SharedBook: On Demand

A Warm Welcome

Today I’d like to dedicate my blog post to welcoming our two newest R&D team members: Alex and Avi.

It is hard to imagine that it has only been a few weeks since they joined SharedBook, since they have done so much in a short period of time. So I am writing this quickly, before there won’t be any point in welcoming them. J

Alex is a member of our Architecture team. He holds the record for the shortest training period ever in SharedBook. By his third day in the company he was already showing great productivity when he started writing a PHP wrapper for our open API. Since then he managed to extend it into a PEAR package, that was accepted just last week (check this out), and he has written some amazing POCs on top of our Open API (which I promise to write about very soon, in the meanwhile, I’ll throw a teaser and say that the initial response we got for it from Caroline was: “this is wild and terrific”).

Avi joined as our IT manager and technical support team member. When he first interviewed with me a while ago, he was concerned about getting bored, and not having enough action. As I walked into his room this morning to check on our latest upgrade status, I found him in the eye of the storm, surrounded by developers, QA engineers and of course myself – all making requests at once. Anyone else would go nuts with all this action, but Avi seemed perfectly cool, smiling as he brought order to the chaos, continuing this complex process (that he just learned last week!), and spreading jokes around. Way to go Avi, that’s the spirit! Remember I promised you’ll never get bored here in SharedBook? Well this is one promise I will have no problem keeping whatsoever! J

Haters 1, Apple 0

Regular readers, and you know who you are, may recall my post in June in which I questioned the wisdom of Apple’s marvelously successful six-month publicity campaign in support of the iPhone.  Yes, it built enormous amounts of awareness, but it also provided a huge window for competitors and pundits to challenge the device and its appeal even before it had been seen.

How did this work out?

When AT & T announced that 146,000 iPhones were activated in the first days of availability, Apple stock took a hit.  Imagine!  I can tell you that if our company had sold 146,000 units of a $600 item in a few days, there would be a celebration for the ages.

But the expectations pegged sales projections around 500,000.  Hence, one of the most auspicious consumer electronics introductions of the decade gets labeled "disappointing."  And even Apple’s announcement yesterday that they had actually sold 270,000 during the period didn’t restore the luster.

You should know that I’m still betting on the iPhone to be huge.  But I stick to my premise – that Apple loyalists, fanatics that they are, would have bought the same number of units in the same amount of time with merely a few weeks notice, and the company would have been spared the Monday-morning quarterbacking.  Of course, I could be wrong …

The Low Turnover

Earlier this week I had a conversation with an experienced candidate for our management team. We had an interesting discussion about his achievements so far, and his vision. And then, I asked if he had any questions for me. I was surprised that his first question to me was about the turnover rate for developers in SharedBook R&D.

This is an easy question. We have a fabulous turnover here in R&D, much better than the industry standard. So many people, who join SharedBook, come back to me years later, saying that this is the place they have worked for the most amount of time in their entire careers! In fact we have a distinguished “club” of people who have been working in SharedBook for the longest time in their careers (a club which I joined just a few months ago after being here for five yearsJ).

But then it got me thinking: is it that easy of a question? What makes developers leave? What makes them stay? Essentially, as a manager I keep thinking that as much as we get from our employees, we also have to give back. And I am not talking about just money here. People have to feel that what they do matters. People have to feel that we care about their personal development, their professional growth in the company. People have to work well together as team, a well-bonded team. These are all key values here in SharedBook that we care a great deal about. And this is a good opportunity to recommend once again my favorite book, Peopleware, which I already mentioned a while ago. But I was still puzzled by this …

Later on this week, we got together and celebrated Ze’ev’s birthday (once again, Happy Birthday Ze’ev). Ze’ev was telling the team that he now has more than 5 years in the company as well. And that what has kept him here that long is that it is fun to come to work every morning.

And suddenly I got the answer I was looking for: indeed working here is fun. It can be a true rollercoaster, with ups and downs, crazy adrenalin, and long hours. But at the end of the day, the simple truth is that it is fun! J

The Benefits of Working with Django

Two months ago I wrote about wanting a dynamic framework to work with our application. Since then we have written part of our application in Django (the popular Python Web framework), and I like working with it.

Development in Django is a great experience. Adding a new application is a breeze. Debugging is also easy since if something is broken (in development mode), instead of getting a cryptic 404 or 500 error page, the framework supplies a very detailed picture of what failed, the line in the code (not just the line number, but the actual source code!), and the status of all the variables and the rest of the environment.

Since Django is written in Python it has another interesting strength. It is much easier knowing what’s going on since you have all the source code at your hands and you can change it and it takes effect immediately (unlike “old school” Java,C++ where you are left glaring at the screen thinking why now, why me …). In such environments it is very easy to really know what's going on by adding debug information to the framework source code.

I used this technique last week when I found out with Nir that the application behaves differently in production than in development. It took me five minutes to realize that the development server is actually single threaded … and within an hour I had wrapped Django with another Python Web server (called “Aspen”) so it would serve multiple parallel requests. The part I played as a detective was short due to a minor code change I did within Django that displayed additional information.

