John Cleese – a lecture on creativity

Cleese makes the following high level points:

• Creativity is a mode of operating and not a talent
• Creativity happens when you are ‘open’ and not ‘closed’ where ‘open’ means a state of play and ‘closed’ a state of tactical completion-ism
• Block off multiple small amounts of time (he said 90 minutes) rather than some huge session once a week
• For creativity to foster you need:
• Space (quiet, free of distractions)
• Time (set start and end times so you can let go of other worries)
• Time (you have to be patient and allow yourself time to think and chew on a problem and not quickly resolve the tension of not knowing)
• Confidence (that you will think of something and not die alone then get eaten by your cats after never coming up with anything)
• Humor (it helps us move from closed to open and encourages play and new combinations of ideas)

At an organizational level he raised some interesting points:

• You can be more creative in groups if you are confident and work well together, but it can go bad easily:
• It is hard to be creative if people expect you to be (or appear) very decisive
• It is hard to be creative around people that you are trying to impress
• To discourage creativity discourage humor and people talking about intermediate ideas that might be bad

People have trouble calculating small amounts of risk (example: By getting in a car today you increased your chances of dying today 100x) they also have trouble understanding small chances of success.  Since it is unlikely that you win big with a startup you need to know how much you are paying to work at a startup.

Opportunity Cost

Working at a startup means that you need to commit to doing something for a few years. While the normal IT turnover is about two years to really have a chance of making money with a startup you need to be obsessively focused on that one thing for greater than two years – no side work or consulting unless absolutely needed.  You have to turn down that call from a friend who just got a job writing the billing system for Krispy Kreme with – you guessed it – awesome employee perks.

Personal Cost

At a startup you are all-in in most cases. Not all startup are like this, but the average startup is based on building a product that scales from the start as fast as possible to meet a certain market need. You are expected to work longer hours and be more committed than in a traditional job. This means it will cost you personal time – everything that isn’t nailed down or a way to recharge yourself for more work will be replaced by work. Watching TV, hanging out with friends, having a close family, lawn care, listening to podcasts, competitive knitting, blinking contests with your parrot – whatever.

Literal Cost

There are many cases where the startup just costs you straight-up money. You make less at a startup and can’t take on additional work so if the options/equity doesn’t work out you lose money.

Well then why do it?

Every startup is different – not all demand 80 hour weeks, no vacation, and daily blood-letting for 3 years before there is any relief. Some cost less than others – but they all cost something compared to other opportunities; it’s the nature of the risk/reward equation in play.

This post so far has come off as anti-startup – it isn’t. You just need to know what the cost is before you pay it; for many the rewards are worth it. So what do you get from paying all this time/money?

Learn to play offense

Big companies play defense, small companies play offense. The bigger the company the more likely they are to be protecting revenue from existing products which means there is less creation/innovation going on and more maintenance/low-risk activity. This is not as exciting, and not something that challenges every type of worker. In addition big companies play defense with themselves – politics between departments and personalities get ugly and awkward and creepy.

Avoid Defense

Getting tired of the co-worker on co-worker political crime? If you have worked more than a few years in IT working at a startup is a breath of fresh air. No HR, no maintenance, no bureaucracy, no weird politics, no grand-standing, no asking for permission, no entrenched product managers on foobar’d products that aren’t evolving.

Make contacts with people who create opportunity

Working at a big company you can meet more people than at a startup and many of them are wicked smart, but the type of people you meet working at a startup are the type of people that a few years later will probably build another company while the big company people probably won’t. Working alongside people that are smart, courageous, and motivated enough to work at startups can teach you and expose you to more than the default choice of a typical job.

Learn by watching fireworks up close

Working at a typical IT firm you don’t normally get to see the whole picture. How much are we billing customers? Who is our most profitable client, and how do we treat their contract negotiations? What is the CTO/Product Manager doing day to day? How much are we growing, and in what markets? What was the thinking behind this decision, and how was it analyzed and tracked after it was made? At a startup you typically get to see the feedback loop up close since it is a buzz saw moving closer to your neck every day. What features should we put in the product, what market should we go after, what is working, what is failing? These are questions you get exposed to all the time working at a startup.

So should I work at a startup?

Every startup is different and every worker is different and every snowflake is different. For some stability is more important, or better insurance, or maybe there really are people that like awkward corporate work parties. For others the chance to learn to move fast, build something from nothing, rub up against people that want to do things differently, and avoid all the defense and hedging in big companies are worth it.  The experience you gain from being that close to the fire at a super-small business like a startup can all be applied at later jobs with bigger companies – everyone wants someone who can play offense, avoid defense, and make smart decisions.

