h3h.net

How to Write Email

2010-04-26T00:00:00-07:00

Send email in plain text - not “formatted” or HTML. Your font is hideous and your gratuitous spacing is offensive. Don’t even get me started on background images. Convey your message with punctuation, letters, words and sentences. If something is *really important* you can use asterisks, like that.
Keep it short and to the point - a few sentences is almost always enough. There are many mantras about keeping your emails to two sentences or three sentences but the point is just that a shorter and simpler message is quicker and easier to understand for your reader. Always strive for the minimum.
Proofread every email at least once - even if it’s just a “quick” email to a coworker, correct spelling and grammar are not optional. Your communications with other people are your connections with the world. Leaving those communications riddled with spelling or grammar errors only serves to jeopardize your accuracy, dilute your meaning and destroy the perception of your personal quality.
Use a signature only with unknown companies - it’s entirely redundant and unnecessarily noisy when emailing people you already know, or personal contacts. They already know your name and email address, they don’t care about your company title, and they don’t need 8 phone numbers with which to contact you. Most mail clients let you configure your mail signature based on at least which account you’re sending from, if not by the person you’re sending to. Use it.
Use quoting only to clarify a conversation - not as a huge anchor at the bottom of every email. Many email clients unfortunately insert the quoted text from the message you are replying to and most people don’t care, so they type their message above the quote—called “top posting”—and add to the madness (sometimes it’s several messages long). If you’re replying to specific parts of a message, type your response under the quoted part you intend to reply to and remove the rest of the quote.

Sample Email Exchange

To: John Doe <john@example.com>
From: Jane Smith <jane@example.com>
Subject: Buy Movie Tickets

Hi John,

Don’t forget to buy the movie tickets before Thursday.

That reminds me—have you looked up the directions to the theater?

To: Jane Smith <jane@example.com>
From: John Doe <john@example.com>
Subject: Re: Buy Movie Tickets

On July 11, 2008, Jane Smith wrote:
> That reminds me—have you looked up the directions to the theater?

Yeah, I’ve got it all figured out.

What is Atheism?

2010-04-25T00:00:00-07:00

Atheism is the state either of being without theistic beliefs, or of actively disbelieving in the existence of deities.

Wikipedia: Atheism

Atheism is a subject that has long drawn the ire of those who don’t understand it. Many words have been spent and many lives lost due to intolerance and ignorance that should be considered barbaric by contemporary standards. Still though, ignorance about different beliefs (or lack thereof) among the majority groups in our society often provokes blind hatred and unmatched vitriol. How can we emerge from this quagmire of ignorance, hatred, and fear with a better appreciation for diversity and a better understanding of the facts?

What atheism isn’t

We can start by talking about what atheism isn’t. First, atheism is not the amalgam of all beliefs that you don’t agree with—it is a particular thing. Atheism is not satanism; it expresses a lack of belief in the very foundations that define religious and supernatural figures, even the evil ones. Atheism is also not science, though many students of science are likely to describe themselves as atheists due to their skepticism, strictly rational perspective on evidence, and understanding of a naturalistic worldview.

Who are atheists?

Given that atheists are “godless” in the most real sense, they must all be terrible people who commit atrocious acts and don’t care for others, right? Well, no.

Atheists are mothers, sisters, firemen, pilots, businessmen, students, and even politicians. Many atheists are self-described secular humanists, meaning that they care first and foremost about humans rather than any particular kind or group of humans. Regardless, it is a mistake to ascribe any particular moral views to atheists in general, other than to say that their views include a lack of belief in supernatural deities. Unlike the case with many theists, there is no single set of typical beliefs or morals among atheists.

What about anti-theism?

Anti-theists, though more publicized and lowly regarded by most, are generally those people who actively oppose and discourage both organized religion and any belief in deities or supernatural figures. As such, all anti-theists are certainly atheists, but not all atheists actively fight against religion as anti-theists do. Many atheists attempt to work together with religious people to accomplish changes that they see as beneficial. That said, anti-theists usually have well-defined reasons for their position and also can’t be responsibly grouped into any particular moral category. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an example of an atheist who doesn’t actively encourage the eradication of religions, whereas Richard Dawkins is an example of a prominent anti-theist who vociferously campaigns for the dismemberment and dissolution of all religions.

Why atheism?

