international geographic

sigh.

Del.icio.us (sorry, it’s just plain old “Delicious” now) 2.0 finally launched a few days ago and the response so far has been mixed. But now that the dust has settled some, it’s time to think about just how we got here and if it was really worth all the trouble.

According to the official blog post, the new and improved Delicious brings us speed, usability, and oh so good looks among other features and it was a long time in the making. The Yahoo acquisition was announced on Dec 9, 2005 and the new site finally went live a little over two and a half years later on July 31, 2008. So why did it take them so long?

A key change as a result of the Yahoo! acquisition was their decision to rewrite the whole thing in PHP using the Symfony framework, for no other reason than that it’s the current corporate standard at Yahoo!. Oh, and, coincidentally, Yahoo! Bookmarks was also built on PHP+Symfony.

So now it starts to make a bit of sense: you take a system being actively used by millions of users around the world and you start over from scratch with the goal of building it bigger and better, toss in a couple of hot buzzwords to meet Web 2.0 compliance guidelines, and before you know it 2 years have gone by.

I find it very hard to believe that with all the talent and the thousands of man years combined software development experience over there, that no one understands the pros and cons of rewriting vs refactoring a code base, especially given the enormous success of the service and the relatively trouble-free history as compared to, say, Twitter.

At the same time, I understand it all too well. From where I sit, and having been involved in a similar situation in the past as well as with my current employer, the decision to move to PHP was clearly not based on a cost/benefit analysis of maintaing the current system. In fact, I wonder if they even understood what the real problems, if any, were with the existing system before deciding to not just rewrite it, but write it in another language.

Moving to another language is a pretty drastic step to take and will rarely solve your problem.

MySQL is generally an all-around kickass piece of software, and like any good open source application, there are a host of tools you can use to squeeze every last drop of goodness out of it. Nearly all of them, however, are geared towards the operational DBA, leaving the wayward developer out in the cold.

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I’ve been to a bunch of shows lately and even though they were all really good I haven’t been moved to write anything about them. Well, here they are… recorded more for my poor memory than anything else.

• March 25 - Crystal Castles with Health (Studio B)
• April 8 - Explosions in the Sky (Terminal 5)
• May 5 - The Teenagers (Bowery Ballroom)
• May 18 - Black Kids (Bowery Ballroom)

Indians are everywhere in the software world — from engineers to CEO’s — but they all share one thing in common: the products they’ve helped build are all for companies based outside of India and for the most part in the US. I had this very conversation with one of our developers in Chennai on my last trip to India. He’s also spent time abroad, in the UK, but had not noticed it until I pointed it out to him. My guess is that there’s just no domestic market for many of the products being developed abroad. Especially with regards to the Internet, with access at home out of reach for most people, it’s not hard to see why most entrepreneurs might end up in California instead of Bangalore.

Fortunately, that all appears to be changing. I was glad to learn that the recently announced Live Documents is made entirely by an Indian company based out of Bangalore (though it was founded by Sabeer Bahtia of Hotmail fame). I’d be curious how their product does in the Indian market, as opposed to the rest of the world, for which it seems to be primarily targeted.

I still intend to finish the series of posts I started earlier, but this quote pretty much sums it up:

In this regard management is also to blame, especially when it comes to dysfunctional schedules, wrong incentives, poor hiring, and demoralizing policies.

Is just getting the job done always enough? One of my personal philosophies is that if you’re not learning, you’re not improving. If you’re not improving, then what have you really accomplished? In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve even gotten worse, if only because everyone else has gotten better. It’s like a television or movie series that comes back year after with the same old, tired formula. No better than previous iterations, and doesn’t even meet the expectations set by its predecessors. Think Bond, James Bond.

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“Commitment means being prepared to do extra things, going the extra mile”

Without a commitment from all the concerned parties, how can one expect any enterprise to be successful? Be it business, government, military or otherwise.

My group has shown it’s commitment time and again, but we haven’t seen the same from others. How do you find the motivation to stay committed in a situation like that?

I think I’ll just go to sleep instead.

Saw some cool sneaks today, but, alas, they only carry up to UK12 and I’m a UK12.5.

The traffic here is out of control, and, with the introduction of the 1 lakh car (which I think is fantastic, btw) it’s bound to get a lot worse, at least in the near term. For a while I thought a big part of the problem was the lack of traffic signals at most intersections and a complete lack of order on the road. The heterogeneous traffic mixed with the all out war mentality creates an extremely hostile environment.

It wasn’t until they put a signal at the [fairly minor] intersection near the office that I realized just how well “organized” this particular brand of chaos can work. Right away, about five minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the evening were added to my commute, just sitting in traffic. The very next day, the light changed to a flashing yellow (go slow!) with a traffic cop directing traffic. In the evening it seemed to be working normally but traffic was much more fluid. Ten minutes sitting still became roughly 5 minutes. Either people took a different route tonight or they just got used to the fact that, sometimes, you need to stop at an intersection.