Posted in Scout | no comments 
Derek
I’ve added 2 videos to the Scout homepage – they demonstrate 3 things:
- Installing the Scout client on a remote server is almost too fast
- One-click plugin configuration (I’m installing the Ruby on Rails Request Monitoring Plugin, so if you’re a Rails developer, there’s an added bonus)
- My awkward narration voice (I think my voice actually cracks on one of them…I assure you, I am not 13 years old).
If you’re looking for an easier way to monitor your servers and web apps, check out the videos. There’s a launch notification form on the Scout homepage as well – we’ll email people on this list before publically launching Scout.
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Andre
Much of what Rails provides to get your apps up and running isn’t optimized for performance. It’s crafted to be more efficient for developers, not more efficent at runtime. before_filter callbacks on your RESTful controllers to get the current object? That’s an extra database call. All those nifty plugins you are using to kickstart your app? They probably generate far more SQL (and slower SQL) than if you coded the same functionality ad-hoc. ActiveRecord itself is slow compared to raw SQL and object instantiation.
If your project grows huge—10’s of millions of PV/day huge—you’re gonna have to revisit some of that stuff. Some of it you can compensate for with smart caching techniques and more hardware. And some of it you will have to throw away and rewrite. If you get really huge, you’re going to have pay back some of the technical debt you incurred by choosing a tool like Rails.
Yes, using a tool like Rails incurs some debts. But just like the rest of the world, there are good debts and bad debts. If you’re smart about the kind of debt you take on, you can build far more, and build it faster.
Many of your projects will never reach the level where you need to “pay back” for all that developer productivity you enjoyed on the front end. That means you can try more ideas, and (hopefully) fail fast at the more speculative ones. If some of your projects do need to scale radically (beyond the basics of better caching, more hardware, etc), you have an incredible amount of upfront productivity you can leverage against that work of—say—optimizing some key queries by hand. As long as you go in with eyes wide open and realistic expectations, then I say that’s a smart kind of technical debt.
Posted in PlaceShout | no comments
Derek
One issue we face with PlaceShout, our short-form local reviews site, is that many of the shoutouts may not be relevant to you. If you haven’t been to Nihon in San Francisco, you can’t agree or disagree with Natasha’s shoutout: “Swanky whiskey bar/restaurant. Food was good-small plate Japanese and sushi”.
We recently implemented “Shoutouts You Might Be Interested” functionality to make it more relevant.
Nightly, we scan our database looking for places you’ve been. We find any shoutouts created at those places. These shoutouts are displayed on your personalized homepage, and you can quickly agree, disagree, or pass on each of the shoutouts. There’s a great chance you’ll have an opinion on these places since you’ve already voiced your thoughts on each of them in the past.
Once per week, we email 3 of these shoutouts to you. Directly from the email, you can agree, disagree, or pass:
So far, it’s been very successful. 38% of users have voted on a shoutout from an email. This increased the number of votes on shoutouts by 27% (real-time voting from Scout):
It’s had a great impact for 2 reasons—it keeps our users informed of activity at places they’ve been and it makes browsing and searching PlaceShout better. The most accurate (and least accurate) shoutouts now have significantly more votes.
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CBQ
When training, I hate using ‘foo’ and ‘bar’ in examples. It means I’m ignoring a major portion of my responsibility—relating the Rails concepts I’m teaching to the problem my students are trying to solve.
For example, let’s say you are training students that are building an application for managing project teams. When teaching RESTful webservices, try explaining how a resourcefully-built web application could provide a free API for retrieving information about the project team members. The team members could be displayed on a totally separate web application by simply exposing these teams of people as bona fide resources.
The example might not be completely relevant – they might not need to connect to other web applications. It might shine light on another problem they need to solve – can we do the same for sharing the project schedules?
In the end, it makes my students more productive. They focus on solving their biggest problems and not just learning all of the Rails concepts.
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Derek
In just 4 years, Detroit Tigers General Manager Dave Dombrowski turned one of the worst franchises in professional sports into one of the best. I thought this portion of a recent Detroit Free Press column really summed up why:
Early in Dave Dombrowski’s tenure as Tigers general manager, I asked him about the importance of having a clear plan, which I thought was lacking under the Randy Smith regime. His response was telling—more telling than I realized then. He shifted the conversation away from the word “plan.”
“It comes down to making good decisions,” he said.
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Derek
Last week, I had the single best neighborhood cafe experience of my life. Amazing service. Gorgeous interior. Spotless. Plenty of unhidden power outlets. A luxurious back patio. Reasonable prices.
Axis Cafe in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco seemed too perfect. Like how an urban cafe might feel in an over-the-top daytime soap opera. Later, I found out that Axis Cafe was affiliated with re{NEW}, a ministry of Christian City Church San Francisco. 100% of the cafe’s profits support the Axis Community Project (ACP), which sponsors programs for the families of Potrero Hill.
My favorite high school teacher preached: “show, don’t tell.” Axis Cafe does a great job of this – I couldn’t find any mention of the relationship at the cafe and I was never approached about anything related to the church, but the entire experience reflects very well on the people in charge.
It’s similar to what Jackson Fish Market is doing with their suite of small web applications. Each of their applications is sponsored by a single brand, but the brand isn’t force-fed to you. It’s joining you on the experience. The well-executed web apps reflect highly on the brands that fund the web sites.
