#1 – Print one picture per week
Slight change in strategy to save money on this one. I’ve been choosing one photo per week and storing them in a folder to bulk print and save money.  On Track.

#2 – Read less, write more
I culled a bunch of my inputs in Google Reader and deleted some irrelevant Twitter follows. I’ve written one of the longest posts I’ve ever written on ScaleConf (which has had over 250 people read it so far!), plus a few on my project blog.  On Track.

#3 – Cook something new every month
I cooked spicy meatballs that I made by hand and a awesome chicken balti. On Track.

#4 – Do the Freshpak Tri in under 1 hour 25 mins
I’ll have to wait a while on this one. Need to run more though generally. Pending.

#5 – Stop talking, build and launch a new site before April 1st
I’ve not stopped talking or building code. But I have begun to solidify the fundamentals so I can direct my activities wisely! On Track. 

#6 – Read the Bible in a year
This started well but trailed off. I changed tactic to read every day until inspired, a better resolution, but that failed too! This is officially not a habit yet! Failing.

Before I get into reviewing the conference and my personal thoughts, my key takeaway for my employers is that somebody needs to be at events like this representing Symantec. Symantec probably has the most relevant “vendor” portfolio of anyone to this topic and not everyone in the room was a bootstrapping start up using open-source. Nobody mentioned Symantec’s private/public scaling and availability technologies once (except for me, over beers, 1:1).

The conference itself was well run, up to the event and the event itself. Any organisational glitches that I experienced (my double-ticketing, bad WiFi performance, speakers getting ill) were handled quickly and neatly (extra ticket cancelled, bandwidth increased, moved to a panel instead). The coffee may not have rocked anybody’s world, but they had Rooibos tea! Logistics were handled by LessFuss so we should probably have expected nothing less, but there’s a more than small difference between keeping Capetonians lives in order and 200+ geeks happy for two days (or is there Jen?).

Content on the other hand was a mixed bag with some superb talks and some downright dreary talks! There were nine speaker sessions and one panel at the end (to cover for the unfortunate illness of Coda Hale) with each session lasting forty-five minutes. This is a perfect length for a talk. Thirty-five minutes of content, ten of interaction. It’s perfect in two ways. Firstly, because if the speaker is great, they can get a lot of information and inspiration done in that time and leads you toward how you can learn more from them or online. Secondly, because if they suck, you can easily entertain yourself on Twitter in the backchannel or answer some email and not feel like the whole thing is a waste of money.

Before I get into the session reviews let me say these three things so I don’t get struck off as a rude ignoramus forever:

1. Organising conference content is really, really hard. I help do it at least three times a year for internal and external events at Symantec. People suck. At commitment, sticking to deadlines, doing what they agreed, the list goes on and on.
2. Speaking amongst peers is really, really hard. Especially in the Stack Overflow/Hacker News era when everyone’s done a quick search after hearing something new and is an “expert” suddenly.
3. Every single speaker at this conference had something good to say. There’s a bible verse that roughly says “Don’t hide your light under a basket but put it on a lamp stand for all to see”. Some people needed help with their basket and lamp stand skills.

Lastly, one more caveat (do I sound nervous of a backlash much?). I said on Twitter during one session of the conference:

95% of the room are trying not to kill themselves, the other 5% think this is the best talk of the day. #iminthe95 #scaleconf

Though I may be exaggerating with my 95% claim, I think from the Twitter traffic during the “not so great” sessions I was in the majority in most of my opinions. In a non-tracked conference, I think you have to try and satisfy majority requirements. With that in mind here’s my own personal, very high-level view of the sessions and any slide links I could find.

Session 2: Craig Raw - Webscaling Tips
Competent, confident speaker but for me delivered little that couldn’t be found on a blog post about 101 Scaling. Maybe not a bad choice putting Craig from Quirk in for level-setting early on in the conf for newbies. Got some grief on Twitter for not even mentioning Python during his comparison of “safe/unsafe” languages for scale! [Slides]

Session 3: Zach Holman - Scaling GitHub
Easily the slickest presentation of the two days by Zach and not just pretty content but delivered well and with the right amount of detail. Top points for me from [Slides]:

• Happy employees make Productive employees (and visa-versa)
• Everybody (not just managers) should worry about co-workers happiness
• Look for seemingly separate datasources to graph for interesting correlations (e.g. “Twitter mentions” against “production deploys”)
• When using Git for source control, Master should be ready to go at any time, branch for new features and merge back to Master

