Two Bs? Not Two Bs!

A while back, I was reading the Washington Post article about teens in the techie age. These kids post up their own blogs on such sites as myspace.com. They mean for their blogs to be read and commented on by their friends. And, yet, since they are very much in the public domain, anyone can read it, including (surprise!) their parents!

The kids often are shocked about this. How dare my parents read the personal private blog entries I have that are on the web for anyone to read? Funny enough, a summer coop at my work had the same problem. She wrote a blog, mostly for friends to read. When she discovered her coworkers were reading it, she immediately shut down the blog.

In reality, she had little to worry about. The teenage mindset, nay, the female teenage mindset, nay, the Asian female teenage mindset is one that is difficult to comprehend by male software engineers that are ten years her senior. What seems like embarassment fodder to her, is teenage IM mumbo jumbo to others. Besides, what well-respecting male would admit to wanting to read teenage blogs? Hmm?

In the back of my mind, I understand I'm in exactly the same boat. When I write the blog, I don't think of myself as having a particular audience. I know a few people are aware of the blog. Some friends, a coworker, my brother. Even they don't read it on a regular basis for the same reasons some of my coworkers don't read blogs at all. Why read about other people's boring lives, unless yours is boring by comparison?

Recently, I blogged about meeting Joel Spolsky at ETECH. I also met the gang from TechSmith, the nice folks that bring you software like SnagIt, Camtasia, and Morae (where do they get these wonderful names?). All of a sudden, I get commentary from Betsy Weber.

Now, I had seen Betsy before, from Joel's Aardvark'd DVD. A little history. Aardvark was a project that Fog Creek came up with to have four interns build a project from start to end in ten weeks.

The project was "Copilot", a tool that would allow the tech-savvy kid to help his not tech-savvy parents or relatives with computer problems remotely. Using their tool, you could see the victim's desktop and control their cursor, so they could see what was going on. The helper didn't have to be anywhere near the victim. He could be in New York, and the victim in California.

The DVD was made by one Lerone Wilson, who, amazingly, doesn't appear in his own documentary once. OK, that's actually pretty common, unless your name is Michael Moore.

When the product is ready to be user-tested, Betsy Weber is invited to Fog Creek Software to help out with usability. They want to find people who are completely newbies to computers, and boy, do they find one. This one guy barely knows how to use a mouse. When asked to rate his computer skills from 1 to 5, he says "half".

Betsy (I believe) is the one who then responds by saying "you mean, like 3?" and he corrects her to mean half, like under 1, like I barely know what a computer is. Right and left mouse buttons do not register in my brain. I just want some free food, and some money!

Fortunately, the guy is rather entertaining, though he appears to have been a minor pain for Betsy.

The Aardvark video primarily focuses on the four interns in the group, plus Joel, plus the Visicalc guy (if you listen to the commentary, you discover that none of the interns even know who he is), plus an odd foray to Paul Graham's Y Combinator group who is working on what now seems like the "cooler" project, the ranking website, reddit.

On the periphery are people who work their full-time that aren't in the video for very long. These include the Fog Creek guys that I met at ETECH: Ben, Babak, and Brett.

Ben had a short blurb about being mildly jealous that the interns had a much cooler project than he did as an intern, but otherwise, they don't seem to be in it. Of the three, I think Brett has the most significant airtime, but I'd have to go rewatch the video.

I had brought the DVD with every intention of watching it again to remind me who was who, but then I also brought like eight books that I never read eith me either. I don't recall if Brett was the one growing the tomatoes or not. There's one other guy, Michael, that works there too. Just keeping track of which intern was which was hard enough.

I remember them in odd ways. There's the product manager dude who says "Owned" in the cockroach re-enactment scene. There's the juggling guy. There are two others, but when I first watched it, I couldn't tell who was who. Only when watching the commentary did I figure out who everyone was, but I watched it so long ago, I don't remember much.

I do remember there was one guy with like 8 names. There's a player on the Maryland team named Nik Caner-Medley. He's the leading white guy on the team, the Mr. Basketball of Maine (what a name for that title!). On the April Fool's Day issue, they said that Caner-Medley adds two more last names, just because.

That was funny.

