Leon Atkinson's Blog, page 34

How can I help you?

Back in September of last year, I decided I was spending entirely too much time doing things I wasn't enjoying — commuting for an hour to Berkeley via BART to spend equal parts of my time

doing project management on tragically underfunded projects,
participating in marathon executive meetings, and
digging around a decade-old PHP/Oracle/ActionScript/Perl codebase that preferred to speak XML/XSLT to itself.

What was I doing? What should I be doing? How could I do it?

The following questions nagged at me. What was I doing? What should I be doing? And most importantly, how could I do it?

I also asked several of my close friends if they had work for me. Actually, I put it this way: find me a couple of months of work and I'll quit my job. Two of the responded simultaneously; I suddenly had two full time gigs starting immediately. Oh boy, was I busy in Q4 2010. And one of those gigs kept going for the first two months of this year. It's been thrilling.

Meanwhile, I took the advice of another friend to form a corporation (18INT) and build a real business. Why not? I've been doing the Internet consulting thing since 1997. Five years ago, I'd made it my aim to understand the operational part of the business. Having earned something like an MBA of hard knocks, I was ready to start something new.

The past five months have been relatively easy if I don't think too hard about the intense weeks in November when I was working 10 hour days seven days a week. Now that the Facebook game I've been helping with is close to launch, I face perhaps my greatest challenge: signing the next big project.

This is a big challenge in a personal sense only. I've worked with plenty of people with a talent for selling. My personal style was to overachieve relentlessly and wait for people to ask me to work on something. I've learned that proactively asking how I can help works well, too. I just need to find the right part of me that delivers this request in a genuine and non-self-conscious way.

With less work in March than I prefer, I'm poised to ramp up my new business development skills. I hung out at GDC for half a day last week. I'll be at Web 2.0 in a few weeks and at ad:tech after that. And I'll continue to reconnect with my favorite colleagues of the past. Lastly, I hope to find the time to be more diligent in talking about what's going on with me.

My goal is to sign enough work in 2011 that I must hire one or two full time employees. I know there's more than enough work out there. So, how can I help you?

Hold On to Your Kids

Click through to buy the book from Amazon.

I just finished reading Hold On to Your Kids by Neufeld and Mate, one of my many xmas gifts. I discovered this book through Freedomain Radio episode where Stefan Molynuex interviewed Dr. Gabor Mate. Serendipitously, I noticed an hour-long interview with Dr. Mate on Democacy Now. These other resources may help you decide if the book will be worthwhile for you.

The main premise of this book is that in North America, we and our kids are suffering from a lack of attachment between each other. We push our kids away from us to attach with their peers. Unfortunately, other kids are not healthy resources for kids to reach maturity. The authors compare parent attachment to peer attachment. They show how when kids attach to each other, they are in a constant state of insecurity which makes it hard for them to learn and grow.

The book spends a great deal of time up front in making the case for attachment. It demonstrates how lack of attachment leads to problems for parents and children we seem to be hearing more about. Many of the ideas in this book jive with what I've learned over the years about psychology, so it read as a bit too verbose to me. For anyone new to these ideas, the book probably covers the ground well.

The techniques offered to foster attachment with your kids are general and seem fairly simple. I appreciated how the authors stated clearly that you should never rely on a book, even this one, as a cookbook. They offer principles and leave it to the parent to apply the principles appropriately.

Generally, the advice of the book is for parents to "collect" their children after any absence, including being at school or even being asleep. They suggest four steps. First, get into the child's space. That just mean being physically close, although I can hardly resist wrapping my arms around my kids if I sit next to them. Second, offer something for the child to hold on to.This can be something such as a kind observation. Demonstrate your awareness of the child and he can hold onto that knowledge. Third, invite dependence. Said another way, this means offering help. Fourth, act as a compass point. That is, be an anchor your child can use to understand where they are and where they should be.

For example, suppose your child is camped out on the couch, hypnotized by the TV. You may  sit down next to him and put your arm around him. You then say something like, "you're really into this show about Egypt. Perhaps we can visit the ancient history museum this weekend. Anyway, mom said dinner would be ready soon. We'll have to turn off the TV." Compare this to yelling from the kitchen the moment dinner is on the table.

