TJ's Kaleidoscope

MacBook Pro and Stability

Hello, my name is TJ and I’m a recovering PC.

As you may know, I have had nothing but problems (documented here and here) with Windows, both Vista and XP. Finally, after the third crash and the third time having to rebuild my hard drive, I decided to make the switch to Apple. I’ll have more on that later, but this little thing I just had to share.

 

I’d like to bring your attention to the little timer in the middle of the screenshot (the Mac by the way, makes it super easy to take screenshots). That’s my VPN connection, and it’s been continuously connected for 57 hours, 34 minutes, and 25 seconds. This was virtually impossible in my Windows machine (even in the uber stable—by Windows standards—XP). Without exception, the connection would randomly drop, and I’d have to reconnect. Not only that, it’s been more than a week since I’ve rebooted my Mac. In the windows world, if I didn’t reboot every couple of days, I knew I was headed for trouble.

This brings me to my first observation about Mac and the need of a stable OS. In all fairness, Vista does almost everything that the OS X can, but it does it in such a clumsy way that it’s near impossible to be productive. The best an OS can do is to get out of the way and let you do your work. The OS X, does that very well for part of getting out of the way is being a stable platform.

Quote of the Day

Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.

                                                                                          --Steve Jobs

Startup Lessons: Passion

I had the good fortune to work with hardworking and passionate people all my career, but I’ll say this, in a startup, passion is not an optional ingredient. It is in fact, essential to survival.

At IBM, I probably put in just as many late nights and weekends, but somewhere deep down I knew that if I didn’t work one weekend, or went home at 5:00 PM one day, the stock’s wasn’t going to tank. However a startup requires hard work at a level of consistency that is impossible to sustain without passion. Startups are run during the week, but built over weekends. Every weekend not spent building, shows up in lost opportunity the very following week. Such sustained efforts are impossible without passion.

Passion gives you hope, makes work it's own reward, and provides the needed focus. On the other hand, hard work without passion is an affront to intelligence, and will die a quick death. This is especially true when building a company for so many things will grind you down, beat you up, that hard work by itself wont have a chance. A startup will dispense with cold efficiency any effort that is abundant in hard work but lacking in passion. There will be so many pitfalls, setbacks, and missteps that you will lose the will to work hard. As I look back at the almost two years with CallFire, and all the ups and downs, I realize what’s kept me going (and still is) is passion--a passion for technology, for problem solving, and for challenges.

Passion, or loving-what-you-do, is hard to describe and probably the reason why this post might make little sense. Passion is emotional, and emotions are hard to put into words, especially so in the confines of a blog.

This post also concludes the first installment of my startup lessons: ignorance, arrogance, and passion. As I said when I first started on this series, these are just my lessons, and a description of my still on-going journey. They are by no means a prescription. Every journey is unique, I'm just sharing mine.

Quote of the Day

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen. 

                                                                     --Frank Lloyd Wright

Do you Buy or Build?

My previous post got Dinesh--one of my business partners at CallFire and I talking about the core argument behind cloud computing.  Do you buy or build software? This is a decades old question in software and a complicated one at that, for the argument can be made either way. Think about it, if integrating your application with the telephone is critical to your business, then you can go one of two routes. You can either say "It's core to my business, so I'm going to build it from the ground up", or you could say, "Because it's core to my business, I'm going to let the experts take care of it, and hold them accountable". Of course, CallFire would encourage the latter. Telephony in all its glory and complexity has been the overriding focus of our lives for more than two years now and we could think of many reasons why letting us worry about managing calls makes a lot sense. There are many objective factors to take into account like cost & quality, however many decision makers overlook the human factor i.e., the teams that will implement these decisions.

 

 

Our own internal decisions have invariably leaned towards build. The way we looked at it, the only way we could perfect the trifecta of quality, growth, and scale was to build our stack from the ground up. I know there are some techies out there that are shaking my head as I'm saying this (and perhaps some competitors snickering), but it works! The overriding reason being the team at the core of this effort. We have a crack group of people that know every aspect of what goes on in our servers. Komnieve is our system architect and asterisk compiler. Punit is our Java code hacker, and resident asterisk coder. Vijesh spends his time at the application, ui, and db layer. What we share is a propensity for lateral thinking. Between these three and myself, we can recompile kernels, deploy on-demand backups, launch complex features, and trace any of the millions of calls that go out of our system. This team has the ability to look at a problem, and figure out how to approach the solution in non-linear ways. In other words, instead of spending time analyzing the problem, figure out the end-goal, and then try anything and everything to get there.  Working with the three of them (and of course, let's not rule out Dinesh, even if he's 'only' marketing), only reaffirms what I've known all my career: You can go to hell and back if you have a great team with you in the trenches.

If you have a similar group amigos, then by all means go ahead and build your telephony stack. We'd like to think we're special, but realize we're hardly unique. However, if you don't have the time or resources to build such a team yourself, then definitely consider this critical aspect of your decision. It's easy to fortify yourself behind elaborate spreadsheets filled with numbers, but in the end it's people that build value.

Quote of the Day

Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

                                                                    --Vince Lombardi