Yesterday, we had part one of our interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku, which provides hosting for Ruby on Rail applications. We had a great conversation with James, but there was a bit much for one post, so we divided the interview into 2. Here’s the second part of our interview….
Jul
23
2009
Another Interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku – Part 2
Jul
22
2009
Another Interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku – Part 1
Heroku (who we’ve covered here, here and here) provides provision-less hosting for Ruby applications, letting developers focus on developing. The hosting service allows developers to just push their code and it’s up in running – no worrying about running scripts, or setting up servers. Heroku recently came out of beta and now offers commercial, paid service. A few weeks ago, I had the chance to speak with Heroku’s CEO, James Lindenbaum, about their recent developments:
Oct
14
2008
To lead programmers, you must be humble
I’m tired of talking about how great I am. What about you, what do you think of me?
There may have been a point in time when someone understood all that there was to understand about computers. Early on there may have been one person who could stand above his fellow scientists and claim to be the authority on everything in this young field. Where wizards stay up late makes a good case for a few individuals who may have filled that natural desire we have for an overall authority on a subject. Yet those men, great scientists and tremendous minds in an unproven field of study, were some of the most humble ambassadors of technology we will likely ever see.
Today we have no overall authorities. No normal person can hope to represent enough deep expertise to be considered an expert in more than one specialty. Exceptional people may be able to handle two or three fields before being overwhelmed by the fire hose of information needed to keep up. Hollywood has it wrong, again, about smart people in technology because there are no generalists out there that know everything. Computers is similar to any other complex system like medicine, law, scientific research and finance. It demands that you specialize to do be considered an expert. (This may also be why I like House as a show but have problems with a plot device that pretends there are doctors that can ever know everything.) Anyone who either pretends to be an expert on the whole of technology or really has convinced themselves that they are will be doomed to huge management failures.
Pete Johnson Chief Architect at HP and a guy who clearly knows what he is doing around a computer wrote up good article on Dzone about why programmers hate working for Software Architects. Pete’s experiences run parallel to my own as a manager of programmers and his first point sums up my advice to anyone who wants to lead a programmer.
- Be humble
- Ask your people for advice on subjects you don’t know.
- Make it public knowledge that you are the least important person in the room.
- Stand back and let them shine before your customers, but stand in front of them to take blame.
- Programmers can sniff out BS. Honestly admit when you’re unsure of a direction.
- Keep them informed and let them know when you are giving fact and when its your opinion
- Ask only what you would be willing to do yourself. Prove it by doing it occasionally for them
- Keep a diverse RSS list and forward on good information to experts in your group
- Be humble
What’s on your list?
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Photo attributed to SuperFantastic on Flickr CC
Aug
04
2008
Yahoo delivering on user created potential in search
Back in April we covered the web 2.0 expo announcement of Yahoo’s Search Monkey, a search result modification API. Now Yahoo is making the bold step of bringing a small group of Search Monkey applications into the default search results space. My prediction: Yahoo is evolving into a specialty search company.
When announced, Search Monkey was Yahoo’s early days search tool that summed up the company’s commitment to an open application development platform. Programmers working in the Search Monkey space were able to create specialized results within the Yahoo search application. If, for example, you run a restaurant and you wanted your chef’s three best entries listed with your name in the results, it could be done in Search Monkey. The catch was, people using Yahoo needed to install your Search Monkey app into their Yahoo profile in order to see the special results. That was, at least, before now.
Yelp and LinkedIn are the first two companies outside of Yahoo to have their Search Monkey applications added to the default search engine for Yahoo. The specialized look that Yelp and LinkedIn developed for their searches will now be in every Yahoo search result by default, meaning every Yahoo search page with Yelp or LinkedIn results will be serving up rich, contextualized information. I have to believe that other companies are seeing this as their best chance to help push their unique content out to one of the big three search engines.
This move begins what I feel is an important journey for Yahoo to distinguish itself from Google and Microsoft. User generated search results like Search Monkey may give Yahoo a speciality search advantage. If you know that Yelp (a resturant recommendation site) has more informative results in Yahoo, you’re going to start using Yahoo for your resturant searches. While it remains to be seen how many Search Monkey apps Yahoo brings into the fold, this is likely only the beginning. Yahoo’s press release suggested that both the Yelp and LinkedIn app were seeing 15% click-thru rates when tested in an A-B group, which is a very high percentage in search. It seems logical to me that as long as your app has a high rate, and your content is well structured for semantic markup (a requirement for Search Monkey to work properly. See Microformats), you too may find your user-created search layout added into Yahoo’s main trunk some day. Now you just have to contextualize your site’s content and write your custom Search Monkey application. Need any help?
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