Metrics

The state of the IT industry is quite sad.  The plight of the IT cost center is that it doesn't have any good way to tie dollars spent to dollars earned.  If I invest $1M in IT, how do I equate that to a business outcome?  I have to wonder, couldn't I have gotten the same business outcome for half a million?

IT managers are desperate for metrics.  They are starving for some way to demonstrably show that they are not squandering money.  It's the old "build things right versus build the right things" argument.  Because IT doesn't have a large stake in determining what the "right" things are, they are left with determining whether or not they did the best they could with what they had.  And anecdata will not do.  We need metrics!  They don't necessarily care if they are meaningful metrics, because it's better to be the guy with bad data than it is to be the guy with no data.

What is our defect rate?  How do we measure quality?  Productivity?  How good are we at onboarding new team members?  Are we up to snuff on all of our compliance concerns?  Let's get some process around this stuff!  That's likely what you will hear after a big company has acquired a few smaller companies.  The smaller companies flew on light (no) process and got by on their skill and being nimble (wanted to use the word agility but the term is too overloaded).  These small companies got to be profitable enough to become acquisition targets.  Then when they get acquired, the new IT manager, who has never built anything from the ground up, surveys his mixed bag of teams with varying degrees of process rigor and maturity, and decrees that we are going to drive consistency. 

The talented developers groan.  The ones who crave a little autonomy are now facing the prospect of becoming a mindless ticket monkey.  But isn't that what it's really about?  Reducing your dependency on skill and talent.  Predictability is now of the utmost importance.  Predictably mediocre is better than sporadically excellent.  And that has to be a conscious choice, doesn't it?  The people pushing this type of process rigor can't really think that they will be breeding a vibrant culture that attracts bright minds, can they?

Keep in mind that I am speaking specifically about the IT Cost Center in the context of a medium sized company pushing to become a big one.  Picture a company inside of the healtcare/insurance/banking/finance space that was recently acquired. 

What is the bright side here if you happen to be one of those knowledge workers who likes to color outside the lines?

Child's play

I've been reading daedtech.com, a blog by Erik Dietrich, for quite a while now.  He really stokes the embers for me about how being a W2 employee is such a bad deal for the employee.  He talks about the absurdity of the industry, and how Frederick Winslow Taylor and his studies on getting the most out of the industrial worker still have strong influence on how workers are managed today.

Anyway, it got me thinking about a particular angle that is being used to exploit knowledge workers (IT workers.  I hate being called IT, but that's a rant for another time.)  I've noticed a trend over the last several years, and it involves the explosion in popularity of the comic book super hero.  There seems to be a large overlap among IT workers, and fans of the super hero genre.  So how has this been exploited?

There is a tech conference in Columbus, OH called StirTrek.  I don't know how long it has been going on, but it's theme is centered around Star Trek movies.  Every year, they would rent a movie theater, and different tech talks would be hosted in each theater throughout the day.  Standard stuff for tech conferences.  At the end of the day, all of the attendees would get to watch the new Star Trek movie, in what was billed as a "private screening". The theater is packed to capacity for your private screening.

All of the local consulting shops and other businesses that stand to gain from the exploitation of knowledge workers converge on the conference and set up their booths.  We all know this formula, right?  A female or two work the booth (bonus points if they are attractive, but not necessarily required), and they hand out t-shirts or cheap Chinese doo-dads.  This is not unique to the IT industry, by the way, but it is probably much more impactful given the target demographic.

One particular local firm even went so far as to have their president dress up in a Captain America suit.  This is what gave me pause for thought.  If you know anything about the consulting (contracting) game in the IT space, you know that it can be very infantilizing for the consultant.  There are many analogies that one can draw here, pick your favorite.  The pimps and prostitutes analogy is apt, but crass.  The parent-child one is probably better.

If you've ever been placed in a job by a contracting firm, you know this routine.  Oftentimes, the agent will meet you at the employer's office, and walk you in.  They stop one step shy of combing your hair and licking their finger and wiping the food from the corner of your mouth.  It takes on a parent-child, first day of school vibe.  And it's weird.

When I go to a tech conference for professional adults, and I see someone trying to attract me by dressing up as Captain America, it's just .... strange.  Maybe we asked for this.  In fact, I'm sure we have .. supply and demand and all of that.  Surely there is a contingent of professionals in this space that are saying "Knock if off with the children's games". 

I'd say that much of my reaction here is easily categorized as "grumpy old man".  I would be interested to know if anyone under the age of 30 shares any of these thoughts.  I'll be attending Stir Trek next week, because I'm still a sucker for a day out of the office to hear live talks about tech that I'm not exposed to in my day to day, and perhaps see some old colleagues and do a little networking.

