I don’t know who first said that if you aren’t embarrassed about your v1 product, you waited too long to ship. At Mightyverse, we repeated that to ourselves as we struggled to release the first version of our iPhone app. After 2 weeks, we hit 128 downloads and I enjoyed reading my co-founder, Paul Lundahl’s reflection on the process. Despite our misgivings, we continue to explore the painful edge of what may not yet be a minimally viable product.

Why do I persist in this belief that we are pursuing the right methodology when the release of this marginally useful app means that many early users may be frustrated and never come back?

• A mobile startup without a mobile app hasn’t reached the starting gate. At least now, we have a demo that anyone can see. No matter how many times I tell people that Mightyverse allows you to access native language video recordings, when I show the app half the people say “oh, so you are using video!” When you are introducing a new concept, people only hear half of what you say. Even when we speak the same native language, communication is hard.
• We are learning a lot from the app and the process. Now we know that we can get through the Apple App Store process. We understand the limitations of the iPhone video APIs. With a version of the iPhone app released we can consider whether another platform will allow us to create a better user experience, while still leveraging our early iPhone work to maintaining a presence on that platform.
• This open approach allows us to move more quickly toward our goals than traditional methodologies. Even if we are a bit embarrassed, we are also very excited. We are learning how to work together effectively to balance content and software development. We know that our 23,721 video recordings represent just a droplet of language and our software does not yet provide features which support any use case particularly well. Working in collaboration with language enthusiasts and other early adopters we have developed a process of continuous course corrections.
• Having an audience leads us to make hard decisions quickly and perform crisply. Since the audience is small, we are comfortable experimenting and allowing forward motion with a post-hoc review process. Moving quickly unleashes creativity. The process is inexplicably fun.
• Lastly, I expect that the people who will discover Mightyverse in the future will vastly outnumber the people who will use it now, so I am ok risking their displeasure. In fact, if we actually manage to stumble upon some people who hate it, perhaps that is an opportunity.

So, if you have an iPhone, download the app, join our experiment, and let us know what you think. After all, where else can you learn to say “I’m sorry. I speak the Japanese of a pre-schooler” ?

I recently gave the following advice about looking for a job. I thought maybe other folks would find it useful. It’s kind of a next generation job search, it’s an expansion of what Ted Leung called Job Search 2.0.

1. Write down your ideal job, then take a serious look at yourself and think whether you would hire yourself for it. If not, what skills do you need to develop that would make you the ideal candidate for that job?
2. Write down a list of 5-10 companies you would love to work at. I would argue that you don’t know if you would love to work there until you have had a genuine conversation with someone who works there or who has worked there recently. If you don’t know 5 companies where you would love to work, then find them.
3. Write in your blog* at least once a week about something in your field that would be interesting to a potential colleague at your dream company.
4. Figure out what are the relevant conference, local meetups or whatever for your target job. Start attending those. Consider whether you could propose giving a talk. If you don’t feel qualified, what can you do to while unemployed that would qualify you to give such a talk? Do it.
5. Tweet each blog post and about web articles you read in your field that are interesting.
6. Consider volunteering doing something altruistic that hones the skills required for your dream job.

Be active in your field even if you don’t have a job. If you keep honing your skills and your ability to communicate about them, two things will happen:

1. You will know better what you want to do and who you want to do it with
2. Yur job will find you

If you don’t have a blog, start one

You have something to say that no one else is saying. Even if there is some repetition with what other people have said, that is ok. I’m sure my blog is mediocre at times, but it is often excellent, and sometimes I don’t know when I write something whether it is old hat or new insight… sometimes it seems old to me since the idea has been rattling around my head for a while, but everyone else thinks it is amazing…. sometimes I think it is amazing, and everyone else ignores it. Writing a blog has helped me figure out what I am passionate about.

In any case, your blog tells a public story about you and when you are seeking a job that is really important. Also, there are less experienced people in your field who might really find what you have to say helpful. It is both marketing and a public service. Over time, google will find your resume more often on the front page of searches, and over time people reading your blog will think…. maybe this person is a fit for this position that has just gotten approved, maybe I should call him or her before I post the job.

Start by just writing a little bit about interesting stuff you’ve read. Linking to other people’s writing on the Web invites them to read what you write (if they are following their referrers as most people do). Some of those people will like your blog and come back or tell their friends or tweet about it. Eventually you will have a small following of people in your field who are interested in the same things you are. That is unique, compelling and powerful.

Cisco CTO, Padmasree Warrior, gave a thoughtful keynote speech for the Women of Vision event. I watched part 1 in May. Reminded by Anita Borg Institute’s Year in Review, I enjoyed watching part 2 and part 3.

She titled her talk: “fear stays silent while passion speaks,” which struck me as an important way to talk about vision and about women in tech. Although I do think a certain amount of fear coupled with the courage to overcome it can sharpen an edge, too often women (and men) hold themselves back without even realizing their own power and creative force.

She also notes that work and life are always at odds.  It isn’t about balance.  It is about integration.

Here are five life lessons she shared:

1. Every transition brings a growth opportunity
   an opportunity to add new skills
2. You can gain speed at a turn
   applies to companies as well as individuals, a downturn or upturn allows us to focus
3. Leaders blur boundaries
   You need to be able to work across functional boundaries, as well as across countries and with different kinds of people. Influencing across an industry is more important than leading a large number of people.
4. The best way to gain recognition is to give it away
   People are often afraid of losing credit. Ideas are stronger when you share them. If you give someone credit for an idea, it is amazing how quickly they will run with it.
5. Opportunity is a mold waiting to be re-shaped
   There is never a perfect fit for a job. We are always in a mold and it is up to us to break out of that mold. The fit doesn’t come to you, you need to work hard to make a fit.

“The CTO’s job is not to know all the answers, but to ask the right questions”

I attended the EngineYard Road Show a couple of weeks ago. I had low expectations for a mid-week corporate-sponsored event, but I found it to be unexpectedly good. I took a few notes on some of the presentations, which I’ve collected below:

Why Performance Matters

Tom Mornini of EngineYard told us about a Google search latency experiment which measured drop-off rates when response time was slow. It is awesome that Google also measured that the effects persisted even when the previous fast response time was restored. As humans, our behavior often reflects our expectations, rather than our immediate experience.

I also enjoyed the four stages of performance which he defined as Delight, Satisfaction, Frustration and Abandonment. It is really easy to get bogged down in the wrong places and optimize things that don’t matter when working on performance. It was nice to see a clear presentation on how to prioritize (and why to prioritize) work on performance and scalability. (Slides)

Agile Deployment

Bill Lapcevic (@blap) from New Relic challenged the audience to do “agile deployment.” AboutUs often releases several times per day — averaging 10 per week.  “Smaller deployments more often allow you to back out small pieces of code” says Ward Cunnigham of AboutUs.  Instead of stress and load testing before you deploy, make it part of the culture of your development team to watch the performance effects of the live site right after deployment and make it easy to roll back and roll forward.

Engine Yard Cloud

Abheek Anand @abheek presented Engine Yard’s new Cloud product, which has a complete web UI for set up. There’s no command-line interface to it, which is weird, since it offers a deeply geeky array of options for you to tweak exactly how your stack is configured. This is the other end of the spectrum from Heroku. You even get ssh access!

Abheek notes that Engine Yard sets everything up to be performant by default — 20% perf improvement out of the box, e.g. gzip’d content, correct load balance settings. He also adds this generally useful tip: measure everything, identify top ten, pick #1 and optimize.

More about Agile

Ian McFarland (@imf) talked about agile, rails and the cloud:

• specialization breeds efficiency: cloud allows you to focus on your key business value (not ops)
• increase your bus number: the number of people who would need to get hit by a bus before it would jeopardize your project
• shift from a technical decision about whether we can release to a business decision of whether you want to
• business driven is sadly, kind of a novelty in software

Also there was an interesting talk on cloud testing by soasta.com — wish I had that the last time I had to build a load test lab!

RubyConf had a most excellent “hallway track.” This was augmented by the fabulous Poken, which allowed you to “high-four” someone who you met and avoid rummaging around for business cards. It also let you look up someone’s name who you ought to know, but had forgotten.

This was the first time I attended RubyConf. I have been programming in Ruby for almost a year and through organizing outreach workshops and other RailsBridge activities, SF Ruby, and adventures in the twitterverse and blogosphere, I knew (and knew of) quite a few Rubyists.

The best part of RubyConf was meeting people who I had previously known only virtually — from people whose blogs or books I had read, to people whose software I had worked with, to those with whom I have had ephemeral conversations with via twitter or fleeting working relationships via RailsBridge. I found people to be very friendly and outgoing. More so than at any other conference I have attended, people would just start talking to me in the hallway and I found it easy to join people for lunch or beers. I’m sure it helped to be a speaker, but I have been a speaker at other conferences and been well-known in other communities which didn’t have the same feeling of being welcomed as a new friend.

Here are some highlights:

I was impressed by Jim Meier who rounded up a group of folks who didn’t all know each other for Thursday dinner at Steelhead Brewery. I got to meet Paul Brannan, a long-time Rubyist who is one of four people to have attended every RubyConf. Sadly, for the other folks I met that evening, my poken failed me. I got an awesome introduction to Erlang from a new friend, whose name I can’t place and whose vcard was not recorded in my poken.

Lunch with James Avery, Nathanial Talbot of Terralien, and Jim Weirich, creator of xmlbuilder and rake, who warmly participated in my Ruby word game: a good use of the word “closure” in a sentence and related challenges. Jim came up with: “Objects may be used to implement closures; and closures may be used to implement objects.” This not only led to intriguing lunchtime conversation, but also to fun Japanese translation (more on that later, after all of the phrases are posted!).

Caleb Clausen spontaneously invited me to a recap of his presentation, Toward a Ruby Compiler, which he was giving to Laurent (of MacRuby) during a break.

I had some nice real-time conversation with Andy Atkinson who I has previously only known thru twitter.

David Chilimnsky of RSpec fame, whose book I have enjoyed, had been following my adventures in test-first-teaching with RSpec. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised but the internet is a funny place where you never know who is really reading the bits of information that you send off into the ether.

I closed the conference by attending larkconf, where l4rk asked people who joined the circle of beer-drinkers to share their dream. That little kumbaya moment had the unexpected effect of making it just a tiny bit less awkward to be the only woman approaching a crowd of a dozen or so guys at a bar. I talking with Brian Doll about the SFRuby community and Brian Jenkins about interactive fiction and Ian McFarland about language.

Overall the conference for me was characterized by informal conversation with famous, lesser known and novice Rubyists. It was kind of sad that more folks could not attend, but I really enjoyed the small scale of the gathering.