So I’m back from my first mwlug jetlagged to hell and shattered, trying to answer the question that LDC Via always does after a paid conference “was it worth it”

For me the big revelation was the PSC presentation on migration strategy, not for the strategic partnership announcement with LDC Via which I of course knew about as I was there as LDC Via’s representative but for the “this is the truth of the world we live in, it is time to accept it” statement which has been an undercurrent of our yellow world for so long. This has lacked someone articulate enough to say it in a non IBM bashing way also Mr Head in one slide managed to sum up LDC Via’s position in the application structure better than the 4 tech that wrote it had managed in 2 years….

The Conference its self was excellent with some stunning content and very enjoyable from both a learning and a social angle, I could have done without the heat of Austin but the city its self is amazing and I can see why the residents are so proud of it.

The Session with Gab went well with a good attendance and no hecklers (security people can be weird), my individual session was the last of the day and thanks to the conference running a bit on the late side was not well attended (I went and checked if the attendance was as bad in the other sessions and it was), but EVERYBODY in the session ask questions and multiple people came up and thanked me again latter .. Weeeeeee

LDC Via was well received and people are starting to see what it can do and that is is not a threat either to IBM or to their jobs and ecosystem, more of a evolution of storage but I really should have brought more marketing stuff to give away 🙁

I also attended my first Penumbra meeting and ended up not doing hardly any of the full days work I had brought with me (I hate meetings) because the conversation was so interesting and engaging, I now understand why people join.

And thus the answer to the question at the beginning of the post is: “Yes, it was very much worth it”

I find with offices that I am more than a little picky, you think that all you want are a few simple basics but it turns out that none of the shared or small office providers want to provide what you want in the way you want it

I tried most of the leading communal office companies as a truly private office would be too expensive, and I would go stir-crazy, but every time there would be something fundamentally wrong with them. Faults ranged from one office advertising itself as a “dynamic shared environment” which turned out to be a lobby coffee shop >:( ¹ through to places that were so keen to get you in that it felt like you had hired yet another project manager to be on your case. This happened four or five times, but I was determined to find a good work base ², and my perfect office turned out to be a place called Purple Patch.

Within a day of trailing in to the building fresh from an outrage at a previous office provider, I determined to settle there like an ugly toad under a rock. If you want the low-down I recommend you go and look at their web site

Let’s walk through my must-haves:

24-hour access: This is a big thing for me, in fact THE big thing. Most shared offices close at 6pm, and you’re waiting at the door at 8am to be let in. However Purple Patch is really 24 hour access. They give you a bunch of keys and security fobs after checking your background, and then you can come in at any time, day or night. Perfect for those late night deadlines.

Impresses Clients: The place must look and feel good: a lot of shared offices have a slightly tired feel about them, a bit like airport lounges. At Purple Patch everything is bright and clean, and I thought at first it was because the place was new—but no, it’s been there for 15 years and simply has regular revamps. This means that you can bring clients on-site with a sense of pride, and its excellent location means that there are tons of great places to eat and drink within idle wandering distance.

Hard Lines: I know that everyone just lives on wifi, but not me. Wifi is fine and everything but I want a good speed, I want to go like the clappers, and so each desk has a network port in it that gives you 100Meg down, and the same up. This means that only individual clients’ VPN speeds slow me down.

Layout: I like open-plan, but not OPEN PLAN. Again, Purple Patch scores: the building itself is like a cheerful Gormenghast (or as Ben Poole said, “an eclectic second hand book shop”). Desks are grouped into bays and natural nooks, you don’t feel isolated, but similarly you are not forced to endure every word of a nearby loudmouth’s day.

Humanity: My office provider must be human. One of the Purple Patch clients has a small dog she sometimes brings in, and no-one howls (sorry) about rules. Parents bring in kids and I have never been disturbed by them (the layout helps with this and the fact there is a chill-out area with table-top football that gives kids something to do). No-one brings in jaguars and what can and can’t be done is decided on a case-by-case bases to keep everyone happy, rather than by following a soulless set of rules.

Now the little things:

Nice toilet roll holders: Don’t look at me like that. How many times have you been at a clients or any kind of office and had to deal with a toilet roll holder that looks straight out of Parkhurst prison? Something that does not allow more than 2 sheets to be pulled off before it jams and rips and you end up having a little tantrum, reaching in and ripping the offending roll out which is less than professional. It turns out that Purple Patch agrees and has proper toilet roll holders that hold multiple roles and that don’t damn well jam.

