Frank's mom works here!

Its gotten even crazier. So we have this just Frank guy on the board. Basically his role is to advise on what the "kids" want from our platforms. So far its been a stream of Facebook this, MySpace that, FourSqaure the other. Anybody from TechCrunch could have come up with that list!

So it turns out that Frank's mom just started working here. Basically she got the role of looking after all the Apps teams. I'm sure the managers must have been pissed, since they must have been sizing up that position for themselves! Its where all the fame and glory is. Nobody, especially Henry cares about the Architecture team or Platform teams, we are the cost of doing business in Henry's mind, or so that's how it appears to me. Henry gets off on the Applications, and Frank's mom now runs all of the Applications teams.

I was confused that the Mobile and Popularity teams did not get folded in as well. That might have been some of the slamming of doors that went on last week in Henry's office. Poor Henry, it must suck being him. One week its Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir and then the next its a good chunk of the rest of the Engineering Directors. They are such a bunch of pussies.

I think it all got worked out in the end. Henry is great at the balancing act of keeping everybody happy and moving the business forward to the success we all deserve.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 8 (same as last week)
Shots : 10 (same as last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

The land that time forgot!

I love our Ops team, they sure know how to get things done and most of all preserve cash. During the first bubble burst they were buying and selling hardware on uBid for profit for the company, but I hear these days they are ensuring that we stay on biblically old products. Take for instance our Databases. 11g. Nope far, far too modern. 10g anybody, 9i or even 8i. Nope. We run 7.3.4 because, well I don't really know why. Apparently DJ is super friendly with the Sales Rep and he gets great dinners in return for us running on something that pre-dates the internet. There is some sort of uplift on the license for running something that old!

Then our O/S. Well RedHat 5, the defacto choice for a web company, we don't have that either. CentOs. Too good for us. We have some hand built Redhat 3 from the sources no less, because we are that cool.

Then our storage. WooHoo. Sun was way too expensive. EMC, super safe choice and they have a great executive incentive package, otherwise know as DJ gets a few rounds of gold at Pebble Beach. So we brought Kodak , Fuji or some other camera makers dusted off disks. They had a special that week for buy one get one free and a weekend in Vegas thrown in.

It gets better. Our servers. Dell would be nice. SuperMicro cool, Rackable even better. We have HP! Who on this Earth deploys HP? Oh I forgot, they have an incredible package that includes strippers at the Gold Club in San Francisco.

Awesome. Its not what you buy, its what the sales rep is willing to "throw in" that counts.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 8 (down 2 from last week)
Shots : 10 (same as last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

QA has vanished!

Well, saying that all of QA were marched away Nazi style, taken to a field, shot and then their bodies placed in a deep hole and then covered up would not be a real reflection of what went down. That would not have captured the whole Tony Soprano "whacking" thing, in that Italian mobster "Iz far da family".

The reality is that the layoffs are brutal. QA lost 70% of their staff. And that's not just my team that across the whole company. The VP was taken out (it took some days to find him) and all the teams folded back under Engineering. The justification seems to be that they had completed all their automation and so were excess baggage, given the economic downturn were a drag on our cash position Henry said.

Now a bunch, if not all of them, were on Visas so they are totally f**ked. Sun, Cisco and every other man and his dog on Techcrunch are slimming down right now. A few old timers said it would be great, the commute times of the 101 would come down and life will be easier.

I'm not sure that computes. If we don't have QA and we are still adding features how on earth will be maintain our exemplary customer satisfaction record? We are going to be that moth heading towards the bug zapper without QA!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 10 (same as last week)
Shots : 10 (down 6 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 187 lbs

Oh shit! We are dead!

OMG we are dead! It was a total Tarantino movie here. Men in suits, blood all over the walls and floors, Uma Thurman kicking butt. I was head down working my own butt off. I've seen all the Directors, VPs and assorted "gods" locked in meetings all week. Sure, they must be planning the next years roadmap for the platform and applications was my thought.

Morning started off great, Geek Babe was looking hot in a short black skirt and pumps. The build was not broken. Three lattes later I was feeling fine, I'd been drinking with friends in the city and had one to many Cosmo's the night before.

Bam! I start seeing people being pulled off their desks and marched one by one towards the stairs. They would come back 20 minutes later with a green Hank folder, like the one I got when I came for interview. Sweet I thought, more options!

Then I saw them take a box and start to pack. A guy over in the site operations team was shouting and swearing and causing a huge ruckus. Then I see Berkeley-kind-of-dude-who's-done-it-all come back. He is throwing things around, Lucy from HR looks kind of scared so I step in. Wow that guy packs a punch, this black eye will take weeks to go.

So what the hell happened? We had a team meeting afterward, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir said that the "coast is clear" and that "this is it". Phew.

Henry explained it all in the company meeting on Friday. Basically its part two of "Nuclear Winter". I did not get the reference, but something to do with when the "dot com bubble burst". I was not even in college then, so like its some sort of ancient history lesson or something. Whatever.

Bottom line is that Henry is here. He's staying. He thinks the future is so bright it scares him. But to make that future happen we need to let go of the weakest to make us stronger. He wanted it to happen before thanksgiving, basically anybody who has left now has the opportunity to change the world in the same way that Henry is doing right now, they just need to do it elsewhere. I had not thought of it like that, but its pretty cool. Never figured Henry for such a humanitarian.