.NET world

I was just rereading some of my posts from this blog, and I realize that it was born out of a desire to capture my thoughts as I ventured down the path on Android development.  If you've read them, you probably picked up on the fact that I'm really a .NET developer.  I "think" in C# when it comes to programming, and that's because I've been doing it for a long time and it's been burned into my brain.  I think that every programmer has a "mother tongue", which is the language they think in.

But I wanted to take a moment here and get back to .NET.  Because my resume and professional experience are so .NET heavy, I typically land myself in jobs that are .NET jobs.  And my current position is no different.  I've spent the last year and a half in ASP.NET MVC  / JavaScript / CSS /  SQL Server land.  I am in the insurance sector writing line of business apps, and we use these tools because they help us just get stuff done. 

I'm excited that Microsoft under Nadella have embraced open source, and made some shrewd business moves to attempt to remain relevant.  I'm excited for selfish reasons, because in some ways I've hitched my wagon to Microsoft technologies with regards to my livelihood.  I have no real loyalty to them, and I'm always intrigued by non-MS technologies (see previous posts).   Tools are tools.  Let's not get into a religious war because you like a 16" long claw hammer and I prefer an 18" curved claw hammer.  At the end of the day, we're both just driving nails.

Over the past 20 years, I've flitted around different industries.  And the more exposure I get to different businesses and domains, the more I believe that the technologists who add the most value are the ones who understand their customer.

I'm a believer that a good, battle tested developer can pick up a new tools very quickly and outperform mediocre ones who've been using the same tools for years.  It's a shame that we still live in a world where hiring managers want to know how many years of technology X you have, rather than assessing what kind of problem solver you are.  But I get it.  Measure what's most easily measurable.  But I would still love to work for a company that is not quite so lazy.  Like, if a candidate lists git repos on their resume, maybe you should go take a look.  How about a job interview over a beer where you can get a more pure signal for your bullshit meter to read?

Which really brings me to this:  small companies and start ups are where it's at for me.  The enterprise and it's heavy process rigamarole and constant fear of being sued creates an environment where the pay is decent, but the culture is one step removed from a government job.  I don't mind engaging with MegaCorp, but it needs to be on terms and conditions where they act like a small company.  For example, I'm in the middle of changing teams right now inside an enterprise-y company.  But I'm going from a team that sits in an open office plan and must dress business casual, to a team that sits in a satellite office, wears jeans every day and has an impromptu work space setup using folding tables.  Those kinds of details that may seem small to some, mean a great deal to me.

Can you talk the talk?

We've all the heard the saying, "You talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?"  It’s a close cousin to “put your money where your mouth is.”  It’s intended to goad someone into action, because “talk is cheap”.

There are a lot of people in the technical space that pride themselves on being doers and not talkers.  Sometimes people who are introverted, whose fight or flight reaction kicks in when they need to talk with someone outside of their inner circle, will begin to justify why they don’t need to interact with other human beings.  “I let my actions speak for me,” they think to themselves, “I’m a maker, not a taker.” 

I’ve been there, holding an irrational disdain for salespeople, because they sell and profit off of the product that the engineering team built.  But for me it’s mostly jealousy, because they make their own schedule, while I am expected to be visible and in a chair for 8 hours a day. 

Several years ago, I took steps to steer my career down the management track.  And it didn’t feel natural.  I didn’t take to it.  I was working for MegaCorp and saw how little they valued the smart engineers, treating them as pawns on the board.   And I didn’t want to be a pawn.  So I got my MBA and got sent to leadership courses by my employer.  But I eventually was drawn back to software development, and it felt right.  

But the game hasn’t changed.  There are still plenty of highly intelligent, timid engineers who are happy to stay out of the chatter and politics.  And if one is truly happy in that position, then great.  But if you’re not, then I challenge you to invert the question.  It is no longer, “You talk the talk, but can you walk the walk”.  It becomes, “You walk the walk, but can you talk the talk?”

Talking and communicating in a confident manner is not just mindless banter, not just small talk.  It needs to happen, for a host of reasons.  The thing that engineers need to understand is that communicating with other human beings equates to getting things done.  And if you can form thoughts and arguments in your mind that are well thought out, and you can put them on paper, then you can look someone in the eye and verbalize them too.

I believe that there is a decently sized contingent of tech workers who are frustrated with the false dichotomy that you must either be an engineer OR a business person, but you can’t be both.  We’ve all heard something along the lines of “If you have technical chops and business acumen, you’re a rare double threat and opportunites abound for someone who fits that profilie.”  But, in my experience that turns out to only be the case if you make those opportunities.  They’re not just out there waiting to be filled.

Python + MongoDB

The opportunity to brush up on Python and MongoDB presented itself, so I'm spending some time doing just that.  I played with Python a few years back, in my GE days, but haven't made my way back to it.  I love REPL based languages because you can just fire it up and go!

