carlcoryell

The difference in this article rhymes strongly with the difference between project and product mindsets in software development.

The combination of daily weigh-ins and the exponentially weighted moving average I learned from the Hacker Diet has been absolutely magic for me. It gives me helpful daily feedback signal in the noise of ~5lb daily weight variation. Beeminder has replaced paper graphs for me. Their new moving average isn't quite as helpful for me, but is still workable. I target rates of weight loss on the order of 0.35-0.50lbs/week.

~10 FTEs, US, 75% percentile salaries, fully loaded, 1.5-3M. Figure that team salaries is probably about 50% of the total software cost (hosting, support, tooling, on call, management overhead, recruiting, training etc)$3-$5M. Rounded to the nearest 0.5 for convenience. We got about ~4 bits of data from the OP, so I didn’t put too much work into making my estimate precise. I prefer to get the ‘software is fucking expensive and terrible’ experience on the front end and go from there, if people are still into it.

For the record, I have no connection to the original poster, and I’m not in the business of doing this anymore. I wanted to respond because I didn’t see any other threads pushing the OP to think about the basic economics and do some basic fermi estimations of the business case.

I used to run the Singapore and Seattle offices for Pivotal Labs and helped a couple of companies build in-house teams to do exactly this.

My first question is to check the basic economics:

$2-300M in annual revenue, ~15% margins, you’re probably looking at earnings/profits around $30-45M. Building and running your own software team is probably around $5M/year, which feels like it could be a substantial hit to your margins. Is there a clear story for how this software will allow you grow to $300-500M in revenue or more? I like to have a credible story for 5-10x ROI on software development because the costs end up being so variable and uncertain.

Then the trick is figuring out how to hire, train, and establish a productive environment for the team. My customers approach was to hire a vendor [Pivotal Labs] to ship a first release and help hire in-house staff to replace vendor roles until the team was fully in-house. The customer got rapid feedback that the team and concept worked; we shipped working software. The new hire landed into a productive context, and could see that the company had an effective approach to software development (because it was already shipping working software).

Sony still hasn't apologized for multiple installations of rootkits on customer computers. I lost all interest in the company after they made those choices and I'm glad to see that a culture that tolerates such enmity towards their customers and disregard for copyright (they were illegally using GPL software in their rootkits as well) isn't doing well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki...

Windows only: The cover photo shows a MacBook Air, but the tech specs say the software requires Windows operating systems.

There are many places in our society where kids can do stupid and immature things but I don't think the adults in our engineering profession need to support or sponsor them. I respect Heroku etc for pulling their sponsorship dollars. I'm a huge fan of supporting adult standards of behavior to participate in adult society and I have no patience for sexism in our field.

Maciej Cegłowski's essay "A Rocket to Nowhere" is a much better description of how and why the Shuttle was doomed by political and military considerations.

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

If you listen to the audio tape of "The Goal", Mr. Goldratt tells the heartbreaking story of why he wrote the book and what happened afterwards.

As a grad student, he developed software to manage the production of certain key components needed for his research. He then ended up starting a successful software company selling those tools into manufacturing companies.

He wrote "The Goal" as a sales tool to help his customers adopt the software and practices.

The heartbreaking part is that he found the companies that purchased his book were more successful than companies that purchased his software or companies that purchased both.

Once realizing that, he immediately ceased to be an effective salesman for his company and was pushed out as CEO.

pair programming in open space

Hi, I'm actually a Pivotal engineer (in our Singapore office) and while I can't comment on either of the examples above I do want to clarify that clients don't have to hire Pivotal engineers in pairs. We do pair on all production code and our strong preference is for mixed teams of client engineers and Pivotal engineers. We strongly encourage even team sizes so that there is rarely an odd engineer out.

In Singapore, most elevator door close buttons work. It's very civilized and one of the small delights of living here.

TransFS is selling merchant accounts and lies with their graphics. $30 transactions and $50K/month they calculate their fees at $1220 and the square fees at $1625 and yet the bar graph is shows square as twice as much.

data is four years old and copied from an undisclosed source.

tl;dr I'm going to buy a tablet so I can distract myself while watching the baby.

Carl here (one of the engineers who worked on birdseye),

The web interface to eBird isn't very usable, especially if you want to know what birds are near by and where to go see particular birds. It is however the best repository of bird observation data in North America and we are thrilled to contribute to it.

This release just reads from the eBird database. Our next release will also allow contributions to the database. This will make BirdsEye a great front end for eBird. It's much easier to record observations in the field on a device with GPS etc than to remember everything until you get home.

Right now, eBird is getting over 1 million observations per month and we're hoping that BirdsEye will double or triple that.