Gary Allison's Leadership Blog

What else could it be named?  Seriously though, this is pretty interesting..  Google is said to be behind this new language that is some super Python, with the performance of C.  I’m really not so sure we need another interpreted language.  Java, Ruby, Python – its like a Jubyathon already.  Truthfully, I’m on my second Python project now and it is growing on me.  My oldest daughter is quite the twitter follower, and about 2 months ago, she was sad that twitter no longer offered sms updates for her feeds.

So I’ve been dabbling in my very little spare time in building out a service to read the feeds of her favorite bands and send them to her via text. I think it will be pretty straightforward to build from my initial progress.  I’m using python because, well, Google App Engine is just too irresistible.   Its free, it works, and its pretty cool.  Python on the other hand is just one of those things you have to deal with to use the App Engine.  Yes, I know they support Java now, but that seems to be more that I need for something as simple as this.  Besides, I like to learn new things.

So, it is with great interest I learned of “Go” via TechCrunch. Go also has its own org site and gopher mascot…

Go Gopher

My favorite part is the return of POINTERS!  I always loved pointers.  Yes, I debugged many a protection violation with pointers accessing memory outside of their allocated space.  But, I still like the power they gave in capable hands.  Apparently Go allows pointers, but is still type safe and memory safe.  I need to look into this.  I’m also intrigued that this is billed as a systems programming language.  I’m wondering what kind of systems has Google built with this?

Today is the big day all MSFT shareholders have been waiting for – Windows 7 is released.  I’m imagining the lines out the door of Best Buy for people waiting to but the new OS…

So, I have been truly awaiting this release.  You might have picked up along the way that I’m not exactly a huge Windows fan through these posts, but I really have been looking forward to this.  You see, like it or not, most of us are compelled to use Windows (see recent posts on why this is changing).  So, I have been looking forward to Windows 7.  Vista was such an overwhelming DISASTER, I really do want Microsoft to do better.

Here’s an informative post though that has me shaking my head.  It seems that installing Windows 7 on XP is not possible.  You can upgrade from Vista, (and it deletes the built in productivity apps), but you can’t upgrade from XP.  Since almost everyone is still on XP, including people like myself who was running VIsta and asked our IT group to upgrade me back to XP, this is a huge problem.

I can understand why Microsoft chose to do this – just think of how this simplified the testing effort – but come on!  More research is needed to see if this is completely factual, but I am blown away by the audacity that “people will just by new computers with Windows 7 preinstalled”.   Well guys, I have news for you – this is yet another misstep in your understanding of the market.  Instead of creating the normal tidal wave of hardware upgrades that accompanies a windows release, you’ve just pissed off the majority of people that have ever used your product.

No wonder Apple stock is over $200 a share.

P.S. Here’s another article from the Houston Chronicle.  SERIOUSLY!  Who is going to do this?  I’m blown away by this stupidity.

Oh, how I love this post by Joel on The Duct Tape Programmer!  This is such a salient point that applies to so much more than the context here.  “You see, everybody else is too afraid of looking stupid because they just can’t keep enough facts in their head at once to make multiple inheritance, or templates, or COM, or multithreading, or any of that stuff work.”

I just ordered my copy of  Coders At Work.

On a total Tangent, I just completed the transfer of my domain name off of Network Solutions to Dreamhost.  Dreamhost is awesome and dirt cheap.  They have one -click installs of just about everything you’d ever want to run on your website and their registrations are almost free they are so inexpensive.  I’ve been hosting with them for over a year and have had zero issues (other than imap email, but that’s another story).  I 100% recommend Dreamhost.

Lots of discussion lately about measuring productivity has had me spending time I should be sleeping thinking about the same.  I love accountants and finance folks.  I find them very bright and love the way they typically approach any business discussion from the point of logic, but they can be an intractable lot as well.  They’d love to measure software engineering efforts like a consultancy – hours in, output out, utilization metrics pop right out the other side of the equation.  More utilization of the team means more productivity!  Wonderful!  Its so simple and we should have figured this out so long ago.  All that time wasted counting KLOCS and function points….

