My biggest accomplishment of the year so far has been creating a new website for Ultimate (Frisbee) in the Indianapolis area. I got a basic concept going one Saturday morning, took feedback and talked to stakeholders, and then made a final version with the help of others in Indy. Notable improvements include:

• pictures from Zach Dobson, an professional photographer in Indianapolis, on the front page
• maps of all the fields that are used for pickup games, with up-to-date information about when they are played
• integration with a league manager that has online signups, payments, and Google Maps support to show where fields are
• live streaming of the 2010 Indiana Ultimate high school championships on June 20th

For comparison, you can check out the old site. I’m really happy that people helped out and offered suggestions and improvements to the site. This project is on autopilot now.

Other projects

A few months ago I created an eight-session class about developer testing that I taught to people at work. I was surprised at how much work it was, but it seemed like the participants got a lot out of it, and I learned a ton putting it together.

I recently made a simple Rails app that tracks personal events. I started this to keep track of soda consumption, but use it for many things now (showering, wake and sleep times, work transit times, standup lengths, etc.) It’s handy to be able to do this from anywhere, so I created a bare-bones Android app that can send events. I’d like to put together some neat graphs and histograms. I plan on implementing some basic parsing to override the dates and times that things were submitted (think: ‘soda 12oz at 12:30′ or ‘exercised yesterday afternoon’). Right now the app would at least be useful for tracking how many days in a row I’ve flossed or exercised.

Lately I’ve been reading feverishly. Recent books have mostly been from the Personal MBA program. I have read 22 read out of 100 and expect to get to 30 within a few months. I’ve found this undertaking to be helpful in understanding how businesses work. I supplement this reading with blogs to ensure I’m not only consuming out of date material. Reading marketing and sales books is useful because I do not believe that merely creating a superior product is enough to be successful.

Finally, I am organizing a Code Jam at my place of work on Saturday morning. Basically it’s a time for people at work to come together and hack on whatever cool ideas they have or learn about interesting things. If anything cool happens, I’ll post some pictures.

Original article: So what have I been doing the past few months?

I have a large backlog of post ideas and musings that I write about, but there’s really no priority to the backlog. Any suggestions? Please leave them in the comments section of this post. I will reciprocate this offer if you wish.

Thanks for your time, I appreciate it.

Original article: Help Me Figure Out What I Should Write About

But please, use your own blog or website to experiment.

Select a load-testing tool

I wanted to survive a fairly heavy load, so I was looking for around three responses per second from the server (which amounts to about 10k requests served per hour.) Anything more and I guess I’ll have to turn people away.

I looked at some load-testing tools that were available for Ubuntu (my home machine), and siege seemed to be the easiest to install and use. Installing was as simple as:

sudo apt-get install siege

Siege comes with a man page and some basic examples. There are a lot of neat options, but I didn’t want to spend too much time on load-testing. One of the best things about this tool is that it tells you that it’s “preparing users for battle” and laying siege to the server, which is just fun.

Initial trials

I started experimenting by hitting the home page with fifteen concurrent users, but this caused a bunch of problems. This means that fifteen people are trying to hit the same page, and whenever they get a response (whether success or failure) they try to get the same page again. I then opted for starting at the minimum and scaling upward.

> siege http://22ideastreet.com -c 1
Transactions:		        1668 hits
Availability:		       98.52 %
Elapsed time:		     1973.58 secs
Data transferred:	       31.79 MB
Response time:		        0.51 secs
Transaction rate:	        0.85 trans/sec
Throughput:		        0.02 MB/sec
Concurrency:		        0.43
Successful transactions:        1692
Failed transactions:	          25
Longest transaction:	        6.86
Shortest transaction:	        0.19

I let this one run for awhile because I thought it would eventually time out and I didn’t want to lose the statistics. But it turns out that whenever you terminate the program with Ctrl+C, the statistics are automatically displayed. What this snippet doesn’t show is that hitting the specified URL will cause two redirects, one to http://22ideastreet.com/ and then one to http://22ideastreet.com/blog/. This ate up quite a bit of time. So my next experiment was to hit the blog index page directly and see how that affected the response times. Also, I upped the concurrent users a bit.

