2009 — My Grand Experiment

As mentioned earlier, Yahoo! decided to shut down its entire Munich engineering department. So since January 1st, I am officially out of a job.

What a downer… or is it?

After some deliberation and discussions with Dana, I’ve decided to concentrate on the bright side: I have a few ideas for products (read: websites), and now I finally have the time to work on them. I’ve always contemplated building them in my spare time while still being employed, but apart from a few small experiments (which were fun to write but are hardly my personal “next big thing”) that concept didn’t work out so well.

Thus, I’ve decided to concentrate on my own stuff in 2009 — full frontal self-employment. That’s right, I’m an entrepreneur now.¹

I plan on spending about half a year to bring my ideas to life, and then taking on freelance jobs later on to bolster the income these site will (hopefully) generate. My ideas are related to gaming, both because it’s something I love and because I am definitely seeing a market there. I think my concept is sound, and I know I can build this …thing. It won’t be easy, but I have no problems working for my money. ;)

I don’t know whether it will work out or not, but I want, nay, need to try. The time certainly is as right as it gets. Actually, one could argue that I’ve waited a bit too long with my idea, since a “contender” appeared on the scene a short time ago.² But I don’t see this as a showstopper, quite the contrary — it’s good to have competition as it keeps you on your toes. :)

So, 2009: it’s going to be my year. It’s a grand experiment, and while working alone I won’t be alone, as my wonderful wife and my friends are supporting me. Still, I don’t know yet whether I will succeed or if this kind of thing will be working for me. Quite honestly, this makes me a wee bit nervous.

Nonetheless, full steam ahead!

Yes I can.

Mini Review: 2008

• I was promoted. Then I lost my job. But I came to a conclusion, and found new goals. (More on this later.)
• I had planned on running 250km, then hit that goal in October, and ended up doing 400km.
• My granny passed away, and I miss her.
• My faith in the USA was partially restored (the Obama campaign and its success even gave me hope, and I don’t even “count”).
• We’re done with the bulk of the renovating of our 2nd floor. I’ve installed the floor tilings. w00t!
• I was overly surprised by a videogame — GTA IV. I’ve spent a lot of time on that one. Wonderful adult entertainment.
• I got me an iPod touch — which turns out to be a good reading device, thanks to both Instapaper Pro and Stanza.
• I’ve tried to bring Child’s Play to Germany, and failed. Oh well, it was the first round. Better luck in 2009.
• I’ve launched a few smaller projects — Twitter Twerp Scan, escaloop (which I’ve shut down a few months later) and Random.li.
• I came to love GitHub. Great site/service.

Verdict

• A really good year.

Posts

I didn’t write as much as I had planned on doing, but nonetheless, here are a few of my “better” posts (subjective opinion, YMMV).

• Revelation, Twitter Edition
• Revelation, Garden Store Edition
• Der Vogel (in German)
• Going Paleolithic
• A German’s View: US Elections 2008
• Child’s Play 2008: Germany
• The Amazing Xmas Gift Ideas Machine

Have a good 2009.

Es War Einmal… Yahoo! Engineering München

Yahoo! hat am Freitag verkündet, die gesamte Engineering-Abteilung in München zu schließen. Meine Freude war etwas gedämpft, bin ich doch (noch) Teil dieser Abteilung.

Meine Motivation, eine neue “Herausforderung” zu finden, stieg dementsprechend sprunghaft — denn ab 31.12.2008 bin ich somit ohne Arbeit (Stand: heute).

Um ehrlich zu sein, ich weiß noch nicht genau, was ich machen möchte. Will ich als Freelancer arbeiten? Suche ich mir einen (interessanten) neuen Job? Mache ich eine eigene Firma auf? Im Moment bin ich etwas unschlüssig, alle drei Optionen klingen irgendwie verlockend.