Why then would someone be compelled to describe oneself as an atheist? Well, the short answer is that atheists simply don’t wish to live their lives through the window of organized religion. The justifications for atheism are sure to be as varied and interesting as the people people who hold them, but I’d like to look at a couple of the more common ones.

First, some atheists refrain from belief and involvement in organized religion because they are convinced that religion is a mental construction of humans, left over from the infancy of our species. As such, they may claim that religion is an artificial and irrational set of beliefs about the world and life which advocates for inconsistent, arbitrary, and sometimes dangerous thoughts and behavior. These atheists may appeal to our shared observational and rational capabilities for the discovery of truth, and duly regard ancient prescriptive texts as extraneous and irrelevant.

Second, there are those atheists who may not care at all about the historical truth or fiction of the Bible or similar religious texts. Instead, they may look at life as a series of people, things, and events that contain their own meaning without need for any supernatural or spiritual component. One might call these people “realists” insofar as their view of life hinges upon only what they can perceive directly, whether it’s a cool breeze, a broken heart, or the creeping onset of old age. These atheists tend to care less about what others believe and more about what others do, which may lead to confusion or indifference on their part when preached to by those who are religious.

There are, as I mentioned, many more justifications for atheism to be found, including from those who regard religion as actively pernicious and destructive, and from those who simply have a distaste for the structure of churches and religious groups. Regardless of the details in any specific justification, we can appreciate that there are many people who describe themselves as atheists after serious consideration and careful reasoning. They are not temporarily lost or being misled by others; they are self-aware and accept the responsibility for their decision. One’s worldview is a decision that each individual mind must make, whether consciously or subconsciously, in order to perceive and make sense of the surrounding world.

Conclusion

The message I mean to convey is one of appreciation for continued and expanded diversity of our society and culture, specifically concerning the inclusion of atheism. At no point in recorded history has there been one all-encompassing correct way to live life, nor will there be in the future. There have, at various times, been those who have regarded themselves as better than those who choose to live differently, and many atrocities have been committed under that pretense. But that outlook on life and the behavior it engenders are neither desirable nor necessary.

Regardless of how you choose to live your life and how correct you think your worldview is, it behooves us all to remember that we are individual people, distinct from one another, and that the greatest chances for widespread happiness and achievement come from tolerance, mutual respect, and education. Further, I claim that a personal morality which harbors exclusion and persecution is one that is objectively worse than those which foster acceptance and learning. Theists and atheists may understand and accept this alike, as a step toward not just tolerance, but mutual betterment.

On Being Informed

2010-01-02T00:00:00-08:00

Increasingly, the picture of our society as rendered in our media is illusionary and delusionary: disfigured, unreal, out of touch with reality, disconnected from the true context of our life. It is disfigured by celebrity, by celebrity worship, by gossip, by sensationalism, by denial of our societies’ real condition and a political and social discourse that we—the press, the media, the politician and the people—are turning into a sewer.

—Carl Bernstein

I don’t consume mainstream news, as a rule. I don’t visit any major newspaper websites, I don’t listen to news radio and I certainly don’t watch any news on TV. There are many people who would, based on this evidence, scold me for my lack of awareness, citing some obvious duty of mine to be informed about the world around me. No one likes an uninformed hermit and especially not one with strong opinions on matters of social importance. Those people would be mistaken, though, because I am rather well-informed, even if my methods of becoming so are not immediately obvious.

It’s popular to lament the dismal state of the mainstream media, but few people take the time to understand why there is such rampant inanity, alarmism, incompetence, and bias throughout popular media. That’s not to say that it’s particularly difficult to find or understand the reasons, but simply that most people don’t bother asking why. So why do I avoid direct consumption of mainstream media as a general rule? There’s too much noise.

In engineering there is the concept of a signal-to-noise ratio, which simply tells you how much good or true information (signal) you are receiving in relation to how much distracting or bad information is coming along with it (noise). When there is a high level of noise, it can become difficult to sort out the signal without large amounts of effort, potentially sacrificing accuracy in the process. The mainstream media are noisy because their incentives require it from them, not because they are particularly malicious or uninformed.

