Nick O'Neill

The Post-Covid Leader's Playbook

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot about what life looks like after the forced quarantine that we’re now a part of. How do the companies we work at look financially? Organizationally? What does life in general look like after this?

I wanted to share with you my thoughts because it’s something that I observe many organizations still being in denial about. My hope and frankly, my optimism, is strictly toward those organizations who will arise from this downturn stronger than before.

However in order to retain and expand a leadership position, organizations and leaders cannot fall victim to the same intuition that is driving so many in this time of uncertainty.

The Government, Testing, and Reopening

The most important place to start is at the top: the government.

At this moment, the dialogue within the media and among politicians is a drive to “re-open the economy”. Unfortunately that phrase is about as far as the plans extend. The result has been a game of reading tea leaves as we piece together information received from various sources.

We have begun to receive a sliver of insight in recent days. This includes Gavin Newsom’s planning that was released last week as well as statements from Andrew Cuomo alluding to a unified plan with other Northeastern states.

The most sobering takeaway is this: we don’t have a good plan in place and have been utterly unprepared for this event. I could provide tons of data and articles on this but you get the point.

So given that we are listening to an unprepared government, what will ultimately happen?

If you were to listen to epidemiologists, you’ll typically receive the most conservative and concerning take. This is the first side of the spectrum. Their position is straight forward: “If you don’t lock everything down, hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives will be lost.”

The other side of the spectrum is from those actively experiencing the repercussions of shutting down the economy. Their take is an obvious one: “re-open the economy” and let people get back to work before we make this downturn worse than it already is.

These two competing forces will drive policy-decisions for the next 6 - 18 months.

I personally anticipate governments to gradually reveal clear testing plans that gets employees back to work in phases. The unfortunate reality is that we are still weeks if not months away from being able to ramp up testing to any sustainable level.

Once people gradually return, we will be sending employees to a workplace that is completely different.

So how does an organization think about supporting their employees during this time?

The People

It does not matter your political affiliation at this point: a huge swath of the population is scared. They are scared about their job security (if they haven’t lost it already), scared about vulnerable family members catching the virus, angry if not annoyed that they can’t get their food safely, and scared about general uncertainty.

I emphasize this aspect of things because the foundation of leadership for the next year or longer will stem from empathy. So what does this look like?

Let’s start with what it used to look like.

Google, was primarily responsible for inventing what is now the standard in incredible employee benefits. This came in the form of in house chefs with all meals for free, free laundry, free fitness, free daycare, and other previously unheard of perks. The outcome was that Google attracted many of the best technical talent in the world.

Numerous companies, especially technology startups, have followed suit.

In this crisis, we will see a new set of workplace standards emerge. It will be those organizations that cater to the mental health of employees that emerge as the new leaders. “Perks” in our forced remote world includes things such as meditation coaches , therapy resources, flexible work hours, and more.

Despite leadership’s own uncertainty within every organization, all individuals require a voice of stability and security. While companies can’t guarantee the future, they can offer support that at least comforts employees.

Radical Transparency The most significant thing that brings comfort to employees is having visibility and reducing uncertainty. There’s already enough uncertainty outside of work, we don’t want it inside.

Providing visibility into what leadership is thinking about brings more peace of mind to employees. Q&A sessions, forward signaling and more is critical. Is the organization limiting hiring? If so, what areas? How are things financially and do we have what it takes to make it through the downturn?

These questions among many others are key to address because they are on everybody’s mind already.

Office Space

The other absolutely critical thing for every organization at this moment is thinking about how we return to work and what that looks like. While not definitive, it appears that strict physical distancing measures will be not only encouraged but required as part of the return to work.

This means desks that are at least 6 feet apart. This also means a drastic reduction in the number of commuters who take any trains or buses.

So how does an organization that was previously based primarily in offices emerge as a leader? They must think about a remote-first world. If physical distancing has a significant probability of occurring for upwards of 12 months or more, there’s no alternative option.

Organizations should be thinking about an environment where at least 50% of the workforce is indefinitely remote. How does this change office needs? How does the organization define who shows up? Can employees be required to actually work from the office anymore?

With physical distancing in place, how do organizations train their leadership to be effective remotely?

Outcome Uncertain

Depending on your organization size, scale, and customer base, the outcome from this downturn is remarkably unclear.

