OtisNotes

Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone by Martin Dugard

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
"Dr Livingstone, I presume!"

That phrase was buried in my mind somewhere. It was familiar, yet I knew not how nor who this Livingstone person was. This book explained it, and was very entertaining in the process. Highly recommended if you ever travel to East Africa.

A friend recently wrote an interesting piece about how the types of creative people that rise to be famous have changed over the years. Livingstone was an explorer in the mid-1800's, and was a Michael Jordan of England. He explored much of Africa, often being the only white man in the expedition. He abhorred slavery, which was then rampant, and fought against it. His quest was to find the source of the Nile river, which evidently was a big thing back then (today we just keep looking for 'dark matter' and other such stuff).

But the most interesting part of the book to me was that the reason we know that famous phrase, is that its an early example of newspaper sensationalism. The New York Observer paid a reporter (Stanley) to take ridiculously large and expensive expedition into the middle of Africa that lasted for years, just to be able to have the exclusive on the story. But it was worth it: millions of Americans were entertained for years by the articles on Stanley's quest. And England wasn't happy its superstar was found by an American either, a fact not lost on the Observer.

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Elizabeth and I finally tied the knot this weekend! We are so excited for our honeymoon, and are leaving in a few hours!

Sunday marked the death of LoveHappens. It is sadly now in the deadpool.

A brief history of LoveHappens. Launched in 2002 as Emode Matchmaking, I was one of 4-5 engineers building the product. Our differentiator was we had a comprehensive personality test (using our know-how from Emode/Tickle) - and believe it or not nobody else had one of those in 2002 (except a then little-known site called eHarmony). We quickly took advantage of the cheap advertising economy and the massive amount of traffic we had on Emode.com to grow the site to a critical mass. When Emode changed its name to Tickle the product became "Tickle Matchmaking".

After Tickle was sold in 2004 the product went without a product manager for a year, and combined with a tougher advertising market, started to languish. We also had made a critical mistake: we had branded it as "Tickle Matchmaking" and put it as a sub-tab on the Tickle site. Now many people either thought Tickle was a dating site, or didn't realize Tickle had a dating site. Lesson learned: only the Yahoo's and Google's can get away with branded sub-products (Yahoo Personals is still doing quite well). Everybody else should launch with their own brand.

So in 2005 I took over the dating site as product manager and decided to re-design and re-brand as "LoveHappens". We changed the positioning from 'a dating site with a personality test' to 'a dating site with matchmakers'. We built scores of tools for regular non-single people to come in and help their friends and others find dates. We were able to turn around the decline in traffic and revenue with the new product, and became a top-10 dating site. One independent study even called us the Darling of the Dating Industry.

I worked for a year and half on LoveHappens with a lot of talented people, and learned a *lot* about making web products from the experience. It's sad to see it go.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book was a pure delight. The subtitle "Adventures of a Curious Character" is spot-on. Feynman gave an amazingly human and honest view into his philosophy and take on life, thought a series of stories.

One thing that struck me most deeply was his passion for learning new things. You would think a world-famous Physicist would just be passionate for Physics - but Feynman was curious about everything he saw. He dabbled in art and was successful enough to have a show, he joined a Brazilian Bongo group and competed with them, he hung out in Vegas until he grokked gambling, he spent time in strip bars in Arizona until he figured out how to pick up women, he cracked safes in Los Alamos for fun - the list goes on! My take: you should have your passions - but you should also have your hobbies. I think I need a new hobby :)

I really enjoyed his lessons learned from observing the Brazilian educational system. He noted that many of the students were simply memorizing words and formulas and had no understanding of the concepts they applied to. I think this is not a unique problem in education.

Another lesson learned from Feynman's studies of science is to never take any data for granted. Always always question the sources. Whenever Feynman did an experiment he would re-generate many of the numbers on his own - even if they had been published in other places. For many things we are (and not just in science) standing on the shoulders of giants. The easiest way to be led astray is if those results were never right to begin with.

I think Feynman was in his heart a true educator and scientist, with real integrity. And I think it drove him nuts how many important decisions are made using unscientific principles. This book was a light-hearted attempt to point that out - not to mention, a very entertaining read.


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Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this book. The concept of a man who had grown up on Mars and never seen another human until he was in his twenties is such a fun idea - and a rich canvas. Watching Mike try to grok humans gave a Heinlein great opportunities to point out some of faults - and our advantages.

I think my favorite part of this book is the word 'grok'. I would bet that there are deep discussions over the true meaning of this word - but I will contend that its closest meaning in English is 'to be enlightened about something'. If you grok God you have reached enlightenment. If you grok music you truly understand in the way that Mozart understood it. If you grok another person you love them. If you grok programming then you truly love and are really good at programming - that, and you're also a probably a pretty big nerd for using a word like 'grok' :) I used it in front of my girlfriend and she still hasn't forgiven me, since I had to explain that it was "a Martian word"!

