Last weekend (2-3 July) I attended the first ever dev4good – a charity hackathon where developers try to solve charity problems in a weekend. It took place in Hammersmith, London in a amazing venue on the riverside:

Three charities came to use with the following problems:

Hope and Play were looking for a way to locate and manage resources. And allow other charities or people to do the same.

The Ministry of Stories were looking for a way to get more young people writing stories and publishing these to the world. All while helping to generate a little more cash along the way.

The Design and Craft Council want to be able to automate their awards processes.

We were about 25 people and were able to split in three teams. Here is a video of my team explaining what we are planning to achieve for the Hope and Play project (I am the one speaking first):

Basically we wanted to create a proof of concept system that:

1. Provides a central web portal to aggregate information and also allow charities to communicate what projects they are running, and in which locations.
2. Allows charities to communicate in real-time work and achievements on their projects via the web portal, Twitter or mobile text messages (SMS).
3. Enable charities and individuals to advertise their available and required resources (human power, building material, etc) and its location.
4. Provides a means for charities to discover information on the web relevant to their projects and location.

At the end it looked like this (test data, which probably doesn’t illustrate perfectly the usage):

My team worked great together. We were able to quickly split the work so that everyone has something of interest to do. It was very exciting to see how we are making progress during our scrum stand ups:

At the start of the event we decided that we are going to use Git for source control and GitHub for hosting. Apart from me only one other person had used Git before, but I was happy to help out each of the guys and keep them going during the event. As you can see from the below GitHub commits timeline we were quite effective in working in parallel:

I think 99.9% of us were running Windows and using Bash or Cmd was absolutely not an option for the non-Gitters who had mainly experience with TFS or SVN. Most new Gitters used Tortoise Git, but that was still confusing as it required understanding of how everything works. Only later I learned about SmartGit and in retrospect I think we should have used that instead.

As you’ll hear on the video initially we planned to use Orchard CMS, but after some research and poking around I was personally disappointed to find out how over-complex and over-engineered Orchard is. So we dumped it and went for plain old ASP.NET MVC 3 and non-POCO Entity Framework, which worked out quite well – after all it was just meant to be proof of concept.

All in all I had great fun during the weekend. I also met some great people, who I am looking forward to seeing and work with again in the future – probably during GiveCamp UK in October!

At the end of the weekend it turned out that most people voted for me as the most supportive and helpful developer during the weekend, so I won the grand prize – a Kinect. I wasn’t expecting this at all and very grateful to everyone and very happy that I was able to help people out. Thanks guys!
And here is an end of event photo of team dev4good:
Great job guys!

Also big thanks to our sponsors:

What’s next?

We are in the process of moving and merging the team repositories in a central one in GitHub. I am looking forward to get in touch with some charities to discuss and get feedback for our proof of concept Charity Portal and its eventual real-life practical application.

Next also is GiveCamp UK! I am also tempted to go to Startup Weekend Lonodon, but I’ll see about that.

Really exciting for me is that a few days ago my series on Editing Variable Length Reorderable Collections in ASP.NET MVC got featured on the home page of the ASP.NET web site. I just wanted to say thank you to the person who decided to share it with the community. Here is a screenshot:

Just finished Duke Nukem Forever on my PS3 and I simply don’t get all this bashing and negative gaming site reviews. The game was very enjoyable and even though there were a few neat mini-puzzles here and there it wasn’t brain challenging at all. But why should it be, anyway? And why should I care about the graphics if I have fun playing it?

11 days ago I posted the launch notice for Triply. The only other place where I publicized it was on the Foursquare Apps list here. It was very surprising for me that given no “advertisement”, no web design and very little features it managed for 11 days to score:

• 103 user accounts – 83 Foursquare and 22 Facebook
• 2226 actions performed around the site
• 651 visits
• 432 visitors
• 10 Twitter followers
• 14 Facebook page fans
• 2 Feature requests in UserVoice (completed)

I used real time analytics (Woopra) to monitor the users navigation flow (not that there are many pages to navigate around) and that helped me to optimize the experience, especially in terms of login flow. For example instead of asking the user to sign in with Foursquare or Facebook to share a trip I redesigned it to show the actual page and only prompt for login when the user needs to import Checkins. As they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but the actual thing is priceless.

Other new features since launch are:

• Facebook Places Checkins support
• Browse trips interface where a user can browser trips, days out and experiences by City, Country and latest
• Allow trips to be downloaded as a .GPX file which users can open with Google Earth and Garmin sat navs. Adding support for other geo formats for other satnavs won’t be hard either.
• A lot of polish and fixes in the backend. Thanks god for ELMAH, which helped me log all problems around the site.

What’s next?

I am on a cross road at the moment as I need:

1. A web design (well overdue)
2. Someone to bounce ideas off and vice-versa (co-founder?) in which direction to take Triply as I think there are many directions Triply can go. For example I can make it the bit.ly for sharing trips/days out, etc or I can make it a trip diary type of thing by pulling and displaying photos of the trip from Flickr (using EXIF location data and search), etc. All fun ideas.

But how do both of those fit together? Doesn’t the design depend on the future features and vice-versa?

Introduction

In March this year I joined IBM as a Software Engineer (Graduate). For my huge disappointment, even though I came with several years of development experience, they put me in Test. I wasn’t simply assigned to any test phase, but probably to one of the worse, where the test plan had no test procedures in it, because it had been written before the code. This can be good (test driven development), but not in the case where you are a Tester and you have to do semi black-box testing by injecting hardware errors for implementation-dependent corner cases. I can’t and won’t go into specifics (because they don’t matter anyway), but for what it’s worth –  it’s some really nasty stuff.

The ability to run a test depends on about five or more asynchronously changing variables. When I say variables I don’t mean “int a = 5;”, but things like “is the frontend code ready and is the backend code that it uses ready and is the firmware ready and is it integrated in the builds available and do we have the required hardware and gadgets” and so on. No fun. And the worse is that noone was tracking this. Probably the team leads were overloaded with other work (other test phases) already and didn’t notice that the testers were in an endless unproductive loop. They were of trying to test something that is not ready yet, filing bugs which obviously got returned then they try to test something else that turns out is not ready yet as well, but maybe the next thing they test works and so on and so on. Obviously this wouldn’t have happened under normal circumstances (I assume and truly hope so), but due the nature of the project and the time scale it did. Speaking up didn’t work, because the team leads weren’t up to date with the details and couldn’t fully grasp the seriousness of the issue.

Anyhow – it was a rather frustrating experience and it didn’t take me long to “give up”, sit down and spend several days trying to aggregate all of the variables from the different teams and figure out how to get their latest statuses in the least intrusive way and basically start tracking what the hell was going on. I should had seen this coming probably, but my team lead realized that I am getting into this and a week later basically offloaded managing those test phases to me.

Observations

So here I am semi-formally managing or “team leading” about 10 people  for the first time ever in my life, only 6 months after starting this job. We are working together on very complex and hard to manage test phases.

So to summarize I think the prerequisite to get to here in a very simplified form are:

• Low frustration tolerance, especially when you see an obvious lack of efficiency and desire to take action.
• Grasp of the bigger picture and keeping on top of it.
• Good understanding of the structure of the department and which are the key people in each team. Those won’t necessarily be the team leads, but the ones that are helpful by nature and don’t mind you pinging them an IM or dropping by their desk for a quick question. They are the ones that are happy to look into stuff that’s not theirs instead of passing you around to other people (if they can). Obviously this requires good communication skills, so that you don’t annoy people .
• To not to be afraid to interrupt someone who you’ve never met before in the middle of whatever they are doing in order to extract the information you needs. Obviously not when that person is on the phone.
• Dedication and motivation for crunching data and processing other team’s status spreadsheets and other administrative tasks. Unfortunately.
• Ability to multi-task like crazy.

So far it’s been an amazingly interesting experience for me and I truly appreciate the opportunity to explore this type of work. I have already made several observations which I am going to share and log for future reference.

People

People are different (O’rly?). Some take the initiative and simply go and start banging on. They don’t need you to hold their hand, because they like their independence. In fact, although not showing it, they don’t appreciate questions like “how’s the work going?”, because it makes them feel patronized, untrusted and underestimated. They also don’t like to be pat on the back when they’ve done a brilliant job, because they feel like you are doing it on purpose even if you aren’t. Special caution has to be taken when and how to express gratitude to those people – the context is especially important. Last observation is that it takes a while to earn their trust, because they don’t seem to believe you are up to the task.

Others are not so motivated and don’t really care. If they hit a problem they are more than happy just to file a bug, pass the responsibility to someone else and call it a day. They aren’t motivated and will stay quite if they don’t have any more work left to do. Hence it’s very important to be on top of everything and know who is doing what, what is blocking which work and so on. Those people don’t mind to be pushed gently and are quite happy to be just told what to do, unlike the previous type.

The third type I have observed is the shy and sometimes disoriented type. They are very quite when they hit a problem, but won’t pass the responsibility around. If they don’t understand something they get confused and disoriented. Those people need some time to feel relaxed and confident in whatever they are doing and sometimes require someone to hold their hand. I feel like providing those people with higher level information and more details of what’s going on in the team in regards to their work helps. When people from different teams are involved or required to help them out it’s best if they get introduced in person and also get told a bit more about that person and what is his role in the team. Third thing that helps is to constantly remind them that if they hit a problem or simply have a question, they should simply either ping you on IM or drop by your desk without any worry.

Again people are different – but more or less a combination of those three types at least in my team.

Responsibilities

My team members keep coming to me for questions and guidance, so I feel those are part of my responsibilities to them:

• Always keep on top of things and be aware of what they are talking about and the context of their question. Otherwise they won’t see the point in coming to me in the future, because they would think I don’t really know what’s going on.
• Be able to admit that I don’t know the answer to a question and most importantly be able to point them to someone who does straight away. Otherwise they will get passed around like crazy, will get frustrated because their time is being wasted and won’t come back to me in the future.
• Try to be in the office before the team. Quite often in the morning they have questions regarding what they were working on the day before, which I need to be prepared for.

Unfortunately keeping on top of things takes a lot of administrative work, reading through statuses and spreadsheets and also creating such in order to assist you. This is very, very time consuming. More so than I have ever expected.

Random Observation

This is a very random observation, but some people are so “brainwashed” that unless you wear a shirt and trousers they won’t really feel like you are or see you as a lead/manager and will take you less seriously when you ask them to do something (also will feel less responsible). Really odd, but I guess this is what enterprise companies do to you? Those are only a few people and they don’t mind after they get to know you.

Conclusion

Managing people is very challenging and I am quite enjoying it so far. I feel like it’s going to be weird going back to my normal duties once I am done managing the test phases that I am. Unfortunately I am sure that I won’t take credit for the effort I am putting in, because I doubt any of the management know about it. Nevertheless I truly appreciate the opportunity that I have and I am very grateful when the people around me appreciate my work. Yesterday one guy told me that the work I am doing is “freaking brilliant” and this is my true medal.

I started at IBM UK (Hursley Labs) on Monday but it is only today that I got my permanent badge with all the security clearance added for the ultra confidential work I will be doing. One of the goodies when working in the restricted area is that only the chosen ones get access to the proper coffee machine which makes excellent espresso coffee only 10p each.

IBM

Yesterday evening I noticed that one can now track the progress of his Domino’s Pizza order live:

Domino's Pizza Tracker

Swine Flu as seen under microscope

Note 1: You should be able to spot a particular kind of animal on the above image.

Note 2: I apologize if my humor hurts your feelings.

В момента седя в един много приатен бар-ресторант на летището в Истанбул, което се казва Greenport. Преди час кацнах и доста обиколях терминала в търсене на контакт за лаптопшс, но тц – няма. За щастие скитайки нагоре надолу в този лабиринт забелязах една бойна група от 20-тина човека насядали с лаптопи и след кратък шпионски анализ открих контактите скрити в храстите… Не се бъзикам просто има декоративни храсти и контатките са прикрити там (защото са доста а така не се набиват на очи). И така сега си седя и хрупам една здравословна салата, охлаждам се с Diet Coke (Cola Light) с много лед (нямат ли климатици тия на това летище!?) и се подкрепям с едно не особено добро еспресо за 6 часа висенете до следващия полет до Jakarta, Indonesia. Самият полет ще е бая здрав – 13 часа и 10 000км.

Второто съществено нещо за това заведение е че има една лепенка скрита по средата на менюто с информацията за безплатно WiFi. Паролата обаче не работеше и питах един човечец до мен дали при него работи. Горкияt от 3часа e седял и циклел без да знае за инфото и направо се изчерви от яд. Life sucks какт знаем. В крайна сметка взех новата парола от един барман и ето качих малко снимки от летището.

Станал съм в 4 сутринта. Сега е 9 вечерта. Следвачият полет в в 11:30 и каца 6 часа следобед на следващие ден. Голям път, голямо нещо.

Was listening to a couple of Fullmoon Trance from my collection when I noticed it’s full moon – a pretty one.

Full moon