Author: tychay
light writing, word loving, ❤ coding
Happy Holidays: Web Programmer Complains SF Is Full of People Just Like Him
[Hat tip to the literary genius “founder” of DickWhack or whatever-the-fuck-it’s-called](http://valleywag.gawker.com/happy-holidays-startup-ceo-complains-sf-is-full-of-hum-1481067192):
I just got back to SF. I’ve traveled around the world and I gotta say there is nothing more grotesque than walking down (almost all) of San Francisco. Why the heart of our city and surrounding environs has to be overrun by crazy, entitled, money-grubbing, startup hipsters I have no clue. Each time I pass by one, my love affair with SF dies a little.
The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, this lower part of society keep to themselves. They sit in their parent’s basements, eat cheetos, program quietly, and generally stay out of your way unless you need a leash in League of Legends. They realize it’s a privilege to be in meatspace and view themselves as guests. And that’s okay.
In downtown SF these ironic-t-shirt-wearing lib(ertarian)tards multiply like tribbles, give you the evil eye (when they bother to look up from their iPhones), and act like they own the city — as if it’s their place of leisure, gluten-free, grass-fed restaurants, and Belgian craft microbreweries… In actuality it’s the live-work city for a hell lot more than a bunch of VC-funded beggars trying to make a business model around helping similar lowlifes securely send dick pics to one another. It’s a disgrace. I don’t feel safe planning out my next meal without having my eyes accosted by their shitty reviews on Yelp or nasty “tips” on FourSquare on whether or not the place accepts BitCoin.
You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover of humanity in the world, but there is an area of town for self-entitled worthless drains and an area of town for the people trying to actually get shit done without being secretly stalked by some dude wearing Google Glasses. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us with their hooded sweatshirts flaunting their fly-by-night social mobile gaming startup when their business is on the Internet and their money comes from Sand Hill. They can eat and “work” somewhere else. It’s a burden and a liability having them so close to us sucking up our LTE/3G bandwidth with their Instagrams of their latest bacon and truffle-oil infused lunch. Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I’d consider thinking different, but the young trust fund white male ordering a code monkey to make a website designed for other white 1%ers like them hasn’t made anyone else’s life better in a while.
Role models, mistakes, and learning
On the way to work this morning, M— mentioned two contrasted successful people in public relations. She said, “When I think of X and compare him to Y, I’d rather take Y as a role model. Do you have any role models?”
*Do I? Feynman? Wozniak? Jobs? Mayer?* I paused for a long time.
“No,” I said.
M— laughed.Continue reading
The ideal outcome of a product strategy retreat
I decided to transcribe [these notes](http://terrychay.com/article/notes-from-chapter-8-of-the-power-of-habit.shtml) because on Friday, James Forrester asked me, “What do you expect to get out of the strategy retreat next week?”
My answer was…long. 🙂 I won’t bore you with the details.Continue reading
Notes from Chapter 8 of the Power of Habit
## Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (244)
> It was Thursday, December 1, 1555, in Montgomery, Alabama and she has just finished a long day at Montgomery Fair, the department store where she worked as a seamstress. The bus was crowded and, by law, the first four rows were reserved for white passengers. The area where blacks were allowed to sit, in the back, was already full and so the woman—**Rosa Parks**— sat in a center row, right behind the white section, where either race could claim a seat (p.215)
The process of social movements (p.217) requires convergence of 3 parts:
1. Start: Social habits of friendships, and strong ties between close acquaintances
2. Growth: Habits of community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together.
3. Endures: Movement leaders give participants new habits that create fresh sense of identity and feeling of ownershipContinue reading
I'm speaking again!
After a couple year hiatus, I thought it’d be nice to start speaking again — the disconnect of basically stopping speaking at open source conferences when I started working at two companies producing some of the world’s largest open-source products ([WordPress][] and [Wikipedia][]) was becoming too much.
I decided to apply this year. Luckily, [Northeast PHP Conference][nephp] forgot to check the The Great Offensive PHP Speaker Blacklist™, and accepted my talk!
The talk will be: [Ten Evil Things: Features Engineering at Wikipedia][10 evil things]. Now with 30% less swear words, but don’t worry, it’ll still be fun. 😀
When registering, belatedly, I noticed they had an interesting preferences page, I thought I’d share my answers with you
[WordPress]: http://wordpress.org “WordPress: Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS”
[Wikipedia]: http://en.wikipedia.org “Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia”
[nephp]: http://www.northeastphp.org “Northeast PHP Conference 2013”
[10 evil things]: http://www.northeastphp.org/talks/view/156/Ten-Evil-Things-Features-Engineering-at-Wikipedia “Ten Evil Things: Features Engineering at Wikipedia—Northeast PHP Conference”
Continue reading my answers to their questions after the jump
The Rubbernecking Theory of Google Glasses
[John Gruber writes][]:
One of these guys is wrong.