So we lost some people, you know, many had been taking it easy, taking lunch breaks, not working through the night or reading blogs like Tech Crunch thinking they all of a sudden become Web 2.0 savvy by just reading a blog! Everybody knows that you have to live it to really know it.

As Henry said many times, we need to "mourn our fallen comrades" (I thought we was a Republican), but we need to re-focus on the American City Bank launch coming up at the start of the year.

The "mourn of fallen comrades" was really helped by the stock option letter that I got. Sweet, I can share more in Hank's future success and dominance! We will be the next big internet story, despite the rift.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 10 (up 4 from last week)
Shots : 16 (up 12 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 186 lbs

Big shouting match!

Not sure what the hell is going on. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir and Constantine have been in meeting rooms all week. Lots of shouting, slamming doors, crying, going to Henry to "talk it out". Its got me and the rest of his team "seriously freaked out". I mean he is our blood, he is our glue, without him life could not possibly exist.

I think Euro-fool senses blood. He poached one of the team last week as part of the "Large Enterprise" product work. That seems to be sucking the life out of just about every team, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir has stood up and said that its all bogus at the last company meting . Henry got super angry and apparently sacked him on the spot. Or well, the story says that he gave Constantine the authority to sack him and then kyboshed his actual sacking. Weird.

I've got my head down working on the shopping basket. Its looking pretty sweet. Even Geek-Babe came over to my desk for a demo last week. I don't think she noticed the sweating and my flustered nature, I think I got away with it.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 6 (up 1 from last week)
Shots : 6 (up 2 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 186 lbs

Dinners are gone!

Disaster. At the company meeting this week Henry said that we needed to "preserve cash". Its not clear to him what is going to happen in the financial meltdown that appears to be looming.

He left it at that. Later in the week, Javier who runs finance sends an email around, no more dinners. Pass me a hail-mary! How the hell I am supposed to do that debugging marathons on an empty stomach? How crazy is that!

I know that a bunch of those South Bay types basically come in late, have a long lunch, go for coffee, stay for dinner and then leave. I get that. Why pay a bunch of cash for people who are lazy? I thought that was what management were paid to do, find the weakest links and dispose of them. So you take the strongest players, like me, and then starve them. How does that help us be the next big internet story?

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 (same as last week)
Shots : 4 (down 2 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 186 lbs

Henry is sick!

OMG. Henry is really sick. We had a company meeting postponed from before Labour Day because Henry was sick and this week he finally made it in to talk to us. I was expecting a deep dive on his meetings in New York and Charlotte, NC. He had been super sick for weeks, but as always put the company first and made sure he attended all his meetings (thank god for Henry).

Instead he told us all about how his assistant got a doctor to do a house call. Then he just talked about some super hot leggy brunette (the doctor), how he got her number and has been on a date with and that she is a total babe. How her ex used to play drums in some 80's hair band that I never heard of (Dokken, Motley Crue or something). I'm jealous, she sounded very hot.

So another meeting without a lot of details. I'm sure its building up to something *big* in the next couple of weeks. I'm sure its all going to be great news for the next big internet story.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 (up 1 from last week)
Shots : 6 (up 2 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x pizza)
Weight : 186 lbs

Apple's are cool, Apple's for management is bogus!

So Apple makes some sexy product, no doubt. The iPod was cool, despite being a re-package of what a zillion other companies have done. Yes, it needed that Newton inspired magic that only Apple can provide, but its still a hard disk and it could only play music. So they took it to the next level, went solid state and put in a phone, and then allowed a select few to develop application for it. Ok, so its cool.

Now the laptops? Ultra, mega cool. They are all very aluminum and cool. I have a IBM Thinkpad, which is black and very uncool. I think its a Leveno so even uncooler, its not even an American product, designed and made by Americans!

So Iron-Mike got me at the interview by saying essentially "Apple for everyone". Wow, I thought what an amazing and insightful company, putting its engineers first and not only giving them a cool laptop but BSD instead of Linux and Windows. How forward thinking. How progressive.

First I wanted to fit and and show everybody my true value to the organization. I think I'm there. So last week I ask Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir whether I could order an Apple. He turned around and said, and I'm quoting directly "Go f*king buy one yourself, only management get Apple's here". Thanks I thought, thanks a bunch. Then I scanned around me.

Of course Constantine has one, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir obviously, but also Lonely-James, Stacy and Euro-Fool‚ he even has a MacBook Air, what a f*king pointless device that it, the poseur! And what do they use them for? Well Constantine does write code, the others just do email, IM, update bugs and PowerPoint, but mostly surf tech blogs and job sites. What a waste!

You know, I'm happy with my Leveno and I'm going to show them that.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 4 (down 4 from last week)
Shots : 4 (down 4 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x pizza)
Weight : 185 lbs

PMO have vanished!

Its true. I did not pick up on the vibe. Its was all a bit "I know What You Did Last Summer". First Tori, one of Henry's super,super lieutenants just disappeared. It turns out, and the story was very confusing for a while, that she decided to leave her partner, move out to Yuma, AZ and live with Henry. See I got you. Not our Henry, but one of the board members that is also called Henry.

There was this totally wild story that went around that you had to be called Henry to get on the board, until Henry then appointed some kid (literally) from Gunn High School in Palo Alto to the board by the name of Frank and not our Euro-fool Frank!

