The shopping cart has been canned!

What a crap week. For months I have been working on this son-of-a-gun feature. Late nights, then without dinner and now without drinks. Dealing with the changes from the HaHa, two weeks to deploy and then the QA bugs right up to the day before the release lockdown.

But i made it.

Too f**king late for me. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir came back from a meeting with Constantine. Apparently American City Bank are going with their existing vendor for the shopping store and since there is little or no IP in shopping we are switching to Google. That's what I f**king said to Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir before I started! There was never any IP in this and the Applications teams were way behind schedule (no change there). Why was I killing myself? Oh because Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir insisted that the architecture changes get done now and pushed into production ASAP. F**king moron.

Next week I'm going to the store to get a can of tartan paint...

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 182 lbs

Beam me up scotty!

Its been an exciting week. I finally got my code out of development and into the hands of QA. The HaHa gave me some serious re-work to make sure that Ops would sign off on the design. I was also super lucky that Dave did not make me go through the new HoMo process, but I'm looking forward to my first one of those.

So basic sanity testing is done, mocked up all the backend external interfaces so that QA can inject the bad and the good. Provided a front end mock for the Applications teams so they can build without the need for having the whole software stack. All looking sweet. All very test driven development, all very agile.

Next step was to get Engineering Services to deploy to a QA environment in the lab. Mother-of-Jesus what an episode that turned out to be and we are still not finished.

Here's what I had to do. A few months ago I had to submit an email which Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir approved. This then got translated onto a cocktail napkin (I'm not joking). This was then pinned to the wall in some sort of timeline sequence, an agile planning wall so to speak. I'm not sure what happens when they reach the end of the wall, they must wrap around or go back to the beginning or something.

Then, I had to attend another daily standup with what's left of PMO. Each day I had to say the following, "Yes, I'm on track and still need the environment". It would have been easier to tell them when I was not on track, but they guy who runs the team wants to "look you in the eye".

Then it came to the day-of-deployment. This basically meant hanging around all day with the services guys. The head guy, known as Beam-Me-Up banged away at his ASUS all day, swearing a lot and then shouting for another Diet Dr. Pepper. I did not like to ask what was going on, but basically if I attempted to get up he said "Leave and I fucking nuke this environment". I mean dude, chill out!

That was three days ago. I'm still at his desk, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir is pissed, he thinks he could have deployed in seconds. I mean that guys is the bomb, I'm sure he could have done it in at least 30 minutes. Its been whack-a-mole, fix one thing and it breaks another. Beam-Me-Up says this is normal.

If I don't get the environment I may loose my QA team and miss the release window. If that happens, then I may not get to deliver this side of Memorial Day, the schedule is backed up with American City Bank work. F**k me, this shit is hard!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 184 lbs

You have to be cool to get it!

I was at a car dealer this weekend, my jalopy was never going to make it through another year, and now that I have a little extra cash I figured it was time to get a bargain with the downturn and all.

Swung by the VW dealer, basically the sales guy had his head stuck up his ass. Wanted to totally kill me on the interest rates and would not budge from the MRSP. So went to Scion dealer. Super sweet. First there was this cool Asian babe of a salesperson. Super helpful, knew the cars and what the deals were. Laid down the options and costs and bam! I was driving away in a Scion xB in flat olive green with a World War 2 US Army markings. Major deal and a sweet ride. I think Geek Babe will totally check me out in this ride!

Henry told a similar story this week at the company meeting. He said the critical thing is to sell our platform to the right people. He's turning down deals because they would take the company in the wrong direction in his view. He's also doing the same with American City Bank, they need to have features that we can sell again and again even if they paid for them. Totally makes sense, write once, sell many.

So lets turn down deals and the cash they bring and focus on those deals that will make Hank Commerce the next big internet story.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 185 lbs

No more drinking!

Henry dropped a bomb shell this week. We will all be in shock for sometime, especially Constantine and the management team. Henry basically said that if anybody drinks on site or has drunk and then connects to a production system they will be marched out, no severance, no anything. It was pretty harsh and I think we all got that he was serious when he said "I'm f**king serious guys, I love you all, but no f**king drinking". Henry has to be one of the biggest drinkers on the exec team, but if he said if he can do it then anybody can. I love that "can-do" spirit.

