Archive: October 2007
Wow!
WOW!
You know, we're going to change the face of blogging and advertising when we release this thing next week. Everyone here is totally confident of that, and incredibly excited about the future. But WOW, is it hard.
I wanted to do a "typical day in the life of" thing, but honestly today's days are not typical. They are as far from typical as you could possibly get, and everyone on the dev team is pining for the point that days do return to their normal typical selves.
5am. Wake up. Kinda. The more work we do, the more goals we aim for, the harder it seems to wake up.
5:30am. Wake up a second time. The first one doesn't usually take. I stumble out of bed, practically fall down the stairs, stagger into the kitchen and hit the magic button that makes coffee. A notebook has usually managed to attach itself to me by this point, so I offload it onto the kitchen counter and make it get my mail.
6:00am. Ok, now the waking up thing is just about starting to take. There's a least one cup of coffee inside me by now, the dogs have been taken outside and duly emptied, I've fed my disgusting nicotine habit, replied to the emails that desperately need attention, and made notes on those that I need to follow up on later. Time to hit the lists now.
6:45am. I use a process called GTD (Getting Things Done) to organize my life into handy buckets of actions I need to take. By about 6:45 I've gone through them all, processed all my open loops, noted new actions against projects in the various areas of my life and sent out a few emails as well for those actions that really aren't mine. Time to go shower.
7:15am More emails, check the code, check the calendar.
9:00am Arrive at the office and that's when the fun starts. I've usually got just enough time to set up my computer (all the dev team use laptops) before someone's stood behind me wanting something.
9:30am Dev team standup. It's called a standup because the idea is to keep the meeting short. By making everyone stand up, there's less tendency to waste time and waffle. These days we're all so tired the standup is actually a sit down. Everyone shares what they did the day before, what they are going to do and what stands in their way. It's a great way to get everyone up to speed with how the workload is spread across the team.
10:00am Back at my desk, more emails, more questions, and various impromptyu meetings usually ensue in between fighting to write some code. Yes, I still write code, but in many areas I'm dwarfed in skillset by the people around me.
11:30am Lunch, and often a code review. These happen 2 or 3 times a week. The dev team huddle together in the conference room and go over really scary parts of the application to explain what they did, why they did it, and teach each other what they need to know for their own work.
12:30pm. Back at the desk. Usually the afternoons slow down in terms of formal meetings, but I can pretty much guarantee that my entire afternoon will be split between writing code, assessing status reports from the team, talking to individuals with concerns and issues, answering to Ted, weighing up new design considerations, checking test deployments, writing emails and managing my own action lists. Throughout it all a little application called iGTD runs in the background ready for me to capture literally anything that might be thrown my way.
6:00pm Home time. I try to leave on time each day. I have a daughter at home, two dogs, two cats and a girlfriend. But the work day is far from over.
7:15pm Arrive home. pet the dogs, hug the girlfriend, argue with the teenager, and then sit down to eat.
8:00pm Back to work. I usually start the evening on the couch with the notebook. I go through all the open items I captured that day and start sorting them. What needs to be an action? What's a project that I need to start thinking about? What can I file? What I can throw away? I go through my project lists again asking, like any good GTD'er does, what's the next possible action to move this forward.
9:00pm Back to code. By now I've usually got a grip on what happened that day, and what needs to happen the next day. I have code to write though, so I'll move to the office about now to log into campfire (the dev team's chat system) meet the team and start coding. We're now in the evening afternoon as I like to call it. There are a lot less interruptions than there are when I'm at the office, but often team members will pick this time to have quality one on one time with me. So, I talk with whoever needs me, sometimes solving tricky code issues, other times talking through workload, the company focus, the future and so on. After each of these it's back to writing code.
midnight to 2am. Time to sleep. I usually can't sleep by now even though I'm exhausted. There's just so much going on, so many things to think about. I grab my iPod, head up to bed and usually fall asleep watching a re-run of something mindless (current faves are 24, and Stargate).
And that's a typical day these days, but far from typical as I confused you all by saying at the start.
But, I wouldn't have it any other way. It's an incredible feeling knowing that what you are pushing so hard to achieve is going to have such a huge positive impact on so many people.
In the past we used to validate the presence of tracking images within a post at the time it was submitted for an opportunity that required it. The old validation was very rigid and allowed only one possible match to pass the validation. You had to have precisely matched character for character the <img> tag embedded in your post in order to be able to successfully post to an opportunity. This caused problems for bloggers who used certain blogging platforms - (I can't remember which ones off the top of my head). But several blogging platforms would reformat the image tags when you published your post to the web. In an effort to prevent these false negative validation problems, we removed this validation and trusted bloggers to embed the image with the honor system.
Now we have a new problem, the tracking images are being left out of some posts or are not being embedded properly. This is a big deal to an advertiser who is paying to have that tracking data. The integrity of all of the tracking numbers are taken into question when just a few posts don't have correct data. We have seen an increase in this phenomenon lately. How can a post have five clicks on a tracking link and zero views? The answer is the tracking image is either left out or not entered correctly. On the customer love side, we have already started reaching out more actively to bloggers who do not have the image embedded correctly and have asked them to fix the post. Also, on the development side, we have implemented some more robust validation that will ensure the image is embedded correctly while making sure we don't fail a validation if the image tag has been slightly reformatted. This new validation is going to go live today. If you get a validation error regarding the missing tracking image when you try to post on an opportunity, please try to move your tracking image somewhere else in your post. The validation will only fail if the image is missing or embedded incorrectly. From now on, simply be sure to add the tracking image whenever the advertiser requires it. Thanks!!
www.payperpost.com will be down briefly tonight at 7PM EDT for systems maintenance. The downtime is expected to be less than 30 minutes.
I am happy to announce that our newest service URLBrief.com has gone live and is now open for public use. URLBrief features the same URL forwarding you have seen with other platforms like TinyURL but features some incredibly powerful enhancements including the use of multiple URLs and TRACKING!!!
To use URLBrief simply go to URLBrief.com and type in the URL you want to forward. You can click "Add Another" to add multiple links off a single URL. The URL created by URLBrief will cycle through the links you provide in order or at random, depending on the option you choose.
In this case we dropped in 4 different URLs that will be distributed evenly in order.
Now here is the really cool part! You can see who clicks on the links (IN REAL TIME!)
The site is going down for a couple of minutes today at 10:30 EST which is about 5 minutes from now. Sorry for such short notice.