A news outlet’s primary motivation, like all other institutions, is to survive. In order to survive, they depend on people consuming their products as much as possible, which, in the news business, means every day. News outlets are thus in the business of disseminating intriguing information that will keep consumers coming back on a very frequent basis. This incentive toward intrigue does not always overlap with qualities like accuracy, impartiality, relevance, or even truth. It is, by nature and due to no nefarious motives, that news outlets deliver stories that are at [many] times inaccurate, biased, irrelevant and simply untrue. They do this for their own survival.

“But it’s not all bad!”, you protest. That’s true. It’s not all bad, and some news outlets are notable for higher signal-to-noise ratios, but no single source has all-quality content, and not all quality content can be found from a single source. In addition, different types of news are relevant for different people. I am not at all interested in so-called human interest stories, nor those about murders, celebrities, diets, or sports. I am interested in some tech industry news, stories about large natural disasters or worldwide strife, relevant health-related news, and original and thoughtful commentary on economics and political theory. Instead of combing through myriad newspapers and websites every day looking for only those stories that both interest me and seem to be of a high quality, I employ filters.

My filters are mostly of the human variety and I don’t pay any of them. There are many people who make it their work to link to and write commentary on news stories relevant to their interests, so I take advantage of their work to gather a sample of stories that range across a decent subset of my own interests. One of the most important practices to follow when relying on others’ commentary and selections, though, is a sober and realistic accounting for bias. Everyone has bias and it will be reflected in their work. Your understanding and views will thus be colored by your filters’ biases if you do not regularly account for them. That said, it is generally simple work to detect and account for the bias of an individual, whereas it is often much more difficult to do the same for an entire news organization.

Through many small adjustments to my filters over a long period of time, I have reached a point where most of the news I care about reaches me quickly and efficiently with little effort on my part. I do agree that it can serve one well to stay informed about relevant issues in society, but I think that each person has to decide which issues and stories are important to them and to make adjustments to their consumption accordingly. I do think, however, for the reasons mentioned above, that it is often wasteful and possibly foolish to use the mainstream media as one’s primary news source, and thoroughly irresponsible to use just a single source.

Thoughts on Quality

2009-06-06T00:00:00-07:00

I seek people who value quality as its own reward. I appreciate those who think that a job well done is not just “nice to have” but a mark of honesty, integrity and the producer’s self-worth. Behind every published word, every implemented design and every piece of running code, there is a body of knowledge, experience and decisions that imbues the final product with its quality and value. Those who don’t care about the quality of those published words and running code therefore necessarily don’t care about the value of the final product they are creating.

An investment in quality is certainly not the only way to create things—there are myriad examples of miserable products that are financially successful—but it’s the way I prefer to create things. A creation that is not only successful, but delights its users with its ease of use and practicality, is an accomplishment to be proud of. I am interested not only in providing inestimable value to people who are striving to produce their own goods and services, but also in improving the sum of happiness and clarity in the marketplace and thus the world at large.

Great products don’t just let people accomplish things more quickly, those products actually improve their users’ mood and disposition toward everything and everyone else those people interact with. Happiness and kindness are unmistakably contagious, and as such, should be cultivated and encouraged whenever possible. The person who uses half-broken and frustrating technology is far more likely to be agitated and discourteous to those he interacts with than the person who is able to achieve her ends with minimal interference and occasional delight. Every product that a person uses throughout his day—from his shampoo bottle to his shoelaces to his car stereo—affects his life in a very immediate and tangible way. The best products will allow most people to use them quickly and successfully before the product deftly disappears into the background. These are products I like to create.

One’s first instinct might be to only see consumer products in this light, as it isn’t quite as clear how the quality of, say, a piece of code would affect a software product’s end users. The difference here is simple: the users of the code aren’t the end users of the product; they are the programmers who have to work with the code every day. The happiness of the programmers is directly affected by the quality of the code, even if the frustration is sometimes latent and chronic rather than immediately obvious. Just as with a poorly designed shampoo bottle or a computer application that intermittently crashes, poorly written code, even if “it works just fine” for the end users, will make life worse for the programmers who have to maintain it.

I do my best to make my small corner of the world that much better by keeping my standards high. I refuse to write or accept sloppy code just as I refuse to punish the users of my products with a poor experience. I am most interested in meeting and talking with other people who share my passion for quality. I’d like to better understand both the varied backgrounds of people who care about quality and new and better methods for raising the bar and delivering even better products.