In times like these, all one can do is think through the multitude of likely depressing scenarios. First Round has published a somewhat sobering yet effective approach to navigating these treacherous waters.

Personally, despite my relatively gloomy take on things, I’m actually incredibly optimistic. There is a massive shift occurring in consumer behavior. It’s in that shift where so much opportunity lies.

While it will be here for much longer than most anticipate, Covid will eventually go away. What emerges will be a drastically changed world.

Those who anticipate this changed world will emerge as the leaders of tomorrow. Personally, I cannot wait … it’s the only option!

Remote Management In Times Of Uncertainty

Wed, 18 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As Coronavirus has forced most organizations into going fully remote, many managers and executives are finding themselves unprepared for the scenario.

How do we keep productivity up while remaining supportive? What to do about all those critical projects that now feel at risk due to disruption? How can we get through what is likely the worst public health crisis in our lives? As employees, how should we act?

While I have not experienced a pandemic of this significance in my life, I can share with you my experience from managing and working on exclusively remote teams. I also have the ability to simply share another human perspective on the moment at hand. Perhaps I can be helpful and if you have a resource that could be of use, do not hesitate to share!

Empathy-First

The most important aspect of remote work, especially during this crisis, is understanding that this is by no means a regular WFH scenario.

Your employees, who did not necessarily have any desire to work from home, are being forced to. In NYC and many other cities, that means people in cramped apartments, often with roommates or childeren, with barely enough space to work, let alone fit a desk.

While some employees, like engineers, may already have experience working remotely due to their career path, many of them don’t.

Aside from the fact that the work environment may not be ideal at home, there’s also the emotional toll that this experience will impose.

Walking home from the supermarket to see the shelves cleared out and expecting your employee to be at peak productivity is anything but supportive. Seeing the headlines take a continuous emotional toll.

So what does this all mean? Take the time to find out how people are feeling before focusing on their productivity. Mental health is the most important thing right now.

Encourage your reports to take breaks and potentially even a walk outside given that it’s now completely empty outside.

Something that the tech team at Dailypay has tested is “coffee talks” which are spontaneous 15 minute check-ins. Small groups of approximately10 or less can hop on Zoom and just chat about what’s going on in their world.

We plan on doing these daily for as long as this quarantine lasts.

Productivity

So how does work continue in this environment?

It turns out that managing a remote team is going to be an ultimate test of your leadership style. Nobody believes they are a micro-manager but if you feel uncomfortable because you don’t know what your direct reports are up to, there’s a good chance you have a micro-management tendency.

Worry not dear leader, we all have this to some degree! Fortunately, I will guide you through these treacherous times, empowering you to motivate and inspire others as you get those mission critical projects.

Set A Clear Vision

Office spaces change the dynamic of management. When you can walk over to your direct reports it unintentionally encourages quick adjustments to projects. While this can promote “agility”, it also have adverse effects, undermining initiatives.

Like a paperclip breaking from too many adjustments, projects similarly suffer from continuous manipulation. The symptoms are reduced morale and decreased velocity. Unfortunately such symptoms appear gradually and you won’t know until it’s too late.

Fortunately much of this can all be solved with a simple act: the articulation of a clear vision.

When everybody is aligned on an outcome there is no question about what each person is doing on any given day. While the duration of this particular quarantine is not clear, it’s likely long enough to test your ability to provide clear messaging and definitive outcomes to your reports.

So to be clear all I’m suggesting here is this: be clear :)

Personally, I’m spending most of my time working with my team to ensure that the point we are running toward is vivid. My measure of success is this: how clear is my team and our superiors on where we are headed, how are we getting there, and when will we arrive?

Lightweight Status Updates

So while vision is important for great leadership, teams cannot operate without effective communication.

Communication is absolutely fundamental and in times of crisis, it’s absolutely critical. Let’s be honest, one advantage of offices is that you can maximize in person communication.

So in a world of remote work, how can you keep the channels of communication flowing?

Unfortunately the simplest answer is that you can’t. The more complex answer is that it’s nuanced.

The numerous tools at our disposal, which most of you are already using (Slack, Zoom, etc), support real-time communication. However if my experience has been any indicator, real-time communication in the office or remotely can actually hinder progress. Getting messages from 15 people triggers the expectation that you must immediately reply to every one of them.

Suddenly hours of time are tossed down the drain.