A couple of us went through the drawers, refrigerators and in the stock room to see the acres of beer, wine, scotch, tequila and Bourbon all being boxed up by the security team.

The rumors has it that it all went down after American City Bank came for a pre-launch visit. They had all the regular glad-handing that goes on, everybody was dressed up (i.e. no holes in jeans) and had showered that day. Nobody had told the Platform team who had a marathon drinking session during the day. Erik, one of the super tech leads on that team, had lost a bet that he could drink a dozen shots of tequila in an hour and keep his lunch down. He looked green, but had kept his Una Mass down, until he made it to the elevator.

The trouble was that he held the elevator for the American City Bank team and Henry. They were going to PK Changs that night in Palo Alto. Henry was trying to ignore Erik, who then said "You're those f**kers from American Shitty Bank" (we was slurring) and then threw up his Una Mass all over them.

The retribution has been pretty horrible. I think Henry thinks we don't work hard enough. No doubt that American City Bank gave him shit as well. So we all will suffer. Thanks Erik!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

HaHA gets renamed HoMo!

Did not mention that we have a new corporate architect, Dave. He's been pretty quite since he started in October. He turns up at meetings, design reviews etc. and says nothing. He then goes back to his desk, pulls a diet 7 Up and then writes more Twiki pages (we are so old school, we don't even use Media Wiki).

This week, he presented at the Tech-Sess. The presentation was called "Why we are changing from HaHa to HoMo and make more millions". HaHa is our review process, the Hank Architecture Holistic Assessment.

It certainly drew a big audience, even Lucy from recruiting was there. Dave's big idea was that the HaHA needs to be less democratic, we need to basically rubber stamp patterns that Ops feel they can deploy + support and stop engineers f**king up with some new crazy architecture or deployment requirement, like reliable messaging. The first step on this long process is to rename HaHa to HoMo, or the Hank Orthogonal Modus Operandi.

Like what gives dude? I get the principal, but do you really think that just changing the name is going to make that huge a difference? I know that Henry always had a master plan for the naming of the company and that Hank Commerce was the final destination after visiting MyScrewdriver and TARDIS Corp. Apparently we have been in a law suite for years with the BBC over that last name.

So HoMo is the name, the process is new and the outcomes will be different, so says Dave. I'm looking forward to my first HoMo.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 6 (down 4 from last week)
Shots : 20 (up 4 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

Scritable systems sucks!

I love how we are changing the world, one customer at a time. But our platform is so friggin' tough to develop and then debug. I mean I love XML and XML Spy, you can do some wicked smart things. But developing an MVC application in XML, its pretty mind bending. The idea, and its pretty cool idea, is that we become a Platform As A Service. Something that Salesforce think they are doing, in reality they have just moved Oracle CRM onto the web and have a bunch of forms that allow you to customize it. Admittedly, its over the web which beats any Oracle technology by four or more years due to their release cycle. But its not as cool as the platform we are building, we call it "SkyNet" after the Terminator movies. We are that cool!

Here's what we are going to do, and its a killer plan. We are opening up the Platform for anybody to build any application. To demo this, a couple of the Product Managers built a Dinner Outsourcing Application (DOA), which allows you to pre-configure your selection for dinner, it then aggregates the days results and with the trends of the previous days, week and months then placed the order with the vendor (over Fax). Soemtimes it even gets the order right, but mostly orders pizza. It can then use the aggregation algorithms to either try a leveraged buy-out of the franchise we buy from most frequently or try to get a corporate rate established though Book-a-Table.

The application is wicked smart and they built in a couple of days. And they are Product Managers! Pity that during the time it took to develop, Henry stopped all the dinner orders. It could have been wicked cool application on our destination site. I think our engineers would have loved it.

So the plan is that anybody can build an application that can leverage our aggregation and broad range of services to create their own mash up. I'm thinking about building an application to examine the costs of flights between New York and Charlotte, NC and San Francisco and then recommend when Henry should travel. Its kiss ass, but he really needs to know who I am!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 10 (up 2 from last week)
Shots : 16 (up 6 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

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