why doesnt this get any easier?

where are the web designers/developers?

2008-04-02T18:49:00.000-07:00

our company was in the position to hire a full time web designer/developers. there seems to be a lot of people who are only a designer, a developer, or they are a third party team that you contract. a lot of dev work in that area seem to be dominated by contracting. i understand that for a lot of companies, website development is not their core competency and they would rather contract out that work. in the land of web 2.0, shouldn't there be a plethora of full time professional web developers who can also design the look and feel of a site. if there are, then am i just looking in the wrong places? i've tried sites such as craigslist and dice but have discovered it is populated by contractors.

where are you finding these people?!?

friendfeed and the social networking annoyance

2008-03-25T22:38:00.000-07:00

recently, my friend dustin told me about this newfangled thing called friendfeed. usually, he's not one to gush about new web 2.0 hotness, so i figure this may actually be useful. the idea is to aggregate your activity information so your "friends" can just subscribe to one activity feed instead of n.

this sounds great on paper, but i'm always weary of things that sound good on paper. my problem is that i dont want notifications about things that my friends and friendfeed think are important. for example, friendfeed decides what information to display to you from a particular site. they also choose to tell you about your friend of friends. my friends themselves get to decide which of their sites they get to tell me about. the only decision i can make is whether or not to subscribe to someone's friendfeed. i am not ok with that. unfortunately, this is the best thing out there right now. of the 10% of my friends' activities that i actually care about, i have to comb through a bunch of junk to get there. this is, however, better than checking every social networking site i belong to.

i would also like to take this opportunity to thank friendfeed for not supporting myspace. if it were an option, i would have added it. also, thank you for not repeating my facebook news feed in my friendfeed.

to me, this hints at a deeper problem, not only about social networks, but all the way back to the dot-com bubble in its relation to the current economic recession. the crux of the problem is that people like new and shiny things. i love them and so do you. at first it was just plain old websites. now it is interactive media, desktop-like web apps, and social networking. all of stuff is useful, but people are blinded by the novelty that they dont know when to stop. a perfectly good example is facebook and myspace. superpoke? what the fuck? novelty, combined with boredom and accessibility make these time sinks very attractive. i'm the first to admit that i succumb to these things, but recognize that they are having an adverse effect on the tech economy. this leads to things like inflated user counts being perceived as demand, in turn inflating budgets in advertisement and VC investments in those kind of companies. then everyone will flock to saturate that market because its easy and the returns are great. ultimately, reality sets in, users leave, and no money is made. then... pop.

it also pains me to see incredibly bright people working on ideas and products that are inconsequential when they could be doing things that actually matter. the saving grace is that even though a product is fluffy and ultimately useless, if it has enough users, then interesting application agnostic problems will arise. recently, people have made a lot of progress in the areas of distributed systems and scalability.

i urge all new entrepreneurs to go out there and solve useful and interesting problems.

why doesnt it get any easier?

2008-03-25T22:22:00.000-07:00

its been a good three months since my company has dropped. as i have never been good with writing blog posts, it has been even harder for me to continue writing in this one. its not that i dont have anything to post or that i'm making myself post things simply because its the "in" thing to do. there are things i thoughts i want to write down and share with the world, but it somehow always escapes me.

in a life where your actions are summarized in a bulleted list of action items each one having been prioritized the week or so before, "write blog entry" never really makes it near the top. this may be because i'm a hacker. maybe i was just naive, but i had always hoped that once we've launched, things would calm down, VC wallets would fly open, and i could concentrate on software development. this, however, was not the case. veteran entrepreneurs may be shaking their heads at my naivety at this point, but one can dream.

recently, a friend from cornell is leaving some boring corporate job to join a startup. he had mentioned his CEO wanted to talk to me about my experiences. as i give him my opinions on early stage startups, i will be posting those thoughts here also. i understand that there is a shitload of literature out there on this right now, but hopefully i will say something that will help someone. secondly, its also a service for myself to help me formulate my ideas.

i realize that things are never going to get any easier, so if i'm serious about writing a blog entry or doing anything else, i will have to manually bump it up on the list of prioritized items.

my company drops this week

2008-01-27T13:47:00.000-08:00

this week, we are announcing our company to the world at the DEMO conference. after a year and a half of work, we're finally going to tell people what is going on. check out all the companies on the list and see if there are any that you like ;).