Advertisements on many popular web sites seem to shout “hey, look at me”. It’s to everyone’s advantage to see less invasive forms of advertising work.
BTW, If you are in Atlanta and looking for something similar, I’d suggest Octane. It’s a frequent work location for Charles.
Posted in PlaceShout | 3 comments
Andre
We’ve just launched PlaceShout (http://placeshout.com) – a “cheatsheet”-style summary of places around town, created by you and arbitrated by the community. Now you can see what’s important about a place without wading though stories about someone’s neighbor’s dog.
If you have ever been anywhere, you’ll enjoy making shoutouts. You’re limited to 100 characters, so save the long-winded narratives for someplace else.
You are probably thinking that PlaceShout’s signup process is a long, arduous process. Let me be the first to assure you that it is not. If you have one of those new-fangled OpenIDs, you can sign right in. Because we’re web 2.0 like that.
The easy doesn’t stop there. To make a shoutout, just type it in along with and the name of the place:
Confirm the place:
Like magic, the shoutout appears:
People are shouting out places in small towns and big cities…
- According to Megan, Welsh’s Pizza of Pender, NE (pop. 1,145) is the “Best place in the tri-county for pizza!”
- Jim Benson is living the big city life in Seattle, WA (pop. 3,263,497), and spreading the news that Cafe Besalu’s “Ginger biscuits will make you happy”.
Where are most of the shouters? Right now Ann Arbor, Michigan is in first place. You can see all the cities and add your city here.
Like maps? We have a map. And it has nifty directional arrows:
Try it out now: http://placeshout.com
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Derek
Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men, is a man that isn’t afraid to break away from the accepted structure of English language:
- He doesn’t use quotation marks
- He doesn’t tell you who is talking
- Say goodbye to apostrophes
- Occasional long sentences joined together by “and”
In a previous novel, when a Spanish-speaking character spoke, he didn’t translate to English.
His style makes the story of a drug deal gone bad in a remote desert location come alive. An author going through the motions might write long passages describing the scenery, the characters motives, their backgrounds, etc – but that doesn’t capture the confusion that would really occur in this situation.
It struck home to me when thinking about building software – sometimes we go through the motions when solving a problem. We don’t focus on the problem itself. It’s asking ourselves “How can I build this RESTfully?” before really thinking about the end-user’s interaction. Perfect technical execution of an inferior solution is worse than breaking a pattern to better solve a problem.
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Derek
This American Life recently profiled Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago. The episode featured one of the most stiring sound bites in my recent memory – a portion of a debate that served as Washington’s coming-out party. It was easy to imagine myself listening to the minute-long segment on the radio and knowing instantly that whether I liked it our not, this longshot is going to win.
I love these moments – when I hear/see/do something new, and know instantly that I won’t return to the old way. They are the reason I build web applications. Getting an email from someone that used one of our applications and experienced this is amazingly gratifying. It’s easy to forget that this happens regularly for many of us in the web industry, but other professions experience this much less frequently.
Why do you build web applications?
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Andre
Have you noticed how much easier it is to remember directions in your own city? Think about the last time your printer ran out of ink and you had to jot directions to a restaurant on a post-it. Compare that to writing out directions from a hotel to a restaurant in an unfamiliar city.
It's a lot easier on familiar turf. Why? Near home, the directions are anchored by points of familiarity in your mind. You already know how to get to someplace nearby, so you can use that as a ready point of reference. Closer to home, you get to use all kinds of reference points: your work, familiar street names, the park you go to, etc. Because that's the way your brain works. In your brain, everything is a relative reference.
This is equally true if you are communicating directions to someone, rather than just writing them down for yourself. The better you know the person, the easier it is: "go like you're headed to work, but turn left just before that Thai restaurant you like." Not only are the directions concise, they are simple enough that you probably don't need to write them down. Communicating is a lot easier when there are shared experiences, reference points, and a sense of "knowing what the other person knows."
There are lessons in here somewhere for those of us who create software. After all, we spend a lot of time with our computer trying to find things, either on the computer (photos, spreadsheets) or with the computer (a book on Amazon, that page you Delicious'd -- or did you mark it in Google Reader?). I often think of this when I'm using Delicious. I know I bookmarked something, but wading through the tag cloud to find it again takes too long. I usually end up finding it with a few Google searches. When the first search fails, there's usually something in those first results which triggers my memory on the keywords that will retrieve it.
Can software infer what is familiar terrain for us, and provide navigation relative to that? Can Google or Delicious know what my mental "anchors" are, and help me find stuff from there?
An OS-level example: I have a dozen or so Ruby on Rails projects in /Users/andre/projects/rails/, and I spend a lot of time in the immediate subdirectories. If there were a heat map of the places I spend time in, this directory would be hot. Would that be useful as a navigational device? Possibly. If a place got hot enough, the OS could ask me to label it in a way that's meaningful to me. I might use that as a jumping-off point as long as spend a lot of time on Rails projects.
Obviously there are pitfalls when trying to get a computer to guess what you're trying to do, or what's important to you (R.I.P Clippy). Still, there are bound to be payoffs for trying to get the computer to present navigation the way you think, rather than how it computes. A good start is to think about how our brains tend to remember things clustered relative to familiar points of reference.
Watch the video (1 min 39 sec)