Asynchronous communication that doesn’t require an immediate response is actually best. One of the tools that we’ve been leveraging to ensure everybody knows what’s going on and address progress blockers is Status Hero.

Anybody on the team can see what everybody is working on and is incredibly helpful for surfacing blockers immediately. It’s also generally effective for keeping people in sync.

Making it through

I’m going to be honest: it feels incredibly disingenuous to write a guide on how to navigate unchartered territories. The one thing that has remained consistent for me and what has worked well though is truly being empathetic.

Your co-workers and reports are actually working more often now that they are always on and next to their laptops. With no commute there are more hours available to work.

That doesn’t mean we should though. Instead, take the time to be with each other as that’s going to be far more important than what comes next.

If you have any suggestions on how to operate I’m all ears (or eyes now that we are virtual). We’re all in this together!

A Treatise On Code: Eliminate

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

“Where do I find the documentation for that?”, I asked the sales engineer on the other end of the line.

“It’s on page 673”, he replied confidently.

His fellow team members were quite impressed by the display of organizational expertise. I, on the other hand, was wondering why the hell this company had a 1,000 page long document explaining how to integrate with their service.

As soon as the call ended I turned to my co-workers and suggested that we find a different vendor.

Complicated By Design

The vendor in question, who will remain unnamed, appeared to follow the defining law of “enterprise software”: make it complicated by design.

Complexity for many means job security.

Have you seen how many people are required to implement and maintain a Salesforce instance? It’s too many.

The reason for this is that in contrast to basic products, which aim to do one thing really well, enterprise software is expected to encompass all business logic and edge cases of any organization.

Granted, it’s not the world’s worst idea but the outcome is that such products are by their nature, worse than the laser-focused “best of breed” alternatives.

Intentionally or not, a product team can head down the path of building “enterprise software” with a single phrase: “You know what would be a cool idea?!”

This phrase, whether it comes from a prospective customer or an internal employee, is the source of much evil.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good brainstorm. However most perceived “great ideas” are enmeshed in the promise of transformation. In other words, “If you do X, it will change the trajectory of Y! All thanks to me!”

If a team is small or the originator influential, this promise is often sufficient to force the idea into, what Andrew Chen calls, the product death cycle. Death by a thousand cuts, or in this case, features.

An Explosion Of Ideas

As a human who becomes bored without sufficient distraction, I regularly seek out new projects. This happens both at home and at work.

In other words, I’m frequently the source of that evil phrase, “You know what would be a cool idea?!?”

Yet when I become buried in projects, I suddenly recognize the path forward. Should I not take this path, I’ll end in a situation similar to Sylvia Plath:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.

One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

For Sylvia, she describes a life filled with too many ideas and dreams. This can just as easily represent an aimless organization, buried under the weight of countless incomplete projects.

It was all of those great ideas that set us off in a thousand directions. Yet now the time has arrived to judiciously narrow our focus.

Time To Strip Things Bare

It’s not merely life or projects that become encumbered by complexity. All poorly engineered solutions are by their nature far too complex.

Nassim Taleb, author of Antifragile, would correctly argue that such complexity is a source of fragility. In apophatic theology, growth is gained “via negativa”, the negative way. In order to become anti-fragile, and decrease all downside, we must implement addition through subtraction.

Taleb exhaustively covers this concept in his book but his take on how we learn is most illustrative:

[I]n practice it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid. You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures.

The same thing goes for product design. When we remove all unnecessary features, functionality, and complexity, what exists is something that just works.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, a French writer, poet and aviator, effectively articulates this in his analysis of the design of airplanes:

Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man’s industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?

It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

Nothing > Something

So where’s the code?! Code is what manifested all those “cool ideas” from earlier into reality.

The code, supported by aspirational and motivated teams, unintentionally set the trap. Yes, the business is still around and operating at scale.

However growing complexity is quietly lurking in the dark. We must stay vigilant against it! We must ask ourselves not what we can add to make our projects and code better but instead what we can remove.

A Treatise On Code: Scale

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In May of 2007, Facebook deployed what would likely be the single greatest catalyst to their eventual domination of the “social networking” industry, the Facebook Platform.

Outside of internet technology enthusiasts and a mere 20 million Facebook users, the event was insignificant. Yet for a small set of entrepreneurial engineers, it marked the first internet gold rush since the original internet bubble.

