Rework

I got my copy of "Rework" by the 37signals guys today - just in time to take it on the plane with me to Buenos Aires! I'm exited to read the latest by David + Jason.

Setting User Expectations

We are currently nearing the end of a few day process to transition our email server from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 and it's gone relatively well from an end-user upset perspective. (The rationale behind staying with on-site Exchange instead of moving to the cloud will follow in a separate post.)

I have it easier than many because my "customers" are generally the employees of our company, so it's easier to set and manage their expectations. Regardless, it still needs to be handled delicately to minimize their upset and resistance to change.

I think a few key factors really helped in the process

1. (Self evident) Let everyone know what to expect out of their experience during the transition
2. (Self evident) Work around the customer's schedule. In practice this meant scheduling downtime for our 9 to 5 employees from 8pm to 6am and scheduling downtime for restaurant managers from about 2am until 8am
3. Be honest about the fact that you'll run in to problems and fix them immediately

Finally, I have to give Microsoft props for ensuring that Outlook 2007 will automatically recognize the new 2010 server without any user action. For our office users, this should make the transition go essentially unnoticed.

Schedules

I used to go by the mantra that schedules were bullshit. I wouldn't give people deadlines or commit to them unless I knew we could deliver something on time.

However, I've revised my stance: schedules are just a guess. We can learn a bit about how long it takes us to write a given type of app and make slightly better guesses in the future.

So why make a schedule at all? Communication. If the other department heads who rely on my team for both day to day and project support don't have a clue what I'm working on, it's hard for them to understand why I'm not working on whatever they need. A schedule helps to explain why everything can't be done for everyone all at one.

Scaling Rails

One of the guys on my team (our staff developer) and I went to an event this morning put on by EngineYard and a few of their partners this morning. The content was pretty informative, albeit a little on the salesy side. The content mostly focused on EngineYard's new cloud product and how easy it is to provision servers.

EngineYard's CTO said something which seemed rather poignant: The demo environment they were using during the presentation (which consisted of three Amazon EC2 instances: two app servers and a database server) should be sufficient to host about 99% of all rails applications on the internet at this point.

That's absolutely insane. The hard costs for the infrastructure of a web-based startup are crazy cheap.

NY Times Article on Credit Card Fees

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/business/16fees.html?_r=2

Why oh why Microsoft?

Seriously. WTF?

We just set up a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine for deployment of our Catering management application. It wasn't responding when I tried to use Remote Desktop to manage it, so my first inclination was to ping the machine to see if it was up. That didn't work, so I opened up the VMWare Infrastructure console, booted it up and tried pinging it again.

Still no dice.

So, I logged in through VMWare and checked that the IP address of the machine was configured correctly. Check.

Still no ping.

Next, I made sure I could ping out and connect to the rest of the network from that machine. Check.

So I'm now thinking it's that pesky Windows firewall again. However, the imcp / ping settings aren't there either, but there is a little link to windows help. I'm on the right track. Yaaay.

However, the little article isn't horribly descriptive and points me to the "Windows Firewall with Advanced Security" Microsoft Management Console snap-in. Great.

Open that up, look around, still can't find anything about imcp under "Core Network" section.

Hello Google. I am angry. Please help me.

I find this helpful article : http://www.petri.co.il/enable-ping-windows-2008-server.htm

The instructions prove helpful and I now have a server which will respond to a ping, but really? Why the f*** is the ping setting buried in a "File and Print Services" heading? Who thinks to themselves "I want to make a server respond to pings. That means I should think about print services!"

Business Email Style Guide (pt 1)

I am a huge fan of using email to get things done. However, the way in which some people use it bugs the crap out of me. It's entirely possible that I'm just more anal than most, but there are some simple rules which I think bear restating:

• I don't care that you're not writing a formal letter. Using bad grammar, stupid abbreviations (such as "thanx") or incomplete sentences all make you sound like an idiot. I don't want to read your email and will probably discount whatever you have to say in it if I think you sound stupid.
• Email is a wonderful mode of communication for a few things: quick thoughts or requests, formal communication where it's important to be able to refer back to what was said at a later date and asynchronous communication amongst others.
• Email is not a good tool when a discussion about something simple drags on for more than two emails in either direction. Did everyone forget about their phones with the advent of crackberries?
• Make whatever point you're trying to make clearly and quickly. You're not writing a novel. (Or even a short story.)
• Before you carbon copy anyone, seriously consider whether they need to get whatever it is that you're about to send them. It's one of my pet peeves to get an email which I don't really care to read just because someone thinks they need to "keep me in the loop," or to receive an email with other people cc'd for the same reason.
  
• Contrary to what some other folks preach, courtesy thank you and you're welcome emails are just fine.
  
• Lastly, please don't ever send anyone an email from your smartphone which serves little to no purpose. My very informal observation is that people tend use such devices to communicate more frequently and faster, but with far less valuable thoughts than they would otherwise.

Call me old fashioned or crabby, but I hate to see the demise of the art of communication because of a collective decline in the standards we hold ourselves to.