When it Rains

I'm not going to talk about what you probably think I'm going to talk about.

I wonder if anyone else is like this: but when I get on a roll, it incites a huge desire to take on more projects and tasks than I can possibly handle.  For the past couple weeks I've been at a new consultant programming position (in-house) and also managed to continue making bug fixes and thinking of new ideas for FanSiter.  In addition, I started a conversation with a friend (and currently a temporary co-worker) about the deficits of CAPTCHA and what is next.  On top of even that I was approached about helping some guys put together a small ecommerce website for their product.  And even beyond that I want to learn 3D, write a game demo, make videos, and now build a PC for no particular reason.  That is, I have no need for another PC, it just suddenly kinda sounds like fun.

When success is on, maybe everything feels like it turns to gold at your touch, does it cause you to in turn become overambitious and wreck it all?

I certainly suspect this probability and have been taking small steps to prevent it: I dive fully into my contracted work while I'm there; afterwards I give myself up to 3 tasks to do for FanSiter (or related: programming, administrative, etc.); and I am trying to keep these other projects on the level of conversation and/or nudges in the right direction rather than work on my part.  And for the others, I let myself daydream and write the results down in my Moleskine.  Having it scrawled somewhere makes it feel "sorta done" and is mildly satiating.

Vacation of Work, Lesson Learned

I've spent literally a week now playing Oblivion for the majority of every day.  Sometimes it is actually an effort not to think about working on some particular piece of code or detail for FanSiter.  I feel some achievement from such an extended lethargy, pretending to rest and relax before a new three month programming contract starting on Monday.  There is fun parts and there is grinding, I get inspired, and I yawn, but in the end I'll get wrapped up in code again with someone else telling me what to do.  It is a relieving thought, that I won't have to think up my direction as well as follow it, for a while.  I know that it will only last so long and thus a quarter year seems a decent length to take a break working for someone else.

One insight I'd like to share, which may seem obvious, is that working from the top down has resulted in the kind of code I always dreamed of writing in the first place.  I focused on quick output and then fleshed it out more elaborately from there.  This modest website production project has morphed into the meta CMS that the procrastinated WebFront was supposed to be.  Sure, the data feeds are still fixed, but that's not difficult to modify.  All of the sites are created by mixing multiple sources together and spitting them out on the other end, complete with a "skinning" system that contains a stripped-down (possibly better in its simplicity) HTML template component.  And I did it in three months, the length of this upcoming consulting job.

Always Be Closing.  Ship it.  Get it out there.  Prototype.  To twist Alek Baldwin's phrase: "Good programmer?  Fuck you, go play with your API's."  I strive to overcome my architecture astronaut tendenices and become a duct tape programmer.  More Kirk, less Spock.  In summary: write the quickest solution to show it or you'll end up solving numerous solutions to non-problems.

Okay, you knew this rule, I knew this rule.  It wasn't, however, until I saw it happen magically before me that I knew I hadn't been practicing it.

When I thought up WebFront (and WeatherFall before that -- funny they are both W.F.), I had a serious vision.  The problem is there wasn't much of a problem.  I was focusing on my own output which, when posting to blogs, is in sporadic bursts.  Lots of clumps and deserts.  So the pain I'd feel one moment in not being able to properly combine such things went away at every dry spell.  I would be left with these scribblings and "specs", but no desire to assemble them into the finished result.  When you refine something as much as I do, it becomes smooth to the point of frictionless: nothing to grab.  Perfection is a skinned knee.

So then at the very beginning of July I read How to Get Rich and it inspired me to get started.  Forgive the title, but it is fairly self-explanatory.  He doesn't talk about the seedy or filthy ways to make money so much as what prevents normal people from amassing wealth.  Along the side he waxes poetic about the problems of monetary monarchy and how, if he could do it all again, he wouldn't try to be rich ... just rich enough.  Anyway, what stuck with me more than anything is his pep talk near the beginning.  It smacks of a drill sergeant yelling at a cadet in the pouring rain.  You're not going to be rich or get this thing done or start that company -- because you're too afraid!  Because you like your comfortable life and abhor fear of unknown, of chances.  You know that if you really and truly try, in the end you may end up with nothing.  Don't worry little lad, most people are as you are, so go on with your predictable path and leave this book behind as only a disturbing memory, a reminder of what could have been if you were brave enough.

