webdevelopreneur - blog

Stop treating salespeople like idiots

2010-02-12T04:19:00Z

If you’re guilty of ever saying “our salespeople are idiots” I challenge you to rethink your conclusion.

Expect salespeople to generally do the following things:

Walk close to NOT OK lines (sometimes crossing over). They make more money operating that way.
Be more on the customer’s side vs. the company’s side regarding pricing, product customization requests, payment terms, etc. They want to maximize the odds of getting the sale, and deep down inside that drives them.
Get irritated when people at HQ mess with sales they worked hard to create.

Key thing is to have authentic conversations with the salespeople, let them know you understand that their comp plan drives their behavior, push them back from the NOT OK lines that they’re tripping over, and give them respect for doing a tough, tough job (humans don’t naturally deal well with continued rejection, so they’re really taking one for the team.)

Salespeople drive revenue, the lifeblood of business—give them the respect they deserve.

5,000 tickets later: our Unfuddle story

2010-01-17T14:10:00Z

At RecruitMilitary we use Unfuddle as our IT work queue. I just noticed on Friday that we have 5,000 closed tickets (which makes it the 2nd company where we processed 5k+ tickets through the system), so I thought I’d give a product review based on our experience.

When I joined the company, we had no source control nor shared ticketing system. So Unfuddle had the perfect feature set to knock off both of those critical needs. We started with Subversion for version control, and later added Git repositories.

Things I’ve noticed:

Multiple projects seem to always want to collapse back into one.
You have to nag people outside the department on tickets assigned to them.
Unfuddle has a responsive development team when we reported a bug, they sometimes knocked it out that day.
The reports are just enough to keep things organized.
Email notices are nicely formatted & get the job done.

What would I like to see from product:

Nothing from a feature standpoint.
Continuously improving app speed & reliability. Occasionally it can slow down noticeably, but overall it’s usually pretty snappy.

If your company is still in the dark ages, I highly recommend giving Unfuddle a try today.

pineypeakoutfitters.com

2010-01-16T18:35:00Z

A while back, I helped put together a website for pineypeakoutfitters.com which is a 7,500-acre, high-elevation private ranch completely surrounded by Colorado’s White River National Forest. For over four decades, it had served as a haven for 400-500 elk and numerous mule deer, but has recently been opened to outsiders.

I saw the directory for the source code of the site last night, clicked into the site, I forgot how much I liked the simple design, and how nice the photography was that Snap Advertising gave me. They made putting together the website easy!

Town Defense Game

2010-01-16T00:03:00Z

WARNING: If you’re not interested in RPG games, or Ruby programming, ignore this blog post.

A few years ago, when I was learning Ruby, I had an idea for a game.

Here are my initial notes for the game that I jotted down before writing code:

You start out with a small team of heros.
Foes start streaming in.
You fight the foes.
Results: deaths/stats upgrade/skill acquirement.
Payment: you get paid for your hard work and effort by the town for your kills.
Shopping to upgrade equipment.
Cash in experience for stats upgrades.
Heros can permanently die.

The inspiration was the “Tower Defense” games that were hugely popular.

I considered basing the game engine on D&D, but instead chose Fudge game system.

I implemented a number of features, including:

Name generator
Creature library
Foe generator
Hero generator
Combat system
Items system
Skill system
Open ID

Why did I do all this? To amuse my son, Emerson. We played the game on my computer.

I have tossed it out onto the Internet (http://towndefensegame.com), so you can play the game too :) Source code (rough & unrefactored) has been posted to http://github.com/ryw/town-defense-game for your amusement. I decided to not try and quickly clean up the source code before posting, except what I had to to get it deployed.

The UI is ugly and layouts need fixed in certain browsers, sometimes a hero dies during battle then gets hit again and is somehow brought back to life (bug), there are no tests, there is no instruction on how to play the game.

But it’s out there now so Emerson can play whenever he wants, and now I’m motivated to clean it up.

Feel free to play it and see if you can get hero’s on the top 20 list. I’m warning you now, however, that Emerson is competitive.

Cincinnati.rb needs a home

2010-01-15T02:16:00Z

It was over a year ago that Michael Guterl (@mguterl) and I started Cincinnati.rb. Our inspiration was Seattle.rb, but we really didn’t get it right.

I think what is hurting us the most is the lack of a quiet cafe-style location near the center of Cincinnati where people can either choose to show up or not, and come or go as they choose.

We have had meetings at RecruitMilitary HQ and EdgeCase Cincinnati HQ, but those locations just feel uncomfortable for some reason, and meeting coordination is no fun.

A cafe in Kenwood or maybe even as far south as Norwood would be the ideal area, being generally central to the Cincinnati metro area. Can anyone think of a place somewhere around there that would be a good place for 2 to 20 geeks to gather with their laptops and code and hangout together on a Tuesday night?

Drew has gone Mac

2010-01-14T00:15:00Z

I’m happy to share that today I helped the President of RecruitMilitary, Drew Myers (@drewmyers), switch over from his tired, slow, clunky Dell laptop to a brand new MacBook Pro. When I showed him how quickly command-space searched all his email & files, he was rightfully impressed. He’s going to have many other pleasant surprises in the days to come!

I certainly don’t think Mac is right for everyone, but Drew has the intellectual curiosity needed to adapt to OSX, and of course we have experienced Mac users Michael Guterl (@mguterl) and John Lauck (@johnlauck) in addition to myself to help Drew along.