BTB: Broke the build

Hey Ralph you BTB with that last check-in so I have touched one of your keys to my  inner elbow to punish you with creepiness

GDOS: Grumpy DBA Over Shoulder

GDOS - I’ve never heard of cursors and definitely never ever used them also I hate NULLs and wide tables and I think that ok he’s gone yeah just do an index rebuild and see if that works

UIT: Using Insufficient Technology; using any tool or framework that makes you dumber

Sorry I yelled at you I’m all UIT with Crystal Reports over here

NTRDTB: Numb to Reality Due To Boredom

I’m still UIT but I figured it out now I have to go all NTRDTB to fill in all these fields one by one

FNG: Green programmer, new guy

Look at FNG suggesting we need to add more comments – he is so cute like a kitten in a shoebox

STR: Spec Tremor

Oh we had a STR and now it’s not a time-tracking system it’s a gambling system for cats with a social networking add-on module

THOSB: Take A Hit Off The Scope Balloon, an advanced technique in which you calm down scope creep by participating in it and overwhelm everyone until they stop adding scope

And it should use your social media profiles and advanced heuristics to tell whether or not you want to install the program for you or just for everyone and did I mention a mobile version because a remote interface into an installer is just so hot right now and also Sharepoint integration and does it export to CSV and what out internalization because I’m talking to this one guy in Nigeria who seems interested and XML plus Javascript packages and Cloud technologies and have you guys ever thought about adding advertising to the window that shows during the installation?

NTPM: Non Technical Project Manager

Hey dude go tell the NTPM that Ruby is now illegal after the election and we have to start over

What the cloud changes

Your local IT staff leaves the best practices to the experts who worry about security and patches fulltime. They still help with the setup of servers but focus more on the configuration and not the “build” piece as the cloud vendor can provide off-the-shelf configurations. This frees up your local IT staff to focus on support specific to your business.

There are some other specific advantages of the cloud infrastructure as well:

• Pay as you grow: Instead of paying in large 25K server purchases you pay as your needs increase slowly
• Geographic independence: Instead of one datacenter where you hope nothing happens you have increased fault tolerance and performance of multiple locations of your resources
• Easier deployment: Cloud vendors provide services that allow you to easily upgrade your services and rollback if there are issues

Check out the full post here.

A blurb:

Functionality and Constraints

So let’s assume you have a mobile-friendly version of your site but your product is either a traditional web application or desktop application. Should you build a mobile version?

The mobile device, due to its constraints, presents some challenges:

• It is hard for the user to enter data as the on-screen keyboard is slower and error-prone
• Due to slower network speeds it is harder for the user to consume large content or have to click multiple times to find the information they need
• The smaller overall form factor means that visually intense or detailed information is hard to consume

Yet mobile devices, due to their features, offer some opportunities as well:

• The accelerometer (the magic part that allows the device to tell which direct it is tilted) can be exploited to present completely new experiences
• A touch screen provides fast intuitive access

The mobile experience is different due to typical use patterns:

• People use their mobile devices during leisure time as well as work time
• Users are out in the world while using mobile devices so location-based data can be exploited
• Mobile users like to try new things out more than the typical desktop user (easily searchable marketplaces and free apps help this)
• People have their mobile devices with them all the time so this increases the amount of advertising or usage that can happen
• People are more likely to be interacting with other people (and new people) when they have their mobile devices instead of sitting in a cubicle or at home

Check out the full post here.

I write first thing in the morning and then intentionally at lunch a few days during the week or I jot down notes as the day passes over me.  I just write anything.  Sometimes it’s in the form of a 13 year old girl’s diary in that I dump my emotions on the page and other times its intentional work towards a blog post.  More often it’s simply noting patterns, entertaining myself, and processing whatever is in me.

Most of the writing that I do is not published – it is a language of communication in which the sender is the present me and the receiver is future me.  I started writing in 2002 after graduating college and being really bored in my first job.  I wrote it on a Movable Type blog that had a password on it – a personal pay-wall of sorts to ensures that only I read it.  Write for yourself first.

Why spend time writing?

If you don’t intend to ever pursue writing as a career or serious hobby why would you spend time writing?  I mean don’t you have Facebook stalking to do and fart apps to download?

Well let’s start with a list of small to medium-size benefits:

1. If you work for a small business you can easily use your writing skills to establish a culture, public voice, and internal attitude for your company.
2. It doesn’t matter what your job is – if you can clearly convey an idea over email, the phone, text message, smoke signal etc. you are going to be better at your job. It is a natural prejudice but a positive one: if you can clearly communicate people think you are much better at other things.  Software developers with clearly-written blogs are thought to be great programmers even if it isn’t so.
3. Writing gets you in touch with yourself – what is in you comes out with stream of consciousness writing.  It reveals your prejudices, in-the-moment emotions, and things that you can’t process without “talking about it”.
4. Archived writing is stored state of mind.  I go back and read stuff I wrote when we had our first child in 2007 and it is fascinating and beautiful just because it takes me back there better than music or photos.
5. Writing is an effective break during work – you clear your head in the same way that reading does while keeping your mind more active.
6. Writing gets new ideas out of your head and new ideas are stuck behind old ideas.

