Field Guide to Programmers

No Man’s Land is a business book aimed primarily at entrepreneurs whose companies have reached the dreaded plateau in sales/profit/customer acquisition/etc. The author, Doug Tatum, calls this lull the “No Man’s Land” where companies either decide to stay small, restructure and break out, or wither and die. The book definitely serves it’s purpose, but I think it is also a great book for leaders who are running high-growth departments within larger corporations.

While I haven’t worked for a startup tech company, I’ve been a customer of quite a few. From that angle, I can tell you that Tatum’s book is perfect for every growing tech company. No, really. If you are running a tech company, buy this book now and read it before you reach your plateau. See what lies ahead of you and stop it before you have a real mess on your hands.

But like I said above, Tatum’s advice is not just good for companies, it’s good for fast growing departments within larger organizations too. If you run a high growth area, there’s no doubt that you will recognize the signs that Tatum talks about in his book. His practical advice can really help drag you out of the doom and gloom scenarios that inevitably come to fast growing departments when they reach maximum capacity and need to change.

[Oh, and in case you'd like to stay small, Tatum will point you to Bo Burlingham's Small Giants. I read Burlingham's book too and I think it is spot on advice for those companies who have pegged themselves to be a certain size. If you run a smallish company and want to keep it that way, buy copies of Small Giants and give them to your executives. This will ease a lot of frustration. You might lose some growth-oriented folks, but in exchange you'll have focused leadership that understands the long term vision.]

What business does a blog about programming and E-Commerce have with posting such blatantly positive and idealistic thoughts?

I’ve worked with a lot of different programmers and tech folks during my career. Without a doubt, it’s a tough racket. The long hours and complex, detail-driven work bends the mind at times. It makes us forget that we’re human and that there’s a big world out there we need to get into and explore before our time is done.

Andrew Galasetti of Lyved posted a fantastic list of things he’s learned over the course of his lifetime over on Dumb Little Man. The 20th is my favorite…

20 Things I’m Glad Life Taught Me:

20. You can change the world: Every single person has the ability to change the world whether directly or indirectly. When you change your life and the lives of those around you, you’ve changed the world. Small things that you do can make a huge impact on the world.

[Via: Dumb Little Man - Tips for Life]

Andrew’s site is pretty cool too. Make sure to check it out if you need a breather from the code and can’t get outside. (although you really ought to get outside, right?)

The title of this post comes from the end of Hank William’s long discourse on the state of tech companies today. I bolded one particular sentence way down at the bottom:

“Companies not lead by geeks in tech driven marketplaces will fail.”

I’d expand that to most industries, not just tech concerns. Every company could use a hard core geek at the top.

Being a geek means that you like to tinker with things. Tinkering produces data and new ideas. Those elements form the basis of more experiments and eventually you hit on something new and powerful.

No matter what business you’re in, embrace the data. Companies that fail to tinker die. (maybe not today, but eventually)

Why Are So Many Seemingly Great Companies Failing?:

By most accounts, eBay is in big trouble. Why? Because their technology has lagged woefully, while Amazon, a true geekocracy, is about to eat their lunch. Amazon understands that they are not a retailer, or a marketplace. They are a platform. They figure out how to connect buyers to products in the most efficient way possible. That means putting products in front of people in the optimal manner. It means creating technology that maximizes transactions. These are hard problems. It also means creating systems that allow others to do the same thing while taking ever smaller pieces of the transaction, but for massively larger numbers of transactions.

Amazon sees itself as the ultimate Internet transaction system. And they are winning. The reason for this is Jeff Bezos and his team had the vision and they realized that they needed to have serious computer scientists working on the really hard problems associated with Internet transactions.

Meg Whitman never understood that that could or should be eBay’s role. This is because non-geeks running public companies generally can’t see beyond next quarter. Google is to Yahoo as Amazon is to eBay. Eventually both Yahoo and eBay will shrink to total irrelevancy because they could not create successful *platforms*, whereas their competitors did.

The bottom line is we are now in the age of the geek. Non-geeks don’t realize this - because they are not geeks, and so they resent it. And they can’t smell the CO. Too bad. Companies not lead by geeks in tech driven marketplaces will fail. What we are seeing now is a radical clarification of what kind of organizational DNA leads to tech success.

[Via: Why does everything suck?]

Recently, I changed my LinkedIn profile picture to King Moonracer, King of the Island of Misfit Toys. That might seem a little strange in the somewhat staid and stuffy world of LinkedIn, but I wanted to keep my profile in line with who I really am. That’s why I added a tag line:

You pay for the brain. Vanity costs extra.

As defined by the OED, vanity is that which is vain, futile, or worthless; that which is of no value or profit; self-conceit and the desire for admiration.

In the world of E-Commerce, there is really precious little time for vanity. Things move at a whiplash pace and the margin for error is small. To be successful, you need people who are focused on the goals of the business and not whether they chose the right tie. E-Commerce is 24-7 (an overused phrase, but apt for this context) and working 9-5 just doesn’t cut it. There are some people I’d rather see stroll in at 11AM, knowing that they were up working at 10PM or midnight the day before. To me, it means they’re engaged with the real-time business.

Some people get caught up in the sales growth. They like to strut. Hey, I like big numbers too, who doesn’t? Yet, while E-Commerce may grow at a double-digit rate for some time to come, there are so many exogenous factors impacting growth that are difficult to measure, like channel shift.

Being vain about growth like this is bound to make you look a little silly in the long run.

I do think it’s important to know when you need to be professional, but you can’t exchange looking good for performance. It eventually shows up on the bottom line, which is how we should all measure ourselves (and why I charge extra for vanity).

While looking for new feeds to add to my RSS reader (NetNewsWire), I thought it might be nice to have a utility that would let me grab a web page, spider all of the outbound links, check to see which pages had feeds, and then create an opml file of new feeds I didn’t have already.

How’s that for a run-on sentence?

Alright, so in addition to being too lazy to click on every link, I’m also too lazy to write fancy code for this project. What I wanted was something quick and dirty. Something that got me 80% of the way there.

feedextractor.py is where I ended up.

This little python script uses the wonderful BeautifulSoup xml/html parsing library from Crummy Software. I highly recommend the soup and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

Using feedextractor.py

1. Export you current list of feeds in opml format.
2. Rename the export file to “mysubscriptions.opml”
3. Place the export file in the same directory as feedextractor.py
4. Change the baseurl variable in feedextractor.py to the url of the page you would like start from
5. Run feedextractor.py (i.e. [python feedextractor.py])

This will create a file called newfeeds.opml with all of the spidered feeds that do not appear to be in your current list of feeds.

Known “problems”

1. The script only takes the first feed from a found site. If there is an RSS and an ATOM feed, the script will grab whichever one is at the top of the file. This means that multiple feeds are ignored. You might think this is a bad thing. If so, feel free to change it. I set it up this way because I didn’t want to comb through the found feeds and delete what amounts to duplicates.

2. The script has just one exception block. If something happens while trying to pull back a page, the script skips that site. Could be more elegant.

3. The script does not bother with parameters. Would be nice if you could just pass in a url… I know this is simple, but again I am in a hurry. I just wanted it to work. I’m not making a project here.

4. urllib2 gets rejected by some sites. True enough. Some web servers will reject a request from urllib2. If you want to go to the trouble of adding a user agent header, be my guest.

It works

This script comes as-is. Use it to your heart’s content. I’m not planning updates or anything else. Just a fun bit o’ code I whipped up to suit a need.

But it does work, and quite efficiently too (even for some sloppy-quick hacking).

Download feedextractor.py

Raw source after the jump…
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