Side note: I’m starting to think that Ubuntu has a trajectory that could threaten Mac at some point in the future (as well as Windows, of course). And that’s a blog post for a different day.

I’ll report back in a few months to comment on how the conversion has progressed.

rounded corners in web design

2009-11-08T13:12:00Z

The RecruitMilitary home page redesign liberally makes use of rounded corners, as all good web 2.0 websites do.

I know we do some rounded corners in the project so far using jQuery, and in some places just using -moz-border-radius so at least firefox has rounded corners, but for the new home page, I decided that I want to make it work with all modern web browsers, including IE.

Quick aside: Microsoft’s lack of any border-radius implementation in IE8 is ridiculous. They basically give us links to some old articles and a few web search links. Why not an -ie-border-radius implementation like Firefox has (-moz-border-radius), Webkit has (-webkit-border-radius) and even Konquerer has (-khtml-border-radius). As the browser with the highest market share, they sure are doing a lot wrong.

Back to solving the cross platform problem.

jquery.corners.js doesn’t work—it tries to render corners and fails
i tried to use dd_roundies, but the corners it renders are a bit ugly
i googled around for another hour, finding lots of articles from 2005 + 2006, not really trusting that the info is relevant for 2009. Many of the solutions were complex.

So then I decided to check + see how 37signals, Apple, and Mailchimp handle their rounded corners, figuring they would have chosen the best route.

No elegant solution, these companies are doing it the way they always have. Big background images, top/bottom caps, repeating background for the body of the element that creates the left/right border.

What I’ve learned is that I generally will want to program my way out of a problem than Photoshop my way out of it, but this is a case where it seems the best way is still to just make the graphics. At least in modern design, the entire elements aren’t graphics, usually most of the text ends up being rendered from HTML.

So, I’m dumping the javascript attempts and waiting for CSS3, it seems. Opening Photoshop… then I remember the PNG transparency bug in older IE’s, but there’s a nice jQuery plugin to fix any divs that are giving you problems.

message from camilla

2009-07-14T13:06:00Z

My 1-year old got a hold of my keyboard this morning and typed me the following message:

s_{zsssssszw szw ZSXZZ ¸Í ΩÍ AZw2`2`@`2`2`@w`2ww2w2w2`wsssdDEEDEEE!!!!!}` 1 1111111QQ111 ````````ZΩ¸¡``1111Q AWACS`AW3`2WA11111111111 11 1 1` 11````` 11 656556465458

I want to know how she was typing the omega symbols :)

Autospec running continuously on failing specs?

2009-07-02T19:41:00Z

Make sure you have autotest-rails gem installed.

Big fish

2009-06-15T19:49:00Z

My brother and I caught this fish right off the beach at dusk at Sanibel Island last month. (My brother hooked it, I fought it for 15 minutes and brought it in, that’s my dad holding it for the camera.)

My return to the basketball court

2009-04-21T01:07:00Z

It’s been nearly 11 months since I last played a pickup game of basketball at a gym. I went down to Beechmont Racquet Club this evening with my family, was just shooting around with Emerson, and lo and behold it was men’s hoops night.

When I first started shooting around a few months ago, I was horrible. But I’ve shot around about 5 times now, and I was actually shooting quite good tonight (made 12 free throws in a row, hit like 5 threes in a row).

So I decided to give it a try. My physical activity/strength/flexibility has improved a bunch over the past month or so. I still can’t “run”, but I can jog.

I was careful—and pretty nervous. I did manage to score once in my team’s 12-7 loss, got a steal (pass interception), 3 rebounds, and an assist or two. I was slow as hell, but luckily there were 2 games going on and the courts were running sideways, so I was able to camouflage it well enough.

But it was very exciting, and definitely a milestone in my Achilles rupture injury recovery. Just in case someone out there is going through a similar injury, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Ask Why

2009-04-02T05:17:00Z

Before doing anything (in business), keep asking “WHY” until you get to the root reason for doing it.

If what you come up with is anything but

increase revenue
protect revenue
reduce cost

don’t do it. It’s non-productive busy work.

Speed up Windows

2009-03-19T17:12:00Z

Find out if you have spyware problems: CCleaner Ad-Aware Lifehacker Spyware Article

If still running slow after spyware cleanup: Lifehacker Top 10 Ways to Cleanup your PC

Idea for Canada

2009-03-19T03:38:00Z

I was thinking — I wonder if there is a country in the world with a constitution like the United States Constitution that hasn’t drifted as far towards socialism as the United States has. I’m too lazy to search for that… but while I was thinking of that, I had an idea for Canada.

What if it adopted the original US Constitution, implemented the FairTax, incentives for establishing & growing businesses, and gave special incentives for Americans with annual incomes over $250k to relocate? It would be a bold, bold move, and I think they could “steal” a lot of America’s wealth.

I’d very seriously consider moving across our northern border.

What have we come to?

LinkedIn architecture evolution

2009-03-10T17:46:00Z

Great read for web application geeks: http://hurvitz.org/blog/2008/06/linkedin-architecture

Interesting narrative on how they started with a monolithic app, and eventually broke it down both vertically (services) and horizontally (partitioned by type and/or ID ranges), and how they surrender to the reality that the data isn’t going to be 100% up-to-date for all uses.