So I have Mongo running on my machine, and I need to pump some data into it.  Since it wants JSON, I figured I'd just hit some web api out there, grab a bunch of JSON data, and then pump it into Mongo.  I already had an api key for imgur, because I was messing around with uploading camera images to it from an Android app.

So I poked around a little bit on the web api documentation, and pretty quickly I had a legit response.  It looks like the 'requests' library (http://docs.python-requests.org) is pretty popular.  So first thing I had to learn to do was import a 3rd party library.  Looks like this is easier in the Unix world because they have command line retrieval built in.  Windows appears to have it too, but of course you have to download it.

Anyway, I learned the "manual" way.  Basically, fetch the zip file, extract it, cd into the folder and run a command and it pulls it into your site-packages folder and you're good to go.

I do have to say, 5 lines is pretty terse.  And 2 of those are import statements.  I love terse.

 import json  
 import requests  
 url = 'https://api.imgur.com/3/gallery/g/memes/'  
 header = {'Authorization': 'Client-ID 31d84e7e126befd'}  #not my real api key!
 r = requests.get(url, headers=header)  

Here's an example of one item returned from the above call:

{u'account_id': 11545168,
 u'account_url': u'PCard',
 u'animated': False,
 u'bandwidth': 76530096,
 u'datetime': 1403397798,
 u'description': None,
 u'downs': 0,
 u'favorite': False,
 u'height': 820,
 u'id': u'1DZ31Oy',
 u'is_album': False,
 u'link': u'http://i.imgur.com/1DZ31Oy.png',
 u'nsfw': False,
 u'score': 2,
 u'section': None,
 u'size': 708612,
 u'subtype': u'Good Fireman Greg',
 u'title': u'Good Fireman Greg',
 u'type': u'image/png',
 u'ups': 2,
 u'views': 108,
 u'vote': None,
 u'width': 610}


I am working with memes here, because I think they are hilarious.  Good Guy Greg, Bad Luck Brian, etc.

Here's how we add all of the items to the Mongo database.  Note that we can pass the list, and it will be treated as a bulk insert.

 import pymongo  
 from pymongo import MongoClient  
 client = MongoClient()   
 db = client.imgur  
 db.memes.insert(r['data'])  

Now that we've got some data in our DB, we can query.  Let's say that I wanted to get all of the "Scumbag Steve" memes:

 c = db.memes.find({"subtype": "Scumbag Steve"}) #c is a db cursor  
 #print them to screen  
 for i in c:  
   pprint(i)  

There you have it!  Using Python to hit the Imgur Web Api, creating and populating a MongoDB with that data, and querying back from MongoDB.

Android Accessibility

Well, I was browsing reddit.com/r/android the other day, and someone asked "How does LastPass read and inject into fields of other apps?"  I thought to myself, "yeah, how do they do that"?

When you install LastPass on Android, it asks for these permissions:
http://imgur.com/H9zm95D

That got me thinking, maybe I can read the screen from the William Hill app without requiring the user to take a screenshot and then send the photo to my app.  That would be a way nicer user experience.

So, that led me to discover the AccessibilityService, and today I'm going to see if I can figure out how to make this thing work.

It's March Madness right now, probably the 2nd best thing to football, which got me thinking about my app again.  I've also been giving more thought to taking the image recognition logic off of the phone and putting it on a server somewhere.

Anyway, just thought I'd post an update here.  That's all for now.

Dormant

Well, I think it's pretty clear from the inactivity on this blog that I lost much momentum.  I haven't looked at the code for the Trakker project in months.  The NFL football season is coming to an end, and my Bengals suffered an embarrassing loss to the Chargers for another 1st round exit from the playoffs.

My son Benny is doing great.  Being a father has been amazing so far, and I know it's only the beginning of a long adventure.  It has proven much more difficult to get long stretches of uninterrupted time at home however, but I think that's just the way it goes.  I certainly don't want to be the kind of father who is always absorbed in something other than his children.

The tech space is so fun to be in.  There are so many options for things to learn and ideas to build.  I have made an effort recently to shore up my weaknesses on the web side and try to learn javascript and some frameworks.  I like Durandal so far, and I backed it on Kickstarter because the author of the framework seemed genuine and he's kind of doing a David & Goliath thing battling Google and AngularJS.

My tech goals as we kick off 2014:

• Get an app on the Google Play store.  Even if it's trivial
• Get more of a presence on GitHub so that I have a functional resume, rather than just the traditional one
• Come up with more ideas that appeal to me because I am passionate about the domain and the problem being solved.  If it involves my interests like golf, guitar, sports, etc I am much more inclined to work these projects rather than contrived sample applications.

I don't know if I'll continue this blog or not, but I enjoy getting my thoughts out so I will continue to author posts like these in one form or another.

Here's to a great 2014!