what a geek really needs

2008-01-13T20:56:00.001-08:00

with all the buzz surrounding CES and the up coming macworld it is evidently that with each passing year, there are more choices for consumers w.r.t. the electronics they can buy. as a hacker, our needs may be a bit more different. ultimately each person's needs are different, but since i have spent a lot (sad i know) time thinking about this, i'll share it with the rest of you.

first, i define what i need to do. as a software developer who is a part time hacker, i find myself having two different sets needs. writing software is best done with a lot of screen real estate. a lot of people have given me shit about this, telling me that all they need is a 80x25 screen. while those people may only need this space to program, i really think that having more space on your desktop can only increase your productivity. throughout my 10 years of programming experience, i have done many types of coding from low level kernel development to very visual website stuff. it is true that different kinds of software have different requirements, but on the whole, having more screen space does not hurt. for me, i need a large screen for development. next thing i do is system administration. mostly this entails ssh and a web interface which does not require a large amount of desktop real estate. it is more important to have mobility. this means a laptop that is not a brick and either a wifi connection or 3G connection. a lot of the systems i administer are setup to send me alerts when something is failing or "weird stuff" is happening. usually it is in the form of email, but i have in the past configured SMSes to be sent to me.

lately, i've started biking to work. well, more preciously, biking to the train station, taking the train, then from the train station to work. this gives me about an hour and a half each day to do whatever. i've been reading on the train which is not half bad, but i would like the option to do other things such as respond to my email, manage my bugs, and any other kindergarten stuff i need to do. the time is too little for coding, but maybe simple bug fixes will be ok.

lastly, i spend some of my time doing security stuff. i usually do these things in or to VMs. i'll also write tools in C or python or perl which i can do locally and then test against VMs. on occasion i'll crack WEP passwords and do some sniffing.

anyway, onto the main point of this thing.

ideally, i would have a laptop that i can run VMs on, and be portable enough so i can actually carry it without working out. i take this laptop to work everyday and when i get there, i plug it into a large display (whatever your work can afford for you) for coding. while i'm on the train, it doesn't really work to take my laptop out for the 20-30mins to check email and read my rss feeds. i need something more portable. the iPhone or another smart phone will most likely do the trick here. a lot of people are addicted to their blackberry phones or their treos for a lot of business stuff. the problem i have with those devices and the iPhone is that the data connection is really slow and there are very few third party applications. the barrier for writing mobile applications is pretty high (especially with S60) and its hard to leverage existing libraries available in the desktop world. there are a lot of UMPCs out there, but few have come equip with a cellular internet service such as hsdpa or wimax. if you've been paying attention to the ether lately, you will know that wimax is positioned to hit it big in 2008. for me, UMPCs running windows doesn't cut it. in addition, a lot of these UMPCs have a qwerty keyboard which is totally too small for me, even though my fingers are shorter than a regular human's.

next to the entertainment. any self respectable geek will have some sort of entertainment system. personally, i have a usenet account and use hellanzb for downloading things. what i don't find on newzbin i get via bittorrent. the trouble is then getting that stuff to play on your tv. i've invesigated many solutions including the apple tv, hacked xbox, and xbox 360. with apple tv and the xbox 360, you get hd video quality but they don't support many codecs. imo, the xbox running media center is the best thing i've found. it has a lot of support, mostly because of the open source nature of it. i mean, it plays rar archives! how cool is that? the only problem is, the video quality is not that great and it doesn't suppose HD content. i think there are hacks to make the apple tv and xbox 360 support more codecs, but i haven't tried any of them yet. there are also "media extender" solutions from companies such as HP, linksys, and .. whatever else. i've talked about this stuff in my last post. using something like a mac mini will be good because you can also run some servers on your there. services that you need like hellanzb and whatnot.

i have the iPhone and it works great as a map and email checker. if i try to browse web pages or read my RSS feeds, it gets to be a little slow. that's about all i can do with it. i tried to do some ssh and other stuff on it, but since its unsupported software and really slow, it didn't really do it for me. this is why i will be getting my Nokia N810 tomorrow. too bad it doesn't have a 3G or wimax. soon i'm sure. for now i'll have to settle on using my phone as a bluetooth modem. what i would like is to have the N810 have some sort of always on internet so i can replace my cellphone with skype or something like that. right now, i'll have to carry a cellphone with hsdpa and bluetooth to get internet connectivity for my N810. and oh yeah, for making and receiving calls.

some people prefer to have a desktop. one for home and one for work. this is a fine solution, but keep in mind that you won't be able to code at a coffee shop, or bring your laptop to some hackathon. you may never need to do something like this, but i do, and its something i need to think about. alternatively, you may do more hacking and less coding than i do and prefer to have a 13.3" or even 12" laptop running linux or bsd. finally, you may not want a UMPC, but an awesome phone instead.

i think i've identified three areas of computing need for people like us. one is a medium for mobile contact. kinda like the beeper of the 2000's. no longer do we get a message that says "someone called, it could be anything". now you have a plethora of different messages in different contexts all waiting to get your attention. a good phone will do this, but if you want more features such as GPS or ssh, then you're better off with a UMPC or a really good phone.
next is a laptop to hack on. this pretty much has to be a laptop unless you do all your security research in a whitecoat lab environment. i'm sure most of us would like to go out and play in the wild at some point. finally, a development machine with a huge ass screen. dont pretend like you dont need it, because you do.

that's all. i'm sick of hearing myself think.

what are commercials?

2008-01-08T02:50:00.000-08:00

i haven't watched live TV in about 2 years. sure, maybe the odd show here and there. don't get me wrong, i watch a shitload of TV. since the writer's strike, i've been led to check out other shows. for better or worst, i've watched all of chuck, and then now gossip girl. i started watching gossip girl after i found out kristen bell was the narrator, but digress.

for a very long time, i've been looking for a way to get the video on my computer, onto my tv. up until about a year ago, this area has been quite empty. recently, a whole slew of consumer solutions. these solutions are ok except that there is a lot of restrictions. these usually come in the form of codecs they support and their requirement for windows media center. i just want a GUI i can navigate files mounted over samba with. using a computer is ok, but there doesn't seem to be good GUI navigators for computers. i've tried things like linuxMCE, MythTV, and just X11 with mplayer, but they were all lacking. either you need a keyboard and mouse to operate it or its meant as a DVR. i tried MythTV because that's what all the cool kids are using. one thing i found out is that if you just want it to play videos, then it is totally slow as fuck. the menu is clunky and if the files change on disk, it is not reflected in the UI.

i'll spare you the details of the shortcomings in the plethora of solutions i've tried. instead, i'll just outline the only two viable solutions i've come across. the first is not for mere muggles. i am referring to the neuros osd. they have a $200 open source hardware solution. the basic functionality is nothing to write home about. it records video digitally from any input source you have, be it a DVD player, a DVR, or a regular ol' TV. the good thing is, you can code for it! you can write anything you want. i actually think there is already a way to samba mount your movies and play it. if you want, you can write a hellanzb server to automatically download all your TV. this, of course, is a double edged sword since you actually have to write the code or wait for someone else to do it for you.

the second, more expensive, but sexier option is your beloved mac mini. its a full computer, so you have the best software in the world at your disposal. it is a bit pricier though. the thing that makes it viable as a media center is front row and that nifty little remote control. you will probably want to google for a quicktime codec pack that will let you play anything you download.

guess what i just bought.

one battle at a time...now all i need is a better screen.

he lives

2008-01-08T01:40:00.000-08:00

its been a long time since my last post. i had promised myself this wouldn't happen, that i would keep up with a blog. its not that i don't have topics i want to write about, but rather the lack of time. for the past year, i have been doing a startup in the bay area. i know, cliche right? during the last year, i haven't been getting out much, mostly work on the company. the good thing is, i've learned a lot, about both software engineering and business. i wouldn't actually say i've learned about business, but more like finding out what consumers want and giving it to them.

there is a lot of good literature out there about the technical aspects of a startup. in essence, it all reduces to getting a small group of alpha coders collaboratively working on a piece software. i don't know if this is typical of many other startups, but none of our problems were technical. we never had a technical problem we didn't know how to solve. as someone told me this past year, "ideas are free, its all in the execution." all the problems were like when to launch, which features to add, how to manage prima donna coders, and where to get moneys.

the good news is that we're launching this thing soon at some.. conference; showing it to the world and whatnot.

stay tuned... more to come.

OpenSocialNetwork

2007-07-21T00:33:00.001-07:00

i just have a quick idea that i want to put out there into the ether. if you dont know about OpenID, then you should really check it out. it is basically a decentralized authentication system. it lets you create an account somewhere once, and then it will let you log into anywhere else that supports OpenID. its getting some traction and hopefully it will really take off. i hate to have so many account on the internets. its just not efficient.

i want to extend this idea and create OpenSocialNetwork. this can actually be implemented as an extension of OpenID. i want to create my friends network in one place. there are all these social networking sites popping up and one problem is initially creating your social network. sites like facebook solve this problem by importing your email contacts list and searching their site for them. this is not a complete solution but illustrates the problem they are trying to solve. if your social network was a create-once-use-anywhere entity, it would make life much easier. social networking sites are here to stay, so let's try to make it a little less painful.

the age of disposable code

2007-07-10T01:21:00.000-07:00

there seems to be a shift in coding mentality of late. before i go any further, i would like to say that i am not counting all software companies. they are making products and they are doing their own thing. i'm talking about people who code for life. back in the day, people thought about coding as an art, of creation, and all that other warm, fuzzy stuff. now, it seems that hackers write little pieces of shit nowadays. their thought process goes, "i need to do x", and then "how do i get it 'working' as fast as possible?". there is no fucking way anyone can use that piece of code again. they dont think about things that people used to such as structure, extensibility, and all this other shit. admittedly, there is something to be said for writing a tool really really fast. i just worry about what's going to happen in the future. it seems we can work together and build good hacking libraries that everyone can use.

to be fair, that sort of exists already, but usually in the form of specific programs. there are some great things going on such as metasploit of course, and security tools like cain and abel, ethereal, nmap, etc. i'm talking more about libraries that implement exploitation techniques. there are some stuff out there but they are small and scattered. this goes back to my observation that hackers dont write reusable code anymore. please tell me if i am wrong and there is a whole community i am not aware of. maybe there are not enough channels to collaborate. there's this whole competition thing about it and the borderline legality of developing exploits may make it hard.

please just realize that this shit is here to stay. we may as well do it for real. think about the future.

on the state of convergence

2007-07-02T22:03:00.001-07:00

recently, i flew out of SFO domestic to go home to Boston. the last time i was at the airport was when i went to japan last april. the airport is a rare place where everyone so many different people converge at one place. there is inevitably waiting of at least 30-45mins. in this time, you can see what people do with themselves when they have nothing to do. more so than ever before, i have seen people from all different backgrounds juggling multiple electronic devices. this was not so just a year ago.

everyone of course had their cellphones, but it was interesting to see how people were using them. admittedly, i have no idea what were actually doing because i didnt try to stalk anyone. i did notice, however, that they were glued to their cellphone screens typing away. i am assuming that they are texting or chatting online. a smaller percentage of people were just blankly staring at their screens. i have no idea what they were doing. there was also the plethora of ipods and laptops being charged in the wall. it has always been like this (well, ever since the ipod came out anyway). the surprise was the number of devices per person. you would see people with 2 ipods, a cellphone, and a laptop all being charged at the same time. it was a nightmare trying to find and outlet. people were sharing outlets to charge up their devices. it was wonderful and alarming. there are rows of booths they have for paid internet access. they were all filled with people not using those computers, but rather using the seat and outlets for their own personal computers and devices. all these people were between the ages of 13 to 35 i'd guess. everyone older had their cup of coffee and book at the ready. then you of course have the businessmen with their nondescript cellphone and ibm/lenevo thinkpads yelling "sell!" and "buy!" into their phones.

i gathered two things from my time here at the airport today. the first is that battery life on devices suck. they really do. everyone knows this. it is a wonder how moorse's law has been true for most everyone electronic except for battery life. i am guessing though that there is not enough drive for it in the consumer market. its one of those things that people dont think they care about, but if they had it, then they'd realize how much they had needed it all along. my guess is that once mobile devices become more integrated into everyone's lives, then they will start crying about battery life.

lastly, it is abundantly clear that everyone wants mobile device convergence. it is no longer for geeks and pedophiles as they say. even your average soccer mom can benefit from a blackberry. companies are starting to realize this and high powered mobile phones such as the Nokia N95 and Apple iPhone are the first to answer the call. people want to check their emails, chat with friends, share media, and browse the web from their phone. not only do they want it, but they want it to be easy and they want it right fucking now. everyone who has reservations about people's need or desire for such a device is fucking retarded and should get out of the industry right now. there is no room for you in this world. go back to your fucking farm.

it is a disappointment in this age to not have that type of device. i dont know what people are doing. it baffles me. it is no longer just about software. it is a consumer product and everyone in the position to build such a product doesnt seem to have the resource for the design, hardware, and software excellence to produce. i hope things change soon, or the people are going to be pissed.

Families of Programmers

2007-06-28T17:25:00.000-07:00

throughout my life as a software creator and destroyer, i have come across a lot of programmers. i found that there are different kinds of programmers are there are with all things. this is just my opinion of course, but i want to show that not all programmers are alike and some are as different as a mechanic to a lawyer.

The OS Developer
also known as the "kernel hacker", these people are the epitome of software engineers. they created UNIX, worked at Xerox Park, and built the internet. these guys created CS theory. They understand all the intricacies of how threads and processes work, and can move bits around with their eyes closed. from a pure technical sense, these people know their shit. there's a problem though. these guys arent really going to change the world from a perspective that anyone can see. now dont get me wrong, they do really awesome things that other people will use forever. they are so far away from the user that they dont need to ever think about them. i dont know which is causing what, but there seems to be a direct correlation between an OS developer's inability to create compelling software and their technical aptitude. if they were the only people writing software, no one would have ever heard of the computer, the internet, or the world wide web. it would remain a geek's plaything that only a small subset of the population would know about.

The Hacker
this isnt the evil hackers you hear about on tv, but they also arent the old bearded MIT hackers you read about in books either. my definition falls somewhere in between. they like to tinker with stuff, reverse engineer binaries, and make things work in an unintended way. now, these may sound like the hackers of the golden days, but unfortunately, most of their efforts are spend in OS exploitation, rootkits, botnets, defacing websites, etc. there are definitely hackers doing more worthwhile things, but my point is that their energy is focused on security which sets them apart from the oldschool hackers.

hackers are bad coders, or rather, they are not required to be good coders to do what they do. they mostly use glue code to piece together tools they find on the internet. even super elite hackers will only write small chunks of C or asm code for some exploit. the code hackers produce rarely has to be reused. they never have to make robust software that scales and serve millions of people. they just write little pieces of code to do cool shit. these guys dont really know CS theory, but then again, they dont need to. if they are really hardcore, they will know a lot about networking and OS theory, but that's about it. dont ever tell these guys they dont know CS theory, because most of these people will think they are the shit at everything. if you spend a lot of time gaining access to servers that contain a ton of sensitive information, you tend to get a big echo, even if what you're doing isnt technically advanced, it does give you a lot of power.

the good guys will write hacking tools and come up with exploits for the rest of the world. they notify companies when their systems are vulnerable and release advisories to keep the world alert. then there are those who keep that type of information for themselves and comply with a strict policy of non-disclosure.

The IT Professional
i almost want to exclude these guys from the list because i dont think they're programmers at all. they know how to install, setup, and maintain preexisting software. usually, these are the geeks who cant code. they play around with linux all the time and learn how to setup stuff like sendmail, mysql, apache, ldap, etc. these people usually end up programming little tools that no one can or will want to ever reuse. it just helps them. for one reason or another, they dont have the desire or skill to hack anything, so they just sit there and setup computers and user accounts. i dont mean to be down on IT people. they are good people and there's nothing wrong with what they're doing. i'm just saying they're not programmers.

The Web Developer
the web developer has emerged only recently. i cant really make any assumptions about the technical background of these guys because they come from far and wide. on the one hand, you have these hardcore distributed systems people who need to make web applications for whatever they're doing because the web has become so pervasive. on the other hand, you have the weenies who just do php and html/css to make pretty websites that either show dynamic or some other web 2.0ie thing. these people are more connected with the user. they usually have to do some sort of UI design. for example, you can certainly tell when a hacker makes a website versus a web developer. hacker websites are either plain, green and black (matrix), or they actually try to design it and it looks really ugly. i dont know which one is worst.

as for technical ability, i guess the 2D scale goes linearly or some sort of curve where the more they know about the backend, the uglier their frontend is, and vice versa. it totally makes sense though if you spend all your time with structure and architecture stuff, then you're going to end up thinking that way when you work on the UI. that's why abstraction is good, so you can have different people of different talents work on different aspects of your web application. these generalizations are reflected in the languages they use too. on one end, you have people who use java and C++ for most of the distributed stuff and then they try to extend that to the frontend. those frameworks are restrictive but powerful. its hard to do "cool web shit" on them, but everything is rock solid. then you have the people using php and perl who are allowed to write god awful code that is not extendable, but it gives them the flexibility to do all this awesome stuff with javascript and and html/css. some frameworks are trying to bridge the gap like wicket for java and objects for php.

with the way that the web is taking over the world, it is hard for any of us to avoid doing some web development at one point or another. i guess you just gotta choose what kind of programmer you're going to be.

The Applications Developer
these guys are closer to web developers than anything else. since this discipline is older and there is more work involved than developing web applications, there are usually two groups. they are split into application logic and application interface. the logic guys deal with the functionality of the application. i guess you would say all the heavy lifting. while their foo is not as great as the OS developers, seasoned applications developers know their stuff. they are all about data structures, networking protocols, and algorithms in general. the application layer is where you can feel directly when something is inefficient. while an inefficiency in the OS can be felt throughout, they are shared throughout all applications (mostly). it is hard to distinguish that in a particularly application. now if your application sucks, then people who use it will notice because they spend most of their time using other applications on that same OS. desktop applications are generally more complicated than web applications and most of these guys earn their paycheck by doing business software for the big boys like oracle and peoplesoft. reliability is a must.

the GUI guys i would say are also more disciplined than the web UI guys. like i said before, their applications tend to be more complicated. toolkits have been around for longer and they are also right there on the OS. they can do pretty much anything they want. if they want transparencies and things flying around, they can do that. users tend to be more sympathetic to website UIs barfing because they can blame it on the "net connection", but not so for applications. if something in the GUI doesnt work right, then heads will roll. just look at your average microsoft office application UI. it is much more complicated than any web application you can find, even the google word web application. personally, google word is enough for me, but there are some features that people use that is hard to implement on the web, such as track changes.

application developers tend to be the more straight edged version of programmers. they dont do anything cool with the internet. they dont do security, they dont hack into servers, and they dont make the headlines. because of that, they tend to be the people who arent geeks and are just programming for a living.

The Embedded Software Developer
these guys are probably some of the dullest people on the planet. according to society anyway. they are the version 2.0 of old school programmers who are constraint by memory size, cpu speed, etc. they also never get any praise or news coverage because their work is so fair removed from the public eye. dont for a second think that they dont concern you, because everytime you start our car or pay your parking ticket, you are using their handiwork. these people get giddy over some obscure method they found to calculate your change faster and with less memory. there is a whole other class of knowledge that they use on a daily basis that some of us never have to even hear of our entire lives. they deal with bitshifting things around and the like. i mean i totally love these guys to death, but they're just a whole other breed.

if i can say anything about these people, is that they lik to tinker. they were the kids who fixed your VCRs and played with ham radios. they sound a lot like old school hackers, and to a degree they are. they just ended up never getting into security or having that mischievous streak. they liked to solve puzzles and try to out-clever themselves. i would say that their patron saint was steve wozniak if the hackers didnt already have him.

these people dont care much about algorithms except for the basic ones. things that they were on usually dont scale that much to require "those" types of algorithms. they're more like computer architecture guys, adding caches here and there and prediction logic to try to squeeze out that extra 2% performance.

if you meet one and you're not already one of them, my advice is to never ask them what they've been working on. they may just tell you, in great detail.

the browser is NOT an OS

2007-06-28T15:12:00.001-07:00

if you understand software, then you will understand why the world wide web is a piece of shit. its really not the inventor's fault, but rather its users. the www started out as a way to visually provide information. gopher was cool, but people wanted things to look pretty. i have no problem with pretty, in fact, i love pretty. i own apple products because they are sexy.

i believe, the problem started when dynamic pages started being popular. it allowed for websites to do things such as e-commerce, web apps, and all this other shit that people want on their browser. and shit, i want that stuff too, but the closest medium to make that happen was the web. the problem is, it wasnt meant for that. the browser wasnt suppose to allow you to run arbitrary code you retrieve from a server. i mean, what the shit is that? it does because people can then make money. again with the money. it was also easy. everyone had a browser so they didnt have to install anything. the future looked bright.

people who make decisions about technology who dont understand it always fall victim to shortsightedness. if it works, ship it, and damn the consequences. well now we're paying for it in full. forget myspace, the whole www is a cesspool of cross site scripting, sql injections, activex exploits, and a whole plethora of goodness. at this time, i would like to take a step back and say unix has a shitload of exploits too. but still, my point remains valid.

now you have armies of web developers feeding the flame and i am afraid i will soon become one of them.

side effect as goal

2007-06-27T20:54:00.001-07:00

you know, its funny. i find myself thinking and saying this a lot. i wonder when in the course of history did writing software become a way to make money. people started out writing good software for other reasons, whether to scratch an itch or to impress the ladies, they didnt start writing it to make money. now they discovered that along the way, they ended up making some serious fuck-you money, which is great of course. now all these gold digging son-of-bitch posers jump on the bandwagon to try to create the same side effect, but fail miserably and they wonder why. i dont blame them one bit. you see people getting rich doing something that you think you can do, you're going to fuck over anyone to get there first.

what they fail to realize is that to make money on software, it has to be good software, and you dont go about creating good software because you want to make money. i swear to christ that these people have on their requirements doc "make money" as the number one item. in order to make money, you have to not want to make any in the first place. that's funny. unfortunately, these people do stay alive and do well in the economy that has been created from good software. they tag along inside big companies or just get money from other people who think they will eventually get some fuck-you money from their efforts. few of these things rarely work out.

and yes. there are piles of books on the subject of how to write good software and all that junk. its not going to matter to most of the people i speak of. they're so lost in the forest that they just keep hacking away (pun definitely intended) and miss the big picture. no amount of schooling is going to set these people straight.

so i guess my advice to people who want to make money. DONT TRY. just try to do something good. the money will come as a side effect, or it wont. either way, it is your best shot.

a new appreciation for managers

2007-06-27T20:36:00.000-07:00

we've all said countless times how useless our managers are, or how our productivity would increase 10-fold if we didnt have to report back to those pesky overseers. i still think that's all pretty true, but the reason isnt because managers are unnecessary, but rather, managers arent doing their jobs well. i dont really blame them, because its really really hard.

one of the major misconceptions that hackers turned software engineers have is that when they're at work, they're building a product. somehow, people get a notion in their head that when they're at work, they get to do things that are "fun". since everyone expects this, the industry has in turned responded with telling its engineers that they are suppose to be having fun. this is just not true.

the first distinction to draw is that when at making a product, you start with a requirements document that you implement and go from there. if you are just hacking on something yourself or even on an open source project, you can do any number of "cool" things that you want. in a corporate environment, you have a deadline, a feature set, and the quality of your product. managers fail to juggle their resources sufficiently to meet all of those things. an effective manager has to know what he has and make it work for the product. they have to make tough decisions about the number of features to be included, while measuring intangibles like code quality. most importantly, technical managers need to coordinate his team, and that means having people skills. they need to read people, recognize the type of people they have, and make them work effectively together. there is often an inverse proportion between the amount of social skill someone has, and their technical ability. while many of you may be outraged at this point, i maintain that its true.

with all the managers floating around, there are bound to be some pretty crap ones. that's when deadlines slip, people get overworked and assigned to tasks they are not suited for. crucial features may be left out and corners may be cut. in the end, you end up with some piece of shit software that the developer then say, mmm, when i wrote something similar to this myself, it was so much better. well, there are reasons for that. this goes into the whole cathedral and the bazaar shit and software engineering theory that i wont go into and assume you are familiar with.

my point is just that, i recognize now, more than ever that managing a software project is hard. if its not some architecture decision, then its some high-school-like personality dispute. its a wonder how any good software gets shipped.

hopefully, this will last

2007-06-24T00:21:00.000-07:00

in the past, i have tried to maintain a blog, but to no avail. i'm not sure why that is, but it could be because i had no focus on a topic. i simply wanted to blog about my "life". that obviously was not enough to keep me writing. the topic of this blog i'm hoping will be my experiences with "why writing software is hard?" this doesnt just include my experiences with writing software, but also my discoveries with other people's software.