secret endeavor to develop a new line of hard drives. At Rackspace, nearly 1/3 employees is a tech or an engineer. Everyone of these rackers are creating solutions to solve customer problems. This is the most important Rackspace value - Fanatical Support in all we do and Passion for our work.

6. Hands-on top management - This is about a highly engaged leadership team. Executives of this caliber are technically competent and prefer receiving direct updates from project members. They are comfortable asking lots of questions (even dumb ones) and are extremely involved in the high value aspects of the company. At Rackspace we do not have a CORE value to describe this, but I see it regularly.  Recently, Lanham Napier, our CEO, called one of my team members to ask some questions about a particular project. I can’t imagine this happening at a traditional company.

Balancing Continuity and Chaos at Rackspace

I have found that change and stability come in cycles at Rackspace. We will often see a 2 to 3 month period of significant chaos followed by an 8 to 12 month period of stabilization. Again, Rackspace leadership is on par with the researcher’s findings:

The successful high-technology company firm alternates periods of consolidation and continuity with sharp reorientations that can lead to dramatic changes in the firm’s strategies, structure, controls and distribution of power, followed by a period of consolidation.

The everyday Racker deals with this continuum in very different ways.  Some folks get frustrated with the chaos, others thrive within it. As a manager for a software team, I understand both perspectives. I am in the unique position of having to garner agreement on business processes and priorities among different teams. Describing my work as “Herding cats” is a true understatement. Rackers are also highly empowered to give feedback - and express frustration. This empowerment combined with technical and business expertise requires an open, servant style leadership that is probably uncommon in other firms.

My next task is to ask some of our VPs (they sit in cubes all over here) where our CORE values came from, and whether, as Picasso once said, “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”

“A little revolution now and then is a good thing.” - Thomas Jefferson

By free, I mean open source. I found this great article, Alternatives to the top 50 proprietary programs (or something like that). The article has put me well on my way to finding some great solutions for a cheap MF.

• Ubuntu - Because I’m bored with Windows and don’t want to spend my money on a Mac. Guess that means I’ll be using OpenOffice and Gimp too. I’m not sure I’m too fond of Gimp.
• Miro - Replacement for media player. Nice interface and lots of TV channels. Oh, BitTorrent access?
• PDFCreator - I don’t have to make printable documents very often, but when I do, I know where I’ll go.
• Filezilla - I’ve been using WinSCP, and am glad to switch. It is the most feature packed, least usable program I have ever come across. I loathe it!!
• Amanda - A backup tool. It sounds pretty robust, not sure if I need that much, worth exploring.
• K3b for DVD burning.

I’ve already been using Firefox, Pidgin, TuxPaint (daughter), and Thunderbird (dropped for Gmail).

It seems the godfathers of Ruby and Rails thought we should learn to use our text editors to comment code. Sorry if I break any conventions:


=begin
def sendEmail
# This is a single line comment
fred = fred
end
=end


In the example above, the single line comment is like PHP, use the number symbol “#”. For more than one line of code, use “=begin” before the first line and “=end” after the last one. Do not use any indentation.

Whats my deal? I am using the wrong terms to do my searches? This is the second time today that I have had trouble finding something on the web.

After a number of annoying fruitless searches on the web, I’ve decided to add my own contribution. Hopefully this will help others.

# psql -U username -W -d database_name -h 192.168.0.1 -p 5432

• -U is the postgres username for the database server
• -W tells psql to prompt you for a password
• -d is the database to use on the postgres server
• -h is the host (you can use IP or domain)
• -p port. This defaults to 5432.

Additional Reading

• Some useful Postgres command-line arguments.
• Using SQL with PostgreSQL
• PSQL cheatsheet

… he give her a server! Microsoft has a new advertising campaign out for which they wrote a children’s book.  The book is obviously meant to invoke fond memories of the children’s book genre that teaches kids about life events. It’s not actually for kids.

HandsonSA.org. I designed the site and built it along with my coworker Vijay and his 13 year-old daughter.  Man these kids are smart.

Its been a long time since I built a Web site.  Felt good.  I think I’ll start doing it more.

We competed in AIR San Antonio a couple of weeks back and won first in both categories. Next on the list is the tri-city challenge (Houston, Austin and San Antonio). This event is put on by Knowbility.

I wrote this at work and thought I would cross post since that content is not available to the general public.

Many of you (our users) are developers and read the same channels we do. An important voice in our endeavors is Steve Souders’ (Yahoo!’s performance guy). His presentation on front-end web application performance is very useful. Here are some interesting points.

1. 80 to 90% of performance issues occur in the browser while rendering, not on the application side. This is definitely our problem.
2. Users with no files cached are prevalent (on yahoo sites).
3. Use fewer http requests: CSS sprites (very cool), combine scripts/CSS, inline images.
4. CDN (Content Delivery Network) change for a Yahoo! site improved performance by 25%. This is an easy thing to try before distributing your application architecture.
5. Modify build scripts to rename static files on every push - take advantage of expires header
6. IE won’t render until CSS is downloaded. Additionally, don’t use @import.
7. Javascript blocks parallel downloads (HTTP 1.1 allows download of two files at the same time per host name). Load them last to minimize impact of page rendering.
8. Avoid redirects

Cleaning the closet effect
You clean the closet, and next week it is full again. Make things faster, and we’ll naturally want to add new functionality that will slow it down. Performance is an on-going battle–make it part of your dev cycle.

This pipes thing is pretty cool. These guys have put a spiffy drag-and-drop interface on the ability to merge RSS feeds. This leads to interesting and simple mashups. For example, you can combine a Reuters news feed, Yahoo maps, and a geographic locater to make an interface that will actually show you news on a map.

The possibilities are literally endless because there are hundreds of thousands of RSS feeds that can all be combined in infinite ways.

There are a number of things that can improve your search rankings. They all settle around three things:

1. Convincing other sites to link to your page
2. Including lots of relevant content in text format
3. Coding your page appropriately

Links to Your Page
Getting incoming links is very important. Every time somebody links to your page, it is considered a vote by Google. The more “votes” your site has, the hight it will rank it. To see a list of sites that link to your site that Google knows about, type “link:” before the URL to your site. My website is mejoe.com. So in Google, I would type “link:http://www.mejoe.com”. This will give me a list of these sites.
Relevant Content
You can’t fake a good website. If you want people to visit your site, you have to give them a good reason. The reason should be lots of text based content. This means articles, blog entries, etc. It should be text because the search engines will analyze your page for the appearance of related key words and their relevance on the page. Don’t grab copyrighted material or use gibberish. Search engines are very smart at identifying cheaters. If you are identified as a cheater, you could get blacklisted.

Proper Coding Techniques
This is a matter of changing how you design your web pages. A lot has been written on the web about this topic. The best advice I have is to make your pages accessible to blind people as the search engines are as well. Some key points:

1. Use semantic markup. That means using HTML tags as they were intended. The first heading on your page should be <h1>, the second <h2>, etc.
2. Avoid using images in place of text. If you must do this, then place the text in the ALT parameter. Search engines can not read text in images.
3. Avoid unnecessary JavaScript. Don’t use it to link to a page. Avoid it in your navigation. Search engines can have difficulty with this.
4. Name your links appropriately. Instead of “Click here for information about learning english at our center.” use “Learn english at our center.”
5. Give your page a proper title (<title></title>).
6. Keywords in your meta tags don’t matter that much. It’s to easy for people to spam these. Put what is relevant to the page and then focus your page on the actual content.

Check out Google’s Webmaster Guidlines. They give away all the secrets. Google also offers a Webmaster Help Center.