Vielleicht muss ich nur überzeugt werden. Also, sollte eine coole Firma in München zufällig nach einem versatilen Allrounder mit einem Faible für Scripting/Hacking (Ruby, Python, Javascript, Perl, PHP, LUA…) und alles Neue suchen, der sich mit geschlossenen Augen in diesem Internetz auskennt: ich würde mich sehr über eine Mail, einen Tweet oder einen Anruf (089 / 317 12 74) freuen. Oder auch über einen Besuch auf meinem LinkedIn- oder Xing-Profil. :) Danke!

Und sollten irgendjemand nach einem wirklich sehr, sehr guten Web Dev suchen: mein Freund und Kollege Mike West ist zur Zeit ebenfalls auf der Suche.

Madrid

The company is sending me to Madrid, Spain, for a summit. I’ll be back on Thursday.

Here’s hoping I’ll see a bit of the city and not just the hotel and office. ;)

Hendrik sucht…

Heute: Webdesigner:

Ein Kunde von mir sucht aktuell für ein größeres Projekt 1-2 Webdesigner(innen), der/die die nächsten 2 Monate Zeit haben und vor Ort (in München) arbeiten können. Gesuchtes Profil:

• Sehr gute Designkenntnisse, v.a. in Bezug auf Websites;
• Sehr gute Kenntnisse der gängigen Tools (Photoshop, Flash etc.);
• Sehr gute Kenntnisse der in der Webentwicklung angewandten Techniken und Technologien (speziell HTML, CSS, XML und JavaScript);
• Sehr gute Kenntnisse von ActionScript;
• Selbständige und kreative Arbeitsweise;
• Das Projekt bewegt sich im Computer- und Videospiele-Bereich; Erfahrung mit der dort üblichen Bildsprache wären von Vorteil.

Interesse? Klickst Du hier für seinen Post.

Send Help!

The other day I had to move my desk to another room, and thus I was cut off completely from the rest of the engineering gang. My homies, my posse, not in my view anymore! Mein Leben!

Anyways, I was chatting with Mike, who still sat in the other room. “How you holding up?”, he asked. “Okay, but I’m lonely… SEND HELP”, I answered. And forgot about the whole thing.

Fast forward three days.

An innocent Amazon package is lying on my desk. Inside: a CD—“Help” by The Beatles.

Mike, you jackass. :)

The (n) Ways of Highly Ineffective People

I had the pleasure to watch hordes of co-workers, past and present, struggling to get through their days without going insane. The lot of them are capable people, but they appear to waste a lot of time (and nerves) by not asking the right questions when it comes to technology. And I am talking here about developers and non-developers.

Also, before I go any further, let me clarify one thing: I am writing this not to tell people they suck, but to share some personal findings and experiences about common pitfalls and how to get around them. I am aware that you can buy books about this topic by the dozen, and I don’t want to go into philosophy, so this is merely a list of tiny things that I changed on my machines that had quite an impact on my productivity. Also, all this stuff works for me — it might not for you. I’m just saying.

The general idea is to get rid of some obstacles that keep my mind from running like the well-oiled, finetuned, skillfully honed bucket of bolts that it is. This idea is neither new nor original nor mine, but hey, it’s good!

So, onwards — let me share some observations with you.

IM contact status notifications are EVIL.

The other day I was sitting in a meeting, watching a presentation, when I noticed the constant barrage of IM presence notifications popping on and off in the lower right corner of the presentation laptop’s desktop. Approximately one every 15 seconds. “That guy came online” and “The other guy went offline” and “OMG the third guy is out for lunch now”. It was hard to follow the presentation, to be honest. The funny thing was that the presenter didn’t really seem to notice them anymore. Or didn’t care, hard to say. In that case: why did he even turn them on in the first place? Oh, wait, he didn’t, the messaging client has them activated by default. My advice: turn them off NOW. Usually these things do nothing else than stealing your attention from your actual work, either your conscious or unconscious attention. Seriously, you probably don’t need them anyways. If you want to know whether someone is on, just take a peek at the damn contact list, that’s what it’s there for.

IM new message notifications are EVIL.