Back to PMO. So Tori disappears. Then I noticed that my stand ups became bearable. SCRUM is cool, you have "cows" and "farmers". Basically the cow is committed to delivering the beef jerky and the farmer makes all the money. Generally the engineers and product managers are "cows" and PMO are the "farmers". They get to say "told you so" when there plans all get f**ked up because, well the unexpected happens. Its not like we are building the new bay bridge and its all a totally known science. I'm totally jealous of those types of engineers, everything always seems to go to plan for them.

Our stand ups are characterized by the PMO types asking the same question over and over again. I swear, you could record them and it would be word for word every friggin' day. And then there were none. They just vanished like it had all been a bad dream. Click your heals and return to Kansas. All very cool.

I'm sure that Constantine is working on some new engineering lead process. That's going to be cool, lets the engineers run the engineering process. Totally makes sense.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 8 (up 2 from last week)
Shots : 8 (up 2 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x pizza)
Weight : 184 lbs

Spring is totally evil and must be killed!

Ok, Ok. The title of this weeks post is perhaps overkill. But boy, Spring is totally bogus.

Now you recall that I said Spring was like an Aston Martin, with Spring the Aston knew me, what I liked and ensured that my model girlfriend could not drive. Well it turns out that in fact Spring is some "pansy" scheme.

This is what happens. You take a big messenger bag full of money to the Aston Martin dealer on Van Ness. You hand over the cash and drive home with a huge smile on your face and errr... well you know what else! You park the car in the garage of your cool SOMA or NOHO loft.

Next morning you wake early, you intend to pick up your model girlfriend and then drive down the coast for some lunch at the Moss Beach Distillery. You leave your lovely loft and wake up the the Aston after its snuggly warm sleep in the garage. You make the first stop at your girlfriends condo. You get back in the car, it feels different. You are not sure, perhaps slightly down on power, the turn in a little less sharp. You drive a little further and stop for gas. After jumping back in the car is totally wrong, it has the get up and go of a Prius and some of the interior feels cheap and from a Ford parts bin.

This is Spring. In fact, Spring is worse than that. Instead of opening up the hood to check on the engine with the full complement of tools that you are used to, with Spring you are left with your favorite editor (mine is emacs) and XML to debug the ever changing system.

It was designed by a narcosist, implemented after one too many for the road and used by people who would never normally be left with a sharp instrument within 100ft of them.

I'm not a fan anymore.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 6 (up 6 from last week)
Shots : 6 (same as last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x pizza)
Weight : 182 lbs

Sacre bleu, Euro-Fool is bogus!

Another week, another tech-sess. This week, Constantine's new "golden" boy presented. I am starting to understand why my boss, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir really hates this guy. Basically he spent 90 minutes talking about dynamic and scriptable systems, extracting configuration into the hands of the Ops teams and Support etc.

Afterwards, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir almost blew another fuse. He was ranting and raving about how we have been doing that for years, how we already learnt to scale this better than YahBay (where I think Euro-Fool came from) and why he should be running the platform team as well. I saw him later that day, tears running down his face, in a conference room with Constantine. I guess he was really showing his passion for the company and the mission. Just hope that Constantine was listening, we can afford to loose him!

Also, I was pulled into Can-I-Have-A-Latter-Sirs inner circle this week. He's pulled together a crack team and wants me to join. They are re-writing the build system to use something called "Raven". Its something really cool for the creator of "Git" that will blow away anything that Euro-Fool and the Platform team can do!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : zero bottles (same as last week)
Shots : 6 (6 up from week)
Dinner : 3 nights (3 x pizza)
Weight : 181 lbs

No iPhone!

Bad news at the company meeting. Henry gave an update on the product roadmap meetings. Looks like American City Bank have decided that they don't need an iPhone application but they do want support for Windows ME. Stacy broke the news at the company meeting, you could hear the tears in his voice. Henry kind of pushed him off the stage (with a "sit the f*k down") and quickly changed the subject and then went on to talk at great length about "the scenario".

It goes something like this

• Somebody just like you has a super cool credit card (yes, much better than Platinum)
• You buy some stock, lets say in Washington Mutual
• The analytic component in the platform then whirs it cogs and come us with a suggestion "go take a train to Seattle"
• The train is auto-booked for you, but you decide to "opt in" to the train arrival notices
• As your train arrives in Seattle, a Fax is sent (your preference on the mechanism, fax now SMS later next year) to the local Taxi company
• The Taxi is dispatched and picks you up
• The driver already knows that you have a table booked Spearmint Rhino at 8.45pm, so takes you directly there, no questions asked
  

Now that would be super cool! What Henry is doing is a Vulcan Mind Melt on his how Hank Commerce makes money with this. Its not in the transactions but its the data as he explained to the Asian guy in glasses. He then had to explain it all again to that Indian guy who always falls asleep in company meetings.

How cool is that!

Another first. It was a "dry" week.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : zero (down 2 from last week)
Shots : zero (same as last week)
Dinner : 3 nights (3 x pizza)
Weight : 180 lbs

Wow, we buy some company I've never hear of!

Henry was at his best at the company meeting this week. He has so totally nailed the strategy on the platform and making the whole web experience personal again through the digital butler. But wow, buying a pet transport company, how totally cool is that! Lets face it, we all have pets right. Ok, a bunch of us have pets.

