Reading circle!

One of the other teams started a reading circle. Its pretty crazy. I think the dude who runs it is a Zen Buddhist or something, but basically on the 1st of the month a book get posted on the Twiki. We then have three weeks to read it and on the fourth week we all meet to discuss. Awesome I thought, plus I saw Geek-Babe had signed up.

This is when it got a bit weird. We all went up to the boardroom, there were candles and incense burning, we all held hands and chanted for like about 20 minutes. Then for the next three hours we had a shouting match on the pros and cons of the book in question. Man it was intense, people calling each other mother this and mother that, shouting at each other, throwing the books across the room. It was like telling a Republican that its all their fault the banking sector just cut its own throat! Franks-Mom tried to keep things in order, but it was crazy!

At the end, Zen-Dude got everybody together again and we all chanted for 10 minutes, we all hugged and then Zen-Dude pulled out the largest bottle of tequila. Technically I think that means we are all now sacked after we finished every last drop.

The book? Tracy Kidder's Soul of a new machine. Man, I almost cried in the chapter about the missing NAND gate, its was like my Spring nightmare all over again, I could not help the emotion and horror of it all.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!))
Shots : 8 (I think I'm sacked!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 180 lbs

Death by twitter part 2!

So New-Marketing-Veep was the next to go. Well how could he stay after his new strategy to attract the 17-35 audience had gone up in smoke after it was leaked on Twitter by his own team. I know what Henry means when he says that you have to love Hank Commerce. Love means that you have to do the right thing by the brand, by the company and by Henry. So another one bites the dust. No tears for this one.

Henry has been hanging at the office more. We had a beer bash this week, not sure why, but he really got into the details. It was a shame that it was not about how we were going to broaden our appeal or get more revenue. But it was super interesting to hear how he thinks its the best time to get a steal on an Aston Martin DBS. He explained it was all about the leverage of cash versus credit in a time where cash is king, demand is low and time is infinite. Not sure about the beige on beige color scheme, seems all a bit Roger Moore.

Demo'ed my ad placement service to Lonely-James and his team this week. I was distracted from the feedback I was being given as I watched the sweat stains grow at a crazy rate. I'll have to see if anybody took notes, I certainly did not.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 7 (beer bash returns!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 178 lbs

Death by twitter!

It was so lame. I've been attending the daily stand ups that Euro-Fool has been running for "Mega Enterprise". Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir has been going crazy because Constantine put Euro-Fool in command rather then him. So he attended for a while and then stopped showing up. Euro-Fool, I guess, then got Constantine all riled up to shout at Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir so he started showing up again. Now I'm his delegate. The only cool thing in this sorry story is the Geek-Babe attends, which is very cool, so I hang out with her for 27 minutes each day.

The idea is that its cross functional, so along with Product Management, Program Management, Eng & QA there is also Marketing. Henry has said that "Mega Enterprise" is going to be key for contributing to the bottom line because we are in control and don't have to chew the costs and late launch that we do with American City Bank. The trouble is that Marketing are a little weird. First they dress weird (how do you say "Gay!"), they talk weird (its all about positioning, drone, drone, drone) and they also cannot keep their mouths shut.

Henry says that "Mega Enterprise" has to be kept secret so that we can make a huge splash and totally change the market. So what does Fresh-New-Marketing-Dude do? He starts twittering about it to start some "buzz".

Henry went ballistic, well that's what at least Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir told me. So our cover has been broken and everybody in the industry knows about it. There was some chatter on Techbyte but Henry got M.Arrington to take down the post and the comments. Their kids go to school with each other and M.Arrington owed Henry after the incident at the school with the new first grade teacher. Apparently she was not as cute as BayGossip claimed.

So Fresh-New-Marketing-Dude is trying his luck at another company, Henry fired his ass right out to left field in a matter of seconds of finding out. Well, in fact the twittering had been going on for weeks, but Henry does not Twitter so it took his assistant to blog about it before he was in the loop.

Sad. Nice guy. Bad taste in dress shirts.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 177 lbs

I had my first HoMO!

It was so totally awesome that I can hardly speak, or at least now speak in a octave or two higher than normal. It just took my breath away.

So to recap, HoMo or the Hank Orthogonal Modus Operandi is the process we use to make sure what gets pushed into production is super cool, scalable and the Ops guys will not shoot you for it. If you do what you are told its a rubber stamp, try and be creative and Dave (our Chief Architect) and the Ops team come after you.

So I have been working on "Mega Enterprise". Its going to be pretty sweet. My feature for this is to ensure that whatever device you use, IE6, a Blackberry 62xx etc. allows you to log on, go through the authorization process and then drop a targeted Ad. Its super sweet, it means that we will totally get a bunch of money from Advertisers falling over themselves to be the first thing our target users will see. We aim to be the destination site for 17-34 year olds, something that Facebook can only be dreaming of.

The architecture was pretty sweet, I designed it to deal with 10M impression a minute, since that's Dave's design goal for the site. He was saying that if we don't get that visitor rate then "Its not worth getting out of bed for". I totally get that. So I used a Spring container, with lazy consistency a bit like CouchDB or Amazon Dynamo. I wrapped that up in the implementation so I don't scare everybody, but its fast and will scale horizontally on commodity hardware, non of that proprietary Sun hardware .

So I got my rubber from my HoMo. I'm very happy.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 178 lbs