Most IM clients have an in-your-face attitude. When there is a new message coming in, it’s slapped across the screen, on top of everything else, stealing the focus. Let’s say you’re typing a mail, looking on your keyboard, as most people do, and a new IM is coming in — the message window pops up, the cursor is put in the reply box, and you’re writing the rest of the sentence (that was supposed to be part of the email) into the messenger window. My advice: change that NOW. My client is configured to get out of my face. When a new message is received, the window is either popping up in the very background of the desktop, not stealing focus, or it is opened minimized in the taskbar. That’s enough. I’ll see it soon enough, and it doesn’t keep me from working.

IM client sounds are EVIL.

Seriously, they might be hilarious at first, but the constant chirping and barking and clingclanging and dingdinging is unnerving. My advice: deactivate sounds NOW. Mostly because you don’t want your IM client to steal your attention or your focus, and sounds are the very best way to achieve that. Nice side-effect: your co-workers will start to like you again.

New mail notifications are EVIL.

Many IM or email clients allow you to watch your mailbox, telling you when new mail is coming in. Constantly. That’s almost as bad as IM contact status notifications. How the hell are you supposed to follow a train of thought if shit is popping up all the time? Exactly. My advice: turn them off NOW. You have a mail client, you check it every one or two hours anyways, that’s enough.

Reduce email polling interval.

Three words: Information inflow paralysis. I get a few hundred mails per day, something like 1 mails per minute. Mostly mailing list mails and bug tracker mails. My advice: Polling for new mails once per hour is enough. YMMV, of course. You have to answer them at some point, or even read them. At least in my profession (engineering, read: coding and fixing things) I have to do real work somehow, and I won’t get anything done if I stare at my inbox all day long.

Now suggesting this I often hear the argument “But I am supposed to answer mails right away!”. Really? I mean, really REALLY? I would be surprised. If I had to venture a guess I’d say that isn’t true for most people. Unless you’re working at NORAD and waiting for clearance to bomb Utah or Thuringia from space, it’s probably okay to take an hour or two to reply to a new mail. So what I do is keeping my mail client minimized, and taking a peek every hour.

Email client: Use filters, for the love of God, USE FILTERS.

As mentioned above, I get hundreds of emails. I’d be pulling my hair out if I had to sift through them manually. Therefore, I set up filtering rules in my email client (I use Thunderbird 3alpha, by the way). When new mails are coming in, they are checked against ~3 dozen filters. They are tagged with the name of the mailing list, they are checked for particular keywords and filtered by senders — and tagged accordingly, too. Once that is done, everything that is tagged is moved out of the inbox into a huge archive. In addition, I have a number of saved searches; one for every mailing list, one for every keyword or topic. I can see on a glimpse how many new mails came in via any given mailing list. I can see on a glimpse whether there are new mails dealing with that particular project XYZ I am working on. But first and foremost, the only stuff left in my inbox is everything that has not been processed, and that’s usually the new mail for me. No bug reports, no mailing list mails, just stuff I should probably read right away. Also, the other mails are sorted into neat piles for easy consumption whenever I have the time. So I can see that the clown-workshop-participants@example-company.com list has 3218 new mails, but I also know that this is not important and can wait.

I’ve seen the inbox of some of my co-workers, and at any given time they have a few hundreds or (deity forbid) thousands of unsorted mails in there. No kidding. I mean, WTF. How can you not feel totally overwhelmed with that many mails, read or not? It’s clogging your mind, get rid of it.

Email client: Keep your inbox clean.

1. Read.
2. Answer/process.
3. Tag and archive / move to related folder.

If your inbox is full, even with emails already answered, then your unconsciousness thinks something like “OMG more work” and blocks your thoughts. No good.

Email client: use threading.

Threaded view is great since you don’t lose the context of a discussion. It’s a matter of taste, of course. I like it. You might not. Nice side effect: you can collapse threads.

Desktop: Delete all redundant and useless icons.