That's how I took it, I'm paraphrasing greatly because it motivated me so much that it filled my mind with an obsession to start and do and go and damn the details!  It's the end of October and I started from scratch at the beginning of July.  At the beginning of July, that is, I started by reading that book and then thinking of something to focus on.  I chose FanSiter, a side project born of two website experiments that had modest success that I wanted to multiply.  The fire that took hold, it burned down all those doors and barriers that had kept me from producing List Server, WebFront, Swordman 2007, etc. etc.  I threaded together a prototype and 500 websites in two weeks, the bulk of the seed I am still tending now.

In the months that followed I hired 3 contractors for various parts of it and have ended up with a reliable writer who is doing great interviews for the blog (which has a life of its own beyond the CMS portion) and a data scrubber who is lazy but good when they get to it (still trying to think of ways to get him excited and to work consistently).  I rewrote the hack software, which I had called version 2, and now have a solid platform to extend.  There are plenty of things to do, exhausting items to think about, but I overcame the first hurdle and there are sites out there now just waiting to be visited, indexed, linked to, and finally monetized.  That will take time, patience must follow fearlessness, but I have come this far and it's easier to keep going when you've already left the starting line.

Fear is why you haven't started, but climbing up instead of dropping down is why you haven't finished.  That's something I'd try, in vain, to explain to my past self.  And in order for any of this code to work, it has to do so on its own, without much prodding from me.  What content needs to be written also can't be done by me, because of my sporadic nature.  Technical issues are easy to solve, but these two concepts must be kept in mind as I move forward, lest I fall back into old habits.  I'm partially writing this just to rally myself back to the cause.

Forward march!

Get Out

Steve Blank just wrote a post called Get Out of My Building telling of the CEO of a startup yelling at him in an all-hands meeting after Steve interjected an unsubstantiated opinion. I smiled and then was surprised by the Hacker News discussion. Some called out the screamer as unprofessional and inciting a traumatic experience. Adrenaline fires indiscriminately in a tense situation, blocking mental facilities. A calm but firm explanation would have sufficed and been more appropriate. He'll be haunted and hounded by the embarrassment suffered from being shot down in full view of co-workers and friends.

I disagree.

Emotion codifies memories and obviously this is one never to be forgotten. Contrast with all the cool, collected, and otherwise professionally given advice I've gotten and couldn't recall it to save my ass. Whether the boss described here is brilliant or not, he's effectively cemented an important lesson. He's walking a fine line between respect and fear, I can't believe it's mere luck.

My fondest manager memories are not the comfortable ones. Heck, I can't think of any of those. Breaking down into tears as a young SDET contractor working for Gary Mock under his intense pressure at Microsoft? Very embarrassing, very unpleasant to revisit, and I'll never forget how he spoke his mind and treated me with fairness and firmness. Arguing my case for a flat-screen LCD (or later about a side-project I disclosed prior to starting) with Jim Beaver at eNom? Nerve-wracking and seemingly ineffectual against his intimidating, unflappable poker face. That pops into my mind anytime I'm going to buy something for my own business and I wonder if I could have convinced him. Chris Cowherd, a many-time manager of me, rarely resists "busting my balls" and so we've been able to maintain a candid professional relationship alongside friendship.

Maybe these aren't your experiences, but I bet if you let your mind wander to the past you'll find at least one.

Always Be Closing

I just finished watching Glengarry Glen Ross, a film which delves into the lives of salespeople with incredible [curse word filled] performances by Alek Baldwin, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, and everyone else in the movie. While it didn't warm my heart, it got it pumping, and I smiled deeply on multiple occasions; dialogues and monologues held me with rapt attention. Go watch it, or at least this clip which Scott Berkun dropped in his post on "How to keep your mouth shut".

We are all of us selling something to someone unless you are living under a rock, tied to a chair, or be utterly complacent to your "lot in life". As much distance as there seems between persuasion professionals and us, many goals overlap. It seems to me that much of what we do is convincing others after we've convinced ourselves (or someone has convinced us). The motto in the movie is always be closing and it refers to having people sign on the dotted line, their commitment and their money. Between leisure and sleep there is your goal and people leading to it. They don't even know how great your thing is, but they will.

The epiphany I want to talk about is this: What are you waiting for? Seriously. I know you've got a mortgage and 1.5 kids, but during your sacred time when you discover that bright idea and subsequently discover that no established competitor exists... why aren't you making the leap?

Read the rest at Rands in Repose.

Now go close!