> siege http://22ideastreet.com/blog/ -c 2
Transactions:                    113 hits
Availability:                 100.00 %
Elapsed time:                  83.34 secs
Data transferred:               6.38 MB
Response time:                  0.95 secs
Transaction rate:               1.36 trans/sec
Throughput:                     0.08 MB/sec
Concurrency:                    1.28
Successful transactions:         113
Failed transactions:               0
Longest transaction:            1.72
Shortest transaction:           0.82

Still seems alright, so I added another user.

> siege http://22ideastreet.com/blog/ -c 3
Transactions:		         205 hits
Availability:		       98.56 %
Elapsed time:		      123.74 secs
Data transferred:	       11.57 MB
Response time:		        1.16 secs
Transaction rate:	        1.66 trans/sec
Throughput:		        0.09 MB/sec
Concurrency:		        1.93
Successful transactions:         205
Failed transactions:	           3
Longest transaction:	        6.26
Shortest transaction:	        0.82

Realism

Now I see the first inklings of failure at around three users at a time. I was also hitting the blog from different pages in a browser, and the responses seemed reasonable. At the time, my index page was the last three posts in their entirety, which was pretty big. So I next decided to see what the transaction rate was for an individual post. I figured that this would most closely resemble what happens when someone links to a post.

> siege http://22ideastreet.com/blog/2009/10/01/interesting-links-nascent-thoughts/ -c 5
Transactions:		         320 hits
Availability:		      100.00 %
Elapsed time:		       95.16 secs
Data transferred:	       13.83 MB
Response time:		        0.95 secs
Transaction rate:	        3.36 trans/sec   *** this gives me a warm fuzzy feeling
Throughput:		        0.15 MB/sec
Concurrency:		        3.19
Successful transactions:         320
Failed transactions:	           0
Longest transaction:	        3.09
Shortest transaction:	        0.76

Conclusions

I was pretty excited to see that I could handle about over three transactions per second without any drops, which was my initial goal.

For some reason, the WordPress stats plugin still causes my server to come to a standstill for about thirty seconds, so I think I will rely on Google Analytics in the future for seeing how many people are visiting. It’s not real-time, but gets the job done for analyzing visitor patterns and seeing what else people might be interested in based on their search queries.

Have you tried load testing your apps or blogs? What were the results? What were your favorite tools? You should post in the comments section!

Original article: My Blog Is Under Siege

I appreciated feedback that people gave me over the course of the year, whether through comments or discussions. This helped me realize that I can provide value through writing and that people are actually interested in reading what I am thinking about.

I now think that being creative is something that one can improve with practice. I don’t think that I seriously considered this angle before trying to produce something creative over a long period of time. Being able to produce consistently is a challenge, but once I started doing it, my mind changed to accommodate this request. When I gain new insights, I start thinking about how I can formalize these thoughts into something that is digestible for other people.

I’ve noticed this in songwriting or poetry as well recently. I don’t think most artists just sit down one day and say, “I’m going to write ten songs today.” The way I imagine it goes is that they write songs continuously and then take the ones that resonate most strongly afterward.

By and far the most popular two posts have been the Pomodoro Technique post and the Vim Word Processing post. Based on Google Analytics, I’m thinking the former is popular because people are searching for things on the Pomodoro Technique, and the latter is popular because it is linked to from the popular Vim Autocorrect plugin page.

As noted in some of the notes sections, I have work to do with limiting WIP and getting things out while they still have energy. Again, as written elsewhere, I realize that having a word target is good, but writing every single day is probably more trouble than it is worth. Writing with energy is important, as is writing out what I am thinking about and just getting it on paper.

Looking forward to another year of thinking, writing, and interacting! Thanks for tuning in.

Original article: Annual Navel Gazing

I had the idea of having a personal blog external to SEP after seeing that the posts and comments could not be seen by others outside of the company. Essentially it was like emailing everyone internally. More importantly, no cross-pollination with the community could happen either. It seemed like the overall value could be improved by taking a little more effort to put the ideas out there. I talked with a few people about their blogging habits and practices, and determined that this could work.