If you open your laptop and see ~200 icons on your desktop, and you don’t think that’s too much, you’re crazy. (I’m not making this up, I’ve seen desktops like that.) Get help. Without knowing your desktop, I’m sure you could delete half of it without missing anything afterwards.

Sum up.

These are just a few things that come to my mind. I know that thinking about setting up 20 or 30 different email client filter rules might be a bit off-putting, but think about it — it might be worth it. You might be spending an hour or two, but imagine the benefits: a clean inbox, more room to breathe, less crap your eyes see and which causes your to ponder all the time, knowingly or unknowingly.

All of these things work for me personally. As I’ve said, YMMV. But I found that jumping through one or two hoops, like reconfiguring your IM client or adjusting your email client, was a good investment of time that helped me deal with all the information that comes my way and the amount of work in front of me.

Maybe it works for you, too. Who knows.

I’m alive. Rejoice!

Huh, a few months since my last post, eh? Bummer. Time flies when you’re having fun or when you’re busy. Or both.

Since I’ve joined Yahoo! Germany in October the size of my brain has increased a bit, I think. Awesome company. My abilities are useful here, and I’m learning quite a bit, which is a great combination in my book. I feel welcome. During the (rather lengthy) interview process I’ve had the feeling they are actually interested in my personality; turns out I was right — I was in fact tested for “group compatibility”. (Testing social skills might seem like a no-brainer, but sadly, in many companies, it isn’t…) This resulted in a TTI (time to integration;)) of less than two weeks, meaning after two weeks I didn’t feel like the new guy anymore. Very cool.

As mentioned, the job is fun. Lots of work, of course, bugs to fix, new products to launch, things to take care of… I had forgotten how fast a day can go by, hehe.

Then there’s the mailing lists. Don’t get me wrong, I think there is, in fact, such a thing as “too much mail”. But on the other hand a company with employee gaming mailing lists where people discuss WoW gold farming can’t be bad, now can it. :P

And… boy, I’ve seen things. Interesting projects in the works here. No, can’t and won’t tell, sorry. :)

So, to make it short, I’m happy, for my work life is finally good again.

That is all. Commence doing your thing.

Oh my, the conclusion

So, over the last few weeks I have posted almost no entries. What can I say, my life was wicked and weird. We went to Ireland, that was great. Still married, which is awesome. Planning to learn Spanish for no particular reason. Learning Ruby and Rails and dusting off my Perl skills.

Then of course, major point, I wasn’t really happy at work anymore. I tried to keep my mouth shut about the office, which is a clever thing to do, methinks; still sometimes, the unhappiness showed.

So, I’ve decided to do something about it. It took a while to bring that plan to fruition, but it succeeded.

Anyways, I gave in my several-weeks-notice today, which was a rather bizarre feeling after over four years of working there. I still have a few weeks to go there, which is good because there’s a lot of stuff to be taken care of. Among them, about 3 weeks of vacation time still to be spent.

So, that’s the gist of what’s going on at the moment.

Oh, and in October, I start working at Yahoo! Germany. :)

Management blogs, #2

By now I’m thoroughly depressed when I think about our aforementioned management blogs. Today I had to learn a few things:

1. There were no new comments on the blog entry.
2. There was no new blog entry, not even a small one mentioning the staff meeting where the blog was explained.
3. The staff meeting where the blog was explained was a real h00t since the two managers (our vice and one of his quality management managers) were opposing themselves to a great deal. When the staff was discussing the why and how of the blog, the vice picked up his phone, listened to his mailbox, told everyone he had to go now and left.
4. I was told that one of the assistents is compiling a weekly digest of the blog comments made because they don’t have the time to read them. She’s supposed to extract the “most valuable comments/opinions”.

I am aware that our vice CEO is incredibly busy and his job with the whole quality management isn’t the easiest and most rewarding task. Subconciously, tho, I think we’re fucked already.

I’ve decided to keep my mouth shut for the next two weeks and watch the whole thing from a quiet corner.

I’ll keep you posted.