jducoeur

The news says that Billerica has 17.5 inches, and Woburn has 18.5. Burlington is about halfway in between, so I guess I know how much snow we have. The plowing service is on probation and I think they know it; we'll see if the driveway is properly plowed tonight.

Of course, Memento has lots of people who work remotely anyway, so the company scarcely even blinked: the message from HR wasn't so much "The office is closed" as "The roads are bad, so we encourage you to work from home". Since most people work from home frequently anyway, that's fairly straightforward. (I'm pleased to see that our new VPN seems to be holding up.)

The amusement of the day was the monthly Sprint Review meeting. Our two Product Managers live in Atlanta and Phoenix, so they usually phone in to these things, while the rest of us gather in a meeting room. This time, they decided to come to the meetings this week in person, so they are staying at the hotel near the office. The result? They were the only ones in the meeting room, while the rest of us stayed home and *we* phoned into it. Clearly, there is a karmic conspiracy against the entire project ever being in the same room at once...

The press release just went out, so I can actually talk about it now: we've got a new CEO.

The weird bit is that the CEO transition was mostly the idea of the founding one. The founder of course owns a lot of stock, and he stepped back a little while ago and decided that he's a good entrepreneur, but wasn't the best possible person to bring the company up to the next level. So he led the search for his own replacement, to find someone who is less about "take an idea and build a new company around it", and more about "take the success and efficiently build on it".

This is something like my fifth startup, but it's the first one that's is clearly succeeding on all levels, and all but certain to become a major player. (The check fraud system I've been working on for the past year is on the verge of release, and looks like it's going to shake up the market something fierce.) And it's the first time I've ever seen a CEO succession (at a company I'm working at) explicitly due to success, rather than failure...

Just got this link going around at work, which nicely illustrates how careful you have to be with online solicitations.

We're all used to phishing emails that pretend to be from legitimate banks in order to get your personal information, but this one takes it to a whole new level: a company that set itself up with all the accoutrements of a real credit union, including its own website and toll-free number -- but didn't exist. The entire company was nothing but one big phishing scam, encouraging you to sign up for accounts simply so they could steal your information. Very, very special...

... and today's Lunch 'n' Learn was one of them. Having a full-time Math Team helmed by a serious research mathematician means that our analytics are pretty much at the cutting-edge to begin with. But today, the head of the team presented one of the ideas he's toying with for detecting fraud in the long run, and it makes pretty much everything else out there look like children's blocks by comparison. I think I need to brush up on my math, just to understand the systems that I may be building in a few years...

May I just note how pleasant it is to have a product manager, who has been doing product management for 20 years, mostly in the traditional ways, who not only isn't fighting my push for the company to move to a more Agile approach, but is actually pretty much backing my play? At its best, Agile is just recognizing the realities of development and flowing with them; he's learned enough from experience to pretty intuitively grasp why the approach makes sense. This is, needless to say, making my life as de facto project manager much easier...

Today's project is localizing the check fraud UI that I'm working on -- that is, making it work in various languages. For testing purposes, this really needs to be "programmer art". This is a valuable concept I learned at Looking Glass: when a programmer is doing any sort of design, it is vitally important that it be as ugly and useless as possible, to head off the chance of someone saying, "good enough -- ship it" before the real designer gets to make it right. Similarly, I don't want to come up with a quick-and-dirty French translation that someone might be tempted to show to a customer: everyone needs to be clear that the localizations must come from a real translator.

So obviously, the correct localization for me to use in testing is Klingon.

Unfortunately, having done about 20 minutes of research into Klingon, it's quickly apparent that doing anything more accurate than stringing together a lot of random plosives and glottal stops (or simply grabbing random words from the mailing list archives of the Klingon Language Institute) is going to be *way* too much effort, and the geek in me kind of wants to do a real (if pointless) translation. So I might just go for Esperanto instead, on the theory that I can probably fake it semi-accurately without as much effort...

ETA: Although I notice, to my amusement, that the number-one Klingon speaker in the world is apparently Rich Yampell, who I know slightly from many years back. It's halfway tempting to write to him about it...

I haven't posted many diary entries lately -- that's mostly because I've been pretty cranky, and I never like posting in such a mood. That said, November was an illustration of a principle I've often found: that the universe tends to keep my life interesting, so long as I pay attention to the opportunities it gives me. So the next few entries will be catching up on what's been going on, as life not only became a bit of a roller-coaster, but one gaining speed pretty rapidly. Part one is about work and stuff.