Session 4: Miles Ward - Scaling using Amazon Web Services (AWS)
This was the first of the sessions where the quality of content was hidden by the delivery. Subsequent appearances and comments by Miles during the panel showed clarity of thought and humor. AWS is amazing, getting better all the time, but I knew that before. Whizzing through many reference architectures, mumbling into the mic is not a great use of 35 mins. What I would have like to see here is examples of bad scaling decisions when using AWS contrasted against the good. [Slides]

Session 5: Bryn Divey - Nimbula’s bIC: lessons learned and challenges faced
Firstly, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Bryn reminded me of Captain Jack Sparrow! Well delivered talk that touched on how they overcame some of the challenges in building a solution for developing private clouds. I felt like I knew a bunch of this stuff because I work at Symantec (we do it too) but key lesson for me in design was the criticality of tracking and documenting service dependancies is critical for multi-service-multi-server systems. One improvement could have been a bit more structure on being explicit on the lessons learnt.

Session 6: Deon Erasmus - Highly available infrastructure on the cheap
OK … last session of the day, so where do I start with this one from Deon. Erm… I didn’t make any notes on this one. But I spent a lot of time on Twitter.

Session 7: Ashley Peter - Scaling a mobile social network
This was an excellent start to day two from Ashley, very practical and very inspiring given 2go’s massive growth (16m registered users) and low numbers of staff (3!). One thing I picked up about scaling which I think I’ve paraphrased was “there’s nothing to do, until there’s something to do, then you need to do it really well, really quickly”! The structure of this one broken down into a focus on how they themselves worked through a combination of Vertical scaling, Parallelism and Horizontal scaling was great. [Slides]

Session 8: Simon de Haan - Learning to Fail
Simon is from Praekelt which is a fascinating dual commercial/foundation organisation. Their focus on solutions for Africa and building Open Source tools to enable that is both well engineered and worthwhile. I took lots of notes on this one, probably worth a post on its own and would like to meet up with the team behind Praekelt again to dive in deeper on some of their organisations set-up. My favourite tip though was “Avoid One Hammer To Rule Them All” … in other words, don’t use your favourite tool (framework, language, database, etc.) inappropriately! [Slides]

Session 9: Mark Phillips - Building Healthy Distributed Systems
Mark is from Basho, makers of the NoSQL database Riak and split his talk into talking about the characteristics of a distributed company, community and system. Great talk delivered with a sense of humor that I like and the right amount of clear advice which was something that some of the talks missed out on highlighting. [Slides]

Session 10: Wesley Lynch - Software Architecture and building E-Commerce Websites
Wesley certainly had a tough job ending the speakers content. He presented a case study of the job Realm Digital did (and continues to do from the looks of things) in bringing Exclusive Books online operations to life. Unfortunately it seems they had to bring order to a ball of “kak” and its taken its toll on Wesley’s positivity and it felt more like a rant than set of learnings with guidance! Full marks for attempting to stoke more audience participation and to the crowd for trying to draw some positives out (I tried… and got a nice t-shirt for my efforts!).

Concluding Thoughts
The conference closed with a speaker panel which had the right amount of wrapping up questions, audience participation and “in jokes” referencing the rest of the two days.

Overall, this was a great use of two days “off work” for me personally. It was an impressive setup given it was the first time the team had attempted a conference of this size and subject. Well done to Jonathan Hitchcock (@vhata), Duncan Phillips (@nuknad) and the LessFuss crew (Jen, Bradley and Marije).

Lastly, I tried to build a Twitter list of attendees by monitoring for mentions which you’ll find here.

Looking forward to the next event!

I’m not usually one for new years resolutions and certainly not written down and published to the world. However, this year I’ve had a long holiday and we’ve mentioned it a few times so I’ve actually given it some thought and wanted to capture them!

#1 – Print one picture per week
I take tons of photos, especially with my iPhone (and sometimes with my DSLR), but never print them out. I have a big blank wall in my office so I’m going to fill it with one “moment” from each week.

#2 – Read less, write more
I often have streams of thought running around in my head and the process of writing them down really helps solidify them. On the input side thought I’m a knowledge horder and love my 30 minute coffee/twitter/Google Reader hit in the morning (I think its what I miss most from my routine when I’m travelling with work). I might try and curate my list of inputs down a bit and carve out 10-15 mins for writing instead.

