tech ramblings

Today I am at Kiwi Foo Camp, also known as Baa Camp.

It’s entertaining and educational.  I’ve met a bunch of people I have not met before - I’ve kind of gotten used to knowing lots of people at conferences that I go to.  This one has a large quotient of New Zealanders and hence I’m meeting tons of new people.

I gave a talk this afternoon called From Startup to Google:  How do I grow?  where I looked at a bunch of issues to do with growing companies: how to start, how to fund yourself, how to hire good people, and how to implement a basic software process.  One of the issues I talked about is something I feel really strongly about, and that is developing your company to have a good culture, making it a place where you and other people want to work, and where people can be passionate about what they want to do.  I have noticed that this often falls by the wayside as companies grow large, and a friend of mine commented that it seems to happen somewhere around the 100-200 employee mark.  I’m interested to know what other people think.

I’ve been to some great talks today: a free flowing discussion on user experience and another on email security, and a talk by Robert O’Brien on Atom, another on agile web dev tools, but the real humdinger of the day for me was Quinn Norton on body modification and enhancement.  The concept of a drug that allows you to control your sleep, implanted rare earth magnets that let you feel your hard drive spinning in your fingertips, or another drug that makes you tanned, thin, and increases your libido…well, who wouldn’t be interested? It’s like ShadowRun made real.

Just as a follow up on the topic of MySQL: next week I’ll be at linux.conf.au in Sydney. I’m going to give a talk on MySQL Troubleshooting in the MySQL miniconf on Monday, and will also attend the PostgreSQL miniconf (Tuesday) and one day of the main conference (Wednesday).   It looks like a great conference - I haven’t been to an LCA before and people keep telling me how much I am missing out on.

I saw this today in Ilia’s blog.  In a nutshell, Kaj’s announcement explains that this is the first source-only release of MySQL Community Edition, version 5.0.33.  He points out "I expect the next Community release, 5.0.35, to be available as source
and binaries for the same platforms as MySQL Enterprise Server and as
the previous MySQL Community Server binary release 5.0.27. Until that
point in time, the 5.0.27 binaries will be the ones listed on the
normal MySQL 5.0 download pages at dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html."  That is, this won’t be the last of Windows binaries (for now at least).

Knowing the MySQL community and new MySQL users pretty well, this is a step in an interesting direction.  Last time I heard some numbers from a MySQL staffer, roughly half of the MySQL downloads were for Windows.  On the other hand, there are not many enterprise customers running MySQL on Windows.  So who are these people who are downloading MySQL for Windows?

I know who a lot of them are: they are the same people that buy our book.  People who are learning about MySQL.  These guys are never going to a) buy the Enterprise edition, or b) compile it themselves.  What they do do is swell the userbase.  If many developers know how to use your product, more companies will adopt it.

Some may say that it doesn’t matter that these people are a few versions behind and that’s fairly much true.  I am mostly commenting here because these seems like a step in a particular direction, just as splitting the licenses into Community and Enterprise was another step in this direction.  If things continue in this direction, we may one day look back and say "That was where they started to go wrong."  I hope I’m wrong.

In the style of everybody else I know I thought I’d post my year in review.  2006 was a crazy, crazy year for me.

January:

• Rode my first decent EFA dressage test
• Said goodbye to family and friends
• Moved to Columbia MD for three months to work at OmniTI.

February:

• Began work in MD, working on Ecelerity webconsole
• Made new friends, found a place to ride, met lots of new horsy people
• Fell over on the ice a lot
• Fell in love with working at OmniTI

March:

• Finished work on Ecelerity 2.1
• Got disgustingly homesick
• Got promoted to Director of Web Development, and made tentative plans to stay in MD

April:

• Tore the cartilage in my knee and began eight miserable weeks on crutches and doped up on painkillers
• Thanked the powers that be for my friends who helped me in this crisis when I was on the opposite site of the planet from my husband and support system
• Was visited by Luke
• Spoke at MySQL UC, on crutches

May:

• Chris became a Principal
• Finally had knee surgery and could walk again
• Started riding again

June:

• Spoke at NYPHP
• Babysat the office while everybody else was out of town
• Spoke at ApacheCon in Dublin

July:

• Went home for the first time since January
• Went to OSCON and gave a tute and a talk

August:

• Returned to MD, further homesickness ensued.
• Went to Germany for long awaited vacation with Luke

September:

• Travelled to Microsoft for the Web Dev summit
• Moved to our new, bigger office in Columbia, started hiring a few more staff to fill it

October:

• Spoke at ApacheCon in Austin and DCPHP
• Rode in my first US horse trials (and was 5th)
• Had a hideous car accident

November:

• Appointed Principal and took a trip home to celebrate

December:

• Moved into my own house in MD at last
• Divisional Champion at a jumper show
• Trip home, Christmas, need I say more?

It’s been a year of amazing ups and downs.  Here’s hoping 2007 has just as many ups and less downs.

I took a photo as a marker of where I am right now:

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man. 
-Benjamin Franklin

Not only is another world possible, she is on her way.  On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
- Arundhati Roy

We’re hiring ("again", "more", "as usual", etc) and last time Theo posted something like this  we ended up hiring Ben who absolutely rocks.  This week he came up with a version of the blog post aimed at hiring a System Administrator.  Hopefully we will get somebody great.