When last we left our hero, he was trying to emulate a good British stiff upper lip, and halfway managing it, but let's get real: losing the CommYou project hurt like hell. While I'm really excited to see all of these ideas I've been talking about for years being put into practice, I had kind of been hoping to be the one to make the splash there. It's a blow to the ego to realize that, while I am very good at startups, I'm not very good at the entrepreneur-CEO role.

The adjustment took about three weeks, from the point at which I realized that Google Wave had washed CommYou out to sea (yes, yes -- get used to the bad metaphors), before really coming to terms with it. There have been two main things that have eased the transition:

• Google aren't stupid: they know that, if Wave is really going to succeed, they can't just build a tool -- they need to incite a whole new infrastructure. Part of giving that any credibility is fostering not just open protocols, but reference implementations of those protocols that aren't under Google's thumb. So I've wound up diving into that end of things. In particular, there is a small group of folks who are pretty serious about seeing this not only happen, but happen right. Most are pretty clear about the weaknesses in Google's initial implementation, but understand the potential in the idea. I think most of us tacitly agree that the objective here is to foster competition, and that means making a real stab at beating Google at their own game.
  
  It's pretty chaotic right now -- among other things, everyone prefers different server implementation languages -- but I believe we'll gradually pull it together. So CommYou or something like it may yet be back eventually, in somewhat different form.



• I no longer have an excuse to spend a day a week on CommYou, though: my business plan is shattered. This means I'm now working fulltime again. The silver lining in *that*, of course, is an immediate 25% boost to my salary, which doesn't suck. Indeed, the effective boost is more than that -- I've been paying a huge amount of money to run the CommYou server, which I'm about to claw back. So the total rise in my take-home is probably more like a third.

So my ego is bruised, but it definitely makes my life easier.

There *was* a sense of being adrift, and not knowing what to do next, which isn't a sensation I enjoy: that was the source of much of the crankiness. But remember what I said above, about the universe keeping things lively? Well, we'll talk about that in the next couple of entries...

Signs that you work at a geeky company: for today's Halloween party, the Development group came as (essentially) the UI that I built when I started here. It's collusive-networking detection software, displaying graphs of potentially related suspects, so each member of the group grabbed a character from our icon set and some string, and tied ourselves together to make the graph...

Okay, it's kind of a silly little thing, but it's still a neat milestone for the company.

Remember that marketing meeting I mentioned last week? The one with wine and cheese for everybody? It was for the in-company unveiling of Insidious, Memento's first book. Basically, we realized that by now, we know more about insider fraud -- how employees rip off banks, steal from their customers, and stuff like that -- than pretty much anybody else, and there are some interesting stories in it. So our CEO and one of our main bank experts spearheaded a project to write it up.

On the one hand, it's really marketing writ large: everyone is quite clear that the purpose of the book is to show off the company, and brag about what we know. OTOH, it's actually kind of interesting, and has been getting a bunch of press. (We even got slashdotted the other day.) The book's main purpose is to slam home that this stuff happens a lot more than people realize, and heaven knows everybody is primed to hear about crime at banks right at the moment.

They even managed to get a longish interview with one of the folks who got caught, who illustrates the point nicely: rather than being a professional criminal, she was a long-time, highly trusted bank employee who just kind of fell into stealing from the bank -- first small amounts, then more, until eventually it added up to a couple hundred thousand dollars. It's a somewhat painful but fascinating appendix, showing that the usual assumptions about who does this stuff are far from completely correct, and demonstrating how basically decent people can fall into crime when it's too easy, and how hard it can be to stop once you start.

Anyway, we all got free copies -- I'm even credited, although I think they simply credited everybody in the company. And seeing something labeled "A Memento Fraud Book" does make the company feel a bit more grown-up...

Marketing called an all-hands meeting today. Now, when an engineering department calls an all-hands, it means a dry presentation of what we're building. When the head office calls one, you worry that there's going to be a layoff or something. (Not that we've had one here, but I've lived through enough startups that there's always that lurking concern.)

When marketing calls an all-hands, it involves wine and brie for everyone in the company. That doesn't suck.

(The subject of the meeting is still under wraps for a few days yet, but it's kind of fun -- I'll talk about it after the press release goes out...)