Field Guide to Programmers

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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If you’re a programmer, you might want to put in some time with books like Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres and Competing on Analytics by Tom Davenport.

Why?

Here’s something for you to think about…

In 10 Years, Marketing Will Be Taught In Engineering School:

Technology is removing all friction from the marketplace. Marketing will really be about figuring out how to most quickly and effectively tap the feelings of the market for the benefit of the product. This will go from a process that currently takes months or years, to one that happens in hours and days. All messaging and product feature sets will be rapidly optimized using the next generation of marketing techniques and technologies.

[Via: Why does everything suck?]

I have no doubt that Hank Williams is right.

Though heavy on the tech side of things, I’ve floated around between IT and Marketing for most of my career. However, it’s been awhile since so many books about marketing to algorithms have hit the shelves. Search is obviously the big reason and that makes me happy. I’m happy because search actually works and is quantifiable as opposed to the personalization craze circa 1998-2001.

The change is here and it is real.

Reg Braithwaite has a brilliant piece about Apple as a purveyor of hardware as opposed to software.

Apple is in the hardware business:

People who think of the argument as being Apple vs. Microsoft think of the two companies as being in the OS business. But Apple is not in the OS business, and hasn’t been in that business since Jobs returned and quickly killed the OEM Macintosh market. Think of an iPod touch. Would anybody argue that when you buy an iPod you are buying a copy of OS X with a dongle that happens to play music attached to it? Seriously? is anybody complaining that they can’t transfer their copy of OS X from an iPod touch to whatever lame music player Microsoft is peddling this week?

[Via: raganwald]

Yeah, so what if I’m a fan boy too.