Raible Designs

Tuesday February 16, 2010

My Guest Room Remodel is finished! On December 5th, I flew home from Orlando (after The Rich Web Experience) and arrived home to the sound of waterfalls in my house. As soon as I opened the door, I knew something was wrong. Sure enough, the pipes had burst in my back guest room and water was pouring out of my ceiling. My guess is that it'd been happening for days.

The following week was quite interesting as I juggled a cleanup with lots of fans and a house without water. My water got turned on by Wednesday and I gained a whole new appreciation for indoor plumbing. Initially, I thought I could get everything fixed before my family arrived for Christmas. As their arrival approached, I became less and less hopeful and quickly scrambled to setup a couple ad hoc guest rooms.

After the Christmas holiday, I met with a local contractor (the same guy who fixed my plumbing initially) and discussed my options. The cheapest option (a.k.a. the one my homeowner's insurance would cover) was to put everything back like it was. However, it was readily apparent that if we did this, there's a good chance busted pipes would happen again. Therefore, I made the leap and decided to remodel the whole thing. Major changes made were 1) moving the bathroom to an opposite corner, 2) adding an interior window for light from the skylights and 3) adding a door to the bathroom from Jack's room.

The results are something I'm very happy with. I'd like to thank Nu Image for their great work and my parents for flying in to help finish it all up. If you're a friend of mine and looking for some powder runs this winter, I have a nice guest room for you to stay in.

For more pictures, see my Guest Room Remodeling set on Flickr. Posted in General at Feb 16 2010, 07:49:37 AM MST 2 Comments

Wednesday February 03, 2010

17" MacBook Pro Stolen from Living Room Almost 3 years ago, I bought a 17" MacBook Pro. This laptop served me well for several years, mostly as a home computer. A few months after I bought it, I started working at LinkedIn and got a brand new laptop as part of my first day on the job. After working with LinkedIn's 15" for almost 2 years, I grew to love the form factor and purchased another one almost a year ago. I found the 17" was too big for planes and the 15" fits me perfectly.

Fast forward to last night.

I attended the first half of the Ignite talks at DOSUG and left around 7. When I arrived home, I suspected something might be out of whack when my front door was unlocked. Julie had come over to pick up Abbie's dance shoes around 6, so I figured she must've forgot to lock the door on her way out. When I got inside and saw my coat closet open, I justified it by thinking she grabbed one of the kids coats out of the closet and forgot to close the door. When I walked into my living room and saw my space heater's remote in the middle of the floor, busted open with batteries out, it clicked that a stranger was in my house. The first thing that jumped into my head was "Where's my laptop?" As I looked at the bare mini-desk in my living room, I realized it had been stolen.

I called Julie and asked her if she left the front door open. She said no, but when she arrived at my house (and came through the back), the garage's light was on and my back door was wide open. I asked her if she saw the busted remote on the floor or if the closet door was open. She said no. Putting all the pieces together, it appears that the burglar was actually hiding in my closet when Julie came into my house. Naturally, she's a little a freaked out by this, but she also saved the day by scaring off perpetrator before they took anything else.

This isn't a new trend for me and this incident is mostly my fault. I left my backdoor unlocked. Two years ago, my truck's stereo was stolen and there's a good chance I left the doors unlocked (and didn't turn on the alarm). Last year, my bike was stolen and the lock was still there, indicating I missed the frame when locking it up. So getting robbed in the first part of every year seems somewhat par for the course.

With my truck's stereo, it worked out well because the rig needed a new stereo. My bike last year? There wasn't any silver lining to that incident, so I made myself earn a new one. With this laptop incident, there is a silver lining in that I've been thinking about getting a 27" iMac for a home computer. Other options include a Mac Pro for my office (and use my laptop for traveling/home use) or a Mac Mini for home and hook it up to my TV with a wireless keyboard and mouse.

The home iMac seems like the best option, but I'd also be interested to hear what others recommend. Of course, I'll be keeping my doors locked from now on.