#3 – Cook something new every month
This is one Lyd and I have jointly agreed. We’ve got loads of cookery books filled with interesting things we’ve never tried and yet we revert back to the same-old-same-old every week. So, to resolve that we’re both going to cook something new every month leading to 24 new things on our home menu (unless they turn out gross!).

#4 – Do the Freshpak Tri in under 1 hour 25 mins
In 2011 I did my first two triathlons in Clanwilliam and Brandvlei Dams thanks to the encouragement of my friends Werner and Kelvin. I’m hoping to do more again this year and weather permitting I want to knock a massive 10 minutes off my previous time. Given I now know what to expect from the course (and triathlon in general) I hope this is a stretch, but achievable goal. I say weather permitting because if its 35 degrees (which it can be) I’ll be aiming for survival!

#5 – Stop talking, build and launch a new site before April 1st
For the last 6 months I’ve been dabbling on weekends and free evenings with a bit of programming again. This time with Ruby on Rails which is super-easy to prototype with. Its led to a bit of a reawakening of certain parts of my brain which has been fun and a great diversion from work. However, I keep starting stuff and not finishing so now I need change that! I need to sign some paperwork for my employers to make sure they know this is non-competitive and evenings/weekends only then get cracking.

#6 – Read the Bible in a year
The others are all mind and body, this ones for the soul! I once was given a bible by my mother-in-law Jean that had all the readings planned out and divided up with dates to help cover the bible in a year. I did it, just it took about 2 and a half years to finish because I keep missing days on end! I’m going to try and be a bit more disciplined this year as I know every time I pick up my bible I get something from it so it’s ridiculous to not prioritise it!

I think six should be more than enough to get going with, I’ll need to check back at regular intervals for my ability to stick with them!

“I have the three i’s: inspiration induced insomnia” – @imsickofmaps on twitter

I sometimes get these spurts of inspiration late at night and then spend hours with a notepad/iPad/iPhone/book/etc. scribbling, reading, thinking and Googling. That night I finally managed to get to sleep five hours after I went to bed about 3am. Sometimes I wake and whatever consumed me was just a passing crazy train of thought that no sane person would care to discuss with me. Thankfully, sometimes its not and that night was of those and has sparked a number of useful conversations since which warrant another blog post another day.

The next day I tweeted again a follow-up quote that is one of my favourites:

“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration” – Thomas Edison

I’ve been thinking about that quote over the last few days and I think that there’s a missing portion to the formula in the quote which I’m stuck for a name for but is “post-inspiration but pre-perspiration”. To be cool it would need to be an “..piration” word but the concept is one of “thoughtful planning”. The formula is probably more like “1% inspiration + 5% thoughtful planning + 94% perspiration”. Too often I think people can jump straight from idea to execution and then flail around trying constantly pivot and re-aim in order to hit the mark they’re aiming for.

Anyone think of a “…piration” word for “thoughtful planning” so I can create a quote as cool as Thomas Edison?

It was meant to be a formal debate with a few people in favour and a few against the motion that “The tech entrepreneurial community in Cape Town is alive and kicking”. However, it started a little oddly as those against the motion proceeded to announce the were asked to be against rather than it being of their own choosing! It sounded like they were a little cautious or burnt be recent flames aimed at them from non-attendees who had seen the announcement prior.

The “for” motion was put forward by Daniel Guasco, one of the joint-CEO’s of Groupon in SA who put forward a number of success stories both of buyouts and inflowing development through things like Google Umbono as proof that it was. Unfortunately as he closed there was a heckle rough speaking that “you’ve named them all”!

This led nicely into the “against” position delivered by the supposedly “pressured into it” but surprising-lucid-and-passionate Eric Edelstein from Evly. His argument was nicely built upon the foundational statement that the community was alive but by no means kicking. He raised a number of excellent points that showed how you differentiate between the two states using Silicon Valley as a benchmark. A number of the audience challenged this as unfair afterwards in the open questions session but I personally think that firstly if you aim low, you deliver low. Secondly, calling the initiative to ignite the region “Silicon Cape” says that most people identify with that focus as being critical. I think his best point was that the ecosystem of related businesses and systems are just not here at the moment in Cape Town. Its not just the finance eco-system (though that could do with an injection of life) but the lawyers, accountants, education, etc. that need to be there to support the entrepreneur in their endeavors.

Eric was so brutal in his delivery and the follow-up debate ended up dragging in a few of the “for” panellists into making “against” statements!