Consume Less, Learn More, Create Most

2009-03-19T00:00:00-07:00

when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

_why the lucky stiff

I won’t deny that Battlestar Galactica and House give me significant pleasure. Surely I would miss them if I stopped watching, but I think a line can be drawn in one’s consumption habits between the most compelling content and the fog of mediocrity. For one, I try not to watch any other TV shows. I am always reading one book, either fiction or non-fiction, and the rest of all the content I consume is filtered based on its potential educational value. In other words, I keep the list pruned by routinely asking myself: “Is this teaching me anything useful?”

I stopped reading TechCrunch and about 100 other feeds in favor of a few high-quality feeds that end up delivering all of the content that’s important to me. All of those unsubscribed feeds delivered interesting content, but none of them were helping me accomplish or learn anything new and useful. I don’t watch the news, read advice columns, play games or use FriendFeed. I do spend a lot of time reading about emerging technologies, economics and web development, in addition to writing regularly. I’m still nowhere near as productive as I would like to be, but I’ve cut back my consumption diet to the point where I actually run out of things to read (save for my books) on a daily basis.

There is an incredible amount of value in a clean slate and an empty inbox every day. Instead of burning up hours on an endless stream of interesting (but ultimately useless) content, I am faced with a blank page and a free block of time to write, code, design, create and explore on a much more frequent basis. I no longer have to set time aside to create things—instead, the blocks of time come to me. Instead of fighting off a fire hose of incoming information and all of life’s offline distractions, I only have to contend with the latter to avoid losing my time to meaningless and unproductive activities.

This method certainly isn’t for everyone, but I have a feeling that most people who spend time on the web could benefit from a drastic reduction in consumption, if only to grease the wheels of creativity and knowledge. I only hope that this piece will fall into the interesting and useful category, so as not to be terribly ironic.

How to Get an Awesome Job

2008-12-23T00:00:00-08:00

A lot of people want to get an awesome job, but most of the advice out there is geared toward joining corporate bureaucracies and saving some repressed human resources manager from a frightful view of reality. Résumé templates, guidance counselors and the corporate ladder have conspired to make your career as boring and reproducible as possible. There is something you can do, however: get a new awesome job.

How might one go about that, you ask?

Be yourself. The single most important component of your career search is you and your personality. You will never be thoroughly happy with a job that doesn’t fit your personality, so the best way to ensure that you find a fit is to never be fake. No “Dear Sir/Madam”, no “I greatly appreciate your time”, no nonsense. Be polite, but be honest, direct and confident.
Know what you want. – It’s crucial to decide what you want to pursue and stick with it, at least for a single round of job applications. A candidate who is direct and unambiguous is much more likely to get a quick response than one who is amorphous and uninspiring. Your mission when applying for a job is to be sure of what you want to do, for how much, for how long, and be memorable enough to achieve it.
Make a clean, strong résumé. – You have less than 30 seconds to make an impression with your résumé. If you’re applying for a chemical engineering job, don’t include your position as Manager of Taco Bell on your résumé. Your résumé is your chance to sell yourself for the position you’re applying for, so it should reflect you in the best possible light for that specific position. Don’t lie, but omit things that are irrelevant. Keep it short (one page), keep it clean and make sure only the most important pieces of information remain.
Know your mark. – Research the company and its products. If the products or services are publicly available, try them out and write up a quick critique. You don’t have to impress the company with your knowledge of their business, but you do need to build up enough mental ammunition to give you a fighting chance in any phone or on-site interviews. Further than that, you need to find out if this is really the type of place that you could be happy. Be vigilant about the details of your correspondences and conversations with the people who work there. Are they happy? Stressed? Candid? Are they your kind of people?
Ask hard questions. – When you do get a chance to speak with an interviewer and they ask you if you have any questions, make sure you have at least one good one ready. You’re not trying to confuse or impress the interviewer; your goal is to dive deeper into the company than you’ve previously been able. Ask about their revenue stream, their typical process for handling product crises or their adherence to their company vision. The question should give the interviewer pause, but they should feel obligated to respond frankly. Don’t ask about benefits or vacation—those just make you sound needy and are always incidental and up for negotiation at a later date. Instead, focus on the internal parts of the company that are most crucial to its long-term sustainability as an awesome employer. They are not doing you a favor by interviewing you, so behave as if they should actually want to hire you for your brilliance.