Proper coffee in proper places Purple Patch have different coffee in different places in the building (yes, yes tea as well!) If you want to wait at a machine while it goes “pluck pluck pluck” then fine there’s one of those. Personally I like the old style filter coffee pots and they are always kept topped-up to ensure optimal coding hyperactivity. I have watched Ben Poole consume his entire body weight in coffee within approximately ten minutes of arriving at the office.

… and that’s it. Really I am just relieved to have found an office I like and can do business in 🙂

(BTW: I’m not getting paid or anything for this review!)

This is where I skulk. Your desk is static and you get a locking cupboard (there are personal lockers as well)

Lots of little drop-in meeting nooks

Coffee, COFFEE!!! (kept topped-up by the lovely lovely staff)

You would not believe that the meeting rooms are actually cheaper than horrible scabby chain franchise ones

A nice shower at an office, there’s an idea

Even LDC Via can enjoy a meeting there (and maybe the pub afterwards)

1. Meaning I couldn’t leave my laptop unattended therefore had to take it with me every time I went to the toilet[↩]
2. I could not really use home as my work place as I need to meet with clients and clients of companies I am sub-contracting for. LDC Via work together a lot as well and frankly I start to lose productivity if I work from home more than around one day every two weeks.[↩]

Last week the ‘swag’ from being an IBM champion arrived and to my utter surprise it was just perfect, yes I had picked it from a catalogue and knew at least one of the items was from a brand I knew but that did not detract from the fact it represents something to me a bit deeper than just a give away to keep some evangelists sweet.

Branded stuff like this is really supposed to be used where clients can see it (on site idealy) but recent IBM marketing stuff has been of very poor quality, just somewhere to slap the logo on and hope for the best, the best example of this is the backpacks that were given away at recent IBM Connect events, they were not even worth taking home where as the 2005 and 2003 editions were still in use and treated as a fine vintage, who ever looked at the bags and decided to skip them for this year’s event was a wise person. Anyway the swag that just arrived represents in my opinion just what IBM is aiming at with their champions

• High quality outsourcing: IBM obviously did not do it them selves but the picking and delivery for me was a simple and flawless exercise.
• Best of breed: The backpack is Wenger, the notebooks were Moleskin, the t-shirt was Nike. Good competent brands, not too flash, but not some no name knock off that falls to bits.
• To be seen in public: I am already using my stuff on site and with the same pride I would a MongoDB t-shirt or a LDCVia power pack.

I expect I am reading too much into this and it’s simply the result of a single individual doing their job very well, but even if that’s the case it’s a good example of a rejuvenating IBM

Hooray!!!, I have been accepted to speak at mwlug this year

I will presenting 2 sessions

1) “The SSL Problem And How To Deploy SHA2 Certificates” with Gabriella Davis

This session went down well at connect and we are hoping that Austin will love this changed and updated version, Gab is awesome to present with.

2) “Salesforce for Domino Dogs”

Now If you saw this at Engage I urge you to come again as this is an evolving presentation that changes dramatically with each iteration (depending on presenters and the ever changing world of Salesforce)

• Version 1: Balanced Architect (Engage 2016)
• Version 2: Happy Evangelist (DNUG 2016)
• Version 3: Rabid Developer <– This is the one I will be presenting

It will be my first trip out there and beside from presenting I will be manning the stand (The rest of the team are insisting I wear a shirt and everything).

P.S.

I’m looking for someone to room share/split cost with ( I sleep on the floor so there never seems to be a point to getting a room for myself ) …. I can provide references…

I have been doing a lot of cloud dev in recent months, not Internet facing work (been doing that for over a decade), but proper work on various cloud platforms (4+ of them) and they have turned out to require a shifting of mental gears, not from a technical aspect nor from a platform or paradigm shift (saas) but from dealing with a different type of client point of view.

Now that seems odd, sure your cloud clients are nearly all the business rather than IT, but lots of my work is direct with the business and it is often a relief to do so as you can deliver a product that best matches the exact needs of the people that use it.

So why?

After a lot of head scratching and reviewing of the projects I have come up with the following reasons

1. Sales before IT: With cloud based projects the sales team have very often just finished with the customer, so the customer arrives with the expectation that the platform is a PERFECT fit for everything they might want and it might just needs a tiny update to match their needs and that the update will only take a hour or 2…. but as is always true the devil it in the details, so when we look at their requirements and say that it’s going to take a week of hard work and then they will have to spend time testing, you have suddenly upset both their time frames and budgets. ¹
2. Client reflexes: A lot of the cloud clients are sales/marketing people or from another branch where haggling and negotiations are built-in, these people live in a fast moving world and have never liked the iterative and somewhat slow moving nature of traditional IT projects “I just want it to work how I want”. for such people paying “not a penny more” and getting more than you paid for are Good Things. A side-effect of this is that such clients are quick to anger when they require a change that will take more money or time. Small changes are non-stop with cloud projects where the client can see the work as it is done: I have heard phrases like “Just one more thing”, “It will only take 5 minutes”, “I had assumed” and — my absolute favourite — “It’s just common sense, it should do XXX,” more over the last six months than I have in the previous six years combined.
3. They have already paid: Decent cloud services are not cheap and the clients have often already paid a fair lump before they get to customising their environment, so every penny you want is money they feel is an extra, very much like someone at a hotel, we all enjoy the extra stuff but are really unhappy to see it on our bill. ²
4. Re-tooling: All of the new cloud platforms are feature rich and do a lot of things very quickly but that is often within the boundaries of a given tool or feature, I can see why this is so ³, you are aiming for the old 80/20 rule , so when a customer says “I just need it to do xxxxx” and you simply can’t make the tool do that, have then used a different tool and spent a load of time reconfiguring the new tool to look like the old one so you can add the one missing feature. it does not matter how clever that is or how hard you have worked, from a clients point of view you have turned a simple 5 min job into a 5 day job you and are from their point of view are not providing value for money ⁴.
5. Client rapport: Most cloud customisations are quick things, as a developer you have had very little time to get to know the client, what they mean vs what they say, what pressures they are under, if they have budget for these changes etc etc, and they often just view you as someone just getting in the way of their shiny new cloud platform.

These relatively new changes in the client developer relationship mean you have to change your way of dealing with clients

So how do we fix this??

This is the hard bit, I have laid awake at night for a number of nights, wondering hard how to fix this, my time honoured method of working my guts off having failed me.

So far I have come up with:

1. Make it human: Try and make the relationship one between humans, site visit if possible, Skype video if not, so clients feel that they are working with people and more importantly people who’s professional opinion they can trust.
2. Speed up interactions: Not speed up coding as that has actually not got much faster with the new platforms, but speed-up the feedback you give clients, a quick Agile Scum with a client each morning can head a lot of bad things off and make them feel far more in the loop ⁵, use this to also keep them informed on how much the client has used / left in their bank / project pool, even it they have pushed for a fixed price, addionally the clients can cut their losses if a small change is going to take a long time.
3. Be firm: I’m rubbish at this part but with cloud clients there is an underlying expectation that you get loads for free, and that includes any changes they might want to make after a spec has been agreed, there is a middle groud between “nickle and diming” and being used as a doormat, try and get a rapport with your client so that you both know where that is.

Any one else got any good ideas?

1. Both Matt and Julian have been REALLY serious about avoiding this kind of thing on LDCVia and have made the phase “it will be easy, it will only take and hour or so” a capital offence.[↩]
2. One thing that I have found after multiple quotes, is that honesty works even less with cloud based quotes than it does with traditional IT quotes, I have had at least 3 occasions where I was genuinely puzzled that a quote I had done had not got picked for a spec, and a much cheaper quote was accepted, on all occasions I questioned the ability to deliver on a quote that low (even using offshore staff) and have been told each time that the competition just use the quote to get in the door then nickle and dime the project to death…. I hate that, I really hate it >:([↩]
3. Hell I’m one of the co-developers of a cloud platform and when we are coding new stuff it always with an eye to “how can we spend our time on stuff that will get the most use”.[↩]
4. BTW the phrase “I’m trying to do what you asked” does not help here.[↩]
5. But be firm that the meeting is only of keeping everyone on track, it is not a place to add a few new requirements in to the spec every day (ohhh boy don’t they love to try that), and that each person does only get 2-5 mins, if they want a longer meeting, book it later in the day.[↩]