In other environments, when you hit a wall, it’s hard and painful. With Django, you have live source code at your hands, nicely written error messages and all related variables. Hitting that wall is so much softer. You bounce right back and have a solution within minutes!

Now that our application includes Django, the next step for me is to gather some time and write a cool feature with the new capabilities.  Until then, we will continue to compare the time and effort to solve bugs in the base system and in the application written with the Django Framework.

Bookmaking on the Beach?

In my search to come up with something to write about today (I'm filling in at the last minute for Dave who was out today), I came across this report in USA Today that Ocean City, NJ is going high tech. By next summer, they're planning to implement RFID wristbands that will enable beachgoers to pay for beach access, food and parking automatically (by credit card). Pretty cool stuff! They're also planning to offer Wi-Fi network connections, which is how this relates to SharedBook. Just imagine ... you could actually sit on (or by) the beach and work on a Legacy.com, CarePages.com (coming soon, stay tuned), or any of our life event books. OK, so you might not want to risk the sand factor with your laptop, but the point is that you could. Our application is entirely Web-based, which means there is nothing to download and you can start a book or access the one you have in progress, at any time from anywhere! This also goes for The People's Annotated and Blog2Print. Just thought it was worth a note.

Drive, Curiosity, Ethics and Energy

Lately, I’ve been focused on filling a number of key roles at SharedBook. For a variety of mostly personal reasons, we find ourselves with the opportunity to bring two experienced people into the management team, to help propel us to the next level of success. While we miss our former colleagues and hope that they will always stay a part of the SharedBook family and lore, we have the potential to add significant talent to our roster. So I am very focused once again on the characteristics that are key. No matter how many questions you ask in the hiring process, it always feels like you never know enough until the deed has been done and you’re living with the decision. Everyone’s on their best behavior in the process and it takes weeks and sometimes months for both parties to understand what they have signed up for.

I have been reading Marc Andreessen’s blog fairly regularly because his practicality and no nonsense approach speak to me each day. On the subject of hiring, he believes it’s drive, curiosity and ethics that are the defining characteristics. I agree but want to add energy to this mix. Being successful in any company – no matter what stage – takes enormous energy: energy to wear many hats, energy to tackle all the ups and downs, energy to make the right decisions and follow through on them. If there’s little energy in the hiring process, when the excitement about the prospective relationship should be highest from both parties, then there certainly won’t be later on. So I’m looking for people who have the desire to succeed, who can ask the right questions, make smart judgment calls, and persevere through the unknown. I hope to be introducing them to all of you soon.

The Latest SharedBook Reports

If you're interested in seeing what others have said about SharedBook recently, here's the latest.  Ron Hogan of GalleyCat published his report this morning as a result of meeting with Caroline during O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing conference. Blog2Print made its TV debut last week when CyberBob included the widget at the end of his segment on San Antonio Living. One note, the first few products generated a lot of giggles, but things turned more serious when they reached Blog2Print at the end. Finally, Les Bain included Blog2Print on his Blogging Information blog recently. Thank you to all!

Thoughts from a Single Parent in a Startup

Today I would like to share some thoughts that I’ve had in the past few days with you.

Working in SharedBook (as in many other startup companies) means sometimes working under the pressure of tight deadlines, needing to work after hours, and leaving part of our personal lives aside.

This is a world we are all willingly taking part in. And then there are us, the single parents. How do we manage that?

Sometimes I find myself wondering, how will I get the housekeeping stuff done? Or, when am I going to finish this feature? It needs to be closed today, but the girls are waiting for me at school!!!

My status is something like half a single parent, as my girls are with me just half of the time, but still, in my case, I always manage to keep the “single” part of my time busy, learning new things, working on my inner-evolving, etc.

As I wrote in my last post, being in charge of the API core development puts me in the eye of the storm at times. This is the point when I start thinking maybe there are too many things in my life. When am I going to go to the supermarket? The fridge is getting empty, and emptier... J

I’m glad my life looks like it does. I like being part of different worlds, and I like being in continuous action ...

So, I must be doing some of it right. J

Social Networking Evolves

I just read the news in The New York Times that Mediabistro.com has been acquired by Jupitermedia and came across this letter from the company's founder, Laurel Touby, which was posted earlier today. Mediabistro.com has been around for about 10 years or so and is dedicated to providing resources for anyone who creates or works with content (their words) -- think journalists, PR professionals, creatives, book publishers and more.  Apparently, what began as a simple cocktail party to bring together a few media folks has turned into a $23 million acquisition for Jupitermedia. So what does this have to do with SharedBook? Well, in addition to the fact that we're in the business of reverse publishing online content in printed book format, the way the founder presents the evolution of Mediabistro.com illustrates how some of the simplest (seemingly anyway) decisions can benefit a business along the way.

New API Wrappers and Examples

As you may be aware, we published a suite of API methods earlier this year to give anyone the ability to integrate data into SharedBook’s Reverse Publishing Platform for on-demand output. We recently posted several wrappers – PHP, Java and Python – to the developers’ portion of our site, which should make the process even easier. Examples are also posted here.