The gist of this seems like something that ought to be mostly common sense: be yourself, be good, be direct; but most people searching for a job are still busy taking résumé templating courses and filling out endless job applications for mindless corporations instead of finding the places that are actually worth working for. There are always jobs out there worth having—and don’t even think about protesting with an “in this economy…” cop-out; it just takes a bit of work to find them and show them your obvious genius.

Why I’m a Libertarian

2008-12-10T00:00:00-08:00

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the law,” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

—Thomas Jefferson

I am a libertarian for two simple reasons with far-reaching consequences. First, capitalism—manifested as competition in a free market economy—is the most powerful system ever devised by humans, and provides the best system for fostering and sustaining widespread success. Second, I maintain that humans have a fundamental right to individual freedom without interfering in the freedom of others. Beyond these two pillars, there is little more to libertarianism than ubiquitous application of reason and a healthy attitude of skepticism.

As for capitalism, it has facilitated more advances for our species in the past three hundred years than were possible in the previous fifty thousand. Never before has a system so pervasive been so closely aligned with natural motives of humans and at the same time enabled us to so successfully harness its incredible output. Private enterprise and the free market have democratized the economics of living among others—any participant in the market can compete directly with others based purely on the value of products or services provided, without prejudice or precondition.

This step forward to a fair, decentralized and value-based economy has been of immeasurable importance in the advancement of our species. Free markets are fair because there are no immovable castes or bequeathals of “divine” power, nor are any individual parties restricted from or coerced into choosing one transaction over another. Their decentralized nature gives great flexibility and resilience, allowing new markets to emerge, valueless ones to die and misjudged ones to rebound. They will not fail simply due to a change in regime or corruption from a single bureaucracy, nor will they lend favor to the most popular despot or suppress the least popular cult. There is no one in charge; instead only goods, services, transactions and value.

Obviously our current economic systems fall short of the ideal free market, but we retain enough of the benefit to spur further progress and growth, however clumsy our path might be. Capitalism as an unbiased economic system is here to stay. Many different individual nations or subsystems may rise and fall, but the immense power and success within the principles of capitalism are too compelling to ignore. Furthermore, successful decentralized systems will always be more resilient, more productive and of a higher overall quality than their centralized counterparts, especially over great time and change. This applies equally well to economic and social systems, as is amply illustrated in the libertarian’s view of individual freedom.

The libertarian economic position is also inextricably linked with its social tolerance. Socially, libertarians are supportive of individual rights, free social interactions and unhindered exchanges of value. Plainly: people should be free to live and manage their own lives. Humans, as individual entities in space, possess no inherent value greater than that of other humans. To argue otherwise is to posit that certain organisms of our species necessarily provide inferior total value to the universe. That is, quite simply, an unsupportable claim. It is true that some people will provide more value in various areas toward the advancement of our species, but to claim that any specific person will provide less value overall is baseless and arbitrary, not to mention defeatist—unequal treatment inevitably leads to disadvantaged actors.

Traditional systems of power and class are derived from the evolutionary path that brought our species to this point in history. But now that we live in an era where contributions to the species can be made at many levels, it is simply false to assume that we can prejudge the value of a life. The ethos of a culture is greatly affected by the freedom of its people, and the individual contributions made in a free society can have far-reaching effects beyond their face value. In general, progress will be more consistent and rapid in a culture that supports individual rights.

The single most prominent objection to absolute individual rights is the one based on some single system of morality or another. One person believes that wearing red is worthy of a death sentence and others rather fancy the color. There is simply no room for coercion and intolerance in a free society because no one person is correct about everything. As wonderful as it is to think that you personally understand the one true universal morality that will save the human species, you are wrong. Instead, there is room only for baseline moralities that respect the freedoms of others and an attitude of tolerance for everything else that doesn’t infringe on another’s fundamental rights.

These consequences certainly are far-reaching, but what does libertarianism not entail? Among many ideas not supported by libertarianism are: entitlement (“someone else should work to provide for my care”), static policy (“everything should stay the same”), centralized political power (“that guy will fix everything so I don’t have to worry about it”) and innovation by fiat (“create new technologies because I say so, regardless of the idea’s value”). Libertarians rely instead on simple trusted principles that allow the market to indicate when a certain idea has value and when an individual’s actions violate another’s rights. While everyone else bickers about how best to spend your hard-earned money, we maintain that you should be in control of your own money, your own life and your own success.