An early indicator of the massive opportunity came in an email from Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike, an application that was poised to be iTunes of the Facebook platform. The email, which quickly circulated the technology blogs, was a desperate cry for help from Partovi. The company was in dire need of additional servers.

For any consumer facing application, this is phenomenal signaling to investors that the company clearly has found product market fit. While most will never experience such overnight demand, one thing is certain: scaling issues are never planned.

When Scale Hits You In The Face

Unless you are building a new technology infrastructure service, scale is something that is typically forced upon you.

A server runs out of memory, a database exhausts it’s connections, a job queue balloons beyond a manageable level, or some stray bug in the code results in a massive hit to the bottom line.

For all non-robots, it induces panic.

In this moment, what follows is a sequence of thoughts and events.

First up is a series of expletives. These typically come from an executive who’s cursing about the site not working. If you happen to be the technology leader responsible for managing things, you too will be cursing soon after.

What comes next is a moment of intense focus. Initially we kill processes that are hogging resources. Then we figure out if there are any dials we can turn that will buy us time. This is the throw money at the problem stage.

Given that we now live in a world of cloud services, money will actually get you pretty far since everything is run on commodity infrastructure. It’s a solid short-term solution.

However the greatest irony to a technology leader being crushed by scaling problems is that code alone cannot scale.

Don’t get me wrong, acute errors can mostly be resolved with technical solutions. Yet when scale appears, it forces a magnifying glass upon the organization.

All the poor strategic decisions that were made up until now spill back out into the open. It’s from within those deep and exposed wounds that we find the next stage of our story.

Built To Scale

One of the most common issues found in rapidly growing software organizations is the absence of structural procedures. When a team is comprised of a few people, it’s easy to plan things.

This is compounded by the strategy I concluded in my last article, “Code as quickly as possible, not in a way designed to scale”.

Now that scale has arrived liked an avalanche, the strategy has to pivot on a dime. Technology managers move from an obsession with code to, hopefully, a passion for people and processes.

So if this series is about “the right way to code”, what does this phase mean for our growing code base?

If you guessed “people and processes”, you’d be right! This materializes in the code in a number of ways.

From Humans That Code To Coding For Humans

Let’s start with the most obvious code situation at this point: technical debt. As a company thrashes with their product and output code in a rush to reach product market fit, technical debt is rapidly accrued.

At the beginning this debt can be viewed as a form of strategic financing. Combined with capital, it provides leverage for a small set of ambitious engineers.

However warning signs will begin to appear. New engineers take a while to onboard. System performance degrades. New feature development slows despite encouraging words from founding product managers.

All of a sudden the technical debt becomes too big to ignore and resources are quickly allocated. So what are the guiding principals at this moment in time?

Before sharing the first principal, I’d like to draw on a favorite and controversial quote from Phil Karlton:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

While it feels pedantic to debate the names of variables and classes, it is of the utmost importance.

This is effectively illustrated by Martin Fowler in his book, “Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code”. In it he states:

The compiler doesn’t care whether the code is ugly or clean. But when I change the system, there is a human involved, and humans do care. A poorly designed system is hard to change—because it’s difficult to figure out what to change how these changes will interact with the existing code to get the behavior I want. And if it is hard to figure out what to change, there is a good chance that I will make mistakes and introduce bugs.

All the early engineers who were present for initial architectural decisions already have a deep understanding of how things work. They don’t have a problem with navigating the code base. However each new developer that’s onboarded will struggle to ramp and contribute quickly.

So how does a team offset this? The simple answer is to begin cleaning things up. Simplifying the code through SOLID design principals is a great start.

Yet companies don’t need a simple how to article. They need the first rule of creating great code at scale: Institutionalize best practices centered around developer productivity.

This typically materializes in many ways including:

Engineering team metrics (velocity, etc)
System performance monitoring
Internal training sessions

This cannot be driven from the bottom. It must be something that leadership is bought into. If engineering leadership isn’t, the company won’t die but will likely destroy development velocity.

This is solely due to the fact that business leadership will wonder why things are taking forever and throw more money at the problem.

From Shouting To Proactive Communication

So why does this money only exacerbate issues? Brooks’s law, as defined in the book, “Mythical Man Month”, effectively explains this:

“Communication overhead increases as the number of people increases. Due to combinatorial explosion, the number of different communication channels increases rapidly with the number of people. Everyone working on the same task needs to keep in sync, so as more people are added they spend more time trying to find out what everyone else is doing.”

