(chef or puppet) + Fabric + Python

Here’s the slides from last night’s presentation (may take a minute to load):

An iPod Vending machine. (credit:

Sometimes you win because the competition goes out of their way to lose. Usually this is the case when one company nails it, and everyone else strikes out.

Take Apple’s iPod: Yes, it was well designed, and in many ways raised the bar for consumer product design. Reality was that iPod was feature barren compared to many competitors. So why did iPod succeed? In short, none of the competitors to the  first three generations of iPod had a really easy way to get music onto their device. So while Creative Labs, SanDisk, iRiver, Microsoft and Toshiba all tried their best to “achieve feature parity” by adding removable batteries, slots for extra memory, better DRM, ways to share songs, support for more file formats, and FM tuners people were buying more iPods that had none of those features. iPod had what mattered: an easy way to get music into the device.

Design for existing customers instead of customers you would like have.

If you want more customers, design your product to appeal to customers you do not already have. Incidentally, that also means that your existing customers are not always the right people to ask about new features. I recently was talking to a product manager from a database virtualization company about why they did not have a Linux version.  The answer? “We asked our customers and no one wanted it.” Of course they didn’t they were already using the product on Windows! Incidentally, according to Security Space and W3Techs, Linux has over 60% of the server market…

Rely on Flawed Surveys in Design Decisions

A story my friend and American Airlines alum Paul Lorinczi tells is of American Airlines asking passengers, “Would you prefer a healthy meal or the current high calorie, high fat meal we serve today?” The survey’s results? Everyone wanted healthy. Caterers were fired. New suppliers were hired. Millions were spent. High calorie, high fat meals like meatloaf and lasagna were jettisoned for healthy salads and chicken.

One small problem: Passengers hated the healthy meals.

A few weeks later, American brought back lasagna and meatloaf. What happened? According to Lorinczi, “Passengers were asked if they wanted healthy or unhealthy. Who wants unhealthy anything?”

You spend a lot less time writing code to implement and manipulate data structures.

First, a lot of type errors are created in code that manipulates data structures. So in Python, you end up leaning on  built in types like dictionaries, lists, tuples and sets instead of rolling your own. When you really need a custom data structure, you use utility classes, and utility classes benefit from duck typing and implicit type conversion (sometimes).  By directing focus away from plumbing for data structures, the developer is free to focus on logic and algorithms.  It’s one of the many reasons I really like Python.

• Going to Djangocon in the fall.
• Going to PyCon in the spring.

Why? I wanted to pick the right employer, and the single symptom of a company that sucks is that they do not invest in their people.  Sometimes lack of training is due to financial problems, sometimes it is due to fear of having to give raises, other times, it is fear of the loss of a few days of products. The bottom line: Companies that do not invest in improving their people suck.  Don’t believe it?  Track profit or productivity per employee and watch what happens after you start training. 

I’m on the plane with Josh Hudson, Matt Deboard and Rick Wherle headed to one of the best educational conferences in the technology world to get even deeper into Python. Which reminds me: when was the last time your employer let you take a week to improve your skills?  If it has been a while, you might want to look for a new job….

I’ll be using what I learn from  PyCon to make finding a better employer a lot easier for you.

People lie to salespeople because they are conditioned like Pavlov’s dog to lie. The modern “sales process” is engineered to encourage the customer to lie from minute one.

Just watch a mall sales person offer help to a shopper:

Salesperson: ”May I help you?”

Shopper: “No thanks, just looking.”

Never mind that the customer has been carefully studying the difference between two phones for the better part of 45 minutes… and really does have a few question. This conditioning is so bad that when I did my time in retail, you could ask:

Salesperson: “Is your car on fire?”

Shopper: “No thanks, just looking.

Why is it this way? Probably because the customer knows that the salesperson is going to engage in a verbal game that ends at the cash register – even if they are not happy with the product.  The problem is not the cash register. It is the game. It is no fun and buyers know that salepeople are very good at it.  So they undermine the game by misdirecting the salesperson and withholding information.

It doesn’t matter what level of sales you are talking about:

Salesperson: “So… are you able to make a decision on this?”

Customer: “Yes.”

Never mind the customer is a new hire who is just doing research for a decision that will be made by the department head. The customer knows that a “No” will result in the salesperson shutting down the sales process. Why? Every sales trainer since the beginning of time admonishes sales people not to waste time with people who aren’t the decision maker.  Never mind that decision makers have employees who often do the groundwork so they can focus on other, more important issues.

In short, it is high time we rethink how to bring honesty back into interactions with customers. It probably starts with throwing out any question that results in a conditioned response and doing something new: listening when customers answer. Then comes the hard part: being direct and honest. The hardest part is being willing to accept that customers do make the best decisions and sometimes, what you are selling isn’t the best choice.

If passed, SOPA will give private corporations the power to:

1. Shut down entire websites over a single link to a website they claim contains a copyright infringement.  So, @schmucketyschmuck tweets a post linking to a photo from Getty Images. Getty doesn’t like it. Getty has Twitter shut down.
2. If say, Sony thinks you aren’t doing enough to prevent people from posting content from their artists, they can get a court order shutting down your website.  Yes, this even applies to sites hosted in foreign countries.
3. Have people jailed for five years for posting copyrighted material. Yes, posting your parrot singing Pumped Up Kicks (or any other copyrighted composition) is an infringement.  Yes, posting a link to a copyrighted photograph could result in five years in federal prison. Posting a clip from Office Space, like one that describes the kind of prison you will be sent to? Five years.

Don’t believe it? Here’s the best two minute video you will watch today:

Oh, and in case you didn’t get where corporations will be able to send you, your kids or your employees if they post a single link that say, the RIAA doesn’t like:

Take a minute to call or SNAIL MAIL your US Representative and Senator today. It is really, really important.