Ryan Sloan

January 11th, I will begin my next adventure at Georgia Tech. I’m not really talking about Spring Semester 2010, which should be another chapter of Georgia Tech life. I’m referring to the fact that I will be embarking on my first adventure in project management. As the Information Technology chair for Georgia Tech’s Student Government Association I have a variety of responsibilities. Until this time, most of those responsibilities involved adding/modifying content on SGA’s website (and sitting in a lot of meetings, of course.) Next semester my committee is going to undertake a comprehensive rewrite of Course Critique. Course Critique provides grade distributions and survey information for every course offered at Georgia Tech. Unfortunately, the current incarnation is prone to outages (particularly during registration periods) and several portions of it are not functional at all (namely the mechanism that uploads and processes grade distribution and survey info — a critical component.) After assessing the code base, I decided it was best to begin a complete rewrite. But this time we are going to do it right.

Even though this project doesn’t officially begin until January 11th, I am using what little spare time I have had over the winter holiday to begin what is arguably the most boring phase: requirements gathering and specification. While this may not be the most interesting phase, I really believe that it is one of the most critical (if not the most critical.) Proper design and documentation will (hopefully) prevent this project from going the way of its predecessor.

I titled this post “An Unlikely Project Manager” because until recently (like, really really recently) I saw myself as a software developer. I figured I’d be a developer forever, which I was sort of ok with. It was in the past year when people started suggesting that I could combine my technical skills with my skills as a communicator and bring balance to the force (Hopefully it goes better for me than it did for the Jedi.) This is my first opportunity to get my feet wet and see how good I really am at this whole “management” thing.

In an effort to avoid becoming a pointy-haired boss, I am going to be doing as little managing of people as possible. I’m going into this experience with three key ideas/quotes:

1. Management is taking out the trash.
2. “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” — George S. Patton
3. “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Management is taking out the trash

I wish I could remember where I heard this quote, but I searched for a long time and couldn’t find it anywhere. (Maybe I invented it? Unlikely.) Regardless of its origin, this statement captures what I believe (and remember, I’m a college student who hasn’t done any professional managing) is a key idea in project management. I will be doing little-to-no coding on this project. Instead I’m relying on the ingenuity of my team. My primary purpose will be to remove obstacles from their paths. I’ll be doing most of the preliminary planning, communicating with third parties, initially setting up their environment (issue tracking, source control, etc.) and all the other boring stuff. I guess what I’m getting at is that you should let them do what they’re good at, and don’t bother them with the other stuff. Sometimes that means taking the can out to the curb.

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”

Patton was dead on here. As I mentioned before, I will be doing almost no programming. I’m ok with that, but it’s important that I avoid the micromanagement trap. This project will be fairly large, and there is no way for me to have my hands in everything. I picked this team because I felt they were capable, and I think they can put together some great software without being pestered. This isn’t a promise that I won’t offer my opinion, of course, I just want them to argue with me when they disagree. I’ll probably cave.

“In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.”

Well, people liked Ike. I thought if I included a quote from him people would like me, too.

In all seriousness, I think this is one of my favorite quotes. Not just as it relates to software engineering or project management, but in general I think it’s a pretty solid guideline. I am going to make sure that my team is given a complete and clear requirements document as well as functional specification. We’ll be laying out a schedule of milestones with target dates. And in spite of all this, approximately one week into the project we’ll realize we’re behind/the requirements have changed/there is no spoon. But that’s ok. It happens. Things will almost certainly not go according to plan, but thorough planning will give us a deeper understanding of the problem, making it easier for us to adapt to change. We can’t realistically count on meeting all our deadlines, or the server setup working just the way we would like it to. People will get sick, or become overwhelmed with school. There’s really no way to know what’s going to happen when we embark on our first sprint. Adaptation is the key to a successful operation. So we’ll adapt.

Here we go…

So I’ll be keeping those three things in mind as I start this adventure. I’m planning to use this blog to chronicle the progress of the project (partially as a personal record, and partially because it seems like a good way to generate some content and discussion.) Wish me luck!

or The One in which I Rebuke all things Shiny and Cutting Edge

Living your life on the bleeding edge can be exciting (I mean heck, Aerosmith wrote an entire song about it.) The Edge is an exciting place — gadgets are shinier, smaller, and more expensive there. It’s hard to resist the allure of a new gadget, or the features of a new technology. We’re all guilty of it from time to time. All it takes is one press release, one vague and over-hyped magazine article, or (for some of us) a late night TV commercial with a 1-800 number plastered across the bottom of the screen. Next thing you know you’re busting out the plastic. Trust me, I own a Snuggie or two. I think there’s some law of nature that says “He who Dies with the Shiniest Stuff Wins.”