In other words, more people means more channels of communication. While the early engineers could yell across the room at each other, that approach no longer works.

Not only is it harder to organize people but as things scale there will also be an increasing void of leadership. While vision and mission are great at the beginning stages of a company, they are not responsible for launching success.

Instead, the organization built something that fulfilled a need or desire of a specific market, vision be damned.

Yet now with more employees (brought on in part by the “throw money at the problem” strategy), more people will look toward leadership for answers, and more importantly, security.

Why security? Things are changing! Code will break, early employees may leave (voluntarily or involuntarily), new organizational structures will be developed and disbanded, and things will seem uncertain.

For the engineering and product teams, that uncertainty will be apparent. So how do we create great code in this environment of uncertainty? With great communication.

So here are my key rules of communication that will lead to “great code”:

Clarity of purpose - It’s easy to become disconnected from the end users of our products. As engineers we are focused on solving technical problems, not people problems. This is why it’s key to remind all team members of scaling organizations about why they are there.
Transparency - Given the feeling of instability, it’s key that the team feels as though they have visibility. People don’t want to necessarily solve all the problems, they just want to trust that those problems are being dealt with. Early scaling issues break that trust which is something that transparency helps to rebuild.
Consistency - This means that you should have a consistency spokesperson on a consistent basis providing the information that team members need to know.

These principles are utilized at all levels of management. From the CEO on down to the engineering manager.

From Code Issues To Human Ones

So if this series is about “code”, why did this article go so wildly off the rails into one focused on management and communications?

The reality is that at scale, great code is produced by great teams. Great teams are managed by great leaders. Great technical leaders are focused on one thing: maximizing developer productivity.

For those who follow this maxim, scaling issues of the past will only be that: the past.

A Treatise On Code

Sun, 26 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

For the past 20 years I’ve been building web and mobile applications on and off. This journey has brought me through numerous languages and projects.

Perl, PHP, Ruby (and Rails), Python, Objective-C, Javascript, and more. A social network, music commerce site, text book search engine, photo sharing site, note sharing application, mobile texting application, blogs, social media tracking system, email service provider, loan servicing platform, and more.

Each day of coding reveals just how much more there is to learn. It’s easy to feel like you aren’t learning anything when infinite knowledge remains.

That said, in 20 years of development, I’ve learned countless ways to build things the wrong way. In this short series I want to leverage these experiences to explore the concept of a “correct way” of building things. What truly makes “great code”?

This article is the first in that series.

And God Said, “Hello World!”

Fundamentally, coding is straight-forward. You take some inputs and generate an output. It’s from this formula, inputs -> code -> output, that an idea can manifest into something useful. Done correctly, code is pure magic.

This magical aspect of code inspires thousands of people each day to dive in and learn. From those, the most determined succeed at building something. A lucky few will produce a product or feature people actually use.

To join the elite club of product craftspeople who force a utility into existence is for many developers, the source of motivation and inspiration.

So for those who dare to dream, what does their code look like in the beginning?

In short, it’s ugly.

The individual behind the code should not be faulted for the disaster they’ll inevitably create. The outset of coding feels unnatural. Unless you think like a computer, which a surprising number do, any introduction to code tends to feel overwhelming. It’s as if you are being taught how to use Rockwell’s Retro Encabulator.

It all sounds like gibberish.

Yet given a desire to build something from the invisible, a few will persist. Fortunately for these individuals, the quality of code doesn’t matter at all. In fact, one should be slightly skeptical of a new project that contains 100% legible code.

All that matters is that the person writing the code can read and understand it. This is due to the majority of projects ending in failure. Even if you manage to get a product out the door, there’s no guarantee people will want what you built. The odds are that few people beyond your friends and family will have any interest.

The beauty of this whole scenario is that thanks to market forces, both novices and experts have similar odds of success. Granted, I’d prefer a 7% chance of winning versus 4% but both are awful odds.

In this glimmer of hope is where we begin our story.

“My Server Is Crashing!”

Last weekend in a moment of randomness, I received an alert for somebody looking for assistance with a new Ruby on Rails application. Overnight, the application they developed had gone viral and the popularity was taking down the site.