Of course it doesn’t really work. You can count hours, or days, or whatever to your hearts content but you are only measuring effort.  And, measuring effort of a software development group is an exceptionally tricky (and potentially dangerous) thing.  Its not the effort that matters, but rather the results.  So how do we measure the results?  Ahhh there’s the rub.

What we need to measure is the business value of the stories the team is being asked to build.  For the consultant this is very simple – you are paid by the hour for the consulting performed.  Thus, hours billed X hourly rate = business value.  The business value of a software going into a product is not so easily measured.  But, lets assume this is a solvable problem.  It gets even more interesting in the planning phase when you are making product choices.  For a proposed feature, what is the busniess value?  Now suddenly, this is not a software engineering question at all.

The inevitible has finally happened. Determined to put Microsoft 6 feet under, the final nail in the coffin has been pulled out of the box by Google, but not yet driven in Microsoft’s casket with yesterday’s announcement of the Google Chrome-OS. A little over a month ago, Google announced Google Wave. This was a clear frontal attack on the to-date unassailable bastion of Microsoft’s stronghold – corporate messaging and shared calendaring aka the Exchange Server. The Exchange Server is the lynchpin of the MS desktop strategy.

Nothing works as well for group scheduling and communication. Thus, you need Exchange. Since you need Exchange, you need MS Outlook which really is the only thing that works with Exchange. Believe me, I have led teams to build a competing solution and the killer is that even if you can build a competing solution, you have to make it work with Exchange. And really, no MAPI plugin really works – even Apple had to license the Exchange connector for the iPhone. You just can break into that proprietary protocol any other way. 

So, With Google Wave, there will be finally an answer to Exchange. Then, you don’t need Outlook. Oh, I don’t need Outlook? Then – no need to buy Office. There’s already Google Docs that gets better and better all the time, and allow the kind of seamless sharing we working on at my last venture company. So, no Office required, and walaa – Microsoft is no longer printing money.

Not to worry, there’s the Windows operating system. Oops, better worry. Vista was and is an unmitigated disaster for MS – unreliable, incompatible, and a pain to use. Now, Google has announced they intend to extend linux, build on top a new windowing system targeted at netbooks offer an new Operating System. Time to short MSFT.

So, can Google pull it off. Look no farther than MAC OS X.  In March of 2001, Apple released Mac OS X 10.0, in my opinion one of the most daring, risky, and successful operating system projects in history. OS X was a total rewrite, based on bsd unix of the Macintosh operating system – aimed at the intel chip platform as Apple abandoned the RISC processor for their next generation computing platform. An undertaking of this magnitude is difficult to appreciate unless you have been part of such an effort (I’ve had the privilege twice). It almost always fails, but Apple did it and succeeded in remaking their company. Someday, I’d really like to meet someone that led in that project and pick their brain….

So, now Google has embarked on a very similar journey, but one that is much simpler – they are targeting netbooks and don’t have a legacy of applications to worry with. They don’t have a UI paradigm like Apple to bring forward, and they are looking to run all apps through the Google Chrome browser. Sounds like about 1/10 of the effort of OS X. So, I’m prettysure they will pull this off without too much difficulty. And, you can bet the next gen of Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar, and Mail will be available right around the same time. Brilliant. Now, the question is truly: Can anyone stop Google?

Happy Mother's Day

Things were not easy for us when I was a kid.  When my parents split up, it was still a somewhat unusual thing, whereas today, it seems the unusual case is for parents to stay together.  It was just my Mom and I back then, as Dad was stationed on the other side of the globe.  She taught high school during the day, adult ed at night, and worked on her master’s degree during the summer.  At one point, she had 3 different jobs I recall.  This was all fairly transparent to me.  We never had a lot, but we had enough.  I’m sure I wasn’t as appreciative then as I should have been, just as today it escapes my own daughters just how fortunate they are.