Thursday November 05, 2009

Consulting, SOFEA, Grails and GWT at next week's Denver JUG Next Wednesday, I'll be at Denver's JUG meeting to talk about Independent Consulting and Building SOFEA Applications with Grails and GWT. The first talk will be a a panel discussion among local independent consultants, including James Goodwill, Matthew McCullough, Tim Berglund and myself.

This session explores the trials and tribulations of an independent consultant. How do you find contracts? Should you setup an LLC, an S-Corp or just be a sole proprietorship? What about health insurance and benefits? Are recruiters helpful or hurtful? Learn lots of tips and tricks to get your dream job and your ideal lifestyle.

The Grails and GWT talk is a preview of a talk I'll be doing at the Rich Web Experience in December. Below is a rewrite of the abstract in first-person.

Earlier this year, I participated in a major enhancement of a high-traffic well-known internet site. The company wanted us to quickly re-architect their site and use a modern Ajax framework to do it with. An Ajax Framework evaluation was done to help the team choose the best framework for their skillset. The application was built with a SOFEA architecture using GWT on the frontend and Grails/REST on the backend.

This talk will cover how Bryan Noll, Scott Nicholls, James Goodwill and I came to choose GWT and Grails, as well as stumbling blocks we encountered along the way. In addition, we'll explore many topics such as raw GWT vs. GXT/SmartGWT, the Maven GWT Plugin, modularizing your code, multiple EntryPoints, MVP, integration testing and JSON parsing with Overlay Types.

If you're in Denver next Wednesday night (November 11th), you should stop by the Denver JUG meeting. It'll be a fun night and there's sure to be a few beers afterward. Posted in Java at Nov 05 2009, 10:52:37 PM MST 5 Comments

Wednesday September 23, 2009

Lean Teams: Doing more with less This evening I attended the Denver Rails User Group (a.k.a. DeRailed) to hear a presentation by Marty Haught. It was titled "Lean Teams: Doing more with less" and the following are my notes from the event.

Today's talk is about "Rocking with Ramen" - a.k.a. working with less funds to make great things. Lean comes from the manufacturing world in that you should Add Nothing but Value. The most important thing you should do is add business value.

The Seven Wasteful Sins for manufacturing are:

• Overproduction
• Inventory
• Extra Processing Steps
• Motion
• Defects
• Waiting
• Transportation

The key to fighting overproduction in software is to trim features to those that achieve the greatest value. You should do "the simplest thing that could possibly work" and delay commitment as long as you can because YAGNI.

A minimum viable product is a starting place for validated learning with the least amount of effort. It should be embarrassing. Early adopters see the potential. Rails Rumble and Startup Weekend are good examples of promoting this type of development.

Unused and useless features are best solved by feedback-driven development. This is a process for validating value and creating software that people use. The end result is that you create software that people use and you're able to pivot your plan as you learn. The benefit of this is you stay humble and you don't drink the Kool-Aid (e.g. VC's tell you you're going to be the next Twitter).

The first part of feedback is "Pirate Metrics" by Dave McClure. The main things to track are acquisition, activation, retention, referral and revenue (AARRRR!). The main things you should gather from metrics is they're actionable and should help you make decisions. Vanity metrics like hits-per-month and such should be ignored.

Other feedback options include net promoter score (popup question to ask if users would recommend to a friend), feedback form (make it easy for users to tell you what you think about your product), A/B testing, and usability testing.

The final point is that it's OK to remove features.

To reduce extra processing and waiting, you should implement "Kanban". It's a pull-based system for a continuous flow of work and can be used in software projects to manage/schedule work for cross functional teams. It's an expression of just-in-time and has an emphasis on flow. It's all about getting across the board as fast as possible. In agile development, this is often expressed as a card-based system on a wall in the same room as your development team. Things can only move from the left-to-right as there is space for them. Marty is showing a screenshot of a "Zen" tool he uses on his projects. It has 3 columns (Definition, Work and Verification) from left-to-right that allows you to easily move stuff.

The most important thing about Kanban is it helps to eliminate constraints. The Zen tool only allows a certain amount of items in the "Work" column and it visually communicates blocked items by moving them to the top and highlighting them with a red border. The Zen tool that Marty is showing looks similar to Rally, but is much more visually appealing.

The benefits of Kanban include:

• simple, less process
• less inventory of requirements/stories
• limit work in progress, maximize throughput
• less time in meetings
• more naturally represents story lifecycle
• more easily spot bottlenecks
• estimate only if it adds value

Kanban promotes tracking how long it takes for a story get across the board and into production vs. tracking velocity of a team.

On my current project, we use Rally, a small team and have two week iterations. Because the things that Marty is talking about seem to be things we're already doing, I asked him how Kanban differs from Scrum with small teams. He explained that this biggest difference is Kanban is most useful when you're pushing things to production with each iteration.

The most controversial practice that Marty promotes is Continuous Deployment. This is the automated deployment of code to production. It includes automated testing and continuous integration, simple deployment/rollback scripts, a successful CI build triggers deployment, and there's real-time alerts in production. When shit goes wrong, you should use the "five whys" to perform root cause analysis. Marty admits that this is only a good idea when there's a high-level of trust in your development team and lots of tests to prove nothing is broken.

The benefits of continuous deployment is there's a lower story cycle time, you eliminate waste in deploying code, you deliver features/bugs fixes faster and you find integration issues quicker and in isolation. It's also a great way to promote not checking in shitty code.

The skeptics think this is a bad idea because 1) it's scary, 2) they believe it causes lower quality and 3) it causes more issues in production. The good news is you can still control production deployments with your source control system (e.g. branches and such). More than anything, it forces you to have a high quality continuous integration system that acts as the gatekeeper for what goes to production.

You can learn more about topics Marty covered in this talk at the following sites:

• Eric Ries - http://www.startuplessonslearned.com
• Steve Blank - The Four Steps to the Epiphany
• Mary Poppendieck - Lean Software Development
• Dave McClure - http://davemcclure.com
• Kanban Applied to Software Development: from Agile to Lean

If you're lucky enough to be attending Aloha on Rails, Marty will be presenting there. I recommend you attend his talk if you're trying to get stuff done quickly and get it into production even quicker. His techniques seem to be invaluable for developers that are trying to maximize their efficiency and reduce the time it takes to get their code into production. Posted in Open Source at Sep 23 2009, 09:20:28 PM MDT 4 Comments

Monday March 30, 2009

New Office and New Bike Back in January, I moved into a new office to work on my current project. The following week, my bike was stolen. The next day I ran to work and decided to do it for a couple months.

My current goal is to run until April 1st or until I lose 20 pounds, whichever comes first.

The next week, my co-worker's bike was stolen and I knew I had to stick with my goal. The significance of April 1st was that our office lease expires on April 1st and we were planning on moving to a new office. While our office is nice, it is a large one-room office with no windows. The previous office was quite a bit cooler, but also cost twice as much.

A couple of weeks ago, we found a nice office near downtown. I signed a 1-year lease and moved in over the weekend. For folks in Denver, you might recognize the nice location.

I did my final run to work last Thursday, in the midst the Blizzard of 2009. While running to work was a great experiment and I enjoyed telling people I was doing it, it wasn't fun. I've been riding my bike to work for many years (first year was 1999). The one thing I've always enjoyed was the thrill of the ride in the morning. On a beautiful spring day, it's really a fantastic experience. It's easily been the best part of any job I've ever had.

With the new office secured and the running mission completed, I walked over to my favorite bike shop and picked up a Trek FX 7.5 yesterday. To research and figure out which bike to buy, I asked my network on LinkedIn.

As luck would have it, my first ride to the new office was today and we woke up to a morning snow storm. Even though the ride was cold and wet, I still had a blast. I've enjoyed riding since I traversed the hills on a BMX bike back in Montana. Getting back in the saddle today was simply awesome and I can't wait to ride again tomorrow, regardless of the weather. I know those nice spring days are just around the corner. Posted in General at Mar 30 2009, 11:51:39 PM MDT 3 Comments

Monday March 09, 2009

1st Hike of 2009 This past Sunday, the kids and I loaded up our camelbaks and headed out for a hike to the top of Dakota Ridge Trail. We parked in the Green Mountain parking lot next to C-470 and trekked up the west-side of the mountain.

First of all, I was impressed with their enthusiasm. Granted, it was a beautiful Denver spring day, but still - you know how 4 and 6 year olds are. I'm not sure how far it was, but I'd guess somewhere between 1 and 2 miles. Abbie was gung-ho the entire way up, while Jack kept saying he was tired and wanted me to carry him. I never broke down, kept encouraging him and they both made it to the top without any issues.

While at the top, they did some exploring and Abbie gathered a whole backpack full of rocks for the trip down. By the time she was done filling it, it must've weighed around 20 pounds. Even though it was pretty darn heavy, she carried it all the way down - stopping every-so-often to empty a few rocks out. We weighed it when we got home and discovered it was 10 pounds. I was very impressed with her strength and perseverance.

Well done kids!

How old do kids have to be before you take them up a 14er? Posted in General at Mar 09 2009, 10:28:20 PM MDT 4 Comments

Wednesday June 25, 2008

Bike to Work Day Today is Denver's annual Bike to Work Day. While I try to bike to work everyday, it's fun to see others trying it. It's also fun to look back in this blog and see what past years were like.

In 2004, I'd just landed a gig with OpenLogic (when there was only 2 employees). The commute was great, but I only rode to work once that whole summer. I never returned to "the office" for the rest of that contract. In 2005, I'd just started working for Virtuas and didn't have a bike. Last year, I rode to The Hive.

This year, I'm riding to LinkedIn Denver (yes, we still need to decorate). I have to say, this seems like one of the best years yet. I've never enjoyed working in an office as much as I have this year. However, with 4 Mac Pros in one room, we might have to buy a window A/C unit. The room we all work in is a good 10-15 degrees warmer than the other rooms. Posted in General at Jun 25 2008, 07:51:19 AM MDT 9 Comments

Sunday May 18, 2008

It's a beautiful night in Denver It's a pleasant 68°F in Denver tonight. Rather than working in the house, I thought I'd step out into the backyard. It's quite nice out here - I might have to do this more often.

Posted in General at May 18 2008, 10:31:43 PM MDT Add a Comment

Thursday May 01, 2008

Denver Weather Yesterday it was 82°F in Denver, today it's snowing. Here's the view from our office in downtown Denver. Drab and dreary - perfect for the Avs Playoff Game tonight.

Posted in General at May 01 2008, 10:38:27 AM MDT 4 Comments

Saturday March 22, 2008

An Irish Pub moves into the Neighborhood In August 2006, I described how happy I was to be living in the DU Neighborhood and how we had so many good restaurants around. Today, I discovered there's a new Irish Pub that opened this week. While I don't live in the same house that I did in August 2006, I still live close by, a mere 5 blocks from Julie's house. While the old location was excellent, with Sushi, Indian and Liquor on the same block - my new location is 6 blocks from the Light Rail and a 1/2 block from the Elementary School Abbie and Jack will attend next year. DU is 5 blocks away - which is great for hockey games and gym memberships.

Why am I rambling on like this? I don't know, I just wanted to write down how much I like this neighborhood. With Spring starting yesterday, a beautiful day today and DU beating North Dakota last night - life is very good.

Today's agenda: skiing with the kids at Copper. WCHA Championship tonight. Posted in General at Mar 22 2008, 09:25:43 AM MDT 3 Comments