Author: Leon

Categories
Business

Release Your Metaphors

Recently, Josh Ross noted how the metaphor of business as war is changing into a metaphor of voluntary cooperation. People are speaking about making their businesses more social. At the surface, this might seem like when the conversation was about making Web sites more interactive. This isn’t fashion. It isn’t the latest technique for improving retention. It’s a rip tide pulling us into the future and Facebook has been paddling madly in the same direction.

Sadaam Hussein

As Josh rattled off several business-as-war metaphors, I thought of the work of Lloyd deMause at The Institute for Psychohistory. In particular, I reflected on the powerful metaphor of the Killer Woman who appears in popular culture prior to cultures launching into war. These metaphors are gels filtering the light of truth. You may be aware that something’s not quite right, but the mood is certainly colored.

In business, it feels natural to slip into aggressive language towards our competitors and our clients. Some of us slip easily into the role of crusader, sacking the infidels at all costs. If we’re lucky, someone hasn’t paid attention from the beginning. They stumble into the bad movie unfolding and ask everyone, “why are you watching this terrible shit?”

I recall a year where the company I worked for was on a wonderful run for a client flush with cash. We were expanding into new departments and ready to please. Christmas approached and managers were eager to dispose of budgets. A request came to build something like a hit piece on the client’s competitor. The idea rolled along for a while. Usually, the engineering team was the last to hear of projects, sometimes not until creative was finished. My team was were the latecomers wandering into a bad movie. To the credit of the entire team, we regretfully refused to sacrifice our integrity.

Josh says our habit of discussing business as war obscures the truth, makes us complete the mission without regard for the greater value. The new social metaphor aligns with human needs. People need relationships. They need to cooperate. We need to trust each other. We need to know our authentic selves. Without an aggressive metaphor to get in the way, we gravitate towards this type of interaction.

"Making the world more open and connected"

I heard Mark Zuckerberg say the purpose of Facebook is to encourage greater connectedness and openness between everyone. This isn’t a strategy for ending war metaphors. It’s a strategy for ending war. I heard Stefan Molyneux say that the way we end violence is through multi-generational improvement of parenting. This is the corollary to deMause’s theory that war is a symptom of child abuse.

I knew I had to write this piece when an unsolicited ad for Guy Kawasaki‘s new book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, dropped into my inbox. He says his book “explains how to create delightful, voluntary, and mutually-beneficial relationships with people.” Ten years ago, Guy released a book called Rules For Revolutionaries.

Metaphors matter. The leading edge of our culture is using more life-affirming metaphors. I won’t ask you to execute the old metaphors. Release them. Free them to help us in other ways. Embrace the new metaphors. This is how we change the world.

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Categories
Business Personal

How can I help you?

Back in September of last year, I decided I was spending entirely too much time doing things I wasn’t enjoying — commuting for an hour to Berkeley via BART to spend equal parts of my time

  • doing project management on tragically underfunded projects,
  • participating in marathon executive meetings, and
  • digging around a decade-old PHP/Oracle/ActionScript/Perl codebase that preferred to speak XML/XSLT to itself.
What was I doing? What should I be doing? How could I do it?

The following questions nagged at me. What was I doing? What should I be doing? And most importantly, how could I do it?

I also asked several of my close friends if they had work for me. Actually, I put it this way: find me a couple of months of work and I’ll quit my job. Two of the responded simultaneously; I suddenly had two full time gigs starting immediately. Oh boy, was I busy in Q4 2010. And one of those gigs kept going for the first two months of this year. It’s been thrilling.

Meanwhile, I took the advice of another friend to form a corporation (18INT) and build a real business. Why not? I’ve been doing the Internet consulting thing since 1997. Five years ago, I’d made it my aim to understand the operational part of the business. Having earned something like an MBA of hard knocks, I was ready to start something new.

The past five months have been relatively easy if I don’t think too hard about the intense weeks in November when I was working 10 hour days seven days a week. Now that the Facebook game I’ve been helping with is close to launch, I face perhaps my greatest challenge: signing the next big project.

This is a big challenge in a personal sense only. I’ve worked with plenty of people with a talent for selling. My personal style was to overachieve relentlessly and wait for people to ask me to work on something. I’ve learned that proactively asking how I can help works well, too. I just need to find the right part of me that delivers this request in a genuine and non-self-conscious way.

With less work in March than I prefer, I’m poised to ramp up my new business development skills. I hung out at GDC for half a day last week. I’ll be at Web 2.0 in a few weeks and at ad:tech after that. And I’ll continue to reconnect with my favorite colleagues of the past. Lastly, I hope to find the time to be more diligent in talking about what’s going on with me.

My goal is to sign enough work in 2011 that I must hire one or two full time employees. I know there’s more than enough work out there. So, how can I help you?

Categories
Parenting

Hold On to Your Kids

Book Cover
Click through to buy the book from Amazon.

I just finished reading Hold On to Your Kids by Neufeld and Mate, one of my many xmas gifts. I discovered this book through Freedomain Radio episode where Stefan Molynuex interviewed Dr. Gabor Mate. Serendipitously, I noticed an hour-long interview with Dr. Mate on Democacy Now. These other resources may help you decide if the book will be worthwhile for you.

