Hodson Blog

Eclipse Day at the GooglePlex

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:47:39 -0800

Last Thursday (8/26/2010) I attended Eclipse Day, held once again at Google.

In addition to the keynote by Ian Skerrett from the Eclipse Foundation, there were twelve presentations and an “unconference” session with 8 different topics of interest.

Overall, Eclipse Day rocked! Great presenters, some extremely relevant to my world including:

Next Generation Maven Development Stack – Jason van Zyl from Sonatype
Super interesting talk about next gen tools for Maven, Tycho, Hudson, etc. Presentation is here.
Eclipse Mylyn: from Stack Trace to Scrum – Mik Kersten from Tasktop
Presentation is here.

There were also presentations on mobile, git and various toolsets. (All the presentations are here)

If you use Eclipse, I recommend checking this out next time they come to Mt View

Six Books I Read to Understand the Financial Collapse of 2008

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:00:11 -0800

Like most people, I watched the collapse of the global financial system in 2008 but didn’t really understand the root cause. Bear Stearns, Lehman, AIG and on and on. Just like 2001, I did notice that my brokerage statements got ugly quick.

While training for the North Olympic Discovery Marathon, I decided to get a bunch of books on the subject and figure out what was behind all the TLAs I kept seeing (CDO, CDS, etc). After reading a ton of books, I found the six books below to be quite helpful and I now have a much better understanding of what it means to be highly leveraged and why there has been such a ruckus about regulating (or not) derivatives.

	Towers of Gold – Great book about the history of banking in the Old West, Wells Fargo and gold. Very helpful in understanding the origins of the U.S. banking system. Here’s an interesting blog post by the author as well.
	The Ascent of Money – Niall Ferguson examines the history of currency as we know it today, along with major historical bubbles and their impact.
	The Big Short – Another excellent Michael Lewis book. The author follows two hedge fund managers that figure out exactly how over-leveraged the housing market is and profit hugely (warning people all the while; their message fell on deaf ears). One of their big problems was trying to find the worst of the worst CDOs and their synthetic counterpart, the CDS. There were so many terrible offerings, it was hard to choose the worst.
	Too Big To Fail – A massive tome, written from the perspective of the bankers, the Fed and the Treasury. The failure of Lehman figures prominently. I came away with a better appreciation of Paulson, Geithner and Bernanke.
	The End of Wall Street – Lowenstein looks at what happened before 2008 (i.e. how did we get in this mess?). He delves into the world of the Maestro (Greenspan) and provides some additional insight into WAMU and Citibank that wasn’t covered in Too Big To Fail.
	Past Due – Written by Peter Goodman from the New York Times, this book examines how the average American was affected by the meltdown. The author looks in the house-is-my-ATM meme and discovers that some surprising things. I was seriously depressed after reading this book. Goodman tries to lay out a path for the U.S. to be successful in the future in the last two chapters. It didn’t cheer me up.

Iterating in the Open Presentation

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:13:36 -0800

I’ve been working with the folks at SSE Labs (aka the “Stanford Incubator”) this summer and as a Mentor, I was asked to give a presentation to the current teams.

Based on previous experiences and the work Bacon (Mike) and I did with PersistentFan, my presentation focused heavily on how to launch with a minimum desirable product and iterate quickly. As you might guess, it emphasized openness instead of going stealth.

Presentation is embedded below:

Iterating In the Open

View more presentations from Dave Hodson.

North Olympic Discovery Marathon – Finisher (Again)!

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:00:06 -0800

Last Sunday (6/6/2010), we ran the North Olympic Discovery Marathon. (I ran this marathon 5 years ago; race report is here) Runner’s World calls this marathon a “boutique” event due to the smallish nature, which was part of the attraction after running San Antonio in November with 30,000 other folks.

Training for the NODM was a bit more haphazard than my last marathon. Between injuries and cold/flu/allergies I felt like I missed half my training (although my running log tells me I made all my long runs)

Like last time, we flew into SEA on Saturday and drove out to Port Angeles, this time making a detour through Port Townsend. Very scenic drive with gorgeous weather (which wouldn’t hold). We hit the tiny expo, picked up our numbers and then were off to the excellent pasta feed (note: when the pasta feed is sponsored by the Sons of Italy, it is going to be a good meal).

The race started at 9am (!) and we had to catch a bus to the start. Heading to the finish line, we caught the bus at 6:45 and around 7:15 arrived at the starting line. The weather was threatening rain, but the temperature was a very nice 55 degrees and the race sponsors had a nice dry largish building open for the 400 marathoners while we waited for the starting gun.

Initially, we ran a 5 mile loop, which took us south-east of Sequim and then back to the start. From there we headed in a westerly direction, across some incredibly beautiful terrain. The course was very similar to the last time I ran this race, however, the Olympic Discovery Trail has expanded somewhat so we spent less time on the streets of Sequim. We crossed several rivers/creeks with wooden bridges and great views.

Like last time, the 3 ravines were larger than life, especially the last one at Mile 20. The weather starting spitting around Mile 16 and finally turned into solid rain around Mile 25 (which was ok with me). The finish was great, even with the rain. We cooled down for 30 minutes or so, headed off to Starbucks (I am *not* the mayor of Starbucks in Port Angeles unfortunately) and then hit the Y for a shower. One long drive and big steak dinner later, I slept like the dead until it was time to catch a flight home the next morning.

Overall, here's how the run rates in my book:

Organization – Well-organized with the course clearly marked. Mile markers were accurate. Grade: A+

Course – Incredible scenery Miles 0 – 5 and 8 – 26.2. Grade: A

Aid-stations – Water and Heed at every station, which were staffed by local organizations which made it a lot of fun. Grade: A+

Swag – Long sleeve, dri-fit shirt. Grade: A

Lunch with the Interns

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:02:17 -0800

I was recently invited to attend a luncheon for new Microsoft interns. They wanted me to discuss my background and thoughts about how to be successful in a tech-focused career.

After thinking about it for a while, I came up with three points to share with the group – I thought it was interesting enough (based on the questions/feedback) to share here:

Be passionate about what you do – the best work experiences in my life have been when I’ve worked on things I am extremely passionate about. Conversely, the least favorite experiences have been when I’ve worked about things where my interest level is lukewarm.

Life is short; spend your time working on things for which you have a true passion. These will vary by person but have similar characteristics. You’ll know you’re in deep when you don’t notice/care what time/day it is. When your bills start piling up because you’re never home. When your significant other starts calling herself a “startup widow”. When you’ve lived in the same place for three years and you meet some neighbors who tell you that they thought your place was “vacant for the last three years”.

If you find yourself in a position that you aren’t passionate about, move on and do it quickly.
Stay up to date – Mary Meeker states (Slide 5) that there will be more Smart phones shipping in 2012 than desktops/laptops. There wasn’t an intern in the room whose undergrad curriculum focused on this – the point being that things are forever changing in technology. Whatever your area of passion is (from #1 above), once you embark on a career you have to constantly work to stay abreast of the changes via blogs, thought leaders on Twitter, etc.
Get your hands dirty – experience increases your value immensely. Whether this means choosing from a wider variety of projects within a company and/or ability to raise venture and start a company. The best way to gain experience is to dive headfirst into a project and immerse yourself. If you’re a developer, the best thing (IMO) to do is to write code as much as possible. Sitting in meetings all day won’t get you to the magic 10,000 hours you are going to need to become an expert.

Customer Loyalty and Rewards with Location-based Services

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:12:04 -0800

I’m the Mayor of my local Starbucks (aka the Peninsula office for PersistentFan) and regularly check-in on foursquare to retain my title.

This morning, I placed my usual order and was informed that my drink would be gratis as a reward for being the Mayor.

Very cool!

(A while back I checked into my fifth different Starbucks and received the Barista badge but wasn’t offered any discounts or coupons.)

There have been a ton of posts about Foursquare, GoWalla etc working with brick and mortar retailers to implement reward systems. The opportunities to utilize location data are large and some of scenarios are pretty compelling (witness the rumored $100m+ acquisition of foursquare )

Having now experienced one of the aforementioned customer rewards scenarios, I am even more bullish (and more of a fanboi) than I was yesterday. Now if I could just win back the Mayor of Taqueria La Bamba from Norm Y …

CTO/VP Engineering – What’s the Difference?

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:17:45 -0800

Mark Suster has an excellent post entitled “Want to Know the Difference Between a CTO and a VP Engineering?”

In his post, Mark discussed both the attributes of a CTO and VPE and when they are needed in a company’s lifecycle. In summary:

CTO – visionary, technically astute, not a great people manager
VPE – technical (knows how to code), process-oriented (builds, unit tests, automation, schedules) and can manage people

He also has some interesting thoughts from a VC viewpoint regarding about teams that have a consulting firm build their initial product

If you want to build a great technology company, you’ll need a “rockstar” engineering lead. Every great tech startup needs one. Whenever I meet a team that had a consulting firm (even a great one) build their product it’s an immediate “pass” from me. If you don’t have somebodyinside your organization who is setting the technology direction then I’m convinced you’ll never head for greatness. I know this will fall like a lead balloon to the many people who believe it is possible to have a [insert: startup incubator or technology accelerator or technology consultant or outsource firm] build your technology. I don’t believe it. Either your core is innately technical or it’s not. It’s what makes Google Google and Facebook Facebook.

Mark suggests the proper time to bring in a VPE is when the CTO is managing more than 3 developers.

Based on my experience, I generally agree with Mark, however, I would add a few things:

The VPE *has* to write code when the team is small (less than 10 people). I have been an advisor to two companies where the VPE managed a team of 4-6 people and did not code. They generally were clueless about the architecture, the process of actually getting things done (e.g. where the SVN drop was, how to build, write a unit test, deployment, etc). At a company of this size, the VPE should be a contributing member of the team; in both situations the VPE was ineffective and ended up leaving the company.
Adding a VPE and CTO when the company has 4 or more developers seems really (!) top heavy. Personally, I would expect that the CTO could scale a bit better than that, even if the CEO has to help out with some of the “softer” skills on the people management side.

Amazon Ships AWS SDK for Java

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:31:09 -0800

Amazon has shipped an AWS SDK for Java (announcement)

Immediate areas of interest for me are:

EC2
Elastic Load Balancing
S3
SQS

Now if they would just ship a version of the Product Advertising API (which lets you search Amazon’s ginormous product DB) for Java – it’s been broken since August 15, 2009 when Amazon started requiring signed headers:

Dear Developer,
We want to remind you that all calls to the Product Advertising API must be authenticated using request signatures by August 15, 2009. Please remember that calls to the Product Advertising API that are not signed will not be processed after August 15, 2009. For help on request signatures, please see the Resources section below.
The Product Advertising API Team.

Their Java library does not support this functionality and has not been updated, leaving Developers to follow long posts like this to try and use the Product API. Seems like Jeff Barr or another Amazon Evangelist would want to fix this problem. I’ve only been asking since November 2009 …

Quora – A better FriendFeed/Aardvark?

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:25:00 -0800

Dave was kind enough to send me a Quora invite last week. After a few days of trying out the service, I am already hooked.

Quora has a lot of the elements of two services I love: Friendfeed and Aardvark. As Friendfeed is working towards a slow death, I’ve been on the lookout for a something to possibly replace it (I realize that Quora does not centralize all my tweets etc etc but it *does* provide a place to engage in dialogue about topics of interest, which was always the true value of Friendfeed.)

I’ve made a n00b mistake or two, confused by some of the UI (like this):

Now I’m hoping they expose an API so I can create a killer Firefox add-on like this (which I just submitted an update for 3.6 and up…waiting for approval) Maybe I can talk sandosh into helping …

Queuing Tweets with Amazon’s (AWS) SQS

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:42:48 -0800

Like many services, we wanted to enable social sharing on Twitter (and other platforms like Facebook) at the launch of PersistentFan.

Initially, our interface with Twitter worked reliably and allowed people to tweet about interesting videos. A basic flow diagram looked like this:

However, once we opened up PersistentFan, the increase in traffic (which wasn’t a tidal wave) we noticed a lot of tweets weren’t showing up on Twitter.

Our first attempt was to simply add a basic retry mechanism, which improved things, but only slightly. Our second attempt was to retry multiple times. The flow diagram turned into something like this:

Unfortunately, several times this led to site performance issues as server threads were busy trying to deliver a tweet instead of handling an inbound HTTP request

I had solved a similar problem (at a much larger scale) at MessageCast by adding message queuing. Implementing a full blown system with ActiveMQ etc seemed like overkill so I took a look at AWS SQS. It was really easy (and quick) to build a basic prototype. After looking at the typica library, I ended up choosing the AWS library and was off and running.

Tweet delivery logic has now changed to:

Overall, things were up and running pretty quickly and we’ve had very few issues. Currently, the AWS console doesn’t allow you to peek into a given queue and manage it (i.e. modify, delete etc) but this is supposed to be added in the near future.

Here’s some basic code for sending and getting to/from a queue:

Sending a message to the queue:

SendMessageRequest request = new SendMessageRequest();
request.setQueueUrl(<QueueURL>);
request.setMessageBody("This is my message text.");
invokeSendMessage(service, request);

Getting a message from the queue:

ReceiveMessageRequest request = new ReceiveMessageRequest();
request.setQueueUrl<QueueURL>;
invokeReceiveMessage(service, request);

Pricing is quite reasonable as well – 10k requests is $0.01

If you’re looking for a queuing solution, I’d recommend taking SQS for a spin.

Iterating in the Open

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:11:06 -0800

Over the years I’ve created, been an Advisor to and invested in online services. There have been various launch strategies from “let’s release as soon as we have these ‘n’ features”, “let’s release when we have feature parity with competitor ‘x’” and “hell, let’s release what we have and iterate as we go”.

There are pros and cons to each of the above three strategies. Based on my experience, the first and third ideas are workable, but waiting for feature parity is equal to never actually shipping anything (I’ve seen this several times).

When Mike and I came up with the idea for what is now PersistentFan (starting as an FB app, “top3Clicks”) we were determined to employ strategy number three, iterating in the open. The vision behind PersistentFan was to create a fan-oriented site where we could create a system that would programmatically acquire content about our various niche (or even micro-niche … is that an actual term??) areas of interest, notify us and enable sharing with our friends. We started off with something easy – video. Obviously, there are other types of content for a given area (news, blogs, photos, audio, etc) but YouTube had great APIs to get the ball rolling.

We aimed to iterate several times a week, pushing new features and bug fixes (here’s a sample). As the weeks flew by, the functionality of the site would increase bit by bit until we had a full featured offering. (Note that we did start off in bare-bones, early alpha invite-only mode). Feedback from friends (initially) and as the site grew, external users would help guide both the features and the priority of the features we shipped. Not crowd sourcing as described in Don Tapscott’s “Wikinomics” but instead open iteration, warts and all.

It’s been several months since we had the first user take the site for a spin and so far, here’s what we’ve found:

The good parts:

The ability to evolve service based on reality (i.e. user feedback, actual utilization)
Feedback based on usage instead of looking at a PowerPoint slide
Users pushing up the priority of a feature (we’ve had the request for a “Forgot My Password” several times now *cough*)

The not so good parts:

A new visitor to the site may not see value on initial visit and never return (the “is that all there is?” problem)
Bugs, bugs, bugs. We have a staging environment and plenty of automated tests, but when you’re running fast …

Stuff we’ve learned along the way:

Iterating in the open is a net positive, but users need information describing updates and bug fixes (blog posts are great for this)
Don’t forget to mail registered users about updates (*cough*)
Enable the site with an open feedback mechanism (e.g. uservoice)
Have a strong grasp on analytics to see actual utilization (e.g. number of signups)
Have internal metrics as well as external (use Google Analytics) to get a good picture of what users are doing and the conversations about your site.
Reaffirmed that cloud computing is a fantastic way to scale super cheaply (AWS/EC2)
Automate as much as you can including unit tests, build and deployment scripts, etc. The time savings and reduction in errors pay off quickly.

Become a PersistentFan if you haven’t already, let us know what works/what doesn’t and look for a steady stream of changes. (Any questions why I’m the Mayor at the local Starbucks?)

Random Collection of Useful Tools

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:52:34 -0800

The effort on PersistentFan has led me to seek out various development/build/performance tools lately.

Some of the ones I found particularly helpful are:

Minify/YUI Compressor – minimizing the number of HTTP GET requests for CSS and Javascript resources and the size (in bytes) of these resources can increase client-side (browser) perf. Matt Snider has a great post on how both to concatenate and compress resources via Ant.
JSLint: Great service that analyzes your Javascript for code quality. Even better, RockstarApps has encapsulated JSLint to run as an Eclipse plug-in. Haven’t attempted to get this to run as part of the build (with Ant) yet.
Page Speed – I tried YSlow (add-on to Firebug) but found Google’s tool to be better overall. Really helpful in determining the best way to increase performance.

What You Need to Know About Foursquare

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:15:59 -0800

Great preso from Robin Grant over at we are social.

I am an admitted Foursquare addict, sure, but walk through the deck below and see why Foursquare and GPS-enabled/location-based apps are ~~going to be~~ a big deal.

How Foursquare Helps Consumers and Business Owners

View more presentations from 22squared.

PersistentFan Graduates to Beta

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:05:29 -0800

Bacon has a post up about PersistentFan leaving invite-only mode.

We’re not quite ready for primetime, calling it an early Beta instead. Like many things, we have a zillion ideas to try out and will continue to rev the service. Check it out if you have a chance.

Here’s a few sample channels to test drive with:

Jack Bauer (of 24 fame)
The Office
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Tony Romo
Brett Favre
Live concerts from the Fillmore in San Francisco
Kings of Leon
Lady Gaga

You can also see what other people are watching

If you are a big fan of Jersey Shore or want to keep up with the latest from the disaster in Haiti, PersistentFan enables you to:

Create channels of interest that persistently search for new content
Receive email notifications when new content is available (you receive these as they are discovered or on a daily or weekly basis)
Share your favorites to Facebook and/or Twitter
Keep up with video feeds of Twitter’s trending topics

PersistentFan was built with open source, Java, Linux, Apache, Tomcat, mod_jk, mysql, junit, Struts, AWS (EC2 and S3), Javascript and plenty of Last.fm.

Introducting PersistentFan!

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:27:59 -0800

Mike (Bacon) has a post up on the BaconMarathon blog about our latest effort, PersistentFan. He details how we got to where we are currently and why we decided to break out of the Facebook/F8 jail.

The site is currently in invite-mode (aka early alpha), head over and sign up today!