Regardless, Eric (our Fearless Leader of Sysadmin) and I decided that Theo really needed a stick if he was going to beat on all those people.  So here it is.  Merry Christmas mate.

If there are any repeat readers (hi! and welcome back!) you might remember my post on the T-shirt index.

I finally got around to reading Freakonomics, which was recommended to me by somebody who read that blog post.  It was damn entertaining, and had me nodding my head and grinning most of the way through, even though I was trapped on a 14 hour flight at the time.

I realized there are other indicators that I use as a mental barometer of Where Things Stand.  I’ll try and blog about these on a more regular basis.  The first of these, which I was discussing with Wez on Friday, is the Little Notes Indicator.

The Little Notes Indicator can be seen in action in any place where a largish group of people must share communal space.  I have seen it in the following places: shared houses and apartments, workplaces, community spaces, and agistment (livery for the English and boarding for the Americans) places for horses.

In all of these places you will find a note or two that one person has left for other people.  We have one in the kitchen at work.  It says, "Please put your dishes in the dishwasher."  This is completely reasonable and similar signs are found in virtually every shared kitchen I have ever used.    A single Little Note is normal.

When Little Notes proliferate, it is a sign that communication has broken down.  If each day is greeted with a new little note (and possibly a new rule for sharing space to go with it) it shows that people have stopped speaking and just entered a period of resentment.  In shared houses this is usually an indicator of the imminent demise of the sharing; in workplaces an indicator of low morale among staff.

When Little Notes start having phrases added to them such as "or else" or when they begin to appear in capitals ("OR YOU’RE OUT") you know you are in trouble.  Other signs of trouble are increase in frequency, the use of colored ink, bigger signs, signs on top of signs, or people writing addendums to printed signs.

One place I used to visit had new signs each day which were circulated so that each individual had their own copy.  They were written in ALL CAPS, and always peppered with phrases such as ‘OR YOU WILL BE EVICTED’ etc.  Each sign inevitably followed somebody doing something not even particularly annoying that was previously not against the rules.  Once things start to snowball, there’s no going back.

Please God let me never be the author of such a missive. </rant>

First, the pragmatic: today I was interested to read Paul M. Jones’ framework benchmarks.  So often benchmarks are biased - and Paul would have every reason to be biased, considering he’s the author of Solar.  But he clearly goes through his methodology, and points out what he thinks might be the flaws in it.  An excellent read from a clear mind.  I’ll be interested to see the way the comments go, although I see from that and other blog entries I’ve been reading lately that RoR appears to have a number of comment spam bots (tongue firmly in cheek here).

Second, the profound: I was pleased to find online the complete text of C.S. Lewis’ essay The Inner Ring.  When I first read it (a few years ago now) it had a deep impact on me.  It was interesting to re-read this essay as my older, perhaps wiser, perhaps more bitter self.  If you’re not planning on clicking though, you may be swayed by the fact that the subtitle is "On Making Good Men Do Bad Things".  It’s about the desire to be accepted and how this turns men into scoundrels.  Sixty years old and as true as the day it was written.

In part:

To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still- just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig- the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which "we"- and at the word "we" you try not to blush for mere pleasure- something "we always  do."

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face- that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face- turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

I have exciting news.

As George put it in his email: "I am very excited to announce that Laura Thomson has been promoted to
the position of Principal. "  My role will include focusing on securing new
business and improving the quality and effectiveness of service
delivery. 

I’m really excited about this opportunity to help take OmniTI onwards and upwards, and I’m really looking forward to the next few years.  I’d like to thank Theo, George, Chris, and Sherry for giving me this opportunity.

And no, contrary to rumor, I will not be changing my name to Schlomson to fit in with the crew. 

I haven’t blogged in a while as I’ve been super busy with work.

I have two conference engagements coming up:  the PHP and MySQL Best Practices tutorial and the Maintainable Code talk at ApacheCon in Austin this week, and the Maintainable Code talk at my local conference - the DC PHP Conference - the week after.  I hope to see some of you there.

At OmniTI we’ve just (last weekend) moved into new offices.  They are really nice, much much larger, and with lots of bonus features like a training room.   I hope to use it to host local PHP and Perl usergroups, so stay posted for more on that shortly.  I have windows all around my desk, which is really nice, too.  We now have lots of empty desks, although some of them are starting to be filled, which is great news.  (There are still positions open, though - you knew I was going to mention that, right?  Zend tells me this is the best place in the US for a PHP developer to live.)

I still struggle with homesickness every day.  Riding here has helped a lot, and I have my first Horse Trials in the US at Iron Bridge Hounds on the 15th.  Wish me luck.

We are seeking junior - mid level web
developers to work on large scale, robust, web applications.

The ideal candidate will have:
- Good working knowledge of PHP, SQL (any of Oracle/MySQL/PostgreSQL), UNIX, and the usual HTML/CSS/JavaScript
-  Knowledge of database design, Ajax, web services, Perl and other programming languages will be highly regarded
- A bachelor’s degree in a relevant discipline
- Intelligence, intellectual curiosity, problem solving abilities, sense of responsibility, and drive to learn and self improve

We
offer an unparalleled work environment for smart people with a sense of
humor; challenging projects; and the opportunity to work with and be
mentored by some of the sharpest minds in the business.

Please include code samples with your application.  Applicants must be eligible to work in the United States.

Send applications to jobs@omniti.com.