I have been trying to keep the ideas of the book in mind as I interact with my sons the past two weeks. It's been easier during this time without work as a distraction. I am always striving to be a better father, so I hope to keep up the momentum. I recommend this book to any parent, even if you feel your relationship with your child is perfect. The principles in this book apply to anyone who cares for children, such as teachers. The path to a more peaceful world requires more kindness and understanding of children. This book helps point the way to a better world.

XMAS Card 2010

Today I present the Atkinson family's 2010 Christmas card!

Handwritten cards? So last century. Photo cards ordered and sent from Shutterfly? So last decade. E-cards? Not good enough. This year I decided to create a big project for myself and it turned out pretty weird. Good and weird and funny (I hope).

I created the video above with

the camera in my android phone,
drawings in GIMP by the kids,
a poem I found on Project Gutenberg,
audacity to record the reading,
music from an old 78 RPM record on archive.org,
Kdenlive to author the video, and
Ubuntu Linux (of course).

Hurrah! The days are getting longer! The sun will be brighter! May your life be filled with peace and joy!

Dev to Staging to Production

How do you keep your development work from interfering with testing new features and providing a stable application to your users? Create a dev to staging to production chain.

You've worked for months on a Web application, you launch and all is fine. Now you need to add a new feature that will take you at least a few hours to get right. Do you subject your users to the errors that will intermittently appear if you code directly on the site? No, of course not. You make a completely separate installation that only you're looking at. When the feature seems solid, push the changes to the production version. You are using a source code repository, aren't you? So, just perform a svn update on the live site and you're all good.

This diagram shows the relationship between development, staging and production servers.

Following is the method I've found works best for smallish teams working on LAMP Web apps where you can't afford to introduce bugs to the production version. This method has worked for me on teams of 5-10 coders, each working on different features at once. There's a balance to be struck between not getting in the way of development work and getting updates out promptly. It's a drag when you can't release one feature because its code is all mixed in with another, half-finished feature.

The main idea to have one checkout for your production version, one for a staging and testing version, and multiple servers for various developers and/or projects. Changes that are ready to be tested are checked into the repository. When you want to release, you freeze checkins and test the staging server. When you're convinced it's all good, you run an update on the live server and allow checkins again. You'll want at least three different databases, one each for live, staging and development.

For relatively short-term work, developers should usually check in frequently. For long-term projects, checkins should be held back. Yes, this is what branches are for, and that's the right choice for more senior coders. In practice, branches don't seem to be something that the junior members can grok. I might have junior developers working on big changes to copy over many weeks. I simply rely on backups to make sure they don't lose work in case of disaster.

Here's a set of steps I might take to set up a new development system.

Create a subversion repository.
Create three virtual hosts: www, stage, and dev.
Create three databases.
Checkout the app once each for www and stage. You'd view these sites as www.example.com and stage.example.com.
Make an open directory for the dev subdomain and make a checkout for each developer. You'd view these sites as dev.example.com/coder1/htdocs. Allow all the dev versions to share a database.
Protect the dev server from the public with basic authentication. You don't want Web robots indexing everything, and you don't want to expose scripts that would be outside of the apache webroot in production.

This system will allow you to quickly make a new checkout without hassling with making new subdomains and tweaking the apache config.

Eighteen Intelligence

My life has been quite busy lately. After nearly two years as VP of Engineering for BTS, I left to start a consultancy. It began with a casual comment to a few friends that if they had 2-3 months worth of work for me, I'd consider cutting loose. Mark Celsor has been dealing with a flood of new business in the past quarter and was eager to have me work with Vine Street Interactive. Meanwhile, Jenny Martin asked me if I knew anyone available for Facebook API work. Fortunately–or unfortunately depending on perspective–both of them wanted my help right away. Saying yes to either of them meant saying goodbye to BTS. Saying yes to both of them meant saying goodbye to daylight….well, nearly so.

Since October, I've been working two full time gigs while also making preparations for the launch of my new company, Eighteen Intelligence Corporation. For tax reasons, the paperwork won't be filed until January. California makes all corporations pay a minimum of $800/year in taxes, so it makes sense to start a company early in the year. I've been trying to work about 10-12 hours/day 7 days/week for more than a month. I've had to take a day off here and there to prove to my family and myself that I still exist. I see light at the end of the tunnel now, as one of the two projects is going into the bug-checking phase and should launch in a couple of weeks.

I hope the other project wraps up mid-December and leaves me a couple of weeks to enjoy the holidays. I expect to available to you help you with projects in January. How can I help you? Thanks for asking! If you've worked with me, you know what I'm capable of. (Horrible, isn't it?) I'm concentrating on building Internet applications, particularly those integrated with Facebook. I'd enjoy helping you start from a requirements specification and see the project all the way through launch. I can help in a CTO-ish way to set up best practices for your team, or I can be a really fast coder who helps you make an insane deadline.

You can read more blah-blah-blah marketing stuff at the 18int.com Web site. Please contact me about any opportunities for us to work together. Thanks! And since it is the season, I should also thank a few people who've helped me out recently. Thanks to the BTS folks for employing me. Thanks to John Szeder for sending leads and projects my way. Thanks to everyone who's already asked about my availability. Thanks to Kathy Marshall for accounting advice. Thanks to Jenny and Mark for the projects that enabled me to launch this adventure. And of course, thanks to Vicky and Tre and Henry for putting up with me toiling in the basement office.

The Fractional CTO

Proproportions shown for illustration purposes only. Actual sizes may vary.

One of my favorite things is solving technology problems. Fortunately, I get paid for that. Unfortunately, I'd rather do more of it. Therefore, I'm putting out a call to anyone interested: if you need a fractional CTO, ask me.

My friends introduce me to other entrepreneurs and describe me as a genius. They usually skip the "evil" prefix. It's true, I've been hacking around in the Web space for a long time now, and I have a few tricks to share. I tend to underestimate what I can do, so I defer to their judgment.  What I do know is how much I enjoy helping someone else figure out a tough technical problem. Lately, I've been thinking I'm not getting enough of that. I've been asking people one-by-one, and now I'm putting the question out to a wider audience. How can I help you?

One recent example is a social games company that needs help profiling their PHP scripts. That's something I've had to do many times over the years. Actually, it was really important when we were coding apps in PHP3. I've also been offering advice to a several startups who are trying to get to an alpha version. And I've been helping my friend John Villarreal juice up his media business.

So I've landed on this concept of the fractional CTO. If you could use the services of a CTO for a day or two a month, please let me know. I'm happy to help.

Car Damaged, Repaired

In June, I was rear-ended on my way home from work. I'd been doing the Martinez-to-Berkeley commute via I-80 for seven years, so I was probably due for some teenager to run into me. Neither of us was hurt. I was stopped and she wasn't looking. Since I pay for collision insurance, I knew I'd only be out a grand, max. As it turns out, her insurer agreed that it was 100% her fault and agreed to pay my deductible. The damage was north of five grand. It took a month, but I got my car back, and I cannot tell that it's been in the shop.

Image via Wikipedia

A curious thing happened the week I got it back. I got a letter from my insurance company, State Farm, telling me that I was more than 51% responsible. They had already paid for the repairs, so it didn't make a lot of sense. I complained and the next Monday they got back to me and apologized for the mistake. My agent, Mark Woodard, called me to let me know and he followed up with the adjusters. A few days later, I got an apology in the mail. Also, this weekend I got another letter telling me they'd checked in to make sure I got the check from the other insurance company to cover my deductible.

So, all's well that ends well. I just wanted to note publicly that while it was annoying to get the mistake letter, everything else about the service I got was great. The repairs were done by Haw's Auto Body in Concord. They weren't fast, but they were clearly working hard to get the best parts.

Back up your phone's contacts easily with Ubuntu and Bluetooth

I'm preparing to hand down my LG Lotus to my wife, who has coveted it since I brought the cute purple phone home, and upgrade to an HTC Evo. We were anticipating the pain of re-entering contacts, so I tried BitPim, software I hadn't used for several years. It failed on both of our current phones. I was about to go with Sprint's solution for backing up contacts but then I discovered that if you've got a bluetooth radio, you can easily move contacts to and from the phone.