However, there were a few things unsaid that stick out for me as the deciding factors in this debate right now. The first was that though this event took place at 4.30 in the afternoon, as I drove there I did so against the massive rush hour traffic out of the CBD! At 4 in the afternoon. Those people are generally not going home to carry on there like the crazy Americans. They’re going home to watch bad TV. I think the overriding culture amongst the educated middle-classes of Cape Town is one of quiet contentment, which is fine and nice, but not conducive to a hunger to leave comfortable corporate land and risk all on a start-up. The majority of those with a fire in their belly to create the companies of the future are not sitting on a body of knowledge and experience that will set them up for success.

The second thing that stuck out for me as unspoken is the requirement for South African businesses to wake up and adopt 10 to 15 year old technologies (such as a basic catalogue style website) to allow the next generation of South African based companies to build upon it and get quick, local, visual feedback on how their technologies are being used. Yes, the digital world allows us to throw something on a server and have people in China, India and Iceland try it out but in the world of user experience there’s somethings best done in-person.

The debate ended with a question time which was wasted mostly with people making statements (fine if that’s the deal, but that’s not a question time) but I got to ask one on the feeling of the experts around the concept of the “pivot” being acceptable here. Blank stares from around the room led me to think the concept is not even truly understood here but another one of the Evly guys, the verbose Eran, did and told a funny story about a South African investor who was outraged that a (successful) pivot had seemed to strongly indicate in favour of returning to the unsuccessful model!

The vote was overwhelmingly “against” the motion at the end, I think mainly to do with the excellent “alive but not kicking” point. I hope when the time comes for me to complete my “start-up sabbatical” in corporate land and reenter start-up land that its alive enough still and I can help make it a little more kicking.

Thanks to the iPlex for hosting, looking forward to returning and sorry for not eating the food but I was going out for dinner and it would have been rude to show up full!

Over scoping was as term I used a lot previously when I was involved in my role as a “pivotal provider” (a term someone invented for the person or team who liaised between a customer onshore and a development team offshore). We used it a lot because at that time (around 2000) as project-based offshore development was becoming popular there was a temptation by customers, as a result of the lower day rate, to try and cram more and more features into applications. Our job was to try and push back the scope to the core requirements and ensure we didn’t start with a functional specification that was going to lead to a massive deliverable. This approach generally came out of a desire to ship a version one of the project or program with everything in it in order to demonstrate why this project should be funded and delivered.

However, it seems to me to be creeping into the wider world of work as a result of people trying to ensure they as an individual are seen as critical to the future health of the business and become indispensable to the organisation they work for. Rather than focus on incremental, bite-sized, valuable collections of activities people look for and try to define grand, strategic, immeasurable bloated roles. Then fail to deliver on them.

Seems like “strategy” is the one title everyone wants and actually what your co-workers and team mates want is strategic execution, not long-term airy-fairy futurism. This means you must understand and return to the epicentre of your role and build back from there. In their book REWORK (buy it) the team from 37Signals talk about the term “finding your epicentre” in regards to business startup. On their blog they talk about it like this:

Epicenter Design involves focusing in on the true essence of the page (the “epicenter”) and then building outwards. This means not starting with the navigation/tabs, or the footer, or the colors, or the sidebar, or the logo, etc. It means starting with the part of the page that, if changed or removed, would change the entire purpose of the page. That’s the epicenter.

That’s a real challenge when applied to a role in the workplace: What thing (or things) that if I stopped doing would the entire purpose of my role disappear and the ability to serve my organisation cease.

This is what I’m focused on today because I lost sight of it. Finding my role’s epicentre, pulling back on the rest and executing (not talking) against that core.

I decided to reflect back on some of the failures I have had personally because you know what… I’m OK with that and I want to make sure I remember the lessons I learnt!

I think I’m going to make this the first of a few posts, it’s time to get back in the writing saddle…

Lesson 1: Communicate (with honesty) without failing
In a hierarchical organisation this has to be “up” and “down” the chart with equal vigour. I think the toughest thing I struggled with this year was the shifting sands of my team. I felt like there was never a time in the last 12 months when my tiny team wasn’t dealing with some kind of crisis. Whether that was personal, professional, internal, external, deserved or undeserved it doesn’t matter … It just gets very wearing after a while if people can’t (or won’t) communicate an honest view of their position. I’m lucky to have worked in some very flat and open teams in the past and though sometimes it felt like people didn’t have enough focus I think I’ve grown to appreciate some of it’s beneficial characteristics! I think there are a few frustrating things about communication challenges but two bug me especially. The first is legal complications and the second is my inability to remain true to my beliefs.

