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