The coolest people are going to research which pets exactly suits their lifestyle, budget and whether it clashes with the decor of say their loft. I mean Google is just setup for that. We want the coolest people on the web to use our product. We buy a pet transportation company, apparently they have cornered the market in pet deliveries on the Eastern seaboard (according to Henry). Cool people after doing their research will use us to ship them their pet through our destination site.

We are so totally on a rip. And, I went to the gym twice and lost some weight! Not sure that the step aerobics was my thing, but Geek Babe took me along.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 2 bottles (down 2 from last week)
Shots : zero (down 2 from last week)
Dinner : 3 nights (3 x pizza)
Weight : 180 lbs

Spring is cool!

Its way cool that I'm in an environment with super techies like me. Spent the week learning and using Spring for Dependency Injection. Its so cool I think it could total deal with the whole global warming thing.

If you are not technical, then let me explain. Basically it does this. Say you have a car, lets say its a cool car like an Aston Martin. Carrying you keys around is a pain, it ruins the line and cut of your Giorgio Armani suite or Diesel jeans. What you really want is this. As you get close to the car, the door unlocks and opens and then as you sit down the car starts itself. The car has auto-magically inserted the key since its a dependency for the thing to work correctly for you.

Now lets say you had a super tall model like girlfriend. You want her to open the car, operate the stereo and check out her make-up in the mirror. You are never going to let her drive. So her key is auto-magically inserted but has a different set of dependencies. She can get in but not drive. If some random person shows up at your Aston Martin it locks the doors and kicks the James Bond machine guns into life.

That's the magic of Spring. In my case I get the cool car and super model like girlfriend. The reality is that its a bunch of XML files. My boss, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir showed me around and I think I now have the hang of it.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 4 bottles (down 2 from last week)
Shots : 2 x Bourbon Shots (same as last week)
Dinner : 3 nights (2 x Indian, 1 x Thai)
Weight : 182 lbs

Popularity contest!

Lonely-James, he heads up a team that I don't really get. I go to see a lot of bands and always, always get a t-shirt or something else to remember the night. So I'm a total sucker for merchandising.

So Lonely-James does the tech-sess this week and its all about "Merchandising" and "Popularity". I mean the guys is pretty weird to begin with, always has lunch by himself and I never see him hang out with his staff like Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir does (my boss rocks). But I don't get it. From what I can work out, they gather a bunch of analytics (sort of a poor mans Google) and then basically decide through some complex algorithm (aka a case statement) that you get either a), b) or c) pop-up displayed to buy something else. Sounds cool, but why do you need 12 people to build that?

Then he talked about "Popularity" and how you get your users to choose which is best. I mean that bogus right, just because Henry choses to buy Feline Pine Scoop Kitty Litter in no way would swing my vote for Safeways store brand even if I was given the choice. I'm sure at YahBay it made total sense (apparently he used to hang out with DJ who runs Ops), but for Hank? Sure I have just brought stock in GM through our Stock App (full disclosure, I'm a shareholder) and then get a recommendation to buy Toyota or Feline Pine Scoop Kitty Litter. No way! Bogus!

Worked out twice with Geek Babe, weight at least stayed the same. Skipping on free dinner sucks. I like, have to go to Safeway to buy stuff, that sucks.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 6 bottles (same as last week)
Shots : 2 x Bourbon Shots (same as last week)
Dinner : 3 nights (3 x Pizza)
Weight : 182 lbs

Henry drives a Mercedes G Wagon!

Blew my mind. You know, I have not been here that long but I have heard Henry speak quite a few times. The markets have been a bit weird recently despite all the interest in Facebook and Twitter. But Henry has been giving a long series of Ayn Rand inspired economic lessons and a whole bunch of why America is so great. I love that fact he loves our countries, but boy, if you cut him he would bleed Republic (guard) Red.

After this weeks company meeting we were chatting, I think he even knows my name now. But total shock. I thought we would be driving something with class, to reflect his stature in the industry and the valley. Perhaps something like a Land Rover or even a BMW.

How wrong I was, he drives a blinged up Mercedes G Wagon. He might as well be selling crack out of the back in the Mission, which I'm sure most of our competitors think he is doing on his trips to New York and Charlotte, NC. I checked it out in the garage, its black with blacked out windows and 23" flat Black rims. Total bling. Come on Henry, this in not MTV Cribs!

Geek Babe said that I had put on weight. Looking at the chart, that 30 pounds I have put on 5 months... she invited me for a workout down the gym, so I think that's my opportunity!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 6 bottles (up 5 from last week)
Shots : 2 x Bourbon Shots (same as last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (4 x Pizza, 1 x Indian)
Weight : 182 lbs

Agile, omg!

I don't want to complain. Its been a long few months of design, code, re-design, re-code to get this Shopping Cart feature done. Its a pretty challenging task, even for somebody as capable as me. But I'm so totally over the Project Managers (PMO) and their f**king "agile" process. I mean, what's so agile about having to stand up and talk for 15 minutes and then spend 60 because they can't read a friggin' clock and keep a meeting on schedule. I mean, I get the whole peer programming, SCRUM and all of those things. I've working in some cool paces where it works. But at Hank, my god its out of friggin' control and its so not agile.

He's the scenario. You get the first "Oh shit" when you see somebody in a pencil skirt or a sport coat enters the circle. You just know that we will have to go over the same basic stuff that we did in yesterdays standup. You know, what the status on line item X. Its all in friggin' VersionOne you dumb ass! Then, there is some bogus check list that we have to complete before the Operations team will even consider staging the code. Then don't get me started with the QA pass rate and execution rate all added to bug burndowns... I need a break, thank god for Burning Man this weekend...

