Author: jeff

The Small Business Subconscious

Small businesses can be challenging places to work. You often have to make do with few resources, play several roles at once, and be flexible enough to deal with loose/nonexistent company organization. If everything magically clicks, as it sometimes does, it can be a beautiful thing. But more often than not, that simply doesn’t happen.

As I talked about this with friends who have had similar experiences, they observed that there’s often a common mistake made in small businesses: since every employee is precious, the organization tries to extract as much value as possible by encouraging everyone to contribute in as many ways as possible. It bills itself as a democracy, as an environment that genuinely listens to its employees.

The problem, of course, is that when people aren’t in sync about the mission, or about specific project goals, you end up with a frustrating mess of conflicting directions. The business (somewhat desperately?) tries to latch onto everything at once, and there’s a lack of decisiveness in moving forward. Projects get fragmented. People believe they’re collaborating but they’re actually not. Confusion ensues. Little gets done.

Leadership is even more key in small businesses than in larger ones, I’d wager. Because if you have few resources, you need to choose your projects very carefully, dedicate resources accordingly, and make absolutely sure they go to completion quickly. There’s not much room for failure. But instead, small businesses seem prone to being wishy-washy. The insidious and tragic aspect of this is that when projects move at a snail’s pace or even fail, the accountability falls back on the individuals. Because management failed to lead, it can remain blame-free. It’s a formula for endless frustration.

In this unfortunate strategy, the small business is structured like the subconscious and its conflicts. Its desire is vague and repressed, and though seemingly absent, it’s actually very much the motive force for its existence. Like a human being, the small business can’t decide upon its identity, which remains in flux. And just like a human being, this repressed desire can lash out violently when it isn’t fulfilled.

“It Works”

This blog post, “The Worst Thing You Can Say About Software Is That It Works,” written by one Kenny Tilton, is pretty hilarious. This is the most beautiful thing I’ve read in a while:

if a pile of code does not work it is not software, we’ll talk about its merit when it works, OK? Therefore to say software works is to say nothing. Therefore anything substantive one can say about software is better than to say it works.

Reading this triggered flashbacks and PTSD. I’d mentioned to a manager recently that I wanted some time to do some badly needed refactoring. My explanation of why was met with a pause, then, “Let me get this straight. You want time to take something that already works, reorganize it, possibly break things, and we wouldn’t have anything new to even show for it?”

That last part was wrong–the value added comes from maintainability and extensibility, but I couldn’t get him to really grasp those ideas. He’s not a technology person. For all he knew, maybe this was an elaborate ruse on my part to be left undisturbed while I surfed porn at my desk for a few weeks.

I work in a very small shop with all non-technology people, so this sort of thing happens a lot. It’s frustrating. It’s sort of nice to know I’m not alone in encountering this mindset. But man… if even the fellow programmer in Kenny’s story doesn’t get it, I’m not sure there’s much hope for the rest of the world.

A Quick Observation

For some potential upcoming work, I’ve been catching up on the changes made to Java over the last few years, and exploring the popular frameworks and libraries now in use.

Folks on reddit.com harshly criticize the bloat, unnecessary complexity, and huge runtime requirements for Java. They have their points. But I have to say, having worked on perl and PHP lately, where good code organization is the exception and not the norm, looking at Java again is a very welcome change.

The APIs for stuff like Servlets, Faces, EJBs, and Hibernate may be difficult to learn and remember, but at the very least, I find I always know where to look for something, and it’s usually where I expect to find it. In my book, over-abstraction is the lesser evil compared to not enough.

EAcceleratorCacheFunction = Cache_Lite_Function + EAccelerator

It’s pretty much all in the title. In a nutshell, EAcceleratorCacheFunction is a “memoizing” cache class for PHP that uses shared memory for storage. It is mostly compatible with Cache_Lite and Cache_Lite_Function.

Just like Cache_Lite_Function, it supports per-cache-object lifetime values, instead of specifying the lifetime of an item at the time you store it. This lets you dynamically change the lifetime of the cache. For example, if system load goes up and you don’t mind serving sightly older content instead of regenerating it:

$load = sys_getloadavg();
// use 5 min avg (ignore momentary spikes)
if($load[1] >= 6) {
    $lifetime = 900; # 15 min
} elseif($load[1] >= 3) {
    $lifetime = 600; # 10 min
} else {
    $lifetime = 300; # 5 min
}
$cache = new EAcceleratorCacheFunction(array('lifeTime' => $lifetime));
$cache->call('make_page');

I wrote EAcceleratorCacheFunction as a drop-in replacement for Cache_Lite_Function. On a virtual private server, doing cache reads/writes from memory instead of disk has made a noticeable difference in performance; it helps tremendously that the database has to contend with less disk I/O.

From Content to Community

Since the beginnings of the commercial web, people learned quickly that “content is king.” Appealing and unique content is a guarantee of raw traffic, and that hasn’t changed with Web 2.0.

What HAS changed is that traffic from content won’t necessarily result in return visitors and loyalty. Syndication feeds have made it increasingly easy to filter exposure to websites, so that a user can maximize only what they want to see. I won’t bother browsing around a website that’s got interesting content 75% of the time, when I can grab its feed and use my newsreader to view interesting content from many sources nearly 100% of the time.

Quality content needs vibrant community interaction around it to ensure that a website gets loyal return visitors. A lot of old media still hasn’t figured this out. They try to fool users with fancy-looking websites, attempting to masking the fact they’re still, well, old media.

One example is The San Francisco Chronicle’s upcoming redesign. While the visual feel is fairly clean and consistent, the page is horribly cluttered. The flawed rationale is pretty obvious: let’s put tons of crap on the screen and maybe someone will click something!

User feedback on the redesign is very mixed. I suspect that the positive responses are coming from non-tech savvy readers, people who are evaluating the layout based on its resemblance to a print newspaper. (They’ll soon change their minds when they can’t easily find anything.) That audience isn’t very large and it’s slowly dying out over time.

Interestingly, the negative responses aren’t just about layout clutter, but the lack of interactivity. Intelligent, web-savvy users aren’t interested in being passive readers. They want to be part of the news, to help shape it and to comment on it; they want their voices featured prominently on the site, and not ghettoized in tiny comments sections, sidebar polls, or letters to the editor. Being a truly integral part of a community makes engaging people feel appreciated, gives them a reason to come back, and makes them want to spread the word.

If Web 2.0 means anything at all, it means that people are realizing the web isn’t yet another publishing medium; it’s an interface for social interaction. And this means successful websites are increasingly distinguished by the kinds of community they foster, not just their content. In the world of technology news, for example, there are plenty of sites that publish decent, timely content, original or aggregated. Sure, they each have their own editorial styles, but in my mind, what truly separates them are the unique communities: Slashdot is mostly full of snarky, pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft ideologues; ars technica is a bit more neutral with a strong gamer and “power user” demographic; reddit tends to have good conversations about submitted links in their programming subsections.

There will always be a place for online newspapers and their model of publishing, but I think their core readership and audience will continue to decline, unless they’re willing to give up their monopoly on content production and focus on fostering distinctive communities.