When I, like all sixteen year old boys, wanted to get a job to buy a car, she said no.  “You’ll have plenty of time to work in your life”, and told me she wanted me to focus on my grades.  I had friends working at McDonald’s and Bill Miller’s, making money and driving cars – I really wanted the “financial independence” that fast-food job would bring.  Boy, was she ever right about that one.  We filled out endless scholarship applications and the grades / test scores paid off; I basically won a paid ride thru Texas A&M.
To this day, she still works harder than anyone I know.  Now just one job, but still 80-100 hrs a week at Alamo Community College where she is a full professor.  At an age when most people are thinking about retirement, Mom went back to school to start work on her doctorate.  And, about 5 years ago, at 60+ she earned her phD.  Since starting that journey 10 years earlier, she buried two parents, and then unexpectedly a brother.

A hundred times she could have quit through the years.  Through all those long nights of grading papers, writing papers, helping me with my writing and projects, working literally all night more times than I can count just so we could have a normal life.  I doubt I could ever say thank you enough for your sacrifice Mom.  I can say now that I truly appreciate you.  Happy Mother’s Day Mom.

Were you worried about the April 1 Conficker worm a few weeks ago? While this virus got plenty of media attention, an attack by cyber terrorists might be much more effective on phone, internet, banking, and maybe even our electric grid with the cut of a few fiber optic cables. The prototype of such an attack may have taken place last Thursday in the SF Bay Area as ten fiber optic cables were cut in 4 places around 4:00 AM.

This could have been a probe of our defenses (non-existent) or perhaps a labor protest by CWA union members who have voted to strike (which they deny).  Either way, Dvorak has it right when he calls into question Obama’s proposal of a “Smart Grid” controlling the nation’s electric distribution.  Terriorist, disgruntled union workers, or otherwise, one thing is certian: these criminals knew exactly what they were doing, exactly what manholes to climb down, and exactly what cables to cut.

Today, Amazon announced their Amazon Elastic MapReduce cloud web service.  A natural extension to their EC2 cloud services on one hand, and a somewhat startling event on the other.  In a recent post, I spoke of the global implications of the readily available low cost cloud computing infrastructure.  Now, it seems this service has entered the realms of massively parallel computing.

Not clear at this point what the limits of this service are, but the possibilities are staggering.  Not enough computing power in Pyongyang?  No problem, run your nuke simulations right here Mr Kim Jong-il. An extreme case, and perhaps too complex / compute intensive for this offering, but the point is never have resources of this scale been so readily available.  Amazing.

A better fit for tasks like SETI@Home, these distributed networks are useful in solving very large data intensive types of problems like web indexing.  Google even provides a nice tutorial on mapreduce.  This is also a nice class lecture on mapreduce from Cal Berkeley.  Enjoy.

Last week, the Austin Agile development user group, AgileAustin, published a online poll of tools that teams in the local area favor for agile planning.  In response to the email announcing the poll, a couple of members emailed the list saying their favorite tool is no tool at all.  Some said index cards.  I shook my head a bit and emailed a good friend of mine who also leads development teams for his thoughts.  We came to the conclusion that it must be nice to work in a project so small you need no tools to help the team plan a sprint.

Actually, I don’t think it would be that nice.  I’d submit that if your plans are so simple that you need nothing to track them, or index cards suffice, you’re probably not doing much interesting.  For my team, Rally Software’s Rally Enterprise has been very successful in helping us plan very complex agile projects.  I recommend it without hesitation.

In many cases, our product management team enters user stories (sometimes we use epics for very large user stories) while the development, QA, and docs team breaks these down into stories and tasks.  We plan sprints as a fully integrated feature team across all these disciplines.  It’s not perfect, but it works and works well.

You can keep your index cards, thank you.

As you can tell by the frequency of my posts, things have been very busy at work – no complaints though, I know of friends and associates that would like to have such a problem. I wanted to follow up on one of the thoughts in the prior post regarding the global ramifications of effect of freely / very affordable cloud computing services.

With services like google app engine and amazon’s elastic compute cloud offering free and low cost resources that would have previously required investment of at least six zeros, the bar is substantially lowered to take a good idea to market.  To build out an idea, you now really just need a handful of expertise and time – not to mention a lot less time that you once did.

This opens competition up on a global scale never seen before – certainly there are many excellent and bright developers in India, China, Eastern Europe, Russia, Brazil, you get the picture.  The value increases for innovative ideas, domain knowledge, and the ability to market the solution.

I firmly believe America remains the cradle of innovation; it is in the very core of our society and our DNA.  I’ve had the privilege over my career to work with some of the best and brightest, and feel very blessed that I still do every day.  It is heartening to see the innovation coming out of Apple and my own company.  Still it is going to be a very different world when my daughters enter the workforce.   Change is coming and it is coming even faster than we can imagine.

Tomorrow I’ll be presenting to the Texas Community College Teachers Association on this post’s subject.  I’ve posted the slides on slideshare for reference.  I’ll be sumarizing a few of the more salient points in an upcoming blog post.

Do you know what this is?

load AX, BX

Then chances are you know how computers really work, and chances are you are, what’s the word, old?  I’m currently working on a presentation for an upcoming conference that describes how Software as a Service, cloud computing, and web services are changing the landscape for education.  The thought occurred to me recently when working on the outline of the presentation that many of today’s computer science students have no idea how computers really work.  Systems level knowledge of programming and operating systems seems to be arcane. Maybe that’s good in a way.

No you can build full-on applications in scripting languages, deploy them in the cloud and not worry about load balancing, firewalls, and nusiances like memory management.  Maybe in 10 years, developers of the future will laugh at us when they recount, ” yea, you used to have to write applications in this complex language called Java, now you just drink it, ha, ha, ha”.  I used to laugh at the PL-1 and FORTRAN programmers.

Maybe this is good.  Now, developers can focus on solving business problems and spend less time on the nuainces of programming.  Or, maybe they actually have less control and are forced into the confines of what is offered in the toolbox of Google, Amazon, Salesforce and the like.  And, since soon they will lack any real systems development skills, maybe they give up all chance of getting outside of those boxes?

Tomorrow, I have the opportunity to speak at an Rally customer success tour at the Renaissance.  Tonight, I am reflecting on the leaders I have a privilege to serve with on the panel, Israel Gat, Jack Yang, Torsten Weirch, and Eric Huddleson.  These gentlemen are all significant leaders in the Austin Community and I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

I’ve chosen the topic of “Agile in the Large” since the real power of Agile is evident when you turn loose the teams to run at their full speed in a self directed agile process.  Agile gets really interesting with development teams over 50, and also holds its most promise.  We believe that the best way to scale a team and continue to deliver successful software projects is to build it as a set of Agile teams.

Here’s few things we’ve learned along the way.  Interestingly enough, in comparing notes with the some of the development leaders at salesforce.com, it seems they have learned many of the same things.

• There’s no replacement for a great technical leader in the Agile team – effective team leads are priceless.  You should always be growing and recruiting for leaders.
• Great Product Owners are hard to find.  I have the pleasure to work with some of the best, but to scale the teams, you need more.
• An Agile team must be composed of all the skills they need to produce a shippable result.  In our case, it is the product owner or manager, usability, dev team, QA team, and tech writers.
• You run into problems when you depend on other parts of the organization that may not be Agile.  Just for an example, if you have a supporting organization that is still working on the Hero principle, or the waterfall process, there is going to be trouble.
• Tool support is critical and everyone must adopt. For large teams, roll up views and quick reporting is absolutely essential.  Rally gives us this capability.
• Test automation is absolutely key to keeping the product shippable.  As each sprint there is significant new functionality being delivered, the QA team must at the same time deliver automated tests so that doing regression testing onthe whole product is a swift process at the end of the release.  There’s just not time to regression test the whole product.

We have even been able to extend Agile to expose our feature teams to end clients through the Rally Agile tool.

Veteran’s Day was this week and I received an email from my Dad, the Colonel, that I wanted to share with everyone.  No, it has nothing to do with technology, but it has everything to do with being an American, and being grateful.  Things that I believe are in short supply these days.

“Each year on Vets day and/or Memorial day, I normally send out a greeting to my fellow veterans and loyal American friends.  For various reasons this year, I have not been in the mood and have not been very moved.  I cannot pinpoint precisely why.  I have not changed in my firm belief in this great nation and all that it stands for. Having personally spent over thirty years in support of and defense of a set of values, I am not likely to change my mindset.

What is finally getting through to me is that there are a measure if folk who claim citizenship to this nation that I dearly love who do not feel nearly as committed to it as do I.  Most of these citizens have never done anything in support of this country but rather have gone to great effort to verbally and by their actions demeaned and disgraced it.  While I have always been aware that such folk were there, I had them fixed on the fringe and that we loyal and patriotic citizens were in the mainstream.  By nature I have always been optimistic, yet for the first time, I now harbor some lingering doubts.

In awful places all over this earth good and patriotic servicemen and women stand in support of this wonderful nation, putting themselves in grave danger by their own choice.  This knowledge gives me reason for hope.  Yet, I see large segments of our population who either are ignorant of this concept of service or who chose to ignore any responsibility to defend our nation by word or deed.  When we reach a point where there are few willing to support our values but many who are willing to damn them, we fail to function as a nation and are reprehensible as a people.  As Vets, we must insure that we do all that we can to keep those who love our nation in the forefront.  We must teach well our children and grandchildren.

When the next catastrophic attack occurs, let us pray that another generation of warriors are out there like a sleeping tiger ready to come forward.  It is my belief that we will likely need those young warriors and very soon if our leadership wavers or shows weakness.  Amid the gloom, there is always cause for hope.  I wish all of my former comrades in arms a wonderful Vets day and hope that my remarks did not throw cold water on an other wise wonderful day.  I feel that we must remain very vigilant in the next few months/years to insure we do not loose our moral fabric and thus our way as a nation.”

Thank you Dad.  Thanks for the many times you risked your life for our country.  I am so proud of you.

The 30 day experience of a life without windows is off to a fast a furious start.  Some early conclusions are clear.  If you are a technophile, read on, otherwise stop and head to Apple and buy a Mac.  (Does anyone like the new MacBook Pro keyboard?  What were they thinking?)  Still Apple is the only way to go right now if you are not seriously technically adept.

Installing Ubuntu was very easy.  First though, you have to convince Windows Vista to free up some disk space so you can shrink the Windows disk to make room for your Ubuntu disk partition.  This should be easy in Vista with the first version of Windows that includes built in tools to allow you to shrink a partition.  But, like the IRS, there is always a catch with Vista.  It just doesn’t work.  You have to jump through many hoops because Vista writes certain system files at the end of the disk and then tells you you can’t shrink the volume.  Here’s a great write up on the many, many hoops you need to jump through to eventually convince Vista to turn loose of some disk space.  Aarrrggh.

Once you convince Vista to resize the partitions, you will still have a huge chunk of free space left on the Windows disk, but you can then at least create the Ubuntu partition.  The Ubuntu install instructions are very straightforward on what to do.  (again, if you aren’t pretty tech savvy, buy a Mac, you’ll be happier any way).  At the end, you will be able to boot Windows or Ubuntu Linux.

Next challenge is VPN – an indespensible necessity in the corporate world.  I could never get the Cisco VPN client to work, though it seems it works for most people in my googling.  I kept getting “Remote Peer Not Responding” blah blah blah.  Thank goodness for this post that shows how set up VPNC.  It worked perfectly the first time and everytime since.

Since your network probably has files shared from Windows servers, you’ll need to get to them too.  Here’s how to do that.

But the big one is Outlook.  The corporate world still largely revolves around the Exchange server.  Connecting from Linux is somewhat of a challenge.  If you are a light email user, and don’t have a complicated calendar, try the Evolution client that is built into Ubuntu.  It is a mail/calendar/contacts client that connects to the Outlook Web Access service on Exchange.  For very light duties, it seems to work ok.  It didn’t work for me at all.  It hung, stalled, and just generally ground to a halt no matter what I tried.  The only real option out there is Outlook for dealing with Exchange.

A pretty good solution here is Crossover – a program for Linux that emulates Windows.  These have been around for years and are getting to the point they actually work – mostly.  Under Crossover, you can install a variety of Windows programs, including believe it or not Office 2007.  It actually works.  Mostly.  More on that later.