Legal Complications
One of the things I want to build up more understanding of this week is the legal communications frameworks of the major countries within the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region I work in. There are certainly cultural differences across this vast region but there also appears to be a complex maze of restraints on what can and can not be said or communicated to employees. I still intend to one day return to running my own business and have realised the importance of this complex area. I have a feeling though the process of hiring great people is more important that ever before due to the mess you can preempt by doing so. My favourite book of the year is Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh who’s company Zappos emphasises the need for “cultural fit” so highly.

Remaining True
This area is far more personal and I thank my wife Lydia for calling me out on this one. I have the joyful freedom to work from home a good portion of the time when I’m not travelling so she gets to listen to one side of my phone calls. She calls me out when I’m struggling by pointing out “you’re gossiping again” which is a personal pet hate of mine. I hate office politics with a passion but have gotten sucked in so easily this past year.

Setting Goals
So the first and most important goal for the next 12 months is to communicate clearer, more often, with honesty and respect. Time to get on with it!

The way it is used is that first you go through the requests and requirements at a high level. Secondly, you describe that you have a finite amount or resources, be it people, time, money or another variable (or more likely a combination of them). Then you discuss that you will therefore be unable to deliver all of them (as much as you wish you could). So then you ask them to pick which ones they must have and start to offer up “If you have to have just one would you like this one OR this one”.

Done in a very consultative manner it is extremely effective in getting the customer to buy into a prioritised list that is a great deal shorter than the one you walked in on!

The reason I’ve been thinking about trade-offs again the last few days was mainly as a result of the revelations that one of the TechCrunch writers might have taken some free gear in return for posts about certain start-ups. What interested me most was the speed of response in regards to the main Editor Michael Arrington addressing it publicly with a post entitled “An Apology To Our Readers“. The post included this:

We are all shaken here at TechCrunch this is someone who was our friend and who we trusted to be honest with our readers. Our hope is that the intern learns something from this experience and grows into the kind of person that will be more welcome in this community.

I apologize to each one of you. I promise that we will always maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do.

Transparency is one of the biggest trade-offs people can struggle with, especially within the corporate world where you are trying to control the way the brand is perceived. Michael should be highly commended for such a rapid response and the openness with which he addressed this in a public forum. TechCrunch is a slightly odd example as its business is a public website but the process of allowing employees to air their views in public is a bold, but I think critical one.

I think one of the best ever posts from Hugh of GapingVoid fame is this the where he discussed the “Porous Membrane” that corporate blogging creates. He illustrates it with this cartoon:

Go and read the whole thing but for me a key point he makes is this one:

13. The more porous your membrane (“x”), the easier it is for the internal conversation to inform and align with the external conversation, and vice versa.

There’s plenty of great advice in that post and I hope to continue learning to put it into action.

One of my favourite interviews recently was with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic, who put a lot into the development of WordPress and commercialise it through things like wordpress.com. Matt is a great thinker and comes across very well in this interview…

TWiST #26 with Matt Mullenweg

The thing that’s playing on my mind is a situation where we have to get a number of the different teams within our organisation all pulling together to make sure an upcoming launch works really smoothly and has maximum impact for our customers. I realised that on Monday when we have some calls on the subject I need to make sure we start from the position of agreeing that we are doing the right thing. Sounds obvious but I have the feeling that people are just doing their jobs and that their hearts are not really in it. Perhaps they don’t feel appropriately ”consulted” up until this point, or they actually have other more pressing things on their mind but we can’t go forward without support.

The tricky thing is going to be phrasing the question in a non-threatening manner that doesn’t make people defensive but instead drives an honest and productive conversation. I was pleasantly surprised the other day to be complemented by someone further up the “food chain” than me that I’d learnt to think a little longer before opening my mouth! Something I’ve been working hard on, speaking the truth without alienating those who I’ll need to work with for months and years to come (hopefully).

I’m currently in the process of applying for a job internally to become the Principle Regional Product Marketing Manager for Security and a lot of the challenges in this new role if I get it will be ensuring that situations like the one I’ve described don’t happen as often in future. Having a consistent flow of communication around current and future product and solution strategy with the various stakeholders internally and externally is critical to our success.

Listening to: Delphic – Acolyte