Image via Wikipedia

Vicky's new(ish) laptop has bluetooth. I hit the function key and the little applet fired up. I told my phone to make itself visible for 3 minutes and paired it with the laptop. This is all painless and mostly automatic through the applet. I played around and could move files between the two, but contacts wouldn't send. Then I discovered that you have to tell the applet that it's OK for the phone to send it contacts. It's a button under the list of known devices. The Lotus has a menu item for sending all contacts, and they came over quickly. Vicky's lame Samsung SPH-M220 requires clicking on a contact, going through the whole process of connecting via bluetooth and then sending…for each contact. She's going through her list right now.

Once again, it just works on Ubuntu.

Are you ready to swim?

"The truth hits everyone like a million atom bombs, and I can't understand how everybody can be so calm. Time is running out and we all just sit around. So leave your message at the beep, 'cause I am leaving town." –Leave a Message, Get Dead

Yesterday was Tax Freedom Day, although here in California it's April 14th if you consider our higher-than-average income taxes. Divide up the days you work: the first hundred days are for the government. The balance are for you to spend on yourself, if you ignore all the other extortion you pay as sales tax or other fees.

It's impossible to "get by" in the US now. The average family is left with $100/month after mortgage, food and health insurance, a scenario assuming no vacations and one car! So many people are out of work and leaning on government to take care of them, that 33 states are out of money to fund jobless benefits. California is at the top of the list. When income can be variable, a rational approach is to save during times of plenty to cover the lean times. Government does not work this way. Government moves by political pull and the expedient solution of the moment.

As all odds mount against any rational, moral person being able to make his way through life here, the Galt Meter tilts into the red zone. Can you imagine a meter that shows how close we are to the nightmare world described at the end of Atlas Shrugged, a doomsday clock that shows how close we are to destruction by weapons of immorality? It seems we're now at a 53/47 split. Nearly half of us work so the other half can loaf and tell us what to do. Furthermore, the top 10% of producers pay 73% of taxes.

Mark Steyn calls tax-payers suckers, the rubes filling PT Barnum's pockets. In fact, we are livestock. Within the system, we have little choice but to pay. You can choose self-destruction in the form of unbending resistance, or you can choose self-destruction by exchanging your soul for a whip in your hand. Disobey or obey. This dichotomy is false. The alternative is to stop participating.

The way forward is out. An incredible opportunity approaches. Statism is dead!  What was a theoretical conclusion will soon be demonstrated empirically. Because of its imminent failure, statism's captains will lose sanction, and no longer be recognized as authority. That inspires fear and excitement, similar to jumping off a high cliff into deep water. Are you ready to swim?

References

http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxfreedomday/
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=529854
http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/08/news/economy/state_funds_jobless_benefits/index.htm
http://www.gainspainscapital.com/index.php?view=article&id=80
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2010/04/galt-meter-hits-red-zone-as-half-of-all.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGIgOIFdnMQ&fmt=18
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452011876?tag=leonatkinson-20
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b6YbkG5-W4

Rollback of Welfare Not the Only Way Out

In today's TIA Daily, Robert Tracinski mentioned the Washington Posts's Robert Samuelson's continual apoplexy over the U.S. governments reckless course towards insolvency, and he concluded, "The bills are coming due for the welfare state, and the result is that we are entering a period of permanent fiscal crisis—a crisis that can only be solved if we decide to begin rolling back the welfare state."

I would like to respectfully take issue with one word in that conclusion: only. Certainly, a rollback of entitlements would slow the inevitable decline of the state, but it's not the only way, nor the most likely. Imagine the federal government coming to a consensus such as, "we just can't afford it right now, so we're halting subsidies for agriculture." That's an unlikely fantasy. What seems more plausible is a sudden disappearance of multiple programs, and the ones who's beneficiaries have the least pull. Realistically, you can already see this. Big corporations get giant bailouts but schools want for funding.

It seems more likely that we will find decisions to cutback left unmade but made for us thanks to the hard facts of reality. These government programs will meet their just ends, and there will certainly be strong emotional reactions, tantrums even. I'm speaking euphemistically–I won't be surprised when there are riots.

Some of these basic services our parents and grandparents handed over to the government are necessary and desired. (Being able to drive around on pavement is nice!) When the government fails to provide them, an opportunity might be seized. Without the a gun-powered monopoly chasing entrepreneurs away, what kind of wonderful solutions can we expect? I'm not sure, but I have been considering how I might help. Is anyone else thinking about how a collapse will provide an unprecedented chance to be productive?