Ship it

Last week was March Break and because I’m a teacher I didn’t have to work (at the College). But it gave me the opportunity to help a friend who has been working on a film for a few years. It was a lot of work with one day of 24 hours of continuous work.
Was it worth it? Would I do it again?
In a heartbeat.
It is a documentary film telling the remarkable story of a man named Kingsley Tweed. He helped to end segregation in Bermuda and has struggled and raged against injustice around the world. I was able to help in a small way to get it done and I’m proud of that.
I love working on important documentary films and I love helping friends. What more could I ask for?

It’s quite a surprise go from working, working, working on something to the COO asking why he can’t find a link to the thing on the Intranet, to which I respond “because you haven’t said we could ship it,” to which he replies “do it.”

And just this morning I was finalizing a new feature. Now it’s live. This is unexpected and nice. Martinis in one hour.

When I’ve hired program managers at Amazon.com or Microsoft I look for really only one thing. Do they have the addiction?

The addiction is the feeling of satisfaction that comes from shipping. The best PM I ever hired had it in spades (and he does a great job describing it here) and many of the best developers I’ve worked with had it (here’s a great description from a fellow Robot). It’s the high you get from getting it done – but it isn’t done then – the high grows as you watch people start to use the software.

I heard someone recently compare software companies and Las Vegas casinos – saying you just have to level them every 10 years and start over from scratch. I don’t know why you’d need to do that with a casino – but I do know why with software companies.

Over time, as the successful company grows, new types of people show up. Managers, middle and upper managers, professionals, administrators – many of them with great pedigrees who know how to run big companies. But more often than not, these folks are not addicted to shipping. Overtime, new political skills become important at the company. Meetings grow. Offsites. Reorgs. Corporate planning. The folks who are addicted to shipping often don’t adapt – or don’t want to. The managerial class is addicted to reorg’ing – and over time – the two groups of addicts part ways. One goes off to ship software somewhere else, the other has a greenfield opportunity to “professionalize” a company without the old-timers getting in the way.

When I got a chance to look inside Microsoft during a brief 18 mos. sojourn, I saw a company that had forgotten how to ship software. Lots of talented and smart people. Very few addicts. For every effort that went toward shipping, there were 3-4 layers of “professionals” ready to administer the process. They were addicted to something other than shipping.

This past week, The Robot Co-op shipped 43 Places, and a couple days later, we tried to issue a press release, but ran into 3-4 layers of helpful Amazon.com bureacracy that wanted to make sure we PR novices handled the press release the right way (Amazon.com funds the robot co-op). The concern was genuine – but it wasn’t a concern regarding shipping it.

We shipped the site and cancelled the press release. We know how to do one of those things, so let’s stick to what we know. We are addicts. And it is a pleasure to work on a small team where we all know the high of shipping it.

I love 43 Places.

We are getting set to release our next effort – like always, named after a My Little Pony – this one selected by Todd and named “Tootietails”.

Tootietails is a bit of a departure; a bigger release than the last few we’ve worked on, and fairly complex logistically and operationally. We likely won’t have this released all the way until July, but we will start inviting people into test it out over the next few weeks.

The ball is rolling (finally) on a document database project that’s been on-and-off for the better part of a year. This one has been fraught with political and legal hang-ups, as well as a couple of technical challenges.

My boss and I have built an online library of company written work product. We call it the “docubase.” It’s a system for publishing documents on our intranet so they are highly searchable. All the docs are in PDF format so we’re leveraging Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) to enrich the docs with lots of custom metadata. Then we’re making all that metadata searchable.

Today, I released the system to a bevy of “catalogers,” administrative assistants around the company who will be tagging and publishing documents. Once we have a decent amount of documents in the docubase, and final questions of acceptable use and policy are answered and documented, then it will go live in-house.

A number of projects at work have been hanging around for too long. It’s time to ship these suckers.

Nailed one today. At the office, our intranet site search has been sucking lately, in particular the full-text search of corporate resumes which are kept in both Word and PDF format. For another project, I’ve been boning up on Adobe’s XMP, tagging, and searching PDF metadata. Using what I’ve learned from that project, I was able to make the full-text searching of the resumes 10 times better, and there’s room to make it more better (huh?) by getting the resume metadata in order. A little metadata instruction for the document handlers is all that’s required.

Next up will be to improve over-all site search with advanced search capability (include/exclude certain directories, sort options, natural language, etc.)