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 4 bottles (up 2 from last week)
Shots : 2 x Bourbon Shots (2 up from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (3 x Pizza, 2 x Indian)
Weight : 180 lbs

Bogus euro dude!

Bogus, bogus, bogus. I can see it already. Constantine our VPE has brought in some new management. Its some French dude, dressed too well and too much aftershave. I think he's real name is Francois, but people have been calling him Frank. Apparently he gets super annoyed if you do that. My boss, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir, is really pissed. Looks like they will give Frank the platform team, which I thought was the team I worked in. After Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir stormed out of the building, I caught up with him the next day. Apparently we are now the Architecture team and we lay the ground for everybody above us, including the Platform team. So sticking one finger in the air to Frank already.

I have grown to love Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir, we did not see eye to eye to begin with. But I'm learning my lesson and not judging a book by its cover. He really knows his way around the code and the system, and I should have respected that. I can see he super loves us in that I-will-beat-you-but-its-for-your-own-good sort of way.

Now I just need to finish that shopping cart feature.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 2 bottles (down 13 from last week)
Shots : 2 x Bourbon Shots (down 8 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (1 x Thai, 1 x Una Mass, 3 x Pizza)
Weight : 178 lbs

Fun in the sun!

Wow. What an awesome way to say goodbye to the old cramped office, a fun day in the sun and "hello new office" next week.

It was an awesome day, Henry did look spectacular in his Ralph Lauren (not Polo) Polo short, cut off Seven Jeans and his regular loafers (no socks). He really showed what it takes to be a king of the valley. Not only did he land some big fish so far this year, he took the time to let down his slightly thinning hair and hang out with his staff. Boy, he also put away a few PBRs in the process.

Tried to hang out with Geek Babe, but she was too busy throwing down Jello Shots and throwing up the Una Mass from the catered lunch. I will miss the old office, with the wall of shame (aka where you go to punch out the dry wall), the coffee stained walls (aka when DJ had a fit when the site went down for the 3rd time that day) and the great food.

The future looks bright, we are not moving far, just into the other tower. We will have three floors to fill out so the recruiting team will still be hiring, hiring, hiring.

Henry had a little rally call at the end of the day. We were hot, sweaty and drunk. He said the most amazing thing, "You are my family, I love each of you like you were my brothers. We are all brothers in arms". I'm starting to think that Henry is that father I never had, he is so inspiring, my father was such a looser working at Washington Mutual all those years.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 15 bottles (up 10 from last week)
Shots : 10 x Jello Shots (9 up from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (4 x Pizza, 1 x Una Mass)
Weight : 177 lbs

Awesome office!

Wow! The new office is awesome. I mean, its exactly like the old office, the kindergarden color scheme, weird names for offices and the super post-industrial-look-at-me-we-have-money-to-spend vibe. I can't wait for the open house that has been planned to lure even more people into the Hank Nation. My friends are going to be so jealous.

So two more weeks in the old office. I had my second HAHA (Hank Architecture Holistic Assessment), and I got slammed. Stacy (Mobile Director) totally killed my design because he thought it would not scale to the 1M transactions / hour that he has to design the mobile server for. I mean I get it, but we are running at 48 transaction a day, a million does seem a bit of a stretch. Back to think through the design again.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 bottles (same as last week)
Shots : 1 x Bourbon (4 down from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x pizza)
Weight : 175 lbs

Cool, we buy an online calculator application!

Henry, he is just so cool. At the company meeting this week he gives a long speech, almost a monologue, on how its critical that we are accurate and accurate all the time. I did not get it. Sure we have to make sure we charge right amount for the services, money is presented in the UI with the right currency symbol and the period in right place etc.

But now I get it. Its totally cool, we have acquired this company that has an on-line calculator application. It totally makes sure that any math you need to do is not only accurate but available everywhere our application lives. I mean, right now that's just a web browser, but as we broaden where our platform can be accessed, you will be able to do this stuff on you cell phone. Awesome.

Apparently, its written in PHP or some arcane language like that, but how cool. A calculator widget anywhere in our application.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 bottles (same as last week)
Shots : 5 x Bourbon (2 up from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x Una Mass)
Weight : 175 lbs

Awesome waffle breakfast!

Wow. I was blown away. All the VPs got together this week cooked all the employee's breakfast. Hey it was Bisquick Shake & Pour but it was super tasty, in a processed kind of way. I've never seen such a controlled form of chaos in my life, must be the fact that Henry was not there. He did say at the last company meeting (from his cell phone) that he would be there leading the charge, but apparently some Red Sox game was playing so decided to stay on the East Coast to watch it. He loves them Sox.

I chatted to Geek Babe, you know, her best advice on Spring dependency injection and so forth. I think she recognizes talent if you know what I mean.

One of the teams has started a bake-and-bring weekly event. Apparently, you bake something and bring it into the office. Sounds totally yuk to me. Why would I want somebodies homemade cookies, coffee cake, etc. when I can just go to Starbucks and get the real thing. Don't people know that home style stuff is so like my grandmother would do?

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 bottles (down one from last week)
Shots : 3 x Tequila (same as last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (4 x Una Mass, 1 x Thai)
Weight : 171 lbs

Our mobile product rocks!