The main premise of this book is that in North America, we and our kids are suffering from a lack of attachment between each other. We push our kids away from us to attach with their peers. Unfortunately, other kids are not healthy resources for kids to reach maturity. The authors compare parent attachment to peer attachment. They show how when kids attach to each other, they are in a constant state of insecurity which makes it hard for them to learn and grow.

The book spends a great deal of time up front in making the case for attachment. It demonstrates how lack of attachment leads to problems for parents and children we seem to be hearing more about. Many of the ideas in this book jive with what I’ve learned over the years about psychology, so it read as a bit too verbose to me. For anyone new to these ideas, the book probably covers the ground well.

The techniques offered to foster attachment with your kids are general and seem fairly simple. I appreciated how the authors stated clearly that you should never rely on a book, even this one, as a cookbook. They offer principles and leave it to the parent to apply the principles appropriately.

Generally, the advice of the book is for parents to “collect” their children after any absence, including being at school or even being asleep. They suggest four steps. First, get into the child’s space. That just mean being physically close, although I can hardly resist wrapping my arms around my kids if I sit next to them. Second, offer something for the child to hold on to.This can be something such as a kind observation. Demonstrate your awareness of the child and he can hold onto that knowledge. Third, invite dependence. Said another way, this means offering help. Fourth, act as a compass point. That is, be an anchor your child can use to understand where they are and where they should be.

For example, suppose your child is camped out on the couch, hypnotized by the TV. You may  sit down next to him and put your arm around him. You then say something like, “you’re really into this show about Egypt. Perhaps we can visit the ancient history museum this weekend. Anyway, mom said dinner would be ready soon. We’ll have to turn off the TV.” Compare this to yelling from the kitchen the moment dinner is on the table.

I have been trying to keep the ideas of the book in mind as I interact with my sons the past two weeks. It’s been easier during this time without work as a distraction. I am always striving to be a better father, so I hope to keep up the momentum. I recommend this book to any parent, even if you feel your relationship with your child is perfect. The principles in this book apply to anyone who cares for children, such as teachers. The path to a more peaceful world requires more kindness and understanding of children. This book helps point the way to a better world.

Categories
Personal

XMAS Card 2010

Today I present the Atkinson family’s 2010 Christmas card!

Handwritten cards? So last century. Photo cards ordered and sent from Shutterfly? So last decade. E-cards? Not good enough. This year I decided to create a big project for myself and it turned out pretty weird. Good and weird and funny (I hope).

I created the video above with

Hurrah! The days are getting longer! The sun will be brighter! May your life be filled with peace and joy!

Categories
Programming

Dev to Staging to Production

How do you keep your development work from interfering with testing new features and providing a stable application to your users? Create a dev to staging to production chain.

You’ve worked for months on a Web application, you launch and all is fine. Now you need to add a new feature that will take you at least a few hours to get right. Do you subject your users to the errors that will intermittently appear if you code directly on the site? No, of course not. You make a completely separate installation that only you’re looking at. When the feature seems solid, push the changes to the production version. You are using a source code repository, aren’t you? So, just perform a svn update on the live site and you’re all good.

Diagram showing flow of code changes from dev to staging to production
This diagram shows the relationship between development, staging and production servers.

Following is the method I’ve found works best for smallish teams working on LAMP Web apps where you can’t afford to introduce bugs to the production version. This method has worked for me on teams of 5-10 coders, each working on different features at once. There’s a balance to be struck between not getting in the way of development work and getting updates out promptly. It’s a drag when you can’t release one feature because its code is all mixed in with another, half-finished feature.

The main idea to have one checkout for your production version, one for a staging and testing version, and multiple servers for various developers and/or projects. Changes that are ready to be tested are checked into the repository. When you want to release, you freeze checkins and test the staging server. When you’re convinced it’s all good, you run an update on the live server and allow checkins again. You’ll want at least three different databases, one each for live, staging and development.

For relatively short-term work, developers should usually check in frequently. For long-term projects, checkins should be held back. Yes, this is what branches are for, and that’s the right choice for more senior coders. In practice, branches don’t seem to be something that the junior members can grok. I might have junior developers working on big changes to copy over many weeks. I simply rely on backups to make sure they don’t lose work in case of disaster.

Here’s a set of steps I might take to set up a new development system.

  1. Create a subversion repository.
  2. Create three virtual hosts: www, stage, and dev.
  3. Create three databases.
  4. Checkout the app once each for www and stage. You’d view these sites as www.example.com and stage.example.com.
  5. Make an open directory for the dev subdomain and make a checkout for each developer. You’d view these sites as dev.example.com/coder1/htdocs. Allow all the dev versions to share a database.
  6. Protect the dev server from the public with basic authentication. You don’t want Web robots indexing everything, and you don’t want to expose scripts that would be outside of the apache webroot in production.

This system will allow you to quickly make a new checkout without hassling with making new subdomains and tweaking the apache config.