Community or just a bunch of people?

Community or just a bunch of people?

When you're a t-shirt-wearing programmer or even a white-collar manager (is there anyone out there?), working on a live open source project, you always care about the community. The community of developers or real users, these thousands of smart Joes, Volkers or Lenkas, hopefully enjoying the project that you have also contributed to. And you wonder, is the community growing, is the product attractive enough to catch the attention of new users, while satisfying the old kids on the block? While you can measure all these attributes, there are also other fundamental questions.

Community life

Just think about the word community. And then compare it with your thoughts about your lovely project and its dispersed crowd. Do you see real community in the original sense of the word or is it about a bunch of people downloading your software and registering on some kind of dumb 3-page long web form? How would you know that the xK-head monster is alive and moreover, how do you drive behavior of your never to-be-seen peers?

So here is my simplified definition of vivid and enchanting community project and although I bet 5$ I missed a couple things there, it's my Top 3+1 List:

• Incentive to contribute to the project
  Think of all sorts of rewards, power to make decisions, 'I made it' effect or other forms of satisfaction.
  I'm sure everyone likes his nickname shining somewhere and it doesn't have to be gold plaque in the Hall of Fame.
  
• Help wanted
  How to help must be crystal clear. If you want to have a group of people that shares something and you don't want to leave someone out, you need to offer newbies and random visitors a paved path  and an open door to your party. Move the needle!
  
• Who's the Einstein 2.0? Challenge everyone!
  Developers love challenges and if the work is too dull, don't expect smart folks showing up.
  
• It's not just about The Work, it's about The NetWork
  Hey, people gathers in communities to meet other this-looks-like-me animals and have fun with them. They should be encouraged to help each other, not just to work on the big idea.
  

How the NetBeans project scores using my definition, I'll leave it open now, ready to be blamed and flamed.

Posted at 07:00PM Nov 19, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Open Source  | 

Freakonomics: Six Lenkas

Freakonomics: Six Lenkas

Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner in their book talkes not only about incentives, as I mentioned in my last blog, but also about hot topics, like abortion, crime, drugs or diminishing power of Ku-Klux-Klan. Not being an expert in any of these areas, I felt slightly manipulated by the data presented there.

Abortion stopped the wave of crime in 90's

I bet abortion is very controversial topic in the US, since it's a nice theme for gaining points in the political game. But it's a also very serious subject and linking abortion rights with low crime is, well, strange. At least.

Although I do support the right for abortion, the assumption that the crime wave in New York stopped, due to the legalization of abortion is quite a strong argument that I can't easily swallow.
The author's illustration of that phenomena by using a revolution in Romania that went wild, due to all these unwanted babies is quite off. How come that the champion in statistical data somehow omit to consider other fallen regimes in that time, I don't know.
Am I also unwanted baby, since I was active student back in 1989, as many, many other students? I hope not.
On the other hand, I see the correlation between the pressure of communistic governments at that time, economical wealth and the desire for for revenge. The more you control, the more likely people hate you.

Six Lenkas I know

Final chapter is about parenting. I love first couple paragraphs.

"A baby should always be put to sleep on her back - until it is decreed that she should only be put to sleep on her stomach".  I laughed almost five minutes.

The rest of that chapter is not as humorous as that. Well, playing with all these lists of popular names was interesting at the beginning, but I lost track after reading the third list.

Popular names are subject to fashion, so what? There were three other Pavels in the class of 20 people, when I was a kid. There are 3 Lenkas in Sun@Prague that I work with. My sister is also Lenka, my sister in law is Lenka and my neighbor is Lenka too. The generation of Lenkas. Waves come and go, but how it's related to good parenting, I have no clue. It's difficult to apply St&St's method on non-clustered population, as Czech Republic.

Read it or leave it?

Mmm, depends. If you're looking for quick solutions, buy a cookbook, some sort of Economy for Dummies or 100 Advices for Anything. Even though I'd be careful to take all the data and ideas as granted, as there are too many assumptions, it's very refreshing reading. Very easy to understand and sometimes funny.
And don't worry, it is not a book that requires an university degree in economics. On the contrary, all these real examples are very vivid, it's about life not numbers.

To sum up, if you like interesting questions, that stimulate other thoughts in your mind, go and read it.

Posted at 09:38PM Nov 04, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Books  |  Comments[2]

Freakonomics: Incentives in a Real World

Freakonomics: Incentives in a Real World

I exchange books with some folks in the Prague Engineering Center from time to time and I've got an interesting one from Martin Grebac lately: Freakonomics written by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS

• What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?
• Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?
• Would you rather send your kids to play with friends, whose parents have a gun or to a family house with swimming pool?
• How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime?

If you like provocative questions, Freakonomics is a book that you must read, although, you might come with different answers then the author[s].

What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?

This chapter is all about cheating. Or rather Incentives that drive specific behavior. Steven Levitt came with an idea that incentives, in addition to general economical meaning as financial incentives can also materialize in social or moral sphere. What motivates [some] people to clean up after their dogs in public areas?  Definitely no financial pressure. Why people give blood for free? Can it be boosted by offering them quite nice sum of money?
Or, speaking about bad behavior, why some teachers in US schools cheat? It's all about incentives.
BTW the author came up with a data mining idea for detecting the cheaters. Compare the statistical data from previous years, the same teacher, same class and look for patterns and deviations, that's the basics of his recipe.

WYMIWYG: What you measure is what you get

The chapter about incentives reminds me another slogan: WYMIWYG: What you measure is what you get. It's true in a positive as well as negative form. Imagine a company (can be of any kind of support, doesn't really matter), where people are measured by the 'Time to response'. Their motivation is to finish the call and close the case as soon as possible, which doesn't always mean that they helped a customer. Or not as much as the customer expects. Beside the example with real estate agents, that's nicely mentioned there, you might come up with other ones. Travel agent, that's motivated to sell you the ticket that's on the table, rather than spending a couple more minutes looking for the best price, is another example that come to my mind.

I'll write a couple more comments about the book next time, but I wonder what your experience is with metrics-oriented organizations. Any thoughts?

Posted at 07:48PM Oct 31, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Books  |  Comments[2]

Vacation Tool = Less paperwork in Prague

Vacation Tool = Less paperwork in Prague

Lesson from movie Brazil

I always wondered why we, at Prague Engineering Center, must fill out a paper form to request a vacation or day-off. And get it physically signed by a manager.
And I was always told that we need a paper copy, since it's required by local law. How much I envied other parts of Sun since they were happy to use various online vacation tools.

Well, one can see that too much bureaucracy and paperwork can even kill people and I definitely didn't want to end up wounded by all the vacation forms. Lenka, from my team, did a quick legal check and guess what: It was a myth! There is no Czech law or regulation that dictates the form of vacation request.

I started to hunt for solution. Every country has cooked up its own solution  to comply with local law. Do I have to implement everything from scratch also? What a waste of time!

Sharing, sharing, sharing

Sharing is the weapon against NIH syndrome.

Fortunately, I mentioned the vacation tool  to Sin-Yaw, VP and Site lead for engineering in China (see the picture). Lucky me! They've already implemented a vacation tool and they're going to share it with Prague Engineering and the site in St. Petersburg. It runs on an opensource platform, using JSPs.

To make it even more interesting, we're forming an international team that will work on the localized version (huh, wouldn't be fun to have Chinese holiday in the Czech Republic?
If anyone else from Prague Engineering Center is interested, let me know.

Posted at 04:34PM Oct 23, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Global Engineering  |  Comments[1]

How Many People Read Your Blog

How Many People Read Your Blog

Tom Ball sent an interesting link to t-shirt design to bloggers community today.


I love that kind of sense of humor and I laughed a lot, when I saw the picture. Then, I told myself  "Wait a moment, it's also about your blog!".

BACK TO HISTORY

When I started blogging 2 years ago,  I expected that everyone in the world would be interested to read my blog. Not only because of the content, but also because of me. Me, INTP (Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving), who finally decided to share his best thoughts with the all other smart people outside. (erhmm)
So I published my first article and watched the number of hits, hoping that it goes higher than Jonathan's, Roumen's or Geertjan's blog, just to name my favorite bloggers at that time. Well, no surprise, it didn't. I published a couple more entries at that time and switched to hibernate mode. Who would write something for less than 10 hits per day?

SECOND [FALSE] START

Hey-wake-up impuls came from 3 people. Steve Wilson, my mentor tagged me, so I was forced to publish something. Volker Seubert, HR business partner, who writes quite long, but pretty interesting HR articles.
And last, but not least, Yarda Tulach, one of the original founders of NetBeans, who talked to me in the hallway the other day and asked me why I hadn't posted anything for so long (actually he asked "Are you dying or what?" . He watched my blog by RSS feed and he threatened me to remove it from his watchdog. That was very serious.