It was late in the evening when the creator, Dolf, who is based in Germany, hopped on a Zoom call with me. Soon after introducing ourselves I said with genuine enthusiasm “Congrats! Seems like you have a hit on your hands!”

Dolf, a full-time business consultant and self-taught coder, had created multiple passion projects in the past yet none had any measurable success. This was the first time and he wasn’t quite sure what to do. Hundreds of people were visiting the site and his clever game design was keeping people engaged.

Dolf was absolutely convinced that his code was awful and the source of the crashes. As I sat with him attempting to diagnose the problem, it became clear to me that the code was likely not the issue.

My hunch was not just based on an analysis of his “unoptimized” code but also based on experience. Even the worst code is surprisingly resilient. That’s because computers do everything we tell them to.

In the case of Dolf, it took me an hour of assessment, an hour of persuasion to use a different system, and about 20 minutes to switch to a more reliable and convenient platform.

For those who know web development, all I did was move Dolf’s Rails application from a convoluted AWS configuration to Heroku. For any new web developer, I always suggest using The Kamal Stack.

While Dolf is not a trained developer, he managed to read some tutorials and piece together a product that thousands of people enjoy.

Maximum Viable Product

I’d like to contrast this story with a more personal one.

9 years ago I started a mobile app company out of my apartment in San Francisco. I had just sold a company and was flush with cash and confidence.

At the time, I was ready to invest whatever was necessary to build a mobile application. As I jokingly told my friend Dan Martell at the time, we were going to build a “Maximum Viable Product”.

Ironically, there was nothing maximum about it. We managed to build a full fledged iOS application for under $60k. The majority of the budget was put toward the name of the application, Holler, and rent on an overpriced San Francisco apartment.

Not included in this cost was the time I spent developing things. I had purchased the “best hosting” and designed my “system for scale.” I spent weeks and months obsessing over the ideal way to structure my code.

In the end, none of that mattered! Despite attracting tens of thousands of individuals, we decided to shut it down as it didn’t meet expectations.

The “Right Way” To Code

I mentioned that this series is about the “correct way” of coding things and that this portion is about the beginning phase.

When all software projects start there is really only one thing that matters: speed. Personally, I’ve observed countless projects become encumbered by knowledge and experience. Without frameworks for rapid development, experienced programmers and teams become stuck on the things that matter far less in the beginning.

This is why I find that ignorance is actually an asset when you begin. This phenomenon is effectively articulated by Paul Graham:

My Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston is just about to publish a book of interviews with startup founders, and I noticed a remarkable pattern in them. One after another said that if they’d known how hard it would be, they would have been too intimidated to start.

Ignorance can be useful when it’s a counterweight to other forms of stupidity. It’s useful in starting startups because you’re capable of more than you realize. Starting startups is harder than you expect, but you’re also capable of more than you expect, so they balance out.

Anybody who has made it through the trenches of building successful software products will attest to their difficulty. Yet the confidence found on the other side, when “success” has been accomplished, can easily backfire on subsequent projects.

All of the lessons learned through late stage projects get adopted into new ones, smothering them before they even have a chance.

With this knowledge, I can confidently present the “right way” to code when beginning a project. Code as quickly as possible, not in a way designed to scale.

In contrast to a maximum viable product, this approach will ensure you get something out the door and can test it with the market. If all goes well, you’ll make it to the next piece in this series.

Google Empties Their Cookie Jar

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today, Google expanded their commitment to the full removal of third-party cookies from the Chrome browser.

If the announcement came from another company it would be far less surprising. However Google generates billions of dollars a year from third-party cookies. Doubleclick, now branded simply as Google Marketing Platform, is likely the largest ad platform on the internet and the greatest distributor of third-party cookies.

Why all the fuss over cookies?

When it comes to cookies, let’s be honest: Milano cookies are much more exciting than those used by your internet browser.

However any frequent user of the internet should be interested in cookies of the digital sort. That’s because most have built up a massive archive of tracking cookies, especially users of Google Chrome.

Load any news site nowadays and you will be bombarded with ads, pop-ups, and pesky auto-playing video ads. It’s like we’ve returned to the internet of the 90s.

You’ll have to wait for tens of seconds for that interesting article you just clicked to be visible since your computer is busy processing dozens of ad trackers.

This degregation in the overall internet experience has driven many consumers to take control. The first wave of this came in the form of basic ad blocking technologies.

