AlexHopmann.com

The newspapers today are reporting that Cisco has acquired Pure Networks. Congrats to the team, and to Cisco/Linksys which is getting itself a fine group of people and some great technology. Pure was always in a complicated marketplace but it makes a ton of sense to me that an industry leader like Linksys would see Software as a great advantage in making Networking easier for their customers. Plus it makes me feel like my decision to buy that Linksys WRT600N a few weeks ago was the right one.

Speaking of which- so far the WRT600N is performing really well, and I’m also using it with a WGA600N which is a dual-band N bridge that I’ve got to hook up equipment downstairs (the XBox, the Wii and the TV). There are two main problems I’ve had so far with the WRT600N. The first is that I named both my 5.4ghz and 2.4ghz networks with the same SID and its sometimes really unpredictable which network a given device has joined (and usually difficult to tell which one its connect to). This is partly a problem with the devices which don’t really communicate well which band they are on, but the router could help a lot here too. Its really confusing to figure out which devices are going to work best on which bands (between trying to balance distance, penetration through walls and media-playback performance). Messing around with it sometimes my TV (which acts as a media extender) works with awesome HD capability and sometimes its just crap. This seems like one of those things some intelligent home network management software could help with (hint hint).

The bigger problem is that for some reason its tunneling isn’t working. I love to use the remote access client to connect in to my home machines and I just can’t get that to work with this router. I can’t tell if its bugged or I’m doing something wrong, but the interface to set it up is actually less intuitive than normal (which is saying something).

Brad Feld posts about Office hours during college and how he tries to do similar things now at their TechStars incubator. We have a different take on office hours at DeepRockDrive but so far it works out really well and I thought it would be interesting to share.

When I started working with DeepRockDrive the technology folks up here in the Seattle area didn’t have a real office at all yet. Folks just met most days in a coffee shop and would hang out and work on the code. There were a few contractors scattered off around various parts of the world and people would often work at home. Everyone would log in to Skype all day in a common chat room so you get the similar concept to shouting over to the guy at the desk near you.

We have had an office now for several months, but its over in Bellevue. Our staff is all over the Puget Sound area and traffic isn’t so wonderful around here most of the time. I was hoping we could maintain some of the culture of being able to avoid wasting 40-60 minutes a day in traffic plus the advantages of being able to concentrate at my home office (not to mention reducing the environmental impact of all that driving especially in stop and go traffic). At the same time to act as a well oiled agile startup we need to have great communication with each other and it was sometimes really difficult to find a time when all the right people were around to discuss a given topic.

What we came up with was the concept of “core office hours”. This is roughly Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 10am to 3pm. During those times people are expected to be in the office (with the obvious exceptions for vacation, travel, important appointments, etc). Those are great times to schedule a meeting, plus you can usually pull together the right people for an impromptu meeting for just about anything. But, with the limited hours this also helps prevent our schedules from filling up with constant meetings so we have solid times to get code done, tested, write important documents, etc. On Tuesday and Thursdays I can avoid getting in the car at all. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday when I do need to go into the office I can do it at a time when traffic is WAY better (20min vs 40-60) plus its a nicer time if you want to bike too.

So far overall I’d say this system is working great, but I do have a few thoughts about some considerations that are necessary to make it work-

• It is not going to work for all job roles. Some types of jobs require you to be at the central place where people can be there together. And the job needs to be something where the output is pretty measurable- if you can’t tell if someone is goofing off, its going to breed ill-will. If the job is something where the results speak for themselves (amount of code written, bugs found, etc) it is a good fit.
• It is not going to work for all people. To make this work you need people that are very self-motivated and self-starting.
• The Skype thing helps us a ton (although any other form of live chat-room with presence information also works). It helps both give us that ability to communicate and get problems solved with colleagues in real time, as well as helps people be visibly “on the job”.
• It helps to have good network resources. We rely on a combination of the Skype stuff, as well as GMail, Google Docs, Basecamp, and an SVN and Trac server that we have deployed in our data-center. I’d also point out that all of those services are accessible without VPN so our staff can easily work on stuff from home / a cafe / vacation / the road. In theory having to VPN shouldn’t matter but I’ve always found it to be a big barrier to getting real work done.

This week I started some part-time contacting for Judy’s Book.
Judy’s is a local startup funded by Ignition
among others and Rich Tong put me in touch with them. Their
site is a cool place to share tips about great local shops, restauarants, ask questions to the local
community and all that kind of thing. It’s got all the usual modern cool things
like friend lists and a trust system that helps the community rate who provides
helpful advice and keep out the trolls.

So far I couldn’t be more happy with the experience. Ok, its only been two
days (+ a little extra) but it has really been one of those experiences where it
feels like I’m understanding much better what I’m really good at (and enjoy the
most) at work. Plus its always great to meet a bunch of smart enthusiastic
people working on an interesting project.

At Judy’s I’m working with a small team of people to come up with some
totally brand new stuff. Of course I can’t say anything about what it is yet,
but the whole combination is really cool. Part of what I’m enjoying is that with
this small team I can be really fast at
pulling together prototypes, concept pages, etc. We can do a
combination of conceptual discussions (who are the customers?, how do we compare
to the competition?) with concrete “wouldn’t it be cool if it worked like this”,
“let’s try it this way” development.

