A Taste of Things to Come

So I have been putting more time into my personal site than before. Which is to say, I started to work on it for once. The big reason I haven't worked on it is I had no idea what to do with it, other than link to some open source projects, if I ever worked on any. Then like a bolt of lightning, I had an image pop into my head. The logo for CCockerhamKC.com.

This is just version 1.0 of my logo so far. Something I threw together using paint.NET using only a track pad. Once I get a chance, I will redo this with my mouse and maybe something a little more, ummm, professional than paint.net I figure if my unofficial title at work is "Code Warrior" why not go with it? This will need some tweaking before I go live, but it is a start. As for content on the site, I will start documenting my workouts, races, and hopefully soon some grappling tournaments. I might even start a second blog to focus on those things that will help feed my site. For the time being there isn't much other than a template, some pictures, and a dream. Once it goes live I will do a technical post on the fun stuff making it work. I am thinking that my site will be strictly HTML5, CSS3, and some JS, but you never know what technology will catch my eye to try as I dig in.

Let's start this thing up

So last week we competed in the HackTheMidwest hackathon. It was a lot of fun, and we accomplished a lot. I can't wait for the next event.

After doing the event it got me thinking about how much fun it could be creating my own startup. Coming up with an idea, creating a demo, fleshing it out, testing, polishing, and repeating. This change of pace was very welcomed. As working day in and day out on the same project in two week chunks, while it pays the bills, gets boring from time to time. Hence why you do these things in the first place. Hackathons allow creativity to flow as well dust off parts of your brain that haven't been activated in a while.

Now what does it take to create a startup? I have no idea, but I don't think anybody really does. I figure it is much like running a race; you can prepare and have done them in the past, but they are all different. So let's just assume that I was going to have a startup tomorrow, I think this is how I would begin.

First off before you begin, you need an idea. Something that will either make money, or get a lot of people to invest in you. Look at things like instagram, vine, and facebook. These things were built before they had a way to generate revenue. But somebody saw potential and bankrolls or just buys your idea.

Secondly, you need a team. I would start with your developers first. You want to get something out the door as quickly as possible. The longer it takes to get your idea into something that investors can see, the longer you might go without a paycheck. Which you might be ok with, but your team certainly might not be. As your idea gets backers, you might start looking into some sort of management role, unless you feel that someone is already stepping up into that role.

Your last step, you need someone with a sales/marketing background. This will be key when you idea is up and running. You need people to buy into your product and drink your kool-aide. That is the idea right? I mean, some ideas sell themselves. Others need a little push. I mean if you told me years ago that an app that allowed you to put sepia filters over pictures would get $1 Billion, that is with a B, for their idea I would have called you nuts. But these things happen. You need somebody who can explain to people with a lot of money why some their money should become yours.

Well that would be enough to get started. I hope that sometime in the future I can do a follow up of how close I was to being right.

Ain't Nobody Got Time For That!

Time Zones. To most they are a cause of confusion as to why TV shows are on at different times. To some they are the cause of much pain and torment trying to build an application for people across the country and world. Fear not those of you that are of the .NET world. I have the solution for you. That solution is the following, timezoneinfo. This simple class can convert datetime objects to any timezone that you want. You simply just need the following code.

TimeZoneInfo tzi = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Pacific Standard Time");DateTime PstDateTime = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTime(DateTime.Now, tzi);

Now you can take your server time and turn it into any time that you want. And it doesn't have to be just now either, it can be any time that you give it. Just pass the zone id and you are good to go. 



Need a quick list of timezones? 



@Html.DropDownListFor(x => x.TimeZoneId, new SelectList(TimeZoneInfo.GetSystemTimeZones(), "Id", "DisplayName"))



There you go. Just slap that into your cshtml and you have a dropdown with all the timezones in the world. Did I mention that this also handles Daylight Savings Time? Because it does. It knows when to fall back, and spring forward. It also handles places like Arizona that have no DST at all. It really is an awesome class.

How to be a ninja!

So over the weekend I went to another conference. The most important lesson I learned was on how to be a social media ninja. The presentation was done by Michael O'Neal, @itsaboutsocial. He was focusing on how to network market through social media. Yes, this was to market an item, but marketing yourself is no different. Let's look at a couple of the key points.