It’s [possible][wiki:false dilemma] that they’re both right in what they observed, but both wrong in trying to derive a conclusion from their observations.
[John Gruber writes]: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/05/20/glass-io “Two Takes on Google Glass at I/O—Daring Fireball”
[wiki:false dilemma]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma “False dilemma—Wikipedia”
Continue reading about false dichotomies and false conclusions after the jump
Some of your clients are clearly misogynist tourists
She complains, “There’s just no appreciation on their end. I got them ___, and they’re still trying to tell me how to do my job. It’s so frustrating. I have clients that I feel I’m under-servicing and this one takes up all my time. They have a low retainer, but they act like they own me. That’s the last time I let them talk me down on my retainer.”
“You shouldn’t have let that happen so you shouldn’t be surprised.”
“How so?”
“I once visited Venice when I was a kid. Many stores didn’t have prices, but some of the stores did. No matter which, you didn’t have to pay the listed prices — there was an expectation that you could haggle over the price.”
“And?”
“Well with this client: they don’t know your field so they don’t know what the expectation is. **You** set that. Letting yourself get talked down on that amount is like buying something in Venice. Imagine if we were in the United States, and someone walked into your store and said, ‘Hey, I know it says it cost $15, but how about I give $10?’”
She laughs.
“Exactly! The only place you can do that here is at a car dealership. If you treated their counteroffer like you just treated this hypothetical, they would have learned to go somewhere else and be someone else’s problem, or deal with you on the terms you set. When you created your own business, it was because you didn’t want companies to feel they owned you, and you wanted to be free to be honest with them. You need to set those terms down in this way.”
“Yeah, they said that they wanted _____ in the long term but didn’t have enough money right now, so they wanted a two month contract at a lower rate to try it out. I should have known they never really valued the work I do.”
“That’s another thing right there! Imagine, I was single right now and asking you out. What if I told you, ‘Hey, I really want have a committed relationship and get married someday. Why don’t we fuck so I can try you out?’ Would you?”
“When you put it that way, definitely not.”
“Exactly.”
Combining
“I am so tired of stupid people, Terry. So tired of the people that say stupid things like, ‘Combining fruits and nut butters is dangerous for your health because… [food combining](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_combining)!’”
Me: “Just tell them that ‘combining your brain and your mouth is dangerous for **my** health because… the stupid: **it burns**!”
Enterprise job recruiting
> Hi Terrence,
>
> I am following up on previous emails and calls. I am doing some research on PHP. I understand that you are focused on [canonical model](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_Model) management, [SOA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture) or [ESB](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_service_bus) initiatives. Do you have 10 minutes for a quick call tomorrow afternoon?
>
> The [redacted] platform enables rapid service design, construction, and management all from a Canonical Model. This enables the following:
> 1) Your services are managed in our repository aligned to all of your business capabilities
> 2) Impact analysis on how a change from a provider system ([Logical Model](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_data_model)) can impact the Canonical and other services
> 3) Rapidly propagate the changes to the impacted services
> 3) Rules based [version management control](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control)
> 4) Mapping provider systems to the canonical model reduces the number of mappings required by over 99% for a complex integration projects.
>
> I know this is a busy time of year. If someone else is better suited for this discussion, can you please refer me to them?
I understood every third word.
The other day, I sat through a presentation from from an enterprise consultant, they had an 8 category scrum chart just for feature choice and a 10 category one for development. The former had categories like: “paths to insight” -> “validation” -> “harvesting”, so I spent most of my time imagining what would happen if people were story cards that ended up dying due to being harvested at the end of validation due to improper paths to insight.
Maybe if they spent less time throwing verbiage and more time doing, [Enterprise](http://terrychay.com/article/php-enterprise-scalability.shtml) [wouldn’t](http://terrychay.com/article/php-pro-con.shtml) [be such](http://terrychay.com/article/php-enterprise-myths.shtml) [a joke](http://terrychay.com/article/enterprise-scalability.shtml).
22 categories? **This** is agile?
My theory is that someone with [Wernicke’s aphasia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_encephalopathy) would make [a killing in Enterprise software development](http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wernicke%27s+aphasia).