There's a guy who's name is like that at Fog Creek.

Somehow I sense there was some gentle chiding that didn't quite make it onto the screen/

If Babak was in the video, I honestly don't recall.

These three have the kind of minor celebrity status that is particularly odd. I happen to know of them, though not them in particular, from Joel Spolsky. More properly, from Joel Spolsky's blog. If you were to have put the three of them in front of me, and I didn't know any better, than I wouldn't have known any of them. I'd probably recognize the four interns (probably, but I'm not great with faces, at least, first time).

And, I'm sure there are plenty of folks at ETECH that are, by comparison, far more famous than these guys. By the way, I'm not trying to say these guys are supposed to be famous or anything. I am trying to apply some metric for popularity comparison.

Going to ETECH is a bit like attending a music conference in Bangalore. You might bump into someone like Asha Bhosle and not even know it was her. (Asha Bhosle, if you're curious, recently recorded her "best of" hits with the Kronos Quartet. She and her sister are the most prolific singers in all of India, having sung some 40,000 songs between the two of them, for Indian films).

I'm sure there were plenty of people that had some fame, that I had no idea about. I saw Jesse James Garrett, the guy who coined the term "Ajax", at a talk. Sorry, I wouldn't know him from his grandma if you had pointed me out to him.

I saw Bruce Sterling. I knew his name, but never knew he looked like hippy Roger Ebert, wearing his biker jacket. I suppose he could have put on some mirrorshades too, this delightful 80s sunglasses, that used a mirrored surface, and was highly popular. I'm sure it had this mass appeal to SF writers like Sterling, since it reflected both the cool of wearing such glasses, and perhaps the hollowness too. When you'd stare into a person's "eyes" wearing mirrorshades, all you'd see is yourself (cuz, you know, it's a mirror!).

I felt there were so many people at the conference that I barely had a clue about. I wanted to talk to this kid, who looked all of 15, wandering around. He had a badge on, so I suppose he was legit, but did O'Reilly give him some kind of junior discount? Where was his chaperone? In any case, I didn't talk to him, for fear he'd talk about some Second Life object engine he'd written last night, and I'd cower away to abject humiliation.

Of course, he could have been 25, and just looked 15. I taught a class once where there was this kid that looked all of 13. He was kinda short, his voice pitched up a little high. I had to ask him how old he was, and he said he was like 18 or so, or some reasonable age. Not surprisingly, he gets carded all the time. He was saying that he tried to rent a car, and they didn't think he was old enough.

Anyway, I figured that there were plenty of people that were out there that would have been as famous, if not more so, than the 3 B's: Ben, Babak, and Brett. But if part of the goal is to schmooze with folks, and there's like, hundreds of people there, then you have to be selective.

Ah, I have to mention one guy I met like right off the bat. On Monday morning, I'm walking the five or so blocks from my cheap hotel (the recently converted Y, which is now "500 West") to the impossibly rich Manchester Grand Hyatt (take a chance to look for it on Google Earth, and you'll see it was under partial construction whenever they took the photos).

On the way in, there's a large entrance, with several desks. I had to turn left, go past some dining area, up the esclators, to where ETECH was being hosted.

While heading in, I talk to one Tom Nguyen, who works at Reuters. He's a techie, who's originally from California, but has been working in New York City. There was some in-joke at my work which I must say I missed about Reuters. Since I didn't quite know what it was all about, I didn't bring it up to him.

Tom's one of those rather cheery Asian guys that make you think "God, you're awfully pleasant" rather than the Asian guy that appears in the Cingular ads which makes you think "God, you're awfully scruffy. I want Tom to represent our people!"

We talked a bit, as we headed to breakfast, and joined some other folks. Breakfast, I'll say, was mildly disappointing. I've learned, in my limited travels, that "Continental Breakfasts" means "suck breakfast". I want artery clogging bacon and sausage and eggs. OK, I don't need an y of that, but come on, this hotel costs more to say in one night that I spend in rent in a month (well, maybe three weeks). Shouldn't they hire some Iron Chefs to make ice cream out of squid ink or something? I feel I'm not getting my money's worth.