From Google Chrome plugins to mobile apps, ad blockers make your internet experience much more satisfying.

This trend was not lost by clever marketing departments. In a full embrace, some of the most forward thinking organizations have decided to make privacy their platform.

Privacy as marketing

Apple has become the most vocal, primarily because it’s in their best interest. The company failed miserably at generating an effective ad business. So they did what any smart business does: embraced the failure.

Instead of a boring privacy policy page, Apple has made their privacy page a full blown marketing campaign. The company has become so fervent in their stance on privacy, they won’t even unlock a terrorist’s phone.

Despite lives lost, Apple gets tons of free advertising every time human-led tragedy strikes. The message is clear: don’t want the government listening even if you are a crimial? Buy Apple products.

Unfortunately this is a total joke as the government can read your email, text messages, and pretty much most of the activity on your device even if they don’t have access to it.

That said, it only further emphasizes consumers’ desire for privacy.

As it comes to internet browsing, there are an increasing number of options to prevent personal tracking as you browse the web. Both Firefox and Brave are entirely focused on protecting your privacy.

There are also countless articles (like this one) which enumerate all the Google alternative projects.

This trend is not going away and as it grows, will continue to threaten the largest internet companies.

Google: A privacy advocate?

Which brings me back to Google.

Google’s announcement is a far cry from an open embrace of privacy. In fact, their two year commitment is a relatively distant milestone considering all the viable competitors with ad blocking tools built in.

Add in the fact that you’ll never hear somebody say, “Man, I really would love some more personalized ads on all my favorite news sites.”

Yet this announcement, which is unsurprisingly buried in one of their less read blogs, is indicative of where things are headed despite Google’s greatest desires. As the largest internet advertiser, Google is far from motivated to make changes that damage their core business model.

As a global corporation though, Google is motivated to provide a service that the consumers demand. It turns out that what they increasingly demand is privacy.

For Google, today’s announcement left an (incredibly tiny) seed of hope that one of the greatest privacy exploiters of our lives may one day give consumers the tools to take back control.

To Infinity And Beyond

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Happy new year!

It’s that time again when a large percentage of the population writes down resolutions for the year and promptly breaks them.

The new Onion calendar sitting on my desk had a great snippet summarizing the situation last week:

For some reason, I felt oddly apathetic toward this particular new year. While resolutions were something I embraced for many years, more often than not, I decide on my dreams at the moment of inception, not January 1st.

I’ve also been reflecting on whether or not new year’s resolutions are actually a useful practice. My biggest beef with them is that they are finite. Lose 10 pounds … then what? Save $250 more per pay check … then what?

Those frustrations were reinforced as I read Simon Sinek’s latest book, “The Infinite Game”, which highlights the flaws of finite goals.

The entire thesis of the book is illustrated through two talks Sinek gave: one at Microsoft and one at Apple. At Microsoft, employees spoke endlessly of beating their competition. At Apple, they had built a customer-obsessed mindset versus a competitor-centric one.

The contrast of approaches culminates in a car ride Sinek takes with an employee from Apple. Sinek shares that Microsoft had gifted him their new Zune music player. The design, he said, was incredible; potentially better than the Apple iPod (clearly the car ride was some time ago).

The Apple employee replies to Sinek, “I’m sure it is.”

This anecdote was, according to Sinek, a perfect demonstration of how Apple (and all their employees apparently) understand that business is an infinite game.

I have yet to decide what to make of Sinek’s book. However I found it hilarious that in the world of Infinite games, it’s easy to forget that somebody wrote a book about this exact concept 7 years ago. That author was unfortunately not as good at marketing 😂.

Despite this, I’d be masking the truth if I failed to acknowledge my love of Sinek’s premise. Success is indeed a marathon, hence the infinite game. Which brings me back to resolutions.

Are they all that wrong? Probably not. There’s nothing wrong with working to better ourselves. I always aspire to be better, perhaps too much! Yet if you are a continuous learner, I highly recommend James Clear’s writings on the subject. While he’s constantly churning out brilliant tweets, I’ll share a more recent one:

Aim to be great in 10 years.
Build health habits today that lead to a great body in 10 years.
Build social habits today that lead to great relationships in 10 years.
Build learning habits today that lead to great knowledge in 10 years.
Long-term thinking is a secret weapon.