I feel like its important for me to acknowledge at this point that I
recognize that the “deliver the product over successive years” part of the job
in the software industry is really important. I’m even slightly defensive on
this topic since I get concerned that people think I’m not good at finishing a
longer project. In reality I’ve shipped dozens of versions of the Resnova
products, stuck through a 3 year Exchange 2000 product cycle and spent more than
3 years working on Avalon.

What I’ve realized is that I can do those projects. I spent years thinking that was what I had to do to be on
track for a successful career. More recently I’ve been thinking that since my skill-set seems especially well suited for that first
6-12 months of a project, I should focus on how to deliver the most
value with that. Right now I’m actually doing that with three
projects simultaneously and while that is probably a bit much, it still helps
every day feel different and gives me plenty of outlets for creativity.

Working on projects like these can have some unique challenges. For example, you
want to build things so that as much as possible of what you build can be
carried forward, especially the architecture. The last thing anyone wants is to
inherit a piece of junk that is held together (barely!) with bailing wire and
needs to get scrapped in a big, expensive, from-the-ground-up rewrite. At the
same time, realistically anything you create in the early phases is going to get
rewritten over the next 6-24 months. Hopefully several times. So build things
with an elegant architecture, but with rapid development techniques and plan on
everything getting rewritten one chunk at a time as the needs change.

The
other set of issues and revolve around your team. I’ve often noticed lots of
uncertainty in dealing with other people. Is it a prototype? Is it production
code? How much does it represent a statement about the future product direction?
The simple answer is that in a startup, everything is an experiment, but that level of ambiguity can be a really
difficult thing. I’ve met many people who thought startups would be great for
them but they wound up miserable with the level of change and uncertainty. I’m
probably confusing some people who have worked with me since I’ve been in a role
where I’ve been trying to lock down a plan and reduce churn before. To deliver
polished products to customers you do need to lock down at some point. Part of
the fun thing about this current role is that those type’s of issues aren’t
something that I need to deal with.

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I would not call today a success at the whole relaxation plan. Oh well, tomorrow is another day.

The big project today was working on my office at home. My office has had stacks of crap all over for a long time now such
that you can barely walk in it. I mentioned yesterday I was looking at some Ikea shelves but I discovered this new “The Container
Store” in Bellevue and they had
some shelves that are not at all
stylish, but do the trick nicely. Getting them into my office involved some major excavation, culling of dust-bunnies
and moving lots of stuff into the other room and then back. I bought two starter packages and one extra solid shelf but probably need
to go back soon for an extra two shelves to finish it off. Of course its going to take me the rest of the week to get all the
music gear plugged back in and running.

I’ve added some new pages to this web site- one for “food”, one for “travel”
and another for “art”. These are supposed
to be lists that I’ll just maintain over time of things I like or want to do.

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As I look forward to some downtime for the next few weeks I asked
Tim if he had any advice
since he took a few months off in between Microsoft and Pure. His advice
was pretty good although I have a feeling I’m going to have a hard time
following it. He suggested not planning anything- take a few weeks where you
just wake up and say to yourself “hmm, maybe I’ll go grab a cup of coffee”.

I unfortunately already have a list of many things to do. There is something like 30
items already on the list. Plus I’m already thinking about how it could be really interesting
to do some consulting for a bit.

Several of the bigger things on my list are getting my office back into shape. I’m probably going
to initially do this the “low budget” way- while I’ve got some cool designs that need some
custom iron-work, initially I’m going to get some cheap shelves from Ikea and go from there.

The second set of things is improvements to this blog- I plan on redoing the styles and graphics
(which were really just a “quick I need something anything in here quick”) and adding some extra
pages for lists of places I want to travel, places to eat, etc.

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For the last two months at work I’ve been writing a ton of code investigating (and building) out some potential new
directions. I suppose having not done this for a few years I was a bit concerned that my coding skills were rusty. They
were, but I’m happy to say that it comes back to me pretty quickly and even diving in to a bunch of new technologies
like PHP had a pretty quick learning curve.

Im still a big fan of the Network Magic product and
all the folks at Pure but I’ve decided to move on.
When I went from Microsoft to Pure I didnt take any time off and this time Im going to
give myself a few weeks to recharge, organize the mess (otherwise known as my office) at
home and start working on some new ideas. I’m even hoping to do some major upgrades to this
site as a way to experiment with some of those ideas, so stay tuned and shoot me email with
any comments.

I also just realized that I did something really rude in my last post-
I mentioned Aaron but I
didnt link to his blog. So
I’ve fixed it in this post and
edited the previous one to fix my oversight.

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We went down to Fry’s Electronics the other day and were thrilled to see
that Network Magic boxes were there on the software aisle. They were
beautiful so we couldn’t help ourselves and picked up a few copies. You can
click here to get one yourself from Amazon. Feel free to buy 5 or 6.

Also- Tom’s Networking just posted a review of Network Magic.
Sweet. I was a bit nervous about this one- I read Tom’s daily and they can be
pretty hard-core. “Network Magic has more going for it” is a pretty great thing
for them to say and I’m hoping we can be all over improving some of the issues
they point out.

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