So I started again. I was keen to see how many people really read my posts, so I inserted google-analytics script in my Weblog Template:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    _uacct="UA-xxxx-x";
    urchinTracker();
</script>

I felt much better, since it shows real numbers and statistics, including Most Visited Pages and the country where people come from.

Summer came, with now toys, like Facebook and I was back to my old habits, slowing down the frequency of posts to almost zero.

I NEED SOMEONE TO READ MY BLOG!

At least one person! Yeah, and I found a victim finally. It's Tony, my English teacher. I promised to write blogs as my homework and he is going to use it as a weapon against me.

But I wonder anyway, is anyone out there reading my blog? Are you a real person or just a search engine?
 

Posted at 03:18PM Oct 12, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Global Engineering  |  Comments[6]

VISA to the US through American Chamber of Commerce

VISA to the US through American Chamber of Commerce

My old passport was going to expire and although I'd heard that you can travel with 2 passports (old with visa + new one), I decided not to risk and get valid visa in my new passport. Folks told me that it's pretty cumbersome to stay in the line to for the interview, well, what can you do?
I browsed U.S. Embassy web site and found an interesting program for companies that are members of American Chamber of Commerce (which we are, indeed)!

So I

• filled out both forms (Online DS-156 EVAF + DS-157 Czech / English),
  
• got a photo in Fotolab on Chodov,
  IMPORTANT: the photo (5cm x 5 cm - please note that this is a larger format than what is available from the automated machines!) must not be older than 6 months, and must show the applicant’s entire face, always from the front and on a light background!
  
• paid courier and visa feeNew Business Visa Program in CSOB
  
• called AmCham (the phone listed on 420-737-258-088, which a mobile phone,... weird, it's better to call 420 222-329-430, I guess)
• sent them all documents (yeah, including Invitation letter and envelope for sending my passport back)
  
• ... and let them to schedule my interview for Wednesday 2pm
  

I came to the Embassy at 2pm and believe it or not, I was out at 2:05. No lines, 2 minutes waiting time. Amazing!
Passport came 3 days later, so I can fly to the US again without worrying about Immigration Officers.

IMPORTANT: AmCham program  applies to all Sun Microsystems Czech employees! Just be nice to people in AmCham, it's not their regular duty, they do it as an additional service to their partners.

Posted at 10:40PM Aug 17, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Global Engineering  |  Comments[1]

Hotel Java on Majorca

Hotel Java on Majorca

 
I thought that there won't be anything  related to Sun or Java on my vacation in Majorca, but how wrong I was. Surely, there was a lot of Sun-shine, but I also run into hotel Java, wearing my NetBeans t-shirt. What a coincidence!


Well, my wife found it funny, I think it's just the reality of Java Everywhere.

Posted at 08:36PM Jun 26, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Personal  | 

Best Employer in IT Category

Best Employer in IT Category

Sun Microsystems Czech became the best company from IT industry in the Best Employer, Czech Republic Study. 
We've repeated the success from last year, when we won the category and left Microsoft behind.

The absolute winner from all 42 companies that participated this year is IKEA, we won 5th place in total. 

So why did we place in TOP 10 for last 3 years?

Here is my theory:

• SMART PEOPLE
  There are a lot of very smart  people working at Sun. I was impressed about high technical level of engineers in my first day here and I'm still amused. Smart people know what they want to do in their career and life. And they're very vocal if they can't get the job done, due to any bureaucratic obstacles. So it gets fixed.
  
• TEAM
  Team is more than the sum of individuals. Team is about helping and respecting each other, leveraging individual skills and knowledge. I've seen companies where the team members competed with each other. Glad not to see it here in engineering.
• CHALLENGING JOB
  Although each job can be boring after a while, it doesn't happen so often, if you need to keep up with the latest technologies.
• FUN
  It's a shame my team of Lab Managers lost the Laser game against Gatekeepers on Tuesday, but I'm sure they had a good time there (counting the number of hours they spent there). Next time I need to clean up my calendar from all evening calls, so I can join them.
  

Long weekend is coming (May 1st is a public vacation and most people take a day off on Monday), time to celebrate the success.

Posted at 05:56PM Apr 27, 2007 by Pavel Suk in Prague Engineering Center  |  Comments[1]