Migrating Between Two Google Apps Domains
Last night I moved users from one Google Apps account to another. While Google supports domain aliasing (the association of more than one domain to your account), it does so with a some limitations. The most significant limitation is the lack of support for changing the default domain. This means that once you sign up for Google Apps using a domain, that domain will permanently be your default domain. For a while I tried to live with domain aliasing by having all my users manually change their default email alias on their clients (e.g. browser, iPhone, iPad). While this worked for email, unfortunately there is no workaround for calendar invites coming from your default domain (!). In addition, it became a burden as users forgot...
SomeOps
Today I’d like the announce the founding of a new movement: SomeOps. Yes, you’ve heard of DevOps, a movement that emphasizes close collaboration between operations and software development teams (note: no one is exactly sure why these two groups didn’t collaborate closely before this movement, but apparently they did not). You may even have heard of NoOps, which is where developers use automation to take control over critical operational tasks such as deployments (note: no one is exactly sure why development didn’t automate deployments before this movement, but apparently it took this cool new name to get them to do it). So today I would like to announce the new movement of SomeOps, whose founding principles are: We will...
The Importance of Weekly Demos
One of the often overlooked innovations from the first Scrum team was the rigorous commitment to weekly demos. This innovation came in the dark ages of waterfall, when a typical software release took a year or more and the concept of demonstrating incremental weekly progress made little sense in most organizations. But our team at Easel was different, due in large part to our commitment to a dynamic programming language, OOAD, an integrated development environment, and short / iterative release cycles. So every week we gathered on a Friday afternoon to show what we had completed. Some demos were of end to end features, while others were code walk-throughs of common frameworks. I guess I should also note that since we were all in...
The Verizon Solution To Reducing Support Costs
A little more than a week ago I noticed periodic lags streaming video to the TVs / laptops /tablets in my house. Prior to this, I was a happy Verizon FIOS customer, even being one of the first in my neighborhood to sign up for FIOS years back. Before calling support, I decided to do some simple troubleshooting. I ran pings to several locations on the internet, confirming the streaming issues directly correlated to packet loss. While the overall packet loss averaged about 6%, at times it jumped as high as 40%, particularly in evening hours. Performing a ping on each hop in the traceroute from my house to the hub in New York City, I was able to isolate the packet loss to a single router in Boston (130.81.29.252). With this...
Sh*t To Pay Ratio
I once worked for a Fortune 100 executive who introduced me to a useful metric to judge the quality of a job: the Sh*t To Pay Ratio (or STPR for short). By his own definition, STPR was the level of compensation required to justify staying in or taking a particular job. If the job was particularly interesting, the compensation needs were low; if the job included onerous duties and/or working with difficult personalities, the compensation needs suddenly increased. I should note that this was the same executive who once described a new opportunity he wanted me to take as his “Chernobyl” – so clearly this was a man who could turn a phrase (let’s just say my STPR for that opportunity never quite worked in my favor ). I...
6 Tips To Taking Advantage of the Boom
For those of you who lived through the mid to late 1990s, you should smell something familiar in the Boston air: a technology boom. I know Massachusetts has a 6.7% unemployment rate and is still recovering from the worst economic downturn in a generation. But the evidence of the boom is all around us: new startups being formed, companies being acquired, and even a few companies preparing for IPOs. Sitting in a coffee shop downtown can remind you of Cambridge in 1997, with technology business being transacted all around and a sense of optimism in the air. The last boom in the 1990s lasted long enough for some of us to ride one and maybe two companies to a successful exit. This means that if you are considering making a career...
Product Management Is a Company, Not a Department
Over my years in startups, I’ve found the single hardest role to fill with a quality candidate is product management. Ask any industry professional to name the best software developers they have worked with, and they will have at least a few names to share. But ask the same question about product managers, and more often than not, you will be met with a confused silence. Why? I’ll give five reasons. #1: It’s a Hard Job In the best of circumstances, being a startup product manager is a difficult job. A startup PM needs to assist the company in charting a course from a founding vision to a growing business, all within both the constraints and extreme uncertainty of a startup. A successful PM needs to reconcile the...
Joe Kinsella is a high-tech VPE and startup junkie in the Boston area.