On to the bigger benefits:

Writing helps you learn to create

In writing you create something from nothing.  Most of us don’t think that we can draw or sing or dance or freestyle rap but any literate person can write.  You don’t have to be fancy; you can write a story about anything to please yourself and create a thing. Creating changes you in many positive ways and writing is the most accessible of those ways.  One of my takeaways this year was how often I came up with something new while writing.

Writing helps you learn to focus

Writing is a very intensive focus-based activity.  You can switch over to a web browser while writing but the structure of words and sentences means you probably won’t do so in the middle of typing out the word “encyclopedia”.  In this way writing is a good way to bootstrap your focus muscles – letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, book by book, obscenity by obscenity.

Resolve to write

Anyway, my unsolicited advice: write something this year.  No excuses.

The entire area is optimized for staying there and working. Because it is optimized for this, it is hard to do other things: drive a car around, go jogging, throw a Frisbee, interview people on the street, walk your dog, violently start or stop a parade, etc.

In our personal lives we tend to optimize for one of two things: input or output. Reading or writing. Consuming or creating. The environment we live in – the prevailing culture – by default is optimized for consumption.   Even our personal computers are turning into devices that are optimized for consumption! This is terrible and dangerous.

A life optimized for consuming might look like this:

• 45 minutes in the car listening to podcasts (at double speed) while driving to work
• 30 minutes of blog reading in the morning.
• Time in bathroom spent reading on your phone [Side note: how freaking scary would it have been to explain to your great-great-grandfather that people would carry around computers and look at them while in the bathroom or driving - he would have been terrified of this future]
• Time spent waiting on someone for lunch spent looking at your phone.
• Time in elevator spent reading a little screen with news clips.
• Get home read email, watch TV, play on cellphone, Facebook, iPad.
• Read eBook in bed until you fall asleep.
• Dream of an Inbox with no Unread messages.

Consuming this much makes you get really good at filtering crap from gold. Everything you pick up to read or watch you are constantly thinking “Does this suck? Is this cool enough to continue doing? Is it cool enough to tell others people about?”

Is it bad to think like this all the time? Absolutely – it is like a bucket of glitter dumped on your head levels of bad. Come on – isn’t consuming just learning? Reading and learning are great – but over-consumption changes the way that you think:

• I need to quickly judge things
• I need to use other people’s work to make myself look cool through sharing them with my friends
• I need more and more faster – the more you read blogs the more you think you need to read to get “The Top 10 Productivity Tips”
• I need to hear what others think before I form an opinion (If you have ever read a review of a new gadget before it launches: think about how ridiculous this activity is)
• I should accept the world as it is and just offer my opinion on it

I think we should all agree that getting faster at judging things is bad, but I think the real danger in having a super-efficient-filter is that your default mode is exclusion – you reject long enough and you lose the ability to create things that pass your own filter.  You stagnate at work for fear of everything you do being judged like every news article or viral video that you view.

So how do you break the power of consumption? By creating your own things.  All the things you consume - somewhere somebody is making all this stuff, right?

• Listened to the song Sail by AwolNation 65 times [Source: Spotify logs, 2011]
• Ate 31 Chicken Burritos from Chipotle [Source: Cherokee County Waste Management Quarterly Report (Q4 2011)]
• Wrote 65,000 words [Source: 750words.com]
• Learned how to spell Cheetos (there is no “h” – BELIEVE IT) [Source: personal food diary, 2011]
• Rode my bike 1,043 miles [Source: dailymile.com]
• Lost and then re-gained 15 lbs. [Source: personal weight diary, 2011]

I’d like to thank all those who helped me make this possible – my wait staff, my network of virtually personal personally virtual assistants, my team of condiment day traders, and of course my personal life coach/pet bearded-dragon. And I’d like to say a special thanks to the accounts payable and accounts receivable departments – guys there are loses on both sides and let’s just end the beef.

As I look forward to the blessings of 2012 I have many goals but I’ll just share publicly three of them:

• Ship the book.
• Earn $1,000 from something other than software development then give it away.
• Be more vocal with my gratitude and more loose with my time.

Thank you.

For technical books about databases the quality is really uneven. You have your query tuning books which are good overviews of how DBMS X query engine works, some examples of the different selectors, and some practical advice followed by some vendor copy about how the next version of DBMS X will solve everything including your inability to feel as if you deserve true love. Other books are theoretical modeling exercises that walk you through how to build an order system so that it makes a college professor stroke his beard and half-smile.