It’s bad enough to spend roughly the money supply of Turkmenistan on new gadgets, but it’s when this mentality carries over into other fields that it becomes really dangerous. When I say “other fields” what I really mean is “software development.” I have had two experiences with this, and both of them had one thing in common (other than the fact that the projects were overwhelmed by the shininess.) In both cases, it was decided (once by an executive decision and once by a vote) that we would be using Ruby on Rails for a new project. There is nothing wrong with Ruby on Rails, but on both teams, there was only one person who had written so much as a line of Ruby in his life. I’m going to talk about the most recent project in this post, because it was equally stressful and frustrating but it has a happier ending. Blogging is a lot like writing a summer blockbuster in that respect.

DISCLAIMER: This post is about to descend into what many will call “RoR bashing” but I assure you it’s not. Rails is a badass framework, and I hope it’s going to be around for a long time. This isn’t about the technology itself, it’s about the “let’s use what’s hot right now” mentality.

One of the Computer Science courses that most every Computer Science student at Georgia Tech has to take is CS3300 - Introduction to Software Engineering. It’s the second course where students are assigned a large team project. (The first being CS 2340, which I wrote about in my previous post “Adventures in Teamwork“) In this course, each team is instructed to come up with an idea for a software project, and go through the Software Development process to bring it to life. We decided to build a web app that would detect the user’s location (using HTML 5 geolocation services) and find the nearest restrooms with crowdsourced cleanliness ratings and comments. (We decided to call it “Poopt,” for anyone who was wondering. I can never resist a pun. Apologies to Sam Altman.) It would run in any web browser that supports HTML 5, but the target would be mobile phone users. I got the idea from an episode of Seinfeld where George told Jerry to give him any street corner in New York, and he could tell him the nearest clean public restroom.’

Before we even started design, one of my group members turned to us, and with a twinkle in his eye, suggested we develop our project in Ruby on Rails. The other three of us got pained looks on our faces — we had never written a line of Ruby in our lives. He assured us that both Ruby and the Rails framework were easy to learn, and that RoR could essentially do the hard parts of our project for us. Nothing gets a bunch of overworked Georgia Tech students on board like the promise of less work. On top of that, this could be a cool opportunity to learn something new! So, with some free RoR resources on hand, we decided to dive in.

Now, group work is a funny thing. It can bring out the best and worst in people. In any team, you can find at least one or two slackers (if you can’t find one, it’s you.) In my case, every member of the Poopt (it might be juvenile but I bet you grinned a little) team had agreed to learn Ruby and do their part. Things started off well — our RRoRG (Resident Ruby on Rails Guru, pronounced “Rawrg”) gathered the three of us together and started explaining things. Unfortunately, after day 1, interest started to dwindle in learning Ruby. There is supposed to be this little voice in your head named “Common Sense” that says things like “Now Ryan, maybe deciding to build a (tightly scheduled) project in a language no one knows is a bad idea.” Unfortunately, my little voice was too busy drooling and saying things like “so…shiny…”

Needless to say, by the second week of our project, the team had realistically dwindled to two: RRoRG, and poor Ryan, just trying to keep up.
In the end, we finished our project, and managed to pull an A out for every milestone, but it was largely because Mr. RRoRG worked really hard. I did what I could, but we both recognized that because of our timeline, there was no time for me to try to learn, the best I could do was tweak displays and templates.. RRoRG worked long nights, and I sat at the table and try to take care of all the bureaucratic and administrative legwork. I was totally willing to learn, but with the time constraints and my other coursework, there just wasn’t enough time.
Now, RRoRG was right about one thing — Ruby on Rails DID have a lot of features that made our project much easier. It would have been perfectly suited for our project if the rest of us knew what we were doing. Sometimes, you just have to settle for the old fallback. Maybe it’s less shiny and less exciting, but when it comes down to it, you’ve got to work within the constraints of your system.
I think I can sum up this long diatribe with one sentence: Next time you find yourself rushing out to buy a Snuggie, ask yourself: will a blanket do?

Epilogue
I’d like to say thank you, RRoRG, for working long hours, trying to teach me when you could, and not lumping me in with any other dead weight that we may or may not have had. You know, some day (when I have the free time) I’d really like to learn Ruby on Rails…

(Or some similarly long and overly dramatic title)

Exciting online news news last week! Facebook launched vanity urls at my favorite price: FREE. (I think there was also a new mobile phone launch or two, I think. Who knows?) Facebook users all over the world anxiously awaited the 12:01am landgrab, refreshing facebook.com/username/ until that magic text box appeared. I opted for facebook.com/ryansloan, but there were some more interesting choices. There was talk earlier this year about the possibility of Facebook monetizing vanity urls, but they opted for the free option instead. Benevolence? Hardly. Granted, they potentially passed up millions of real dollars when they decided to grant them to users free of charge, but I think Zuckerberg & Co. are just looking to the future. No, not the impending robot apocalypse, but a race with Twitter.
Everyone remembers the rumors of an acquisiton deal by Facebook, but it ultimately fell through. Shortly after that, Facebook announced more changes to the home page — they were moving to a live-feed format similar to Twitter. As usual, it was met with some resistance from the user base (surprise surprise) who felt that Facebook should stop “trying to be like Twitter,” and at that point that’s exactly how things seemed: Facebook was trying to be a cheap imitation Twitter with Photos ‘n Stuff ™. Their next move cleared things up a bit: vanity URLs. Vanity URLs enable access to any user’s profile without jumping through all kinds of search-hoops. As of now, if a non-friend visits your vanity URL they are just taken to your summary page. That was expected, after all, Twitter and Facebook have models of “friendship” that are fundamentally different. Twitter’s model is more open, whereas Facebook friendship is a two-way street. I think this is part of the reason that people have reacted so negatively to Facebook’s “imitation Twitter.” Assuming Facebook didn’t alter that model, then Twitter and Facebook could continue to exist as two similar services with different audiences.
The next phase makes the game much more interesting: real-time search of public posts. No longer are you limited to searching your friends, but everyone who chooses to make their status updates public. This brought Facebook into the real-time news ecosystem — one that was previously dominated by Twitter. But that’s not all! Word on the street is, Facebook is ready to make some changes to their privacy system, enabling users to choose privacy settings for each individual item they post. Assuming the interface isn’t a total pain, this is particularly interesting when applied to status updates. If you can make your status updates visible to (and searchable by!) everyone, then the playing field changes dramatically. Combine that with the vanity urls for easy access, and you have more than a “cheap imitation Twitter,” you have the functionality of Twitter (followers, live “news” stream, updates via web, mobile, etc.) with the features, API, and (possibly most importantly) user base of Facebook. Two of the common questions from people reluctant to adopt Twitter are “why would I need a Twitter? Who would follow me anyway?” Given that everyone and their mother (yes, that includes my mother) already has a Facebook, the argument becomes moot. If the users are already signed up, it can’t hurt to give it a shot. Who knows, you might like it.
So is this the end of Twitter? Probably not (not yet, at least) but the game has become much more interesting. Twitter’s recieved some great press lately, but is that enough to save them from their performance and scalability problems? More importantly: Facebook has monetized their product (albeit not very well.) Twitter, on the other hand, has yet to name their price. In the end, cash flow could be an important factor.
Either way, Twitter and Facebook get to share the spotlight for a little while, but can there be only one? What do you think? Is Facebook going after Twitter? Should we seek some sort of consolidated solution, or can the two services live together in harmony?

I recently finished up my first real team software project. One of the classes I’m taking this semester is CS 2340 - Objects and Design. This is the first software project class at Georgia Tech, so it’s full of…well let’s just call them “learning experiences.” Most of the students have never really worked on a team before, and if they have it’s been in a more restricted environment. Technically I work in a team at CSI, but on a day to day basis I’m on my own. Most all of my tasks are delegated by my boss, and it was rare to work in sync with someone else. Needless to say, I approached this project more sure of myself than I should have been.

Our task for this semester was to develop our own version of The Oregon Trail in Smalltalk. No one in our class had any Smalltalk experience, and we’ll just say that it is “interesting” and leave the this-language-totally-sucks rants for another day. We split up into teams of Five, and were given a series of milestones and deadlines. Collectively, the milestones would represent 44% of our grade, leaving 16% for small projects and 40% for exams.

Our first milestone was due shortly after we were assigned to teams — we had to put together a rough outline of our Domain classes (a few scenarios and CRC Cards.) This milestone was no problem, but the next week we had to have our preliminary UML Diagram done. We worked to arrange a meeting, and this was where we hit our first roadblock.

Lesson one - People come and people go…

And sometimes there’s more going that coming. While we were trying to get our second meeting set up, we recieved an email from one of our group members in which she let us know she was going to be dropping the class for the semester. That was an understandable excuse, and only left us four-handed. Four seemed like plenty, so we arranged our second meeting for a night later in the week. This was the last time we heard from Teammate number four. He is still enrolled in the course, but we haven’t seen him in class and he hasn’t responded to our emails. Then there were three.

This was a real shock for me, I wasn’t expecting this sort of thing to happen. I got lucky in that the other two guys in my group have worked super hard and have been very accessible, but we could have been up a certain creek without a paddle. I realized that sometimes you just can’t count on everyone on your team. Sometimes people miss deadlines, sometimes people just up and quit, and there’s not much you can do about it. And, even though no one wants to admit it, that person could be you.

We had to scale back a lot of our plans because we were short-handed. This leads me to my second point…

Lesson two - If you can dream it, you can do it…

Given the proper amount of time and manpower, of course. This was a lesson that hit us fairly hard. We had some pretty extravagant plans for our Oregon Trail game: Markov Chains for realistic weather simulation, Procedural Generation of graphics (a la Spore), a hefty database back end, and some more all-around awesomeness. Unfortunately, when we lost team members, we realized fairly quickly that we had to adapt. We decided to scrap some of the “unessential” features. This translated to “just make the darn thing functional before demo time!” We had to scrap a lot of our cool features, but I do think we did something right here. Before we got knee-deep in late, half-finished special features, we laid out what these features would require. This made it easier to see what needed to be cut. Proper planning sort of saved us from digging ourselves into a hole this time.

The final product didn’t look quite as cool as we had hoped, but we prioritized. We managed to meet the requirements, and still had some time for bonus features.

Lesson three - Use the source (control), Luke…

Anyone who knows me will give me a lot of grief for even having to write this section (”Ryan, you ALWAYS preach the importance of adequate source control! How could you?”) and I probably deserve it. Normally I’m pretty good about source control. I try to set up a repository even for one-man personal projects. Yes, I have been known to complain about source control on other projects. But, in a moment of mass-foolishness, we decided we didn’t need a formal source control system. We set up a “repository” on Sakai, which pretty much just consisted of a Wiki with a “check out list” and a folder of the accepted “stable” Smalltalk source files. It worked just long enough to give us headaches in the end.

Initially, things were progressing slowly enough that the system worked fine. I might have the Wagon class checked out, and if a teammate decided he needed another feature in Wagon, he could just shoot me an email and have me add it while I had it in my possession. No problem. Problems began to arise the weekend before the due date when we were furiously working on features, trying to get things working (don’t judge, it happens to everyone) and we couldn’t always reach one another. Even though we knew better, we started modifying files that others had checked out. This resulted in one of my teammates having to do a (very messy) manual merge of source files right before the due date.

Even a simple setup of SVN would have saved time (and aspirin). Sometimes, it takes a little stress to reaffirm what you already knew.

Happy endings

Ultimately, everything turned out okay despite our problems. We met our deadlines, did fine on the milestones, and no one died of dysentery. My two remaining team members were great, and that was most certainly a factor. Working on a team is definitely a different experience. I have a feeling I’ll be shelving my Smalltalk knowledge after finals week, but the things I’ve learned about team work will follow me forever. Now my eyes are on next semester, where I can certainly look forward to more “Adventures in Teamwork”.

On the First of September, Google “announced” (if you can call it that) the release of their new web browser: Chrome. They brought in famed comic artist Scott McCloud to illustrate a comic explaining the theory and reasons behind Chrome, and apparently, a few copies of the comic went out a bit too early. Nonetheless, Google scrambled to get the Chrome website up, and announced that it would be released on September 2nd. Unfortunately, there’s only a Windows version at this time, so I switched over to the red-headed stepchild partition, and downloaded the Beta. I’ve only been using it for a few hours, so these are just my first impressions.

Setup

Getting Chrome setup was about as quick and easy as it can be. It was a fast download (most of the install files are not downloaded until you run the executable) and a faster install. It requested that I close my instance of Firefox so that it could import my bookmarks and settings. The bookmarks and settings were imported fairly flawlessly — the bookmarks toolbar was identical, and the other bookmarks were retained as well. I lost my saved login credentials, but I didn’t have that many. Chrome starts up lightning fast — especially compared to my install of Firefox 3. When you start Chrome for the first time, you’ll see a pop-up regarding your default search engine. It defaults to Google, but you can change it immediately.

User Experience

Chrome’s UI differs from IE and Firefox in it’s simplicity. One thing you’ll notice is that there is no title bar at all. I see this as a positive feature, because you can devote more of your screen to page content instead of menus and toolbars, but opinions vary. There is also no “Search” box (as in IE and Firefox) but the address bar serves as both. Depending on what you enter in the address bar, Chrome will visit that page or perform a search with your default search engine. Once again, I like this idea. It may be because I have faith in Google to interpret my jibberish, but I think simpler is better. I do miss the Firefox search box, though. It was nice to have a dropdown of search engines to chose from. (Although appending site:url to your query works fine.) Another feature I think is neat is the “Incognito Window.” It works the same way as a standard window (multiple tabs are allowed) but when you close the window, all the temporary files (history, cache, cookies, etc.) from that session are deleted. This will be very valuable if you’re using a shared computer to access any sensitive information (banking, birthday shopping…I feel certain that incognito mode will be used for less noble purposes as well!)

Performance

Chrome was designed to eliminate a lot of the performance problems that have plagued tabbed browsing. Each tab runs as it’s own process, and the memory from that process can be freed after the tab is closed. In Firefox, a specific amount of memory is allotted at startup for N tabs, and once you reach tab N+1, it allocates another big chunk of memory. Because of this, there are some memory usage and fragmentation problems. The memory usage of Chrome isn’t very different from Firefox at first, but in theory, after continued use, it is considerably less resource hungry. Pages tend to load faster in Chrome as well. While I’m not sure of the exact reason for this, it makes sense that you’d see improved load times for JavaScript heavy pages because tabs are independent of one another — they don’t have to wait on a hung script to finish executing/crash. Of all the sites that I visited, I only noticed one that didn’t work properly. The “Advanced” version of Georgia Tech’s Zimbra webmail service did not load — it always reverted to “Standard Mode.” Advanced Mode is very AJAX-y, so I’m not sure if it’s a problem with Chrome or Zimbra. I have a feeling Zimbra’s doing a browser test, and it doesn’t really know what to make of Chrome, so it just switches to the no JS version to be safe.

Geeky Stuff

Chrome has some cool features for those of us with a flair for technology, as well. The developer area of the “Control the current page” menu has a couple of cool features. One is the JavaScript debugger and console. These are almost identical to Firebug. I haven’t noticed any significant improvements over Firebug yet, but I haven’t really played with the console much. There’s a cool resources tab that lets you monitor resource usage by JavaScript running in the current tab.

There’s also a task manager that allows you to monitor the Memory usage, CPU usage, and Network activity of each running tab. If you want more detailed statistics, you can point your browser to about:memory. This page will show you the Memory usage of each tab and plugin. There are a lot of statistics here. If you have any other browsers running, their memory usage stats will be displayed here as well.

Other

Flash - Flash worked right out of the box. I’m assuming it automatically picked up on the version used by another browser, but it was nice to have one less thing to install.

Application shortcuts - Okay, this is kind of neat. You can create an “Application Shortcut” on your desktop or start menu based on the current page. This isn’t exactly new, but what is neat is that when you launch the page in Chrome, it hides all the navigation bars and runs it like a standalone application. Once again, this takes up less screen space, and treats the web application more like a traditional desktop app. This isn’t very convenient for browsing, but I think it’s great for Web Applications. Google Docs comes to mind. It allows you to focus that window on one thing. The separate process gives you some crash protection, as well.

Summary

All in all, Chrome is pretty slick. I think there’s some considerable work to be done (Linux and Mac version, anyone?) but if they deliver on a lot of their promises I can see it taking off. If they implement good customization and add-on support (like Firefox) then I think we’ll start to see a lot of users moving towards Chrome.

…and geeks gotta blog. That’s right, Ryan Sloan has entered the blogosphere!
What can I say? It was time for my voice to be heard.
-Ryan