I’d like to modify and simplify Clear’s tweet down to this: Build habits which enable you to maximize and appreciate each day, it will pay off. That’s going to be my motto for 2020. Don’t call it a resolution.

Happy New Years!

P.S. If you are looking for more New Year’s content, check out this great video by Casey Neistat.

Between Stimulus and Response

Tue, 24 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have a confession: my co-workers have a remarkable capacity to trigger me.

I mean, it’s only natural that the people closest to me, who I spend the vast majority of my days alongside would know all the buttons to press, right?

What’s puzzling though is how knowledgeable they are of these buttons prior to the sharing of any emotional response. This must mean that either (a) they are ill-intentioned genius manipulators or (b) they aren’t actually out to get me, I’m just being reactive.

Against my own monkey-mind’s desire to blame others, I’m going to fess up: it’s me.

Victor Frenkel, Holocaust survivor and the author of “Man’s search for meaning”, stated it succinctly:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to chose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

This quote stood out to me as I listened to Lori Gottlieb’s audiobook version of, “Maybe you should talk to someone”. In the made-for-movie book, Gottlieb, a therapist and author, describes her own personal journey through post-breakup therapy and some of the deeply human experiences shared by her own patients.

At the particular juncture in the story where she referenced Frenkel’s quote, she also mentions a note from her own therapy studies:

Reaction vs response = reflexive vs chosen

Which brings me back to work. It’s this space between stimulus and response, trigger and action, that I’ve found myself exploring more.

In that meeting where somebody says something that triggers me, I’ve found peace in just listening and noting. I desperately wish I could claim to be a master of this but alas I’m far from such.

But with minimal exploration of this space, so much has been revealed. The most glaring is that most people are also just reacting to other stimuli. Often it’s a boss who’s demanding an instant answer on something or a reaction to the emergency of the moment.

In all cases, most of it is meaningless yet we hand the wheel driving our lives over to these reactions. This all leads me to ask: will you be driven by reactions or driven to design responses?

As it’s the holidays, this is a perfect time to ask as we surround ourselves with people who are the most capable of triggering us 😃.

So a happy holidays to you and I’ll see you in the new year!

Writing Is Leadership

Sun, 22 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Want to become a leader? Learn to write!

Every single day of my mid-twenties I would write for hours. Despite being an awful writer, I became quite prolific, churning out upwards of 10 articles in any given day.

My writing skills improved and my reach followed, eventually expanding to millions of monthly readers.

Then I burned out and it all stopped.

Then this year, I was reminded of the power of writing. It began with simple, private emails.

No, it hasn’t driven me new email subscribers to my newsletter. It hasn’t brought me widespread acclaim and attention.

Instead its impact has been felt among a very tiny group: my boss and team.

Nobody can say they aren’t aware of what’s going on and it presents an opportunity for team members to flag issues or my boss to switch directions.

Slowly introducing the habit back into my life reminded me of the many reasons to write…

It’s Simple

One of the most compelling aspects of writing is that it’s so simple. There’s little overhead. Anybody can do it.

Then once you bring that writing to the web, the impact becomes magnified since anybody can read it.

As James Clear writes, “There isn’t much to it. It is just a few words on a page. But these words can be read by anyone, anywhere.”

The simplicity of it is easy to overlook.

Don’t be fooled: just put the words down and publish them. You are crafting the narrative of success one word at a time.

It’s Therapeutic

I’ve found writing my thoughts and feelings to be immensely therapeutic.

While they don’t all reach my blog, writing notes has enabled me to think through my feelings. From root cause analysis to simply getting in touch with whatever is happening in my mind, it prevents impulsive decisions.

Writing can pierce through the tactics and actions we use to solve problems and help uncover purpose.

The process of slowing down can also reveal ideas that aren’t immediately obvious during our daily routines.

Obviously being well thought out can make you a more respected leader.

It Scales

Finally, all the views and likes of social media have made it easy to forget the impact writing can have.

When was the last time that the answer to a question you asked on Google was found via a tweet or a Facebook post?

For me, it’s basically never. Instead, articles written by billions of individuals provide the answers for our daily lives.

I’m just one of those people and you can be as well. It’s one of the highest leverage things you can do.

To the people reading your content, you are the leader.

So if there is absolutely any hesitation you have to writing and getting your words out there, just remember that it’s the easiest path you can take to leadership.