Economy of Software Maintenance

2008-12-05T00:00:00-08:00

Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.

—Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., “The Mythical Man-Month”

In the old model, large companies built large pieces of software and had to support nearly every user and their myriad edge cases and behaviors. This meant fixing a huge amount of bugs, especially at the corner cases of the software because of the sheer volume of users. This model didn’t adequately factor in the ongoing software maintenance costs associated directly with the number of bugs found by the users, contrasted with the organizational costs and loss of inertia from perpetual maintenance.

In the new model, companies and pieces of software are smaller and more numerous. The competition between products and companies means that software consumers have a choice and market economics have a chance to provide some great benefits. Notably, if one company’s software is buggy in an edge case, they need not worry about fixing the bug unless it would earn them more income than the cost it would take to fix; the user can simply purchase a different piece of software. Small companies can choose what they fix and who their customers are, enabling them to stay small, innovate faster, compete better and optimize for growth or profit.

A great deal of this ability also stems from the generally increased state of data interoperability and increased competition at the different levels of software implementation. Operating systems are still relatively few in number, but drivers, utilities, word processors, graphics applications and so forth are intensely numerous. Add to that the arrival of the Internet as a platform and you have the most thriving and successful software ecosystem in history.

Quickly fading are the days when a monolithic company worked tirelessly to fix every reported bug, only to end up with a mediocre product constantly teetering on the edge of its own implosion. And it can’t change fast enough.

The East Bay

2008-08-21T00:00:00-07:00

The East Bay is the area on the east side of the San Francisco Bay. The general feeling of the East Bay is very mixed, but overall relaxed. A lot of the bustle of San Francisco is lost across the bridge and there is some stale hippie culture lingering in Berkeley that probably makes its residents more apt to recycle. The mornings are gloomy and overcast, nearly without exception, but most non-winter afternoons clear up and blanket us with warm sunshine. Living right next to the bay also means that it’s often windy—about half of all evenings the wind is howling around here. In the summer there have been a couple warm days that made leaving the non-air conditioned apartment a good idea, a few gorgeous days around 75°F, but mostly mediocre days on which a sweatshirt is non-optional.

There is quite a bit of good food around Berkeley, but most of it comes with a price. I’m not saying it’s expensive, but most of the deliciousness will be found at sit-down restaurants that will drain you to the tune of $30 for a couple. That may be par for the course (no pun intended—ouch) at most suburban eateries, but I guess I was spoiled by the abundance of awesomely cheap food in San Diego that allowed me to survive on less than $10 a day for the better part of seven years. That said, you could probably eat that cheaply up here, though you might end up with an obnoxious illness or a stab wound or two.

The best part of this area, for me, is the variety of neighborhoods and neat places. Kensington is one of my favorite niches of the world, even though I’ve never exited the vehicle while coasting through its maze of hilly roads. Tilden Regional Park is a glorious series of hidden treasures on top of the Berkeley Hills, where nice people go to have a nice time amid a sunny (on good days) and verdant festival of beauty. It should be no surprise that the hippies took a stand next to the trees of Berkeley—they are wonderful. Getting lost in the hills surrounding this area has become a treasured pastime of late, letting us glide into new and interesting environments with fresh eyes and no compass. I thoroughly enjoy the leisure and beauty in the hills.

Down on the flats, however, you can expect Berkeley and Oakland to be dirty, run down and generally unpleasant. Some areas, like Telegraph Ave., have character, but most are just sad. We’ve found redeeming qualities of Berkeley, Emeryville and communities to the north, but Oakland’s grime has permeated our most hardy judgmental reserves. Needless to say, we linger north of the 24, though we sometimes also venture to the east and west.

East of Berkeley, in the Diablo Valley, Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill provide what have become the customary accoutrements of suburbia: large, clean grocery stores; malls aplenty; angsty high-schoolers roving in droves; near-every chain restaurant that exists within a few gallons’ drive; and more SUVs than would be proper in any context at any time, period. That said, suburban life brings with it many appreciable things. I like safe neighborhoods and the convenience of fully stocked gourmet grocers, but the sum total falls somewhere short of gleeful and completely outside the bounds of interesting. So we moved over the hills and onto the bay, increasing dramatically both our satisfaction with living and our appreciation for the expense to be found with (semi-)urban dwelling.

The grocery stores could be closer (and cleaner), the armed guards at Best Buy are only mildly unsettling and the price of gas is higher, but I don’t have to drive to work. My $1.50 daily travel costs are an all-time personal best and my commute is pleasant and short. We’re less than ten minutes from “The City” without traffic and within two minutes of a major interstate that whisks us away from the gloom when the desire for real warmth overcomes us. Overall, not half bad.

Forming Software Teams

2008-05-25T00:00:00-07:00

Great software development is a creative discipline that requires skillful individuals, effective organization and undying passion from all who are involved. There are many theories about developer productivity, engineering management and company organization, but few that make an honest attempt to reconcile all of these factors and present an approach that both builds from proven methods and defines limits on its applicability. All theories have limits of applicability and in this case the limits will surround small creative companies with a small number of products.

Most creative companies start with two to three individuals banding together to provide a product or service. From there, if the company is successful, the existing team should stretch itself until it becomes infeasible, then hire one more person to fill the most painful gap. These first few hires are crucial because both the productivity of the company and the team’s personality depend on their output. The company must make a concerted effort to hire people who are brilliant, passionate and compatible with the established personality of the team. The goal should be to unify and extend a single personality or culture across all team members; a disjointed culture is the first obstacle to greatness. This process of pain-based hiring can be successively repeated until the first inflection point in company organization is reached: forming teams.

Forming teams centered around specific disciplines becomes important when the communication and coordination among the current set of people gets unwieldy. It is often hard to tell when this point has been reached from inside the company, but it almost always happens at the point when daily interaction is required between eight to ten people. Depending on the products or services the company offers, the natural team boundaries in a software organization will be something close to: front-end development, back-end development, design, product development, marketing and business development. Each team will have to form at its own pace, but the most crucial step is the initial move from the amorphous blob of people to separate groups, each with separate concerns.

The structure of each individual team is also important and there are many established models to choose from. In a small creative organization, the best results will come from teams that have a solid direction and strong leadership, but maintain the culture and closeness found among equals. Instead of installing a manager for each team or expecting all team members to have equal leadership, a hybrid approach will prove more successful. Embracing the concept of team leads—team members who still work directly with their teammates, but use about twenty percent of their time to coordinate efforts and tend to the performance and concerns of the team—will pay off immensely in the long-term. These team leads stay close to both the work and the people by spending most of their time accomplishing the same tasks as others, but also embody the passion and leadership needed in a small team to maintain direction and accountability to the company as a whole.

These distinct teams with separate concerns should create greater focus and lead to more individual productivity, but because there is no regular communication at the project level between all people, a need will eventually arise for meta-level coordination and communication. Project managers are those who shepherd a project from inception to creation, launch and maintenance. They work directly with all teams in the company to ensure that things are done well and on time. Most of the time the project manager will be dealing individually with team leads and workers on specific projects, coordinating and communicating to ensure dependencies are met and dates are set for different phases of the project. When a company is just forming teams, a single stellar project manager should be able to manage all projects in the company for a while, leaving the hire of more project managers for much later in the company’s life.

With team leads, a project manager and a steady flow of projects, an infant startup can transform into a coordinated and productive small company with a plan for controlled future expansion. The limits of this approach revolve around the same communication bottleneck that requires the first split into teams: communication between eight to ten people. In the case of an individual team, there will always be inter-team coordination that adds to the number of people, so the ideal maximum team size with a team lead ends up being five or six. Extrapolating this limit to all teams in a small creative company, plus meta-level workers, the maximum limit of applicability for the whole theory comes in at about forty people. Beyond this limit there are other theories for growth and maintainability, but for small companies this theory will prove to be one of the most efficient and sustainable ways to run a productive software development operation.

Through the publication of the methods and practices comprising this theory I aim to establish its viability and tested success for those interested in creating or helping a software development business. The basic structure and limits described so far are only small parts of the larger, detailed version of this theory which will be expanded upon in future articles. The intricacies to be described will take into account the people and challenges in today’s business world, rather than relying solely on any past model. The hope is that with a relevant and proven theory in hand, creating and growing a business should become easier and thus more prevalent, for the benefit of all who are involved.