Stacy, who runs the mobile team, gave an overview of the product at the company meeting this week. OMG, we are going to kill that market! I had just not thought about the horizontal synergy that mobile gives the digital butler. Its just everything, everywhere and at anytime. We rock!

Stacy walked through the product roadmap. We are looking to support the 62xx and 65xx range of Blackberry's late this year. It makes total sense to support technology that has been out in the market place for quite a few years. That way its prevalent because all the business dudes already have them rather than support a new or current model which nobody has. Its really pushing our engineers, those models have no memory and use a version of Java that's older than my mommy. Those platforms are tough to crack, which explains why the team have been at it for some time.

The Asian dude with glasses asked what about the iPhone. The answer made total sense. We are aimed at the business market and not the consumer market so we need to support business. It kind of sucks because I can't show my friends and family the digital butler on my iPhone and looks like I will not be able to for a bunch of time. I'm sure Henry is right about the strategy.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 3 bottles (same as last week)
Shots : 2 x Tequila (down one from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x Pizza)
Weight : 171 lbs

Geek babes!

I'm sure Henry has something to do with this. Yes we have way over the normal quota of babes in finance, marketing, HR and the normal places. But this is why Hank Commerce is just so different, we have geek babes as well!

I was at a brown bag this week and one of the total goddess babes was presenting. Hair pulled back, white t-shirt, skinny jeans, slingbacks you know the drill. OMG she totally knows what she is talking about, there was some stuff in there that blew my mind away. I'm sure that I must have looked like some sad puppy or something, my cube buddy kicked me one time, I think I must have been dribbling into my soda.

Henry has the vision. Development have the Geek babes. We are so totally writing the next big internet story!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 3 bottles (down three from last week)
Shots : 3 x Tequila (same as last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x Pizza)
Weight : 170 lbs

Shopping carts are cool!

So I have been developing this feature for sometime. I finally got my design through HAHA (Hank Architecture Holistic Assessment), its a sort of review board that involves a lot of sitting in conference rooms drinking coffee and sodas. With that signed off, I got through the implementation and now I'm on to testing. I work on the platform side, I'm not one of those CSS/HTML guys, I'm not that cool. And building applications, well that's what you give people who can't code server side...

So I was wondering why QA or the Application teams were not banging on my desk each day waiting for me to finish. Then I thought about it. Where will this get used? The Pet Store is a punch out to a 3rd party that does the procurement flow, I think we use D River or something. So that store was out.

Then I thought about our stock trading system. That has to be real time since the prices change so much. So that store is out.

I was thinking the Flower store, but could not see that people would load it with a big number of items. So I went to see my manager, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir and he said that it was "an investment in out future platform".

Wow. I think that is cool that we are really investing in the platform. Build it and they will come!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 bottles (down one from last week)
Shots : 3 x Tequila (up one from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x Una Mass)
Weight : 170 lbs

We have the Hank police!

Sometimes, you just hear things and think no f*ing way. Sure every company monitors emails and IM's or at least logs them. You know some harassment case comes up, fight over intellectual property, blah-blah-blah. The thing is, this normally get stuck on a bunch of disks, tapes or CD's and shipped off to Iron Mountain... just in case.

So I don't believe this, but apparently Henry has somebody up in Tracy or Modesto or some other hole in the central valley. Guess what they do? All they do is read other people's email and IM's the whole day. What are they looking for?

Well, my guess when I was talking to the Ops guys was anything security related, you know we have credit cards a shit like that in the database. Perhaps protecting our IP.

No. Ops dude says that all he looks for is references to Henry and whether anybody is talking shit about him, his women or his executive team. Henry gets a daily report. If you appear you are out of the door that day. Its some kind of totall weird I'm-not-a-communitsit-I-love-free-trade-but-talk-shit-and-you-are-in-the-gulag type of thing.

I love Henry, but that shit is totally f*ked up. It can't possibly be true.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 6 bottles (up one from last week)
Shots : 2 x Tequila (up 2 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (4 x pizza, 4 x Una Mass)
Weight : 169 lbs

Awesome, lets all get electric staplers!

I totally get why I can't order Eclipse. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir sent me over to the IT and Ops guys. I think he wanted to have a fun and watch them beat me down. I'm sure he's bi-polar or something else weird.

So the long and short of it, I get dressed down for asking to spend money to improve my productivity. Not only that, DJ the VP of Site Ops at the company meeting then gave this long horsewhipping about spending money. How we need to stop using Microsoft Office and buy Electric Staplers on Ebay. I was confused until somebody said it was a joke. It was something about how one of those costs the same of Microsoft Office and why would anybody want either. So, I dig it. I never got Microsoft Office, I got OpenOffice (which is cool) but all I wanted for Christmas was IntelliJ.

I got so busted in the company meeting on a different front. Could not help myself, but got caught casting an eye over "her". I think Henry has me down as a marked man. I avoided talking to him at the beer bash afterwards.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 bottles (up three from last week)
Shots : 0 x Bourbon (down 2 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (4 x pizza, 1 x Una Mass)
Weight : 168 lbs

Eclipse is totally bogus!

I try so hard, every hour of every day of every week of every month. Startups can be tough, something like counting your pennies or something.

But, Eclipse is totally bogus. I mean, I get the whole open source, its free, just use it "as is". But dude, its like my time is totally not free. Where's the refund on my hours when I spend 30 minutes figuring out that I don't get that feature or the feature works different if I change my perspective.