Buying Links

I'm considering buying one-way links to jumpstart the SE ranking some of my websites.  Price is less of an issue than the thought of somehow being penalized for it by search engines.  Theoretically if the links come from relevant sites to mine, then what does it matter whether I paid for them versus contacting the webmaster(s) directly?  Also, I paid $299 to get a Yahoo! directory listing and I can't say that it's particularly useful.  Yahoo's own Site Explorer didn't find or count it as an inbound link.  Contrast that with $249 for 10 "permanent" one-way links, I think you can see where I'm going with this.

Mechanical Turk Revival

Moderating results from Turk today proved more inspiring than the last bout, the ones requiring people to write things.  I thought a lot about coding against Amazon's MTurk API, but then decided the cost of time (and money if I hired someone other than myself) was not worth it.  Instead I altered the way I requested the HIT's and also the instructions.

Rather than 4 HIT's for 4 different pictures sent to 3 unique workers (which sometimes gives me great results), I have only 1 for 6 which gets sent to 2 unique workers.  I also lowered the pay-out for that one, rather than raising it, because I want to do more of these and have less to moderate.  It doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense (or cents), but it does in my head so I'm going to try it.  Since I'm having to go back to these and scrub/fix data anyway, my aim is to get their cost as low as possible (about a buck per site instead of five).

Part of the issue also related to waiting to publish the pic HIT's.  I found that putting out all of them at once tended to degrade the quality: all the pics from one person would be the same for all 4 HIT's.  So I had 4x the work and 4x the cost, with the same output.  Additionally, pacing myself is not fun and caused a lot more repetitive busy work.  I hope that this new structure allows me to blast out all the HIT's at once and parse all their data the following day.

Lastly, I hope to genericize the pics HIT to use for games, movies, and television shows in addition to people.

Split and Stalled

This week, these last couple days, I've been feeling split and stalled.  My "to-do" list has grown exponentially and there are many disparate categories of items.  I installed Tasque in Ubuntu and created a Remember the Milk account to sync with it.  Now I have a paralyzing collection of tasks staring me in the face.  Rather than bang my head against all of them, getting nothing done, I decided I'd rather write about the problem.  I'm sure it will seem insignificant when I read this back to myself and then I can move on.

It's not as if I haven't had large, challenging piles of work up to this point.  I have.  Somehow I run into this "writer's block" (except it's not just writing) and at some point I chew threw the barrier and burn past my immediate responsibilities, resulting in a panting wait for the remaining motes to settle.  Currently, there is a transparent wall.  It can be seen through, but it keeps movement stalled until broken.  That makes it more frustrating to see the path extending further than where you are, and somehow your metaphorical feet refuse to budge; mentally cemented.

Okay, so what am I working on?  The problem isn't what to work on, it's what isn't to work on.  With FanSiter I am constantly writing and posting on the blog in the "Celebrity Bikini" and "Game of the Day" categories, because they require no research and are pleasing to do.  They are, however, my "busy work"; occupying the mind and hopefully merely exercising it and not exhausting.  On the other hand, trying to find bikini pictures inevitably leads me to more people who are great candidates to be new fansite subjects.  Blessing and a curse!  These probably need to be in their own list, rather than on my Tasque.

There is programming to be done.  Little improvements to the engine are queued up in my Moleskine, brain, Gmail tasks, and Tasque.  There is a major feature, the Blogger Fire-hose, rattling around my noggin.  And administrative coding for better management of Turk HIT's looms large on the horizon.  Turk, as is obvious by a previous post here, has caused some major disappointments.  Large time sinks appeared where trampolines should have been.  After giving it careful consideration today, I've come to the realization that part of how I input and structure the HIT's has flaws and is cracking under the issue of scaling.  By relying on CSV's, I have to create whole new spreadsheets containing the subjects to be re-done.  The thing is, I don't want to learn the API ... at least not right now.

Training is the most arduous of cerebral labor.  Communicating concepts in tiny consumable bits, feeding someone you hope to be hungry enough until performance matches a new part of the position.  This comes in the form of documents which I have spent a great deal of care producing; and there are only two thusfar (more on the way).  My hope is that they can be recycled should I need to find new help.  It is straining to pull apart the processes I take for granted knowing, and attempt to lay them out in an educational manner.  Gratifying output, for sure, but exhausting to the highest degree.

Finally, the business overhead and some form of meetings.  Talking to others about the project, figuring out what to say, or just winging it.  Then pondering accounting and license issues ceaselessly; a constant internal cycling ear-to-ear and without reprieve.  Sooner rather than later I must bring an accountant on board, for this year's taxes at the very least, but have been dragging my feet.  There is so much else to do, I tell myself, but then I cannot escape my own reminders.  And I dislike putting things off.