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

American City Bank delays again!

This delay is totally our fault. They came to do an audit and it appears that we store some of their data in plain text, I don't know all the details but apparently Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir was supposed to build out some components that only partially got completed. When I say partially, I mean it was a basic pass through.

Long and short if it, he spend many hours with Constantine and Henry this week. I think Constantine is at the end of this rod with him. I also sawhim and Euro-Fool plotting, they always seem to go to another floor and then draw on whiteboards that can't be seen from the outside which are always clean (I checked).

I get the feeling that something big is going to happen again. It upsets me, since we have trying to pull it together since the layoffs. Why does the management team hate Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir? He is the only true leader here.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 179 lbs

Guns on release night!

So I had my first release night, it was a pretty awesome experience. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir asked me to fill in, he wanted a night off.

So we gathered in the board room, its full of Aeron chairs, its a pretty sweet set up. On the projector they were displaying the Flight Plan for the night work. Down one side the Operations team were all positioned. Apparently DJ likes them in order of seniority. The Scary-Ops-Guy was leading the charge, playing AC/DC on his MacBook Pro. Apart from that the only thing you could here was the sound of fingers on keyboards. I broke the silence to make a joke but was told to "Shut the F**k up". I thought they had some sort of Vulcan mind-melt since there was no talking, but I was told that they use IRC. I laughed at that, boy we should all go day to 28k dial-up and AOL, like that's dinosaur technology!

You don't mess with the Ops guys. Scary-Ops-Guy was actually in Desert Storm and is a leading light in the "Open Carry" movement in the Bay Area. Its all about the right to carry arms and all the NRA horse shit, but I did not like to make that point sitting opposite a guy with a Magnum in a un-clipped holster.As I understand it, the guns are not supposed to be loaded, but I was not going to push my luck and find out.

The only project manager left is a huge NRA fan, he screen saver is actually an AK47 or something. He was thumbing through the Flight Plan so I figured I better leave him alone as well.

Things started well, but the food was late. Can you believe that these guys get food, no wonder Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir always is here for release night! They had a really nice pizza from "I Love Charlotte, NC". It came with deep fried pickles and grits on the side. Yummy.

After one of the DBA trashed the production database and the DBA team spent the first hour trying to recover the database, things went pretty smoothly. Funny, they were super quite until Scary-Ops-Guy asked "What the F**k are you guys so busy with"... then the shit hit the fan.

Our code went out smooth, as I'm told by Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir always happens. Roll on the next release night!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 1 nights (pizza on release night!)
Weight : 177 lbs

American City Bank does not go live!

Wow. Crazy few weeks. Everybody has been focusing on making the American City Bank launch successful. Lots of late nights, a whole team baby sitting the call each day and managing their issues. Lots of bugs, lots of missing requirements. I have a friend working on the code, sounds like they are writing it as they go along, nobody seems to have a clue how the API contracts should work. They are nailed down in terms of XML, but not the behaviors. I mean, how COBOL is that? They all sound like a bunch of old guys in some brown walled, nondescript office in Delaware. The peons don't work in the high end Manhattan office!

Finally American City Bank called off the launch. Apparently, they have some deal with their staff that they don't launch a product in a month with a Friday 13th, so we have to push out the launch past Feb.

Was looking forward to the mind bending party that Henry had promised. He said he would take "only the engineers" to Gary Danko in SF, this was later downgraded to PF Chang's in Palo Alto, which to be honest I super happy about. Who does not love PF Chang!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 176 lbs

Moonlighting!

Ops guys are weird at the best of times. They work strange hours, act weird and have a big interest in guns. Generally you should not mess with them, especially if its open carry week.

So I'm not surprised that DJ ever question the fact that one of his guys volunteered for night shift work. Its kind of easy, since there are not customer to piss off if you take out a server or database and sometimes pull a wire on the wrong switch. Its all scheduled so the customer have low expectations. Somebody has even written a script that you can cut & paste from.

But then there's the rub. Dude was actually working for a competitor, some outfit in Dallas during the day and then doing work for us during the night. He was getting double pay for doing the same thing twice. Explains why you never got on answer on the pager when he was on duty, always claimed to be sleeping. We all heard Henry screaming down here in the dungeons all the way from the Management Tower.

Super dumb for DJ letting this slide. But then something super crazy happened. They kept him on and doubled his pay, the theory was that the company could not cut is wages because he was in too deep with the Chinese Mafia. Cutting his wage was like giving him a death sentence and that is totally bad karma. So dude is still here and making more money than ever! Whoever said Henry is not a humanitarian is on crack.

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

Awesome open house!

Henry gave the killer of all killer speeches today. Since we have a hiring gap and the resumes are thin on the ground we decide to have an open house! So I dragged a few close friends in, did not invite everybody since there are only some I want to share the bonanza with when we go IPO!

Henry gave the whole soup-to-nuts of the boom and bust in 1999-2001. It was a great history lesson for me, I had not even started college then. He explained the core values of our employees, shown by the determination to beat off junkies, hookers and debt collectors in those first days in rented loft in SOMA. The pictures looked awesome. Then came the whole twin towers thing and Henry was so depressed that he could not visit NYC for months.

Then he explained how the Republican's will have the answer, they always do in a financial crisis and that the Democrats will mess it up if they win the election in the fall. They don't seem to have a chance, the washed up first wife of a disgraced president and a black guy who's name sounds like he's a terrorist.

He wrapped it up with a rally call that now is the time to put money to work, to invest and make something amazing. The people all stood and gave him a standing ovation, it was awesome.

Lots of great people to talk with but lots of interviewing to do.

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

We hiring!

Super cool, news came down that we can hire back the spots vacated by those rats who jumped ship. Thank god for Henry, that's such a smart move. We just can't make our commitments with a bunch less people.

So the hiring machine starts up again, they let most of the recruiting team go in the Rift so its going to be a bunch of hard work for them, but they seem to be hyped up to do it.

I'm having trouble with coming up with a reasonable way to talk about the fact that we rift'ed a bunch of people then a few months later we are hiring again. Its sounds pretty weird. The drop in cash is tough to talk about since they seem to be making offers at the old rate. Sure, we did get extra stock to make up for the pay cut, but like that's not going to pay for the rent dude.

Here's what I have so far

• Henry is awesome, he's like the cool Pop you never had
• We have customers and are making some money
• If the economy turns around, we are going to make a pile of cash fast!
• The pay sucks, but the mission is so worthwhile
  
• You get to work with cool people, even the managers are pretty smart
  

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