I've heard Henry's rally call and it totally makes sense. Don't spend money we don't need to, we have to preserve cash in order that Henry can wine and dine the movers and shakers in New York and Charlotte, NC. But Eclipse? I've got to say, I'm tempted to get out my credit card and just buy IntelliJ myself. It makes my blood boil each time I see the friggin' oh-so-1997 splash screen.... grrrrr. I think I need to go to the gym just to cool off. And just how friggin' bogus is that?

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 3 bottles (down 2 from last week)
Shots : 2 x Tequilla (down 2 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (1 x pizza, 1 x Indian, 3 x Una Mass)
Weight : 166 lbs

My boss sucks (again)!

Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir really got on my nerves this week. I've been working on a complex design, so have been building prototypes just to make sure I do it right. Then he comes by and says what I have done it a pile of shit and how I'm completely worthless. You know, it really gets me down. I have total respect for him, the rest of his team love him, but I really think he has an inflated ego or just has poor self-esteem. I was trying to use components right out of the open-source box, then BAM. He makes we totally re-write things to "preserve our IP". This is totally bogus, but I did it anyway.

I love this company and will do everything to make it successful, but boy, they make it tough for somebody as smart as me to be successful!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 bottles (same as last week)
Shots : 4 x Bourbon (down 4 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x pizza)
Weight : 166 lbs

Where have the bagels gone!

At first I thought that I was just unlucky. You know those creative and marketing types. Dressed in the too cool 80's game t-shirts and army pants, they are first to the poppy seed bagels when they are not spending the morning making their third double iced latte. You have to be totally committed to get a poppy seed bagel around here. I mean, like, get there before 10.30am on "Bagel Thursdays".

Last week I just about managed to get the last one by beating down "legs" from Finance, but this week... the horror of it all.

I get there at 9.45am. I'm totally going to get a poppy seed bagel this time. I'm so ahead of the game here. I get to the kitchen, first shock is Noah's (otherwise known as bread-with-a-hole-disappointment-its-not-a-bagel). Second shock, they have ordered some kind of artisan shit, with all sorts of crazy stuff in them. Wow! This is so uncool. Hank Commerce is changing before my eyes.

Big rumors is that our VPE and Henry have been out shopping. Some people are talking companies, other are talking a new management team. I hear from the old timers that we get a new management team every 18 months, so this could be my first big change!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 5 bottles (3 up from last week)
Shots : 8 x Bourbon (6 up from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x pizza)
Weight : 165 lbs

Its so "Office Space"!

Its the holiday weekend so not much to report this week, actually kind of been a bit boring. Was talking to a guy at the beer bash a sort of Berkely-kind-of-dude-whos-done-it-all type. He was pretty cool for being old and bald. Anyway, he was telling me this story. Apparently this is all true but have no way of verifying one way or another.

The story goes like this. There was this total dick in Sales, Business Development or something. You know the type, Oakley's and a suit each day. So he totally makes a mess of a contract with some supplier. Henry gets really pissed and storms out of the meeting. Apparently the guy is shitting himself. Its Friday so he goes home. Comes back the on the Monday and Henry says nothing, does not even look him in the eye. So the guy thinks "Ok, I'm in the shit but I have a job".

This goes on for a few weeks. A few weeks turns into a few months. A few months turn into a year and a half.

But as the Berkley guy told me, and he swears he was told by a VP, Henry actually sacked him on the spot. He just carried on turning up each day for another 18 months before he finally quit for another job. Fucking idiot! Didn't he see that he was not getting paid?

This place is so Office Space its not funny. Talk about life imitating art.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 2 bottles (one down from last week)
Shots : 1 x Tequila, 1 x Bourbon (three down from last week)
Dinner : 4 nights (3 x pizza)
Weight : 163 lbs

Production trip after trip!

Wow, I thought last week was bad. I was getting back to normal with some crazy bugs for the shopping feature. Then over came Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir and I thought "Oh hell, not again". But sweet, he came and gave me a pat on the back and we had a shot of whiskey.

Literally seconds later his BB was ringing and then I was a tidal wave as BB's around the floor went off. "Oh fuck" were the only words he said before running over to DJ's area. DJ's team run the web site and they all can walk on water. Seriously, one guy was in Desert Storm and walked across a burning lake of oil to nail some sucker from the Republican Guard. How cool is that!

Turns out that American City Bank were coming for an inspection. Made sense after giving us a pile of green. What happened was that some dick from the operations team went to tidy up the data center, pulled the wrong plug and everything went down with it. Databases, network, you name it.

The guy was dressed down (rightly in my view) at the company meeting by Henry and then marched out of the building. I think that's right. You got to stand up and be accounted for in a place like this. With awesome opportunity comes great responsibility. And if you can't cut it then Henry has to show you the door.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 3 bottles (down five from last week)
Shots : 5 x Bourbon (three up from last week)
Dinner : 4 nights (2 x pizza, 2 x Una Masa)
Weight : 162 lbs

We got more funding, awesome!

Henry is just so cool. I finally got to hear him at the company meeting. At the beer bash afterward I went up to introduce myself. He then spent 15 minutes one-on-one with me to explain the big picture. I'm just a small cog in his big machine, it blew me away that he would spend that sort of time with me.

He was in town to tell us all the most awesome news. American City Bank of North Carolina have invested in us! He told hows its been living at the Omni hotel in downtown Charlotte and eating at P.F. Chang's (yum yum) every night. He said it was hell, but all worth while to secure further investment in building out the platform.

But boy, he really told us how it all is, how the platform will really sell us and give us a 30x or even a 40x valuation over our revenue. He made some comments to a bald Asian guy in glasses that "I'm not going to talk about revenue, you don't need to know that". But wow, awesome funding to build out this platform. Wow. We are going to be bigger than Google.

The only thing that freaked me out was the brown loafers without socks that Henry was wearing. But, I love this company despite that.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 8 bottles (six up from last week)
Shots : 2 x Tequila (two up from last week)
Dinner : 4 nights (3 x pizza, 1 x Thai, 1 x Una Masa for the funding celebration)
Weight : 161 lbs

I feel sick!

I think the late nights, drinking, stress of my first production trip all got to me. My boss ("Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir") spent the week chewing my balls. I spent the first hours trying to figure out what a "production trip" was, just to find out that its similar to a trip of a power supply... all the lights go out, rather than a "crazy trip at burning man, you were like blue dude!".

So I fired up the debugger and asked for logs. "You can't have logs or access to production". Its something to do with compliance or control or something I didn't get. So I tired and tried my best. Then my boss came over, "Fucking idiot" was not a great introduction to a hack-a-thon of console access, editing XML files, restarting JVMs and other stuff that I really did not follow. It was tough looking over his shoulder, but wow he knew his stuff. This guy is god.

I don't think I'm good enough for this place.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 2 bottles (same as last week)
Shots : zero (same as last week)
Dinner : 4 nights (3 x pizza, 1 x Indian)
Weight : 159 lbs

I built the product!

Three weeks. Wow. I built the product. This is so friggin' awesome. I asked one of the QA guys if I could run the regress on the product, you know, just to make sure that I built it correctly. He said "You will need to schedule that, we do it all by hand here".

I thought about that. I think its really cool that we hand test all our releases. Its a real commitment to quality. Most places I have seen they automate it and then you spend all the time fixing the scripts when you change the code. That involves people, so they might as well be adaptive and apply themselves to testing by hand. Hand crafted like a Rolls Royce. Its probably why we have a ratio of 1.5 QA for each Engineer. But that's cool, they are all cheap and on H1 visa's so they are not going anywhere or costing us!

I love this company.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 2 bottles (down two last week)
Shots : 1 x Tequila, 1 x Bourbon (down two from last week)
Dinner : 4 nights (4 x pizza)
Weight : 156 lbs

Still not built the product!

I'm starting to worry. I still have not built the product. It seems a never ending loop of problems and asking questions and people getting mad at me. I met my boss, he has some unpronounceable name ("can-I-have-a-latter-sir" or something). I'm told he is a super techie but he shouted at me a lot which did not make me feel good about myself.

I meant to start the eating and drinking spreadsheet this week but found out that us engineers don't get Microsoft Office. It makes total sense, the money should go on important things like new servers, storage, Oracle licenses etc. rather than waste it on frivolous stuff. My boss also said that I have to use Eclipse rather than IntelliJ, but I can make that switch it will be worth it for the company. Still can't wait to meet Henry, he's in Charlotte, NC this week (again).

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 4 bottles (one up from last week)
Shots : 4 x Tequila (three up from last week)
Dinner : 4 nights (3 x pizza, 1 x Thai)
Weight : 152 lbs

Wow, one week down!

Wow, that first week shot by. I met so many great people here. Everybody is so friendly and gave me loads of great advice ("dev manager x is bi-polar, director Y is a pyscho, don't do shots with the VPE" etc.).

Still trying to build the product. Its been a long week and many, many late nights but I can't seem to get the thing built. There are so many frameworks, go and ask such-and-such, Database upgrade fails, get a new CentOS baseline etc. You know its never easy in your first week. But this must be such an amazing product if it is this difficult to build!

Still not met Henry, apparently he is in Charlotte, NC to meet with American City Bank. Apparently he is there a lot. They are a potential big investor so I guess it makes sense. Just wish I could hear his inspirational thoughts in person.

Found out they really look after their staff here. I had food three nights last week (great Thai, so-so Pizza and fabulous Indian food). There was also drinking. I'll keep a chart in a spreadsheet but here's the data.

Beer : 3 bottles (1 Coors Light, 2 Corona)
Shots : 1 x Tequila at Friday's beer bash
Food : 3 (Thai, Pizza, Indian)

Here's hoping that I get the product to build this week.

Welcome to Hank!

Wow. I can't believe it, I'm finally here. Many months after being referred by my mentor at Sun Microsystems, three rounds of interviews and all the back and forth over money I'm finally here. I have been blessed with the chance to work at the Next Big Internet company. I have to say a big thanks to Adrian and Lucy (she a little hottie) in the recruiting team getting me through that process.

I arrived at 9.30am, I could not sleep and was so eager to get into work. Although they said 10am, I'm sure it was Ok to be there early. People have been soooo helpful (OMG they are all so smart!). Got a used machine (hear that happens a lot here) and now I'm trying to sync and build the product. I'm told that "really smart" people can get this done in a week. I'm sure that I will manage because I am super smart.

Can't wait to meet and hear Henry, I hear that he's super inspirational and had an amazing vision of what this company will become.

So I'll try to keep posting this blog as I get up to speed and really understand the vision and business model. If I seem to disappear its just because I'm writting the Next Big Internet Story!