heart.head.work.life

Author: Mike

Downtime in the Age of Cloud Computing

We are working on an experimental mobile based social photography app called Snaptime and we have an ambitious plan to have it on the various app stores by the 1st of February so that people can start to play with it and help us learn what it does [and should do] for them.

8 hours to try and resolve Plan A

But today we got word from our cloud provider – Digital Ocean -that our server had been sending data out at an alarming rate. For the non-techie a cloud provider doesn’t provide fluffy clusters of water vapour in the sky, they provide computers you can access via the internet that are really quick to set up. Anyway, we use this Digital Ocean – for my other startup Amazemeet. We imagined (or used to) they were our partner in running a reliable service and when some kind of emergency happened, that they would be right with us, working to resolve it.

Well, it turns out this ‘alarming rate’ was 35 million packets of data in a very short time – approximately 18 minutes. That’s more than 220 megabytes of data in a 18 minutes. Their systems detected this and locked down our server and disabled the network connections so the flooding could be contained. They also locked the account.
They both entitled and entirely correct in taking this course of action.

Then they emailed us and asked us to investigate and then explain to them what happened and then they would investigate and consider whether to switch it back on.

Well – so we did – as much as their lock down would allow. Which is not very much – and my 2 emails to them in 8 hours to get assistance went unanswered.

Meanwhile the development is at a standstill. But not for long.

10 minutes to switch to Plan B

Fortunately I keep a backup provider – Vultr.com – for just these kind of situations and the turnaround time to get a new server, set it up and be back online is frankly hard to imagine possible even 5 years ago.

After 8 hours of getting nowhere, I tired of Digital Ocean’s lack of cooperation in this matter – which lets face it is simply a cheap lesson in picking hosting providers – and made the decision to bring the service back up, things happened rather quickly.

I emailed Digital Ocean to tell them since there seemed to be an impasse and frankly radio silence from them, I had no other choice but to destroy the server (so I didn’t continue to pay for it) . Even to destroy it proved impossible until they removed the lock – which they did on request. In fact – they replied faster to me deleting my server and initiating my plan to move all my services away from Digital Ocean than they did to my requests for assistance. I think that is a poor business decision.

It took me less than 10 minutes to get a new server on Vultr.com, change my Cloudflare settings to point to a new IP address and now my developer is going to take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours to put all the software we need back on it and bring it back to full strength.

Mike Gets Philosophical

I have a saying I recite to myself when things don’t go the way I expect them to – “Don’t get angry, get philosophical”.

Given that we have growing subscribers on Amazemeet who are increasingly relying on our service to be robust and reliable. I consider the relatively unimportant downtime on Snaptime as a dress rehearsal for what the experience of the extent of Digital Ocean’s willingness to help me overcome a revenue impacting service. So this was a cheap lesson of an important subject and for that I am a grateful student.

Downtime in the Age of Cloud Computing means that provisioning metal (thats system administrator speak for getting servers setup) is now a fairly simple, quick and inexpensive task. It also means that with the technical complexity resolved, the battle ground for providers is in customer service and recovery partnership.

In this regard I’m disappointed to say Digital Ocean has let me down. I did like them – or my impression of them – young upstarts daring to grab a sandwich from Amazon’s unconquerable AWS service. The underdogs, the cool kids doing cool things for other cool kids. But alas that is not really the case, from this experience my impression is they really couldn’t give a cockroach’s wotsits about my predicament.

But heigh ho – I simply hop on another cloud and carry on my merry way. Lesson learnt, achievement unlocked for fastest Plan B ever.

25 January 2016
A week of amazing things.

3 amazing things happened this week

First – the fundraising target for my Long Walk on Camino de Norte was reached in less than 24 hours.
Then I hired a developer to work on an ongoing experiment – SnaptimeApp – and this was the fastest hire on Upwork in 8 years of using the service.
Finally, despite some setbacks, we launched Amazemeet to the world.

Reaching and exceeding my Long Walk fundraising goal

I don’t usually ask people to fund things I believe in – usually I fund to the extent of my means and do the best I can. This time is different.

This time I wanted to create awareness and amplify the amount I was prepared to contribute for a cause so close to my heart. So I went ahead and created my first ever campaign on Just Giving and set a modest £1000 goal.

Within 12 hours I was 90% to that goal and by the next day , it was entirely funded. This triggered my goal matching and doubled the goal.

To say I’m blown away is an understatement – I was thrilled to tears – sobbing as I read the messages of support and having my faith in humanity rekindled to a blaze.
Thank you so very much.

The campaign has so far raised £2050+ for the Invest in M.E charity. I have since increased the goal to £3000. There are 15 or so weeks to the start of my walk and there is still plenty of time for you and others to contribute to this effort and truly make a difference getting both help and justice for the sufferers of this brutal condition. Please support generously.

As I chatted with my best friend Joel about how the fundraising was going – he said he had been researching the Camino de Santiago and discovered his family namesake – Robert Langton – the Bishop of Salisbury and Winchester – had also walked and documented his Camino in 1520. So now this is getting weird but pleasantly so. I guess everything is connected after all.

Record awesome hire on Upwork

Since I joined the freelance work platform in 2007 , I have been convinced that for any digital work, the future is freelancing and remote freelancing at that and Upwork (formerly oDesk) is an amazing platform dedicated in bringing that future to the present.

In all the time that I have been using it – my average time to find and hire talented people has been pretty short – from 5 hours to a couple of days. This week, however, I beat this record with a time to find and hire of 90 minutes and that included 2 Skype based interviews. That is a phenomenal time – made only possible by the work that Upwork has done to facilitate the interactions between providers and purchasers.

Amazemeet launched

The startup that I have been building for the last 12 months was finally launched this week – although it didn’t go out on the 14th of January as I had hoped – we got it all lined up and released on Saturday 16th January.

This has been a real labour of love and I’m incredibly proud of the work me and my team has done on this. Now to see the workers of the world – fed up with crappy meetings – show it some love.

Please check it out and share it. You may very well save someone’s life with it 🙂

18 January 2016
I'm going for a walk
The Short and Sweet

Between May 8th and the 20th , I’ll be walking ~~214km~~ 240km of the 815km long of the Camino del Norte – the northern route of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.
I’d like you to support me and my selected charity and invite you to join me.

Walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela

Millions of people from all over the world have walked to the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. The routes they have take over the ages are called the Camino.

For whatever the reason people make this ‘pilgrimage’ – spiritual, recreational or simply popping out with the dog for a pint of milk – this is a chance to connect with whatever you need to connect with. In my case, my dog, myself and your donation for a great cause.

Ultimately I intend to complete the entire 815km northern route in 4 visits. This is the first visit, the second is tentatively planned for September 2016 and the rest in 2017.

You can see more of the route I’ll be taking here.

Make every kilometre count

I’m making this journey because I’m fit and healthy and fancy a walk. There are thousands of sufferers of M.E in the UK – including my best friend Joel – who can’t walk 100 yards without feeling totally exhausted. They’d love to do this – but they simply cannot.

They – like Joel – used to be fit and healthy until they suddenly got severely sick and never got better – like a permanent severe flu. Their lives have been put on painful pause by M.E and their recovery put on hold because the UK Government and medical establishment are hiding their heads in the sand on this. It is up to the general public – you , me and InvestinME – to move this forward.

So I need your help.

I need you to put your hand in your pocket and sponsor this walk. My target is £1000 and I’ll even match donations up to that target.
Give what you can and more importantly share this we need to raise awareness as much as we need to raise money.
Sponsor me here now:

About Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (M.E)

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) is a systemic neuroimmune condition characterized by post-exertional malaise (a severe worsening of symptoms after even minimal exertion). It causes dysregulation of both the immune system and the nervous system. The effects of ME are devastating enough to leave 25% of patients housebound or bedbound. For moderate to severe patients, living with ME is like living with late-stage cancer, advanced stage AIDS, or congestive heart failure for decades. – www.meaction.net

Living with ME is like living with late-stage cancer? That’s pretty rough – right? Now imagine that is your life for the next 5, 10 or even 15 years,

You would think that with such chronic pain, suffering and lower quality of life affecting so many people with this condition that there would be state funding to fund research into the condition and develop a cure or definitive treatment. Not so – in the UK, the funding to date – of £2m over the last 25 years – is entirely embarrassing.

It simply isn’t good enough and I’m taking this walk partly to raise awareness of both the condition and the lack of emphasis on it. Please help me in doing both.

Join me

My 214km walk is in 10 stages and if you would like to join any of the stages – that would be wonderful. Here are some things you need to be aware of:
- you need to be fit and able to commit to complete whatever stage(s) you join
- you’ll need to make your way to the rendezvous location the evening before the start of the stage with whatever gear you need
- If you would like to do a multi-day walk with me – you might have to rough it. My dog and I plan to camp in a tent most of the time but there are very basic hostels called Albergues that you can bunk in.
- We’ll walk for 6 – 8 hours a day and eat ,drink, muse and recover for the rest of the time.
If all this still excites you – please send me a mail and lets plan our camino. Please make sure you also make a donation to the cause too 🙂

A Super Special Limited Offer

I’m a sought after world class agile coach – you cannot hire me until 2018 because I’m all booked up to help organisations deliver value more effectively and joyfully . If you would like to spend a day walking and talking about the challenges you are facing as a manager/Scrum Master/whatever in a tech organisation struggling to deliver value effectively – then make a minimum donation of £500 to the cause above, get your walking boots on and lets talk. I guarantee you it will be the best £500 your company ever spent.

Limited to first 3 people only.

Updates on my Camino

I intend to keep this blog updated of my progress before, during and immediately following the walk – so be sure to bookmark and follow along.

You can also “like” my Facebook page here to stay updated.
13 January 2016
Who is telling your story?

I’m reading an autobiography of George Carlin – one of my favourite comedians. This biography is much more than an autobiography – it is more like a spending an endless evening with George sitting across from you with copious amounts of whatever your choice of poison and hearing him tell you everything. Some of it sounds pretty far fetched. But that is the how life is.

So it got me thinking. What if I was simply a character in a tale told in a bar by some boozy raconteur to a spellbound audience on a cold wet night someplace cold and wet?
And if I was – which would explain a few bizarre things that have happened in my life , not to mention being Serendipity’s play thing – how does this story end?

If I’m a character in a story – perhaps you are too – who is telling yours?

Photo by avlxyz

22 December 2015
Every kid needs to learn to use a toilet brush

I recently showed my son to use a toilet brush to clean up a mess he made.
Of course he turned his nose up and made the face that says ‘this is a shitty job’. It is.

Life is full of shitty jobs – crappy things that you sometimes have to do as part of the other amazing, interesting things there are to be done.
Some shitty jobs are cleanups of a mess you made.
Some are cleanups of a mess that others make.
Some jobs are just shitty.

However they come about – there is learning and character growth in this work. It teaches kids to be prepared to do necessary messy jobs and the humility to value all labor – even that of dealing with crappy work.

My life’s work is to bring up my kids to care about the world and to treat everyone with respect by default. The nature of people’s labor has become a way to discriminate and in some cultures – yes you India! – it has become institutionalized discrimination. I’m against treating people badly because of what work they do and this is a principle I teach my kids.

Helping your kid recognize they made a mess – in my son’s case a rather unsightly cluster splatter – and supporting them to clean it up is an opportunity to help them grow. It is an invitation to a conversation about who would do it instead and what that would mean. It is a ticket to explore the bigger idea of what it means to be in a family and the distribution of work in a unit that exists together and individual responsibility in that unit.

When I was a kid, someone taught me to use a toilet brush and it helped me value all labor and to be prepared to do even the stinkiest work and not let that work define me as a human being.

Photo by illustir

15 December 2015
The Process Delusion

We do Scrum (or Kanban or SAFe or..)

How often have you met people – usually executives and management at conferences or other spaces outside of their company and they proudly proclaim ‘we do Scrum’.
I meet them alot – not only at conferences – on planes and more worryingly in their own companies. It’s like the Sixth Sense – only with Process.

Then with the slightest of prodding – examining what they produce, how they produce it, who they produce it for, what feedback they get – and how often they get it, what they use the feedback for and how quickly they apply it – the delusion begins to become clear. This is what I call the Process Delusion:

The Process Delusion is the pretense – for whatever reason – that you are doing something a certain way for certain benefits but there is little or no evidence that you are doing it or getting the expected benefits.

Let me say straight off – I applaud the willingness of anyone in any organisation who tries out any process to get some improvement.

It takes recognition that something needs to improve. So many just live with the gross imperfections – often the downright insanity – of how they work. I’ve met them. Through whatever path they came to this point, they don’t really give a crap about what they are asked to to do. They’ve arrived at a place where they gave up or never started trying to improve things for themselves or their organization. But I digress.

So, willingness to try is wonderful. But it is – sadly – not enough. It is like taking out gym membership. You get kudos for recognising you need to get fit and ‘well done’ for taking out the gym membership. But the real applause comes when – most importantly – you start to see actual improvements. And that takes persistence and focus.

How does the Process Delusion play out in your team or organisation?

Photo by Michael Gwyther-Jones

14 December 2015
Love with Dead Things

Our walnut tree gives us lovely walnuts and dead leaves. Both are lovely in different ways.

I actually love sweeping up the leaves, hearing them crunch underfoot and , occasionally, making art with them before they go on to the fire heap to get turned into another form of energy.

12 December 2015
The Nature of Crazy

It’s 5:15 AM in Geneva and the train to the airport is getting busy.

Amongst all the bleary eyed travelers is a seemingly ‘normal’ individual. Rain jacketed, clean shaven and serious looking.

He sits down in the sit adjacent to mine, makes no eye contact and proceeds to read his newspaper.

“Blah blah Federale blah blah” he argues across from me. I look up and now we make eye contact – as in my eyes met his, but all I saw were eyeballs. There was no recognition of connection – as far as I could tell, the lights were on, but no one was home. The argument – as best as I could make it out in French – was fit for the European Parliament. It seemed to be political in nature – he mentions Vladimir Putin and makes some other political references.

This chap was having a full blown emotional political exchange with no one in the carriage that I could see. He got increasingly agitated with his oration. I wish I understood what he was saying. More importantly, I wish I understood how his life, experience, his brain and chemical composition all aligned to bring this guy ranting out a political argument with no one in particular.

Public Reaction

My reaction was “this dude is crazy”. And then I caught myself analysing both my response and the response of other nearby passengers.

There is a moment in a public space when a member of the group in the space behaves in a way that is not considered ‘normal’. It is an awkward moment. No one wants to engage with the person – either verbally or non-verbally. We look away, we pretend they don’t exist. We hope they will stop being ‘not normal’. As it persists, gazes will find themselves and wry little smiles – acknowledging the awkwardness and recognising another who is trapped in the encounter with mental health.

By and large, we in European societies – East to West, North to South – do not know how to treat mental illness. By ‘treat’ I don’t mean medicate or repair. I mean ‘relate to’. I wonder how long this has been like this. Perhaps forever?

I’m Joe Public and so are you. What can we do differently and more humanely relate to people with mental health issues?

20 November 2015
My Web Summit 2015 Experience – the really short version.

TL;DR

Web Summit was a major experience. There were a lot of people – the organisers claim 42,000 people were in attendance – and it felt it.

If you aren’t a people person don’t go.

If you are exhibiting, go to a busy vegetable market or car boot sale a few weeks in advance and learn to engage and trade. Otherwise you are wasting your time.

This is exactly what it’s like.

I personally consider The Alpha track to have been great value. Even after flights and accommodation, it worked out at about €800 per person. We made leads, tested product fit of the app with a wider audience and made some really great contacts.

On the other hand, it is blatantly obvious that profit is a major thing for the organisers – pay very little out, bring as much as you possibly can in. Even if that means screwing people over. The debacle of the food tokens demonstrates this perfectly.

There were some really cool exhibitors and some speakers – I tried to see all the exhibitors but only 3 really sparked my interest. There seemed to be a multitude of people doing things that were not really solving a problem or solving a known problem differently.

If you were attracted by the quality of the ‘celebrities’ and the possibility of rubbing shoulders with successful and influential peeps – you would be out of luck – they were there but not mixing and as my speaker friend said ‘oh they are all in there, but no one is coming out – there is food there and its not so crowded’. I don’t really blame them.

The WIFI also classically sucked. Given the much reported problem from last year’s event, you would have expected such focus on getting that bit right. I met at least 10 alpha track cohorts negatively affected by this. Such a lack of attention to detail on a sensitive issue speaks volumes to my earlier point about profiteering. We even joked there was a lot of ‘summit’ but not enough ‘web’.

Ultimately the organisers are awesome at what they do – marketing, data mining and building their business – whatever you as the attendee or exhibitor gets seems accidental. They deserve alot of respect for that alone.

I personally got very little value from the talks – with such a huge range of people, I can appreciate the speakers easily going for the lowest common denominator level to pitch their talks.

So, Web Summit – it is like the Eiffel Tower. You only really need to see it once. We won’t be going back.

The long bit is coming in another post. Too busy, can’t complete.

18 November 2015
Are Netflix and other interval collapsing platforms dangerous to your mental health?

I just watched the entire Daredevil season 1 on Netflix in 3 days.
Prior to that I watched the entire Arrow series in 4 days.
And Agents of Shield? I polished that off in 2 days.

Before Netflix – I got into the Sopranos box set – that was a killer.

Earlier today, my 6 year old son and I explored the idea of being able to watch episodes of a series whenever you wanted and I explained how different his experience was to mine when I was his age – 35 years ago.

When I was a kid, you watched an episode of something a week – at the predetermined time. When video recorders came up, you could choose to record a series but had to do that weekly at the predetermined time. You could only watch the entire series after it had been aired.

Then came boxsets. Boxsets moved things on a bit. You could watch entire seasons that had aired a few years to a few months ago. But the interval based episode format was still the same.

Netflix disrupts this format by making both syndicated and original content available in episodes but without the interval – you don’t have to wait at all to watch episodes in a season and only a short time for new seasons. I don’t know whether they are following the trend of the ‘NOW’ generation or leading it. Actually I don’t care.

What I care about is the content – specifically how stories are told. Three hours of a series of episodes is theatrically different from a three hour movie. Even my 6 year old – Ruben – understands this. Things developed to be consumed in intervals must build in enough hooks to keep you coming back every week to see how it unfolds. So there needs to be drama, thrill and suspense – all key emotional manipulators – in each episode – to trigger anticipation. Over the course of a week, perhaps our human system can handle such manipulation, but when you binge – as I and millions of others do – what damage does that cause to our emotional and sensory systems?

To a large extent we have the same experience with franchises like Lord of the Rings and Avengers. The interval is longer between episodes and each episode is itself a longer show. But collapse the intervals and watch them back to back and you are in danger of seriously messing with your mind and possibly your perception of reality.

I’m sure Netflix and others – Amazon etc – argue this is disruption in format is about choice and in part I agree. However, I am curious to understand whether that choice is both real and actionable when the content is designed to hook.

Do you watch Netflix or binge on boxsets – how does it affect you?

Photo by CJS*64 A man with a camera

3 June 2015