One thing that I grokked (yes I'm going to keep using it dammit) after finishing this book is that it is kind of a 60's manifesto for free love. I wasn't alive in the 60's, but given everything I know about the 60's from movies, books, etc it seemed that my grokking was right.

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So I got an email from Facebook today and clicked on it to discover my Verizon router had decided Facebook doesn't exist. A DNS kink? Or is Verizon trying to make money on some ads?

After a brief hiatus, due to Mephisto not supporting Rails 2.0 yet, my blog is back - yay!

I spent the week in San Francisco, and attended a farewell to Tickle party, and saw a lot of old friends which was great. Monster has decided that Tickle is not worth the expense anymore, and is moving the site over to Affinity Labs. Ringo (a top 3000 site) and LoveHappens (my baby) are just being shut down. Read the coverage on Techcrunch for more information.

It's a real shame about Ringo and LoveHappens, because both are great services and even (I think) profitable. But their profit is a drop in the bucket to a big company like Monster, so they are not even going to sell them. They're just gonna pull the plug! All Ticklers past and present are feeling nostalgic about the products - but its good the everyone at the company now has a resolution and can plan their future.

I learned everything I know about the internet at Tickle. I got a 6 year education in building successful consumer facing websites. Tickle was special because of the people that were there. I haven't worked at many other companies, but even I understand that we had a special culture. It is a culture I will strive to build for Goodreads and any other place I work. So here's a heartfelt thank you and good luck to all the Ticklers!

Below is the death notice for LoveHappens.



Save Ringo!

Want to see what Google css dorks do on their weekends?

click here

A friend at lunch told me: "Focus on your strengths, you're going to add much more value that way". Sometimes in a startup we wear so many hats we think they are all our job - but I think this is sage advice!

Phew, now I can relax and just focus on product :)



Code, monkey code!

Some good mysql gotchas in this article: http://casey.shobe.info/documents/mysql_limitations/. I've heard Postgres is better on many of these things...

The new buzzword in hiring seems to be 'hire great athletes'. I've seen the term used twice now, so it must be a trend right? The idea is to hire smart people who might not have the exact skill-set you require, but have a broad range of experience and know how to learn fast and get things done.

The Feedburner founder talks about hiring the best available athlete, and gives a fun analogy about how high school quarterbacks are often picked in the pro's even when they won't be quarterback because they are known to be great atheletes. Star of the infamous LA tech video (see previous post) Frank Addante also recently posted a similar article called Great Athletes versus Great Resumes, in which he revealed that his company hires smart people wherever they can be found and whatever they are doing (physical therapists, teachers, etc).

Interesting stuff. By the way, Goodreads is looking for some great atheletes too :)

Another video for you - this one from my advisor James' singing group!

Funny video on LA:

A friend sent me a blog post titled Why Do the 'Cool Kids' Choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java?. He wanted my take on it, since I'm a former Java programmer and have switched to Ruby on Rails. I started to write him a response but decided to blog it instead.

The short answers is that its faster. The author of the blog claims that Java more powerful for 'middleware' logic. The sweet thing about Rails is that it largely eliminates Middleware logic. Something like 70% of the code you write in a Java web application is accessors or setters for adding stuff to the database, getting it back out, or validating it. The smart people who built RoR did all that for you. Now there is no reason someone couldn't build a RoR-type framework with Java. Maybe someone has and I just don't know about it (anyone?). I've used Spring before and it was the closest thing. But nothing I know of is as fast as RoR because so much code is already done for you.

Another important piece of Rails is that its not typed. Java is not a 'true' OO language because it has native types (int/char/byte etc). Java 1.5 did some work towards fixing that problem, but it was kind of a hack under the hood. In RoR nothing is typed, which reduces a surprisingly large amount of work. The result? Faster :)

The last point the author mentions is that Java has better tools and a bigger & better support community. I won't dispute this - its absolutely true. RoR is poorly documented and even occasionally buggy - not to mention the performance concerns. But is quantity more important than quality? Every quality programmer I know has either switched to Rails or experimented with it. That's the true reason I switched, and one of the main reasons I believe in Rails. As a further example, I know a guy who wanted to outsource a project to India. He found literally thousands of PHP developers, most of them not quality programmers. I told him to change the posting to require RoR. There are much fewer RoR programmers in India, and the ones that do know it are much better coders. RoR is a good filter for finding quality programmers :)

If you have any comments on this, join my Ruby on Rails Reading group on Goodreads!