Have a story. Everybody has a story about their life or what they do. Some people call it an elevator speech. Something that you can tell in a few minutes or less that shows your passion. Oh yeah, you need that too, have some passion about your thing. If you are trying to sell yourself, you damn well better have some passion about yourself.

Make sure you have a way to tell your story. Look at your business card. What is on it? The example story was a guy that Michael had met at a bar in Denver, lets call him Dan. Dan had a passion about the city and became a realtor  He knew everything there was to know about the city. Great guy who could find you a great place. You would remember this guy, but if you were just going by his business card you wouldn't remember him. It was just your basic card for a realtor. His photo and tons and tons of information. You aren't going to remember that or even talk to the guy after that if you aren't looking for a house. So what did Michael do? Made a card with a name and phone number. Then the other side said "Location Ninja" What is a location ninja? I don't know either but I bet Dan has a story for you when you ask. That is the key, grabbing the person's attention and then making them remember you.

Don't show your hand too early. Like the business card, you don't want to show all your hand up front. Make people want to come to you. You can meet them at 80 or 90 percent of the way there, make them come to you for the remaining 10 to 20 percent. The same is on social media as it is face to face. If you are telling people to go look at your resume and that is it, why would they do that? Or if you are selling a product, or yourself, don't just give people the link and expect the best to happen. If a person has no reason to click your link or view your product, they won't.

Lastly, this is the most important, do not ever post something that is simply stating "Ask me about" or "Email me if you..." Nobody wants to do that. I am guilty of doing that myself. I have since learned from that and have slapped my own wrist. If you start a post with that, you look like a salesman, and strangely  nobody wants to buy from a salesman. Look you can be a salesman, but try to remember this ratio, 10 posts from you to 1 post about what you are selling. And if you can somehow make that post seem like it is about you, even better. Trust me, if done correctly, people will come to you.

Also check out itsaboutsocial.com Michael knows his shit.


Also as an update to my last post about the company you keep. Michael had everybody walk up to a random stranger that you didn't know and put people out of their comfort zone. Well I chose the CEO of the sponsoring company. I figured go big or go home right?

Be wary the company you keep.

I heard a saying once. A level people will hire A level people. While B level people hire C level people. Why is this? A level people get to their standing by constantly getting better at whatever it is they do. Understanding that they just can't do everything on their own. While B level people are just worried about themselves and not looking bad at their job. That is why they hire those that are worse than they are. Makes yourself look better, without getting better.

Same goes for your friends. You find that people who are successful tend to stick to their own. But you know at one point, they had that good for nothing stoner friend. What happened? They realized that they were becoming an A level person while their friend was sticking to B or C level. Yeah I know that this sounds very dickish, but think of it this way.

A bunch of us from work are getting ready to compete in a hackathon. We have separated into three teams; Team LiveWire, Team MajorLazerKittens, and Team WubWub. We did this to compete against each other, as well as the rest of the competitors. B or C level teams might not even have gotten this far. And just waited until the day of to figure something out. We used to be those guys. Now we are one our way to A level. In just 12 hours, each team had a website, twitter, and mascot. Once again this was driven by each team's willingness to compete and put in work to win. Since we are all working to be A level teams, it will only make the other teams better.

So back to your friends. You always compete against your friends, in your head or in real life. Somehow you try to find a way to prove who is the best. If you have A level friends, you will constantly be doing something to win this battle. Getting that better job, learning something new, making that awesome project, etc. Just to show who is superior. Yet if you have B and C level friends, you realize that you are already doing more. This will cause you to not try as hard, since you are already doing better than they are. Your point of reference is skewed. And pretty soon, you become a B or C level yourself.

Be wary the company you keep.

To Tweet or not to Tweet?

I know a lot of you are on social media, but this will be about Twitter in general. Recently there has been a few incidents in the news where people get in trouble and lose their jobs due to tweets. You have the recent Pycon incident and then most recently an employee got fired for his actions on twitter. Let's take a look at each of these incidents and look over the details, then go over some tips to save yourself future embarrassment.