Having an external blog is nice because I can have different categories and tags and send specific posts to work so people won’t be bothered by my incessant posts on cats. It’s also pretty nice because it will establish a common place where people can see my thoughts and interact with me. This is handy for going to seminars or conferences or other general networking outside of whatever my current company happens to be.

There are some exciting things going on right now with SEP and the software community at large, so it’s great to be able to talk about them. I think that to achieve the goals that we want to achieve, it’s important to excel externally as well as internally. Hopefully relevant blogging can help with the former. I encourage you to join by blogging yourself or becoming an active participant on other blogs. You probably have experiences that would be helpful for others to know about, and it’s great to get some street cred. I was talking with a tech evangelist at Microsoft, and he said that one day someone was having a conversation with him, and the other person starting quoting one of his articles without realizing it. He said, “yeah, I know that, I wrote that.” The other person was pretty impressed. How cool is that?

You can read all of my non-work posts at 22ideastreet.com.

Don’t worry, if there’s any super-secret-confidential information, it won’t be in here. Perhaps I’ll revert to the Sharepoint blog for that.

Anyway, enough metablogging.

Original article: Why Blog?

My subconscious worked on it for awhile, and when I woke up, I asked myself what the correct name should be. A couple of strange hazy names came to mind, and then in literally a flash of insight, ’22 idea street’ popped into my head. It immediately seemed correct, although I didn’t necessarily understand why. I excitedly woke up and wrote it down.

After thinking about it for a few minutes, each of the parts actually represents something that is deeply important to me.

Let’s start with ‘idea.’ It represents novelty. Whether this means truly new and original ideas, the ability to apply newer practices to old problems, or to seeing a general solution to problems that others have been solving inefficiently, it is the essence of creating things that are truly valuable. Ideas have a great deal of energy, and are the driving force behind all great or inspired creation. When the going gets tough, you need to have the original vision of the idea clear to have the motivation to keep going.

’22′ is something that is specific. In this equation, it is the physical manifestation of the idea. It springs forth naturally from ideas that are truly founded with the end value in mind. No idea, no matter how interesting, has any value unless it is concretely implemented. The idea of fire doesn’t give you warmth or food. Building a fire does. But although it is one of the outputs in the process, it is not the end in itself.

The ‘street’ represents people. A creation is worthless unless people desire to interact with it. Things must be appealing functionally as well as aesthetically. No one on the street is going to visit a booth if the presentation is unsightly, and few people will tolerate something that doesn’t resonate with them at a deeper level. A busy street captures a great deal of human interaction. It is inherently a human thing. If you walk along a street or visit a crowded street party, you can feel the energy and silent and verbal communication that takes place. The street is fundamentally about people interacting with their world and each other.

Both the ’22 idea’ and ‘idea street’ portions indicate that ideas are related to one another, and consistent thinking, analysis, and innovation spur other ideas. Hence, a multiplicity of ideas is positive, as long as the ideas that are given time are important in the long run. Every experience you have shapes you indelibly, so actively seek to cultivate interesting ones. Continuous learning and deliberation assist you in every area of your life, even when you don’t apprehend it at the time.

The entirety of the idea ’22 idea street’ means creating value from ideas while never forgetting the people that produce and use that value. It’s about balance and taking the time for recreation (or as Thoreau would say, “re-creation.”) It’s about realizing that you only have one life to live, and then it’s over, so you must say “yes” to the right things, and an assertive but peaceful “no” to everything else. It’s about investing the time required to do the job excellently. It’s about taking pride in your life and managing your future with your heart as well as your brain. It’s about thinking outside of the box to come up with better approaches to solving the world’s problems without making new ones. It’s about having meaningful and open relationships with all of the people that you come into contact with, because they are the neighbors on your street in life. And finally, it’s realizing that by nurturing these relationships and placing trust in others, a whole greater than the sum of the parts can emerge.

By understanding these things that are important to me, I have a good guideline for living and growing. These beliefs are hardly immutable–I expect them to change. Nonetheless, writing them down is an important step of living with a purpose. It’s tough to live well before you enumerate what you are living for. Although some of my future posts might not have quite the same passion, gravity, or verbosity, I hope to get there with consistent effort. Hopefully you will join me in my journey.

Original article: 22 idea street