The Art of SQL is a combination query tuning/performance book, modeling book, and practical advice book. Think of it as Design Patterns for SQL – it could have easily been called the title of one of its chapters: “The Nine Situations” as it goes over common situations you will face in getting a relational database to run quickly. The book is written in the “Art of War” style and uses (surprisingly effective) war metaphors throughout the chapters – it calls performance monitoring tools the “employment of spies” and begins each chapter with a war quote that also applies to database management (In a chapter on planning: “It is the first step that reveals genius in all wars”)

This book isn’t vendor specific but still has practical examples including some advice on how to handle SQL generated by code (with a realistic PHP/MySQL example – name another database book with non-ironic PHP in it). Reading through this book was sort of painful for me since it talked about things that you should avoid which I did not in any way avoid in the past and offered practical advice on dealing with things that I had run around like a man in a padded room before discovering.  Just look at these chapters:

• Representing Trees in a SQL Database
• Distributed Systems
• To Be or Not to Be, or to Be Null
• The Difficulties of Historical Data
• Considering Indexes as Data Repositories
• Holy Simplicity

I’d recommend The Art of SQL as a good “second book” for developers looking to understand databases, why DBAs don’t like NULLs, why linked servers should be avoided, why your code to generate SQL makes DBAs beards turn white overnight, and how to best plan out your database structure.

When you start working from home you have to prepare those around you for the inevitable consequences of this new lifestyle. I’d recommend telling your neighbors, kids, pets, imaginary friend(s), team of personal therapists, and parole officer.

And of course the absolute most important person to prepare is your Significant Other (SO). A lot of people who try working from home give up after about a month and when you ask them why they say “I was driving my wife crazy so she threw a burrito at my face”. If you do not properly handle the work from home transition (aka “The Great Move Away From Pants) you will eventually have a burrito thrown at you – I just proved it with science.

When you start working from home your SO’s life is going to change in unexpected ways and they need to be prepared for this shift. The way you communicate, interact, and smell are all going to change in ways that they don’t expect.

Why? Because of mismatched expectations about the benefits to their lives.  The sad reality is that working from home does not offer many benefits to the significant other.  Maybe eventually you will look at them more and will be able to do cool things like eat lunch with them sometimes or do them small favors. But the reality is that telecommuting (i.e. riding your phone to work) has certain realities that lead to other not so pleasant realities for your SO:

You can see these realities and mismatched expectations when you announce your transition:

Honey, I’m going to start working from home.

Your SO hears other things:

The SO Management Plan

You need to make sure that your SO knows what working from home actually is and establish the below ground rules.

You wouldn’t like me when I’m working from home but will like what it makes me.

Tell your spouse / girlfriend / live-in monkey what working from home is – a risky challenge with a high payoff.  Working from home is stressful – you have to work much harder at staying in the loop, reading between the lines, networking, and focusing to get things done.  Managing the tension of working out of your home – where you used to just relax – is not easy. Let them know that focused/work version of you isn’t chill/at home version of you.

You working from home may offer no direct benefit to your SO but does offer massive benefits to both of you.

Working from home successfully is not easy and might not be all roses and free burritos for your spouse, but it does offer them some good overall relational benefits:

• When you work from home you are more in control of your environment and schedule thus leading to an overall happier version of you
• They no longer have to listen to you complain about co-workers (because cats are not co-workers)
• You can, if managed properly, save an amazing amount of money
• You can, if managed properly, have free time in the middle of the day to do other things (if you have a typical commute you can gain 10 hours a week to spend with your family, level up in your favorite video game, work on your novel, tweak your karaoke robot – whatever.  For those of your doing the math at home with an abacus: 10 hours is more than a typical workday that you gain.)

Separating work from home is a critical component of telecommuting success and is the only one they can help you with

Your SO can’t help you communicate effectively, stay organized, stay professional, and get more things done but they can help you separate working from non-working.  There are two common complaints that affect worker and SO: the SO complains that the worker continues working past normal work hours (since the office is right there) and the worker complains of being constantly interrupted by their SO during the day.  Both of these common failures are just cases of work and home not being separated aggressively.

How to separate work from home is a separate topic, but the attitude should be that during established work hours you simply aren’t there.  Any interruption should be run through the filter of “Would you have called me during work for this?”.  I have my SO text me just like she would have if I had been at work – don’t knock on the door.

I’d also suggest a month trial run in which you have very hard and fast rules about work hours, communication, and availability so that you set expectations firmly – i.e. as the worker don’t be helpful in the beginning.  The space this creates allows them to realize that after they leave you alone for a while you are able to establish yourself as a reliable telecommuter that you will be a more relaxed version of yourself.

Being left alone and in charge leads to super-productivity if you are intentional about it, and having more control means more freedom means more happiness, and will allow the sort of things that they desire.  When the Cheetos-dust clears most SOs when given the choice prefer a happy slightly crazy/stinky spouse to a clean miserable one.