Tom turns out to save the day. On Thursday, the last day of the conference, one guy was complaining about his inability to connect to his own website. There's something a bit humorous about a tech conference that can't get enough bandwidth, mostly because the attendees are like newborns, hooked up to their umbilical cord that feeds their laptops, and need to suck Internet bandwidth like Dracula sucks blood.

I imagine an ETECH conference, where they shut down any wireless connectivity, so the attendees at a conference themed "The Attention Economy" would, you know, pay attention. I could imagine the riots that would ensue, as patrons run to the front desk, quivering from their lack of an Internet fix.

I feel your pain, brothers. I feel it. I was in a hotel that only had wireless on the main and second floors. I was on the fifth floor. I could tap into the wireless in the next hotel over, but only for a fee.

My discussion keeps digressing off and off and off. Point is, I figured there's only three days. I hardly know anyone. I would like to meet a few folks, and better to meet a few folks well, than meet many people for a brief moment.

And I must say, one of the things I admire about the 3 B's is that they came without a laptop! Or at least, they didn't bring it with them to the conference. That was amazing. It's one of those things, if you don't pay attention to, you wouldn't even notice. No one ever asks "where's your laptop" even at a conference as techie as this one. They only care about their own laptops, and their precious, precious Internet!

Even now, I'm amazed at this.

But back to the issue of fame. Even though Brett, Babak, and Ben are not exactly household names (heck, even Joel Spolsky isn't that famous. I could ask their entire computer science grad school who Joel Spolsky was, and I'd suspect upwards of 90% would have no idea, because that would involve, you know, reading someone's blog. I told several folks I had met Spolsky. I offhandedly remarked "And Joel's gay.", which is something, I think most Joel readers know, but it's not something Joel waves around in people's faces. (Don't go there, people). He doesn't sport a campy voice. He's not wearing pink triangles or rainbow flags. He brings it up in funny subtle ways. He was talking about Ipods vs. similar, but less noteworthy MP3 players, and brings up A-list actors vs. B-list actors. I think he has Julia Roberts, and someone that's up and coming. He also puts up Brad Pitt, that seems to be gay America's poster boy, though Pitt doesn't really do it for me, and the "B" rated guy is Ian Somerhalder. Now, there's a name most people couldn't put a face to. If you are wondering who he is, he's the brother who was in the plane that was trapped in a tree, and fell, killing the brother, from the series, Lost. His name recognition is probably an nth degree higher for the gay community, not because he's gay (like say, Rupert Everett), but because he's a hunk. Joel sneaks that in. It doesn't matter particularly, who he puts there, but it's a wink and a nudge to those who might care.

In ETECH, a guy like Joel is techie royalty. Sure, he was there mostly to be charming, rather than to hawk a product. He did a review of trends in webpages and technology, which he liked, and which he didn't, but it didn't look like he expended a great deal of effort to make it happen. Nevertheless, he's invited because he's fun to listen to, and he's well known for his blog.

Which brings me back (again!) to the three B's. These guys, despite having 1/N the fame of Joel, are in many respects, extensions of his company. They represent Fog Creek, whether they actively think about it or not. I'm more of an Occam's razor guy, who thinks that Fog Creek simply hire great people, and I don't necessarily mean that from a tech point of view, but the kind of people who are inquisitive and outgoing.

I had eaten lunch with these guys, and there was some issue about why Duke's computer science grads are down this year. Turns out Ben just graduated from Duke. As a Terp, I should, of course, hate his guts, but the fact is, I was a graduate student Terp, and we can't be bothered by such pagan trivialities such as college sports (I'm lying, of course. I like college sports, but I'm not rabidly Terp). One of my former roommates (apartmentmates?) was a Dukie, but he graduated quite a few years ago.

I applied for a teaching position at Duke a few years ago, that simply went nowhere. If I had to guess, the job went to some guy named Robert Duvall (no, not that Robert Duvall) an instructor at Duke, who Ben did some work with (I think).

Somehow the discussion got onto whether math was harder as you get more advanced. Joel recalled that he struggled with, say, calculus, but then found, say, linear algebra easier. I think his boyfriend is a math guy (at least, I think it's his bf), who occasionally teaches him math (oh how sweet!), and Joel finds it much easier to grasