CyKho now on Microphone

For the last few months I've been working on building a place for students to come talk to Microsoft - all kinds of people, jobs and opinions.  Now we're live on Facebook!

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CyKho Out

Over the short time I've been blogging some of my posts and comments have proven to be more controversial than expected.  I've been asked to take down one too many posts for various reasons, so I will no longer be blogging for Microsoft.  Sorry guys.

Cy

design first code later?

It's kind of funny.  Regardless of how many project management and development life cycle project and courses I've participated in, I still create software (personally) in the same way:

start with and idea

start coding

remove features as they are too hard or add some if they are quick wins

lather rinse repeat...

As I'm starting to pursue some endeavors which require the pursuit of patents - I'm starting to actually define my inventions before creating them.  It's fascinating how system design works itself out with out being bounded by the difficulty of implementing any given feature.  Writing a patent also forces you to drill deep down into your idea to ask the key questions developers so often forget:

Is it novel? Is it non-obvious? What is its application?

So often (I at least) have continued down the path of creation with out asking REALLY asking those key questions.  Only to realize after a few hours that I'd invented the wheel....back to the drawing board for me!

I know quite of few of my readers are students - and budding developers.  And, while the act of writing software can be pretty fun and definitely satisfying, it should really be for a purpose and it should be new.  Honestly, I think if everyone asked themselves that question before making something we'd have half the software we do today - but twice the number of useful applications :)

Where to work...

The top computer science/engineering grads in the world choosing the warm embrace of the corporate world generally have three choices: get a job at - Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.  At least when I graduated, they all paid about the same and recruited the same students (if you had an offer from one of the three the other two would begin their pursuit).  So, if you behaved, did your algorithm homework, and side research projects, who do you decide to go with? At the end of the day - what is it that you actually will do?

Well, having several friends and colleagues distributed across the three (all having major bases in Seattle/SF now) - here's how I'd break it down (I<3 pro/con lists):

Google

Google is the playground with no adults.  The children (aka engineers) run free to build cool stuff with very little in the way of management interference (unless you work on search/adwords/adsense).  There's pretty much only engineers on the team (they commonly outnumber other disciplines 10 to 1).  Upside - is that you see cool stuff everywhere - if someone has a good idea it can come to fruition AMAZINGLY quickly.  Downside?  I'm not sure that they're capable of doing any real enterprise level software or making a big impact outside of their founding property (search).  Also, as they continue to grow workforce health with become a greater issue.  Most of their employees have been there less than 3 years - the generally acknowledge time of highest productivity and general happiness.  As that starts to wane - how will they handle employee morale issues with no management?  No restraints means no bound on productive or destructive trending. 

For more - check out this post on coming back to Microsoft by Sergey Solyanik - very good analysis of MS vs Google as well as the practices that should be shared by both.  

Amazon

Amazon is the machine.  You start off by being an engineer who builds what they were told to build.  Eventually (after a year or two) people will start listing to your opinion.  Very hierarchical  - the specs are driven from the top down.  If you are an engineer - you are a builder NOT a designer.  While possibly stifling for a new grad used to the scholastic environment - they get shit done.  They've created one of the largest webservice infrastructures in the world - and when downtime costs them around 2 million an hour their software is pretty bullet proof.  Also - as they migrate to become more of a webservice platform (E2C and S3) - they are demonstrating real vision and ability to execute on the next big thing.  Providing this scalable platform to host web applications from will be the next Windows.  Oddly enough I don't see MS or Google doing much in this space at all - while Amazon already has a pretty good service available.

Microsoft

The democracy.  Of any of the companies Microsoft is by far the oldest and the largest.  Built into the culture is a notion of consensus between the disciplines.  There are PMs (design/managers), developers (code stuff), and testers (make sure it all works).  All three work on pretty much every project, and all three have to be happy before anything is actually released.  This means it takes a lot longer for anything to be finished  - but it's usually pretty well balanced.  Also, everyone in the company is expected to speak their mind and has the ability to start/impact BIG projects. After the first 6 months of working there my feature was on 3 million computers around the world.  Cool stuff.  Downside?  To get stuff done - its more about getting consensus than acutally doing the work.  You spend a TON more time talking than coding.  When you look back on a project (no matter how huge it was) it's still frustrating to think of the hours spent arguing to make it happen. 

All in All

So that's the good and the bad in a nutshell.  Ironically enough, the worst thing I hear from everyone (managers, engineers, marketing) is the politics.  It's been described as a toxic byproduct to getting any number of humans together and it plauges anyone trying to acutally make a difference in the world (and not in the tiny sphere of their office domain).  This is typically propogated by the people who don't care about the company or the customer either trying to get ahead (ladder climbers) or simply avoiding work (larder dwellers).

Ladder climbers will: focus their time on stealing credit and kissing ass

Larder dwellers will: focus their time on defining the scope of their work such that they don't have to do any (it's not my job!).

And sadly, all of the big players they all have politics.  Want to avoid it?  Go start your own company.

Oh - and  if you think free food can suffice as the sole reason join a company.  You're an idiot.

Please note (since someone will inevitably their knickers in a twist): these statements  are all simply from my personal observation and anecdotes of my friends and colleagues.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  Feel free to disagree/add/amend by commenting (politely please) :)

I <3 the PTO

Often times I look around me an wonder what most people are doing with their lives.  Unfortunately, the answer is all too often nothing - too many of my peers let the minutia of living take over their life.  Constantly keeping busy with parties, movies, and minor chores to wake years later discovering their footprint in the world is nothing.  Depressing.

This biggest reasons I visit art museums is to spark innovation.  Artists strive to find and express something new and different - all the time.  I'm fortunate enough to live in an area (DC) filled with this.  Take a visit to the smithsonian's hirshhorn museum on the national mall and you'll see what I mean.  However, recently I found another source of inspiration - certainly the underdog of the monuments in DC: the Patent and Trade Office.

Reading through the documents I feel a deeper connection to the community of great inventors.  Some are quite obvious: a referral system by Jeffery Bezos (Amazon.com)  other reveal work and great minds I'm utterly unaware of: drawing tools from Michael Birsch (Bebo.com).  Utterly unaware of the implication of the invention I take some time to read its proposed innovation. Then, due it it's brilliance, I'm compelled to look up (insert favorite search engine here) the name behind the idea (how I discovered Birsch = bebo = 850 million).  To me, patents, more than any other documentation of discovery (ie research paper) represent the pioneering spirit of innovators.  It's a set of documents designed for the lay person to understand the idea.  And guess what - they're mostly written by people intending to implement the idea.  So we can see how the concept comes into this world as a real product, service, or formula that moves the ball (that is industry) forward. It's odd that I missed it for this long - the place where Einstein cut his teeth and the recorded history of the inventions given birth in this country.  I can think of no better place to go discover and get inspired to make something new!

Oh STEM why won't you grow?

In recent times we've seen enrollment in STEM (Science technology engineering and math) majors plummet.  Even as the need for professional in these areas reaches an all time high (with no sign of stopping) students are still reluctant to enter into these arenas.  Why?  Honestly I think it's because the major is hard.  In all honesty - my computer science education felt much more akin to the experience other report back from professional school (med/law) than the average undergraduate experience.  At the UW I worked twice as hard as my counterparts in business/psychology etc.  Call it major-arrogance, but that's what I observed then and see in most schools to this day.  So, from a students perspective, why should I forgo my golden party years in favor of a monitor tan?

When graduation came around - I had several companies submitting competing offers and at the end of the day doubled some of my peers' salaries. 

Luckily - at least some of the media is taking notice.  Fellow blogger Alfred Thompson recently wrote about a few articles addressing this issue

.  Hopefully as the coverage grows - this concept will move into the mainstream of student consciousness.  The statistics prove out this anecdote:

http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/14/pf/college/lucrative_degree/index.htm

On this list from CNN the top earner is Chemical Engineering, followed by Computer engineering, followed by electrical engineering, then computer engineering, then mechanical engineering.  I do see a trend!  All in all (at least according to this list).  Overall the majors on this list - STEM made 51k average and the rest made 35k on average.  So, I guess you could answer the "why STEM?" question with "cause you'll make way more money".  Nearly 50% more in fact.

So that the micro-econ section for the day.  How about macro?  As the up and coming economies of the world began to acquire the necessary financial base to fund more competitive challengers to the US in the idea economy (inventions/new companies/science) we're screwed.  We have the money now - just not enough intellectual horsepower to make use of it.  Other countries (pretty much every other country) is beating out the US in every scholastic endeavor - especially in the STEMs field.  So, as time moves one we'll loose our hold as the world's intellectual powerhouse and slip silently into the abyss that is international anonymity (looking at you Britannica). 

"Save STEM or watch American Fail - It doesn't get more blunt that that!" - Alfred Thompson

Making people smile

Recently, I've started using (follow cykho).  For those of you who don't use twitter - think of it as micro blogging.  You write 140 character posts about whatever you're thinking of doing at the time.  Then, you can follow (think RSS) people and they can follow you.  That's it!

While Twitter is basically the same as blogging - the 140 character limit really makes a difference. You no long feel obligated to write long novel like posts about your entire thought processes.  Twitter only allows room for the thought or concept at the top of your consciousness.  This leads to much more frequent and whimsical posts.  The major downside is that nobody seems to use twitter history as an archive.  So, what you write is just for the moment. 

That all being said...I digress....

Today twitter was "over capacity".  (from the users' perspectives this = down).  However the cartoon the put up there to show to rejected users (see birdies lifting a whale below) made me giggle and move on with life with a smile and happy thoughts about twitter.

That is nothing short of a brilliant customer experience.  The service failed.  I should be pissed and never come back.  However, because they took the extra 15 minutes to draw a funny cartoon - I walked away happy.  Think about the ROI tradeoff here.

A - invest millions and hundreds of engineering man hours in a foolproof scalable infrastructure to ensure 99.99% up time (think amazon)

B - ask a dev who doodles to make sure to have a couple cute cartoons on hand to make up a 95% up time.

Hmm...which seems easier... hard choice.

To me this is the true secret sauce to a great project.  Make people smile.  This has nothing to do with being an effective or useful product.  That's all separate.  In evangelism we know the job to be capturing hearts and minds.  Well the "does it work/do what I need it to?" is the mind stuff.  Very utilitarian easy to test.  What sways a customer's heart "do I feel happy using this?" is much harder to test - but is fully equal in value to the utilitarian side.  However, many companies have left the emotional response by the wayside because it's harder to quantify.  How do I explain to my boss making people smile is valuable?  To a great extent I believe this can only be done successfully if the boss believes it already. 

At the risk of becoming labeled JAF (just another fanboy) Apple has really mastered this technique.  I just discovered the value of their magnetic power cord (as I tripped over mine).  The cord popped out - everything was fine.  awesome.  I was so happy about that I didn't care when a wmv crashed or I can't get quicksilver to do what I want.  Just that one moment of happiness makes up for a lot. 

If you can make people smile - you can get away with murder :)

A goodbye to FY08 and a bit on what corporate America thinks is important

First of all, let me apologize for my long absence.  During the period I have been away - my fingers have been busily typing the 13 page epic poem which is the full summer of my activities over the last 9 months.  I simply couldn't bring myself to write anymore.  But now its done and I'm happier for it.  *phew* 

Thanks to you (my trusty audience) this blog's readership has grown to be in the top 20% of Microsoft blogs with almost 40 Thousand views a month. That's quite an accomplishment!  I hope the material is (at some level) useful to you all.  If its not - be vocal - speak out - and be heard!

Looking at little factoid along with the rest of my activities over the course of this last (almost) year has made me think quite a bit about what my future manager will think when reading this.  I feel quite like the caveman making crude drawings - almost preemptively ashamed of their primitive nature in light of the inevitable progress from future times.  What I write now - and the way I write it - is what I did to serve the customer - now.  I only wonder how that will change in 5 years - or even 10?  A huge focus of my work in academia is to understand the general pulse of the audience.  We estimate there to be 2.5 million or so technical students.  In order for me to understand my reason for being I need to understand what that audience thinks of me.  A daunting task for sure.  Our hope is that social networks will provide a better way to ask students what they want and need from this company.  Only question is - if we ask will they come?  Guess it depends on how we ask...

Nevertheless, this day is quite an auspicious one for Microsofties everywhere - not just become reviews are due.  Our founder - and fearless leader for the last 3 decades: William Gates III left the building (kind of).  Today he officially stepped down from the position of full time chairman to go run his personal endeavor - the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.  Ironically enough, my first job (in high school) for Washington State University involved drafting a grant proposal to the foundation back in its nascent phases.  Now, with an endowment of over 38 billion dollars it's truly a force to be reckoned with.  With more than critical mass I'm very curious and even more exited to see how his big brain wallet impact this little blue marble (unless he joins the "lets build a spaceship crowd").

However, where does that leave Microsoft?  Traditionally, when the fonder leaves the company dies.  There are some notable exceptions who've been able to successfully reinvent themselves to remain competitive.  Will Microsoft become a GE or a GM?  God hopes Ballmer's old office mate (CEO of GE) rubbed off on him.  I'm seeing a dangerous trend of in the company of weakening leadership and a ballooning employee population.  This is a bad trend.  Sooner than later large masses of drones become unmanageable and the whole organization careers out of control (read Breaking Windows) Can our leaders exercise necessary leadership to consolidate our current position and move our behemoth organization forwards?  God I hope so.  Despite everything I have an undying affection for this company.  One of the most democratically run fortune 500s working here I feel like I can make a difference and my voice will be heard.  So what can we do to keep the ball rolling?

Get lean and mean (read Mini-Microsoft: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/).  When I started I expected the hyper type A uber geek culture.  Not so much.  We've trended towards mediocrity.  There are smart people who work fairly diligently.  This is ok for our mature product lines (office + windows) However, in the web space we NEED tiny teams of highly competitive WELL funded superstars.  When I worked for MSN we had a team of 100+ just to figure out who was using our website.  Seriously - too much.

Its about the team not the product: conventional software you can buy - saves a lot of time.  In the new world of web development - where weekly releases are a requirement - you need a strong team - because your product will be obsolete before you even get it out the door.

</rant> *phew* (again)

Ok BillG - stay cool.  You are my hero (I was voted most likely to become him - no joke).

Microsoft - let's be picky about who we're in the foxhole with and get our fighting spirit back!

How to REST in a nutshell

If you hang out with the web 2.0 kids long enough you'll inevitably hear the word REST/RESTful.  I've gotten this question enough from the CS students I work with to create a little knowledge nut right here:

REST = Representational State Transfer

In a canonical desktop application we have objects (ie cyBlog) and methods (getPost()).  If I want to get a post from Cy's blog I'd write something like cyBlog.getPost().  Now, to do anything with the actual post I'd probably store a local copy and pass it around internally.  This happens so much with the web we've stared to look at everything as an object.  So, rather than doing a method call to get cy's post I'd go to a resource - www.cyBlog.com/getpost (yes - the entire world wide web is RESTful).  This makes it a TON easier for a more diverse and rapidly changing set of services interaction.  I really don't care who or what you are as long as you can use HTTP to ask me for information.  Also, if the connection is lost - I can just retry at the same URL - no state information is lost (in RPC if you loose the connect you're back to square one).

How is this different than Remote Procedure Call (RPC)?

RPC looks like the classic cyBlog.getPost() way of grabbing data.  You just open a client connection first.  In RPC think of everything as a verb - get this set that.  REST is all noun based - go to get or set as a URL. 

Public Transportation and Clarity of Thought

FYI - this is one of those thinking in general posts... 

I just realized something interesting:

20 miles = distance from one side of DC to the other

20 MPG ~ the in city mileage of  my car

Gas ~ $5/gallon

So, for me to drive from one side of the city to the other costs about $10.  Time for me to start taking public transit.

At first the proposition of using the DC subway system was a bit short of savory (walking/waiting/shoving through masses people).  And it was.  At first.

Eventually, I began to use this time as a window of my life to think and write without the internet.  It is truly amazing how valuable this is.  I spend most of my day careening from one task to the next - futilely churning through an endless barrage of (let's face it) pointless email.  While sitting alone in my city apartment I am surrounded by virtual voices.  However, when I'm sitting in those oddly felted metro bucket seats I am - for once - alone in a crowd.  I can let the milling people around me fade away and focus my whole mind - no email | no chat | no cell - on a single idea.

In general we do far to little of this.  We've been trained to speak as loudly and as frequently as our vocal cords allow simply in the hope that some fraction of idea is heard and embraced by our peers.  Instead, we should take the time to distill our ideas down to their core and only express the essence of its meaning - saving our fellows the trouble of sorting through the extraneous verbiage.

So, in the spirit of clarity here are the two takeaways (all numbered and everything):

1 - Spend time alone - just you and yourself - to see what emerges.  Even an hour spent creating something (anything!) when left to your own devices will yield some enlightening results.

2- Less is more - cliche as it is - we often forget this.  At the behest of expediency we often skip that polishing step to reduce our idea down to its essence to make it easily consumed by our fellows.

Think you can do that? 

Graphing Social Patterns Redux: so how does social networking affect business?

My Bad Apple

Today I bought a Mac.

After spending the week with the good folks of Graphing Social Patterns East (aka Apple Fanboys) - I had to see what all the hype was about firsthand.  So, today I took the plunge with a friend (and fellow Microsoftie).

Walking into the store I knew what I wanted - just a simple dev platform - lowest end MacBook + 1GB of RAM.  Once we got in, we got a little distracted playing with all the toys - they do make it attractive.  However, once we decided we had to hail down a sales person - harder than finding a Cab in the suburbs.  With 30 floor employees (all with shirts denoting rank by armband) nobody seemed to know what was going on.  Eventually we got service (how hard it can be to give people money these days) - and were "walked through" (read assailed) all of the options that I could buy with my mac - including AppleCare - their extended warranty which only covered the machine if THEIR parts broke and cost more than a quarter of the actual computer.  On top of that, we had to wait for more than an hour (in increments of "just 15 more minutes") for them to add the 1 GB of memory.  I had time to go to a Starbucks a few blocks away get a drink come back, play Starwars Legos, check my email and still be bored as hell.  Take out battery, unscrew, swap ram repeat = 5 mins...wtf were they doing for the other 60?  Strike One.

Once we finally got them home mine had some sticker residue on it which never came off.  Strike Two.  But what really put them out of the game was when my cohort hit his power button:

Beep-beep-beep

Was all we heard - no screen activity.  FnA.  Ok - try again.  And again. No luck.  Selling us a F*ing lemon = Strike 3.  Apple store can bite me.  We schlepped our way back to the store to go through another waiting period to talk to another know nothing "I-wear-too much gel-frat boy-specialist".  Finally we found an apple employee (the manager) who deemed us worthy of attention.  He performed the diagnostic (hit the power button).  Same beeping.  Tried to reseat the RAM.  Still beeping.  We sit there for a while longer while they write up an incident report and replaced his computer (another 30+ mins).  In the end, after sitting there I let the manager know my disappointment in the experience - he offered a 57$ credit.  For about 3+ hours of out time.  Thanks Apple - totally made me feel better.

All of the applets I talked to had one mantra: "It just works" When I walked into the store that's what I was expecting.  You pay a premium for the service and a premium for high quality hardware.  I expected competency and customer satisfaction - not Dell hell.  The whole thing just left a sour taste in my mouth.

.

Google should fear Facebook (CyKho @ O'reilly Graphing Social Patterns East Part 1)

I'm sitting here listening to Ro (Rogelio) Choy of Rock You give the basics of social networking for marketers.  Most of the talk is fairly simplistic (we learned how to set up a Facebook profile) - however, one point he made was was fairly poignant:

Social networks are the new entry point to the Internet.

In the early days of the web, users use individual web pages as their entry point (first place I go when my browser opens).  Soon this evolved to directories (just a list of webpages) and eventual searchable directories (ie Live Search/Google/Ask).  Ro's primary point was the more and more we're seeing that the first thing users are doing is going to see their profile - and see what their friends are doing.  The FIRST thing - their entry point.  This means that users recognize a social network (say Facebook) as their launching point for the internet.  So, every time they log in, they'll go to Facebook rather than Google.  That means less eyeballs (and money) for search and more for the social.

As we see this shift I'm interesting in seeing more utilities (ie search/readers etc) built into social networks as opposed to search.  If I'm going to Facebook already, wouldn't it be cool for me to be able to find websites, visit my favorite links, and see the weather from Facebook?  I think that if a company can do this right, they can capture the eyeballs up stream from the search engines of the world - with better context (using data from the social graph).  Google in trouble?  Nah - all they have to do is make Orkut fly :)

(a MUCH delayed) Tour on Charlotte Report

Back in the end of April I took a trip down to lovely North Carolina to make school visits there and talk with the local Microsoft campus.  On the academic front - there was an academic dark horse - Central Piedmont Community college blew me away with really cutting edge development and educational practices.  Their focus was very focused on learning by doing.  This resulted in an incredibly excited and engaged student population as well as some amazing artifacts.  One of the most interesting I had an opportunity to record was a new motion capture system designed around tracking LEDs - which project light - as opposed to a series of infrared beams (the current standard).  This project was a great example of the educational secret sauce used by CPCC: Have student do a cool project.  The students working on this system learned a TON by creating a complete platform - not just a one-off application to prove you know a concept.  The learned collaboration - this is too big for one set of expertise or one person.  Lastly - the end result is something cool - an amazing artifact that you can bring to the table and wow any interviewer.  The blog of their department head Farhad Javidi is certainly worth a look to see what the folks at CPCC are cooking up next!

A highlight to my visit at CPCC was the Microsoft Charlotte Director Stephen Sorenson.  He was able to come along as do a great job of working with the educators to understand the needs of Microsoft in our incoming employees:

Enter the Surface

While making one of my periodic visits to the mothership back in Redmond I had the opportunity to see the latest version of Microsoft's surface - a new was to interact with computers with human gesture alone.  Essentially, this technology is designed to look for certain gestures and behave in a certain way.  Simple right?

So, how is this different than tablet technology?  Surface acutally uses a set of cameras that look UP through the screen to interpret users's movements (that's right - it can track several users at a time).  This means that you don't have to actually make any physical contact with the surface before it will react.  Also, the surface is capable of recognizing visual symbols (ie barcodes).  The icing on the cake is when you combine a wifi device with the Surface's recognition technology.  Put a digital camera on tech surface - immediately download all of the pictures for viewing and sorting. 

In the demo attached you'll see quite a few commercial applications of this technology - AT&T has already started to deploy Microsoft Surface in stores around the us.  However, I've also gotten quite a bit of interest from schools.  To me, this is quite  bit more interesting - what are the pedagogical applications of the table?    Back in the day information was the centerpiece - and the browser became the school's centerpiece of allowing students access to this wealth of knowledge.  The current buzzword around the blackboard (or whiteboard) now is clearly collaboration. Employers need it to function - and schools are realizing its value in such a diverse and rapidly changing working world.  My dream is for the Surface to become the collaborative centerpiece of the school systems.

Surface makes collaboration fun.  In the attached demo you'll see a bunch of hands reaching to play with this technology and work together to eagerly operative the software. These hands all belong to distinguished faculty members from universities around the world - all excited like school children at the prospect of being able to manipulate digital objects just like physical ones.  Imagine how real students will react?

Microsoft Surface demonstration by Barb Marshall - Surface Marketing Manager: