Life as I See It

A losing hand of poker

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:59:12 -0800

Poker is a beautiful game of skill. Its depth and complexity have always drawn me in. I think that in it one can find the ultimate expression of rationality and self-discipline in their raw forms. I had just bubbled out of a small poker tournament due to a momentary lack of both. For those of you whom are not familiar with tournament poker terminology, finishing on the bubble means that I finished one spot outside of the money payouts. In this case, I had finished in 11th place, when 10 people were to make the money. Then again, if you did not know this, you probably won’t gain anything by reading on… Save yourself some time and move on ;)

If you know tournament poker, feel free to read on for the TL;DR:

With 13 people left, I had a chip stack of approximately 17.5 big blinds. It was 6 handed at my table and I looked down at the TT in the cutoff. I had been raising a lot of hands in this position, and my standard raise was 2.5 big blinds. I made it 2.5BB again. The guy in the big blind had about 13 big blinds. He had not played a single hand for approximately 5-6 orbits. He asked me the following question: “Why do you keep raising my blinds?” I answered: “Because I have a huge hand.” To this he responded by immediately declaring: “I am all in.” I analyzed the situation and came to the following conclusion: “This guy had not played a hand in approximately 6 orbits and he immediately pushed all in when I told him that I had a huge hand in that specific situation and sat back in his chair.” It’s as if he told me: “The worst hand I can have here is TT+ or AQ+.” In that situation, there was no way I could ever be far ahead - it’s as if he played his hand face up. At best, I was a 57.2% favorite (if, for example he had AQ). At worst, I was a 4-1 underdog. The pot was laying me about 1.5-1 money odds. A truly miserable situation any way you slice it. Even if it were to be a coin toss, it wouldn’t have been exceptionally favorable equity. Against that gentleman, it was almost never going to be a coin toss.

Instead of folding and leaving myself with 15 big blinds (in this case, I would have still had the second biggest stack on the table and the third or fourth biggest stack in the remaining field), I went completely against all rationality and took one last look at my otherwise very strong hand of TT and shoved in the remaining 10.5 big blinds. To those of you whom have been paying attention, I don’t need to tell you what he turned over: KK. The rest was history.

There were 5 other players on that table, against whom calling with TT in that same situation would have been a standard play. Against that individual, it was the worst possible mistake of the tournament. It ultimately cost me the money bubble, and likely a top 3 finish - given that the rest of the field were some of the softest players that I’ve played against in a long time.

When playing poker against live opponents, always side with reason and use all past observations to your advantage (so long as you have been observing your opponents up to that point). In that case, your hand is merely secondary to the meta-game and the observations that you had made up to that crucial moment.

First place was $4750. Next time.

Ryanair CEO is John Galt

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:14:13 -0800

Ryanair CEO is John Galt

kirkwoodmtn: Powder Anxiety Some time in October, around the...

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:23:54 -0800

kirkwoodmtn:

Powder Anxiety

Some time in October, around the time when ski movies are premiering and new ski mags show up in the mail, the annual “jones” for shreddin powder begins. We gather our gear, mount up new skis and anxiously wait, day dreaming of blue bird pow days. Eternity seems to set in and fall drags on forever and ever. Until one day it starts to snow, winter begins and skiing follows. However, this year the phenomenon of winter is not really happening yet.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so resorts around Lake Tahoe began to make snow and push for openings around Thanksgiving day. It’s great to get out on the boards and rail some turns, but unless your from the midwest, you’re probably going to get board with the man made “ribbon of death” sooner than later. With so much uneasiness and anxiety about skiing and winter, I had no choice but to quit my job, and head north where the snow is.

I hopped on the next available Southwest flight, and hours later found myself in Seattle, just moments away from gigantic peaks and yes, lots of snow. My first days ever spent in the Cascade Mountains were with “extreme” skier Drew Tabke. We shredded around Crystal Mountain seeking out every last bit of pow we could find. Crystal is awesome! With breathe taking views, sustained steeps and rock features everywhere, there’s not really ahything to dislike.

Tabke was fired up to ski something new, so the next day we journeyed out for the CJ couloir. A 3000 foot long couloir with a 50 plus degree entrance that leads to a tight choke half way down. After a 2 mile approach, we strapped on our crampons and booted straight up the beast. The climb was challenging with constantly changing conditions of punchy crust layers, bullet proof ice and occasional powder patches. We pushed onto the top, a little apprehensive of how the variable conditions would ski.

Tabke dropped in first, carefully making his way down the steep exposed entrance. I hesitantly skied in behind him, and much to my surprise the turns were powder-ish. The conditions were definitely variable though and a fall would have been fatal. So we took are time and survival skied down the couloir, rather than opening it up and “givin er”. We were both psyched to ski such a rad line and celebrated with cold beers down at the truck.

Being more responsible than I, Tabke traveled back to Seattle to work. I continued on, and hooked up with some friends from Squaw Valley, who just happened to be at Crystal. I joined the crew of shredders; Josh Anderson, Mat Jackson and Ben Paciotti who all grew up skiing at Crystal. We spent the next few days casually crushing it on their favorite lines from childhood. Inevitably, we found ourselves reminising and playing cards at the Snorting Elk each night until last call.

Now I find myself in Tahoe again, back to the ribbon of death. Dreaming of the ellure created by the mighty Cascade Mountains. I am anxious and needy as ever for snow, but feel fortunate that I got to experience a brief moment of winter for Christmas. For now there is nothing to do but eagerly wait and obsesively check weather forecasts and models. The only other option is to burn skis, vacuum cleaners and pray for snow.

-Josh Daiek

Steve Jobs on Startups

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:53:56 -0700

daslee:

“I hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business.”

Photo

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:53:31 -0700

"When I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before..."

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:18:58 -0700

“When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

- Walt Whitman, p. 418 of Perrine’s Sound and Sense (11th ed)

Breaking Bad and its Philosophical Context - Part 2

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 02:02:12 -0700

As I’ve posited in Part 1, the discussion of Walter White’s character in Breaking Bad is necessarily a discussion about philosophy. More so, it is a discussion about the nature of morality in a social context - it must begin with a study of his code of ethics - the one he finds after being faced with death.

The pilot episode finds Walt working two jobs: as a middle school teacher and as an attendant at a local car wash. His pregnant wife Skyler lives at their home with their son Walt Jr., whom is suffering from cerebral palsy. This is not a rosy suburban family. We know that while they love each other, they are facing difficult times. Walt finds himself hating his carwash job. We also see that he is struggling through his days due to a nagging cough that won’t go away. Suddenly, during one of his shifts at the car wash, he collapses. He soon finds out that he has stage 3 lung cancer. His family has no savings. They will have no way to pay for their expenses if he is to die. It is with this realization that Walt looks to make enough money to ensure his family’s livelihood after his death. He teams up with Jesse Pinkman - a former student, turned street drug peddler, to make it a reality.

I began this part by stating that Walt finds a moral code. His character began the first episode as a bit of a loser - a washed up brilliant chemist in two dead-end low-wage jobs, suffering from health problems. Walt ended the first episode with a solution to the dire situation that he found himself in. Everything in between were choices that are within the realm of ethics.

“Drugs are bad” - this is what we hear day in and day out. This is what is fed to us by our friends at the DEA, and other agencies of the federal government. We are guilted into believing that things we put in our bodies are bad for society - and bad for us. Yet we also find ourselves surrounded by legal drugs: alcohol, cigarettes, prescription drugs, etc. Interestingly enough, meth is available by prescription as Desoxyn. The latter is prescribed to children with ADHD by your neighborhood psychiatrist. The irony.

So what makes drugs bad? What does “bad” mean? Why are they bad? By whose sanction? The questions of what, why, how, whom, etc. are the questions that I like to ask whenever I consider the ethical merits of a decision. When I consider Walt’s initial decision to get into drug manufacturing for profit, I consider whether this decision was good or bad on the merits of the answers to those questions and some others. But let us begin with those.

It seems that we had not learned the lessons of the Volstead Act: we did not learn the lessons of the countless murder sprees in the name of business - that is in the name of monopolies created through government corruption; we did not learn the lessons of corruption at all levels of federal and state government… I can go on, but it would be easier for the reader to watch another excellent show called Boardwalk Empire for the tl;dr summary. Suffice it to say that Volstead was repealed a long time ago, and booze flows freely through bars - freely that is, after it is taxed and after the surgeon general’s warnings are plastered on the bottles, among other things. Lest we forget that “minors” under 21 years of age cannot legally purchase alcohol - without threat of hefty fines to the seller and to shaming of the drinker through various guilt inducing ad campaigns, parental sanction, etc. Does it stop teenage drinking? Not particularly. It just makes it that much more desirable.

Prohibition and taboo of any choice of a human being to act on his decision, which does not prevent another from freely going about their lives, is a breach. It is a breach of that human being’s capacity to choose that which he thinks is right for him - whether or not the decision is a mistake. It is a violation of his ability to think. It is a sanction on his brain. It is a statement that some people’s decisions are better than others’ without consideration for individual cases, individual needs, or individual experiences.

The above is an introduction to the reasoning I use in deciding that Walter White’s actions in the pilot and next few episodes are moral.

I intend to dive deeper in Part 3 by covering some abstract concepts regarding morality and demonstrating their applications in Walt’s decisions throughout Season 1.

Again, I welcome comments and suggestions. Please keep it civil.

Breaking Bad and its Philosophical Context - Part 1

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:42:43 -0700

I do not watch much television. Most programming these days is just that: sheep herding - the same philosophical ideologies of altruism, amoralism, nihilism, etc. put into moving pictures - alas, regrettably so.

Breaking Bad is decidedly different.

The show’s basic question of “What if you had terminal lung cancer and knew how to cook the best meth anyone had ever tried, to provide for your family?” merely scratches the surface of the ethical questions it raises.

Morality is within the realm of ethics - and ethics, in turn, is a branch of philosophy. The primary reason I think Breaking Bad is excellent is that it is a fantastic study of morality in a social context. Thus, it also serves as an excellent portrayal of various philosophical ideologies - all ideas, after all, eventually find their sources in philosophy.

Breaking Bad begins with the brilliant chemist turned teacher/family man Walter White finding out that he has stage 3 lung cancer. With the realization that he may not have much longer to live, he looks for a way to ensure his family’s well-being after his death - understanding that his family’s future lives depend on this decision. He finds his solution in the production of methamphetamine. For the first two seasons, he hides this from his immediate family, from his DEA-agent brother in law Hank, etc. He understands (or learns with experience) that his decision to sell meth puts him in grave danger with the feds, with other meth dealers, and ultimately bears the risk of failure and death (even before the cancer gets to him). He deals with these risks systematically, rationally, and swiftly. He learns, he strives forward. With every step, he gets closer to his goal - sometimes having to take one step forward and two steps back, before finally getting what he’s after. Eventually, he succeeds.

Does Walter White make mistakes along the way? Certainly. Are his actions moral? Fundamentally, I posit that they are. According to the society in which he lives: No. This is the dilemma that is core to the philosophical context of Breaking Bad and the one I’d like to explore further in this essay. Walter White’s actions are the result of a rational decision to provide a product to people whom have voluntarily decided to consume it - to their own detriment notwithstanding - to make a profit to be used for his family’s livelihood. Walter White cannot do what he does without taking tremendous risks - imposed wholly by the societal context in which he finds himself.

This concludes Part 1. I welcome comments. As always, please keep it civil.

Poker within the context of economic theory

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:57:00 -0700

Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources, which have alternative uses.

-Thomas Sowell

I am a poker player. My fundamental problem with poker had been its status as a zero sum game - and the resulting chastisement of this hobby of mine among certain members of my family and friends. I am also an entrepreneur. I am driven by wealth creation - the polar opposite of a zero sum proposition. This is a dilemma and seeming contradiction, which has gnawed at me throughout my poker career.

Per game theory’s purist tenets, poker is indeed a zero sum game.

I think of it more as a perfect study of economic theory. Further, I would posit poker is a mechanism of indirect wealth creation - and therefore challenge the very notion of it being a zero sum activity (while fully preserving its status as such in the context of game theory).

In any version of poker, there are two core parties: a winner and a loser - but these two parties only win and lose in dollar terms. In reality, however, both parties benefit - so long as the loser doesn’t happen to be a degenerate gambler (caveat: most losing poker players, including myself, have counted themselves in the ranks of degenerate gamblers at one time or another).

Among responsible adults, poker is either a pastime, a part-time job, or a full-time source of income, and a variety of combinations thereof. For those to whom it is a pastime, it serves as a good way to socialize, spend time satisfying competitive urges, watch a televised game while having a beer, etc. For this group, losing money, while not necessarily pleasant, is simply the cost of admittance. For the ones who play poker as a source of income - whether full-time, part-time, or anything in between - it is a competitive activity in which the score is tallied in terms of the dollars won or lost. In any of these cases, the exchange is voluntary.

As I had established in the very beginning, “economics is the study of the use of scarce resources, which have alternative uses.” In the poker world, the resources are money and time. When a losing poker player decides to step into a casino or a card-room, he allocates some of his dollars and some of his time towards either entertainment or towards an income. In either case, win or lose, the assumption is that the poker player perceives a tangible benefit from participation in the activity.

I’d like to finish by saying that poker serves as a mechanism for indirect wealth creation. When a losing poker player allocates some of his excess time and money (resources that are in scarce supply to others, but not to him), these resources are transferred to people whom will eventually make greater use of them. The winners of a poker game will go on to purchase goods and services. If they are especially profitable, they will go on to purchase real estate, start businesses, hire employees, etc. All of these examples constitute wealth creation.

Syllogisms in lexicon - and why they are unnecessary

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 12:17:00 -0700

Syllogisms in lexicon - and why they are unnecessary:

A conversation among a few of my Facebook friends and me about what I consider to be idiotic syllogisms of the English lexicon: phrases like “no worries,” “no problem,” “have no fear,” etc. I think that they place the conversation partner in a somewhat awkward position of a negative assumption. For example, telling someone “no worries” is the equivalent of saying: “You thought I was worried, but I wasn’t” or “you shouldn’t be worried about it.” Well why are those assumptions made? Why can’t we be more positive and optimistic in our day-to-day conversations? That’s the subject of this discussion :)

A mistake on my part (re:last post)

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:05:00 -0700

My last post got a very negative reception on HackerNews: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3041386

I did mess up in one big way: I posted something that had no attribution, and which in fact turned out to be a piece of propaganda. For this, I sincerely apologize to those whom have read and responded in kind.

To all of you who simply decided to flame in response I simply say this: don’t be a child.

To those of you who think that socialism works: you must be kidding yourself. My views on socialism have not changed.

Self note: I need to take more time in looking up sources and posting them with my quoted pieces.

Equality for all? And everyone fails...

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:08:46 -0700

Quoted from an anonymous source:

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan”.. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A…. (substituting grades for dollars - something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.
When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that. (Please pass this on)

Remember, there IS a test coming up. The 2012 elections.

-Anonymous

Formtastic goes 2.0

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 14:56:23 -0700

Formtastic goes 2.0:

thechangelog:

Kudos to Justin and 43 other contributors for shipping 2.0 of Formtastic, one of the best Rails form builders out there.

Check out Justin’s blog post for a list of improvements.

Epistemologically unsound "expert" commentary

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 22:53:00 -0700

Epistemology, from the Greek ἐπιστήμη [epistēmē], for knowledge or science, is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and limitations of knowledge. For an argument to be epistemologically unsound, it merely needs to be proved false or fallacious.

An interview on KQED radio with economist Ken Goldstein was on the air yesterday.

I like to start with context, and background:

The interviewee was the same Ken Goldstein whom on August 12, 2009 said:

We’ve averted the worst, and there are clear signs the stimulus is working

-Ken Goldstein, U.S. Enters Recovery as Stimulus Refutes Skeptics

He has also said, as recently as April 21, 2011:

The leading index continues to point to sustained economic growth through year end

-Ken Goldstein, Leading U.S. Indicators, Consumer Confidence Gain as Fuel Costs Discounted

So, for starters, Mr. Goldstein doesn’t have a very good “fortune-telling” record.

Ken Goldstein’s hypothesis in the interview was essentially two-part:

The stimulus hasn’t worked long term, because it was not large enough or sustained for a long enough period of time
The biggest reason we got ourselves into the mess we are in now, is because we elected politicians into office in 2008 who have done nothing, but caused gridlock. Essentially, according to Mr. Goldstein, it’s all our fault.

I would like to start my argumentative rant against our “esteemed” economist’s hypothesis, by addressing its second part first. By having stated that it was our fault that we elected the wrong politicians, Goldstein implied that a) the congressmen who had taken office in 2008 were not the ones that should have been there and b) that we were to blame. While part (b) is true (we did vote all those new Congressmen into office, part (a) is pure hyperbole. Part (a) implies that it were the actions of the freshmen Republicans that are the problem in today’s politics. This of course has also been de rigeur in mass media and the official position of the POTUS. So what’s wrong with all this? It’s simple really: yes there’s gridlock. The republicans are simply doing what they were elected to do: prevent further expansion of the federal government. Are the House and Senate doing a good job? Not really - but they are not throwing individuals under the bus as quickly as the other group of donkeys. But, that’s not the focus of my article. I’d like to leave it as a worthwhile exercise for the reader to explore the facts. Instead, I’d like to circle back to why Goldstein’s argument is epistemologically unsound. By pointing the finger at us, and the new Congressmen we have placed in office, and drawing the conversation away from the root causes of why we are in the sh*t we are in now, Goldstein and his friends in the media and in the Presidential office are merely spouting red herrings. “It’s all their fault, it can’t be us.” Good luck folks, but I know that a red herring is worse than ignoratio elenchi - and both are fallacies of the disgustingly offensive kind. We are not children, so please spare us the bullshit.

Now to the first part of Goldstein’s argument, re: there not having been enough time for demand-side stimuli to have worked. The neo-Keynesians have been screaming this as “bloody murder,” ever since Keynes has been turning in his grave for the vast misinterpretations and misrepresentations of his theories. In reality, economic stimuli, according to Keynes himself, were only supposed to work during times of war. He has suggested in his works to stop stimulus spending at other times. Again, I leave the research on the above as a worthwhile exercise for the reader. I am not an encyclopedia, and this is a blog post - not an academic essay. Suffice it to say that stating something is true, with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is either lying, evasion, or both. In either case, the argument is epistemologically unsound.

If Mr. Goldstein somehow gets wind of this blog post (infinitesimally small odds of this happening) and wants to have a debate with me on the matters above, I’ll bring the proof. I know the LD debate format. Bring it, “comrade.”

In the meantime, I urge the reader of this post to merely consider this: question everything you read. Ask “why? who? how? when? where?” and find out the truth. Don’t let “experts” brainwash you into believing that what you know to be true is false. Don’t let “experts” drive your decisions when you go and vote the “wrong” politicians into office. Keep your eyes open, your brain well oiled, and may logic and reason be your only guides.

My First Year at BizeeBee

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 12:04:03 -0700

Poornima hosted my 1 year at BizeeBee party at her place last Friday. It was excellent, on more than one level.

First, Poornima has been cooking like a pro for the past couple of years. Naturally, the food was great.

Second, and most important: all the Beez were in attendance. This is really what made it a very special evening. Poornima had thanked me for helping her create a culture, a process, and a context within which we now operate. As I had told the team in person, I must stress again now: though I did set the context and ground rules for building our product, it was each team member’s support and daily contributions that made it a success.

When I joined BizeeBee in September 2010, Poornima had asked me to evaluate charting libraries for what was to become our new dashboard. I got the opportunity to look at our code-base, our feature backlog, our release schedule, and our process in general. While working on my initial project, I also took it upon myself to find all the holes in how we handled those areas. The team was especially receptive at first on the technology end, because I was able to clearly demonstrate efficiency, elegance, and maintainability improvements in using HAML vs ERB as a templating language. When it came to more “esoteric” issues, such as discussions about BDD, TDD, code DRYness, process, communication, and context-based management, I initially received lots of resistance. After all, I was new on the team and was suggesting all sorts of fundamental changes in how we did our work.

Though there was resistance initially, Poornima encouraged me to explore those areas in more depth, and come into my own with the rest of the team. I am deeply grateful for that. I am also grateful that she often gave me a dose of reality, when I evaded it by trying to be an “Enforcer” - an ironic title, that was a moniker given to me by someone on the team at some point - probably after one of my many rants regarding the benefits of agile! Poornima helped me finesse my proclivity towards leadership, by suggesting that I took into account some of the “people skills” that she so naturally possesses.

Aside from having the opportunity to lead the team on the engineering/process side, I’ve been able to become a better engineer. I am gaining more and more knowledge about Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript. All our new features now start with tests. While at BizeeBee, I’ve been able to perfect my understanding of the fine differences between BDD and TDD, and how each may be done at every tier of the product’s technology stack. This translates into our product having very few bugs, and moving closer and closer to daily releases. Further, I’ve always been extremely interested in building awesome UIs. I’ve blended my experience in building UI/UX for enterprise apps in Flex/Flash for former clients with the deeper understanding I now have about doing similar stuff with HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

All in all, I think it’s pretty clear that I am super stoked about the last year! I look forward to the challenges of the next year and how we will surely overcome them.

Writing a set of Cucumber table testing APIs/Steps

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 10:39:00 -0700

In line with one of my goals, which I had discussed previously, here’s some context for this post: Refactoring is a necessary way to get to a more optimal and reusable (DRY) solution to a high level problem. It is also important to understand that solutions usually start out at a specific concrete or low-level problem and bubble up when higher level solutions are needed. Red, green, refactor - a good philosophy to follow - even when you are refactoring your own test suite! :) For an excellent book that will get you thinking differently about software engineering, check out http://pragprog.com/book/achbd/the-rspec-book. In the BizeeBee app we have html tables, which display various data: students, class cards, purchase history, etc. Some of these tables have non-trivial functionality. For example, the students table allows the studio owner to take attendance by selecting some students and pressing a “Take Attendance” button. Often, the table is sorted by a column before attendance is taken, and the sort order needs to be preserved. This is complexity which necessitates code coverage to make sure it works now and in future iterations. When we had initially written the functionality to render these tables, we used the jQuery datatables plugin. One of our early customers had a student list with 7000+ records. When we saw this, we realized that we needed a way to pull paginated data from the db (for performance). With that, my partner in crime David Grieser (there are two full time engineers at BizeeBee now, and we are hiring) proposed that we move away from datatables and use the will_paginate rails plugin. This good choice also ultimately gave us the opportunity to have more control over the table rendering and table functionality. Up until that point, we had not written any tests for the html table functionality. For what it’s worth, we already had two test suites: one with Cucumber and another with RSpec. But, without the html table code coverage, we couldn’t be sure that refactoring to use will_paginate wouldn’t blow up in our face (by way of errors logged by customers). We initially implemented will_paginate for the student table. When we refactored the functionality to take attendance, I decided to write some Cucumber tests. In one of the scenarios, I had to ensure that after taking attendance, the table still had the correct data: For the step Then students 1..3 should have 1 less credits I wrote the following Cucumber matcher: It’s easy to see that I had tightly coupled (bad) the above step to the html table under test:

tr_locator = "table#customer_users tbody tr:nth-of-type(#{s_id})"

That was ok, until I had to write a similar step for other html tables in the app. At a higher level, what I needed was a step that would check for the presence of specific data at the intersection of a row and column in an HTML table. As soon as I defined the problem, the matcher was easy to write: After writing the above matcher, I quickly realized an even more interesting use case: I wanted to test that an HTML table had the correct set of data. Again, wording the problem in those concrete terms, helped me write this matcher: The above test makes use of Aslak Hellesoy’s (he is the author of Cucumber) Table class. The above Cucumber matcher matches a Then step in the following format: After writing the step matcher above, I realized that I should refine it further. It’s easy to see that it’s a bit unintuitive to write that step in Gherkin. This is doubly true when taking into account one of the core problems, which Cucumber tests should always address: good communication of a feature’s functionality in plain English. Ideally the step should be writable like so: In other words our step matcher should be able to compare the html table’s output directly to a set of desired output on a column by column, row by row basis. I will leave this as an exercise to the reader. Of course, I will also be writing this shortly myself. So, if you respond with your version in the comments, I’ll thank you! :p

The Next 6 Months

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 11:41:36 -0700

In my previous post, I discussed my last eight months at BizeeBee. Now, I’d like to focus on the next six. Not to be clichéd and cheesy: knowing the past is good, but the future is what’s really at stake - until I invent a time machine. As I had said previously, I intend to maintain my previous 5 goals as overarching themes - a framework for success, if you will. To those, I’d like to add 3 new ones:

Context-based management & leadership

I’ve always despised micromanagement with a passion and loved context-setting leadership styles. The folks at Netflix (Reed Hastings rocks) realized this best and has made it one of the core company policies: “Get the most out of the organization by setting context and offering freedom, rather than by exerting control and establishing rules and processes.” They call this their “Freedom and Responsibility Culture.” I just checked NFLX. It’s trading at $246.10/share. The stock’s up 580% since 2009. That’s pretty much insane growth - I don’t know of many companies that have grown at such a breakneck pace. They’re doing “something” right. I bet it has to do at least a little with how their company functions from the inside out. I could write a whole post or even a book about management styles and their tradeoffs. For now though, I will say that I will dedicate lots of time in the next six months encouraging and fostering a context-based management and leadership structure at BizeeBee. If I am right (I tend to be right more often than I tend to be wrong), as the company grows from our current team size of 5, this should work out well.

Changing direction

Over the past couple of weeks we have realized that we need to do some rethinking about the product. As I had predicted from the beginning, we observed that direct sales for SaaS is not a scalable business practice. So, we’ve begun working on some interesting and super secret-sauce ideas on how to make BizeeBee turn-key. To give a hint: making lots of small hypotheses, A/B testing, rolling with the best option, and doing a ton of web marketing, distribution channel plays, and other sexy methods of spreading the word. After we will have determined which hypothesis is the correct one, we’ll have to actually build that functionality and expand upon it. On the whole, this is going to be a pretty radical change in direction for the company - both philosophically, and practically. I have been encouraging it for a while, and I look forward to its success.

Writing more

I’ve always done a decent job at writing. Hey, if you are reading this, you must agree at least a little :) I’ve decided to take a more active approach at writing on my blog and elsewhere. As with everything else that I do, I am doing this with a single purely selfish intention: I want to understand myself better. What better way to do that then to organize my thoughts with the written word, and possibly even get some feedback about them on occasion! Also, I think that writing more will help me develop my own personal brand - the corollary to the above. As one of the founding engineers at BizeeBee, I think it’s essential to get my views out there - so that our customers, our partners, our future employees, and any other folks with whom we may work with in the future know that: a) there isn’t just a set of monkeys building the product; b) that the human primates behind the keyboards have interesting ideas mulling around in their gray matter; c) lots of other obvious reasons. Last time I did 5 goals for a year, and that worked out well for 8 months. That’s it for now. 3 new goals for 6 months.

Success Metrics Met!

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 17:31:00 -0700

Almost 8 months have passed since I had written my first post about success metrics. I am happy to say that in that time, I’ve been able to meet and exceed every one of those metrics:

Building a product that solves real problems

At BizeeBee, we’ve already built a product that is solving enough problems, that we have customers who are willing to pay for the solutions!

Focusing on quality of execution at every step

At a high level, I’ve been able to bring my knowledge of agile development as a huge benefit to the team. At each step of introducing agile methods, I had to learn what works and what doesn’t within our very specific context. I had adapted my implementation of agile to our team - with observable benefit. At a lower level, while learning Rails and Ruby, I had initially screwed some things up. Every time I realized that I had screwed up, I re-factored the code. The code base is getting better by the day. The team is happy with both the process and understanding that learning from mistakes is of paramount importance to our success.

Utilizing the best tools for the job

Here my emphasis has been two-fold: don’t reinvent the wheel, and when using an existing wheel, use the one that is best suited to our problem set. Pardon the metaphors! In essence, we’ve picked the right process, the right framework, the right gemsets, and the right hosting environment. I will continue to push for knowing whether they are still right, as the context will surely evolve.

Learning a ton about entrepreneurship

With Poornima’s guidance, knowledge, and experience, the team’s cooperation, and my own exploration of all relevant subjects in great depth, I’ve learned more about :

pitching customers
finding out what the customers want
guiding and leading a development team
raising capital
knowing how to deal with my emotions - both good and bad ones

Making money, as a result of the above

While we haven’t yet been acquired or gone IPO, we have paying customers! And, I am happy where I am financially. So, clearly, this goal has been met. In my next post, I shall write about my next set of goals. For now, though, suffice it to say that all of the above will remain on the list!

Entrepreneurship - Success Metrics

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 17:54:00 -0700

Over the past month I have been very busy with freelance work with the folks over at kidBombay. If you need a great design/web shop, I would highly suggest their services! I have also taken a deep dive into satisfying my entrepreneurial passions by working at BizeeBee, with Poornima at the helm, and the excellent team of “Beez” she has assembled. As I said in a tweet recently:

After my conversation with @poornima tonight, I know that we will Crush It at @thebizeebee.

There are a number of reasons why I am so confident in that we will succeed. Before I get into the specific reasons, I am going to clarify what my metrics for success are in this context. Firstly, I am not going to measure success purely on whether the company will go on to become a multi-million dollar business. Surely, that’s what we all want, and what we all want to happen. I’ve found through experience, however, that it’s more crucial to create a business with the goal of solving a problem, putting a price on the solution, and reaping the benefits as the result. David Heinemeier Hansson said this pretty well in his talk at Startup School in 2008. It puts the focus on the solution, and implies monetary compensation as a result. From experience, and from other brilliant peoples’ experiences, this tends to produce both a better solution and a greater reward for us in the end. To be more specific, my personal metrics for success are:

Building a product that solves real problems
Focusing on quality of execution at every step
Utilizing the best tools for the job
Learning a ton about entrepreneurship
Making money, as a result of the above

While all the team members’ personal metrics for success may be slightly different from the above list with the means of achieving them being matters of specifics, I am confident that at least a few of the metrics are very similar among us. This is the primary reason why I think BizeeBee will crush it. I firmly believe that success metrics must align within a startup’s founding team, in order for the team to work in concert towards the same goal. Thus far, I have seen myself and the rest of us work together by doing just that. It’s interesting to hear and participate in a lot of discussion around the subject of learning from failure. Cassie Phillips even runs a conference with this as its central topic. Though I understand that learning important lessons from one’s mistakes is essential, I also firmly believe that thinking about it from the perspective of success is even more critical - defining realistic metrics for success is the groundwork.

Musing on John Lennon's birthday

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 20:02:50 -0700

So I’ve been seeing all these reminders today that it was John Lennon’s birthday. Google even posted an animated rendition of his famous song “Imagine.” I’ll start by saying that I like some of the Beatles’ songs. Except that one. I like reality, and that song promotes a dream world, which never did and never will exist on this Earth.

Sure it’s very appealing to think of one world, shared by everyone equally. Is this possible? Only if you are a Communist/Socialist and you’ve taken the Manifesto too seriously. The truth of the matter is that every human being that is born on this planet needs to ensure its own survival. As such, a human being is inherently and properly selfish in pursuing that which will ensure this. So there’s really nothing to “imagine” — there will always be some people who are hungry, some people who are less fortunate. As for greed - without it, good luck world.

This is a challenge to the sort of idealism that John Lennon promoted. I live in California - hippie central - and I don’t believe that what the hippies want to achieve is possible. The truth is that hippies aren’t after equality and freedom as such. They are after an easy life without worries, without troubles - without earning it (very often at the expense of someone else). Humans simply don’t get anything for free. We must, each and every one of us, earn our existence and subsistence. Therefore, that “ideal, ” which is much akin to stuff written in the Communist Manifesto, is pure dreamland. To take this ideal to heart is evasion of reality.