Story one took place at Pycon, which is now stupidly being called "DongleGate". Whoever comes up with these names needs a take a close look at an ice pick. Adria Richards works for SendGrid, an email delivery company. While at Pycon a couple of guys who making some jokes about forking and who's dongle was bigger than who's. Adria then felt it was her duty to tweet a picture of these guys. This in turn led to these guys getting fired. Of course there was a backlash against Adria at this point because these guys did nothing to her directly, other than be sitting in earshot of her. Once these guys got fired and people were asking for her head, Richards went on Twitter to boast that SendGrid had her back. She was fired shortly thereafter.

Story number two. Adam Orth works for Microsoft and tweeted about how the new XBox will have always on DRM. People starting asking questions and citing examples as to why this is a bad idea. Orth began to make fun of those who didn't live in a big city, and laughed at the misfortune of those without broadband internet. Just showed a general lack of care to his customers. He was fired.

Now let's take a look at some of the details here that make these two cases stand out. Let's start with Richards, she was a SendGrid Evangelist. She is the face of SendGrid and therefore is expected to be an example. Instead of doing the right thing and minding her own business asking the gentlemen to speak softer as she was trying to listen to the lightning talks at hand. She instead tried to flex her power as an Evangelist and get these guys in trouble. She knew that not only did she have a lot followers, but a lot that listen to what she says. She abused this power and it blew back on her. Orth was just an employee in the sales department, Orth thought he was safe. The problem is that when you are associated with a company like Microsoft, you are going to be noticed. Especially if you topic of conversation is the latest gaming system to come out. His story probably only got really noticed due to sites like Reddit, and that made it go viral.

So how can you avoid a situation like this yourself? There are actually a few simple steps.

Step one, understand your power on the internet. You may think that nobody is watching you, but trust me, somebody is. All it takes is one person to see your tweet, and then they will tell a friend and so on and so forth.

Step two, make sure you know your company's social media policy. You need to ask whoever is in charge of your relations if there is such a policy. Are your tweets your own? Will you been seen as a face for your company? Richards was very much the face for her company, Orth, not so much. Ignorance of the law has never worked, and it won't work in your company either if there are people pitchforks wanting you dead.

This leads us to Step three, don't assume that your company has your back. You might think that in your position that you are safe. But if you say something that is damaging the companies image, your value will be evaluated. A good way to look at your value is as follows. Take your salary and divide it by 12. An example would be say you make $60,000 a year. Do you bring $5000 of value into the company? Now how much value do you bring if PR is now being involved to clean up your mess? Trust me, if it doesn't break even, firing you looks a lot better than any kind of spin you think of.

To take away from this, if you have a twitter and it is personal, keep it that way. The moment you mention your job(name of your company, not just what you did), it is now a professional twitter, whether you like it or not. So be careful out there folks, and don't lose your job because you thought you were being funny on twitter.

What is the rush?

I just recently purchased Bioshock Infinite. I have been waiting for this game for a couple years now. But delay after delay after delay caused me to think this was never coming out. But when it finally got released, it was better than I could have imagined. The graphics were amazing, the gameplay was a great improvement to the prior games, and the story. The story alone could get its own blog post. I mean seriously look at the image below.

The creators of this game took their time to get it right. Seeing at how well this works, look at Valve also (Just mention Half Life 3, and watch excitement followed by sadness in every face) So seeing as how time can make things better, why do we seem to always timebox projects in writing code? I understand that people have urgency for contracts or legal reasons. But who let this happen? 

Should it be the project manager or the sales team, that doesn't matter. As a developer we need to prove that given all the time you need, a better quality product can be made. Let's look at it this way. I have a project that needs to be finished in 3 days. I know it is going to take me 9 days, but I have to finish in 3. So I rush and staple together something that looks like a finished project. Sure it works, most of the time. But it does have its bugs. We can just hotfix them later. So we find a few bugs, each takes 2 days to get fixed and tested. Surprise, we are at 9 days. Just like I said it would take, only this time I had new features to work on because nobody planned time to fix bugs. So we are behind even more, rushing faster gaining even more bugs as we go. 

All of this could have been avoided had you just said it will get done when it gets done. As long as it is done right, people will allow you to do this. I understand that some things need to get out relatively fast, these things will happen. But if you are pushing out a new feature or project, why rush it if you don't have to? 

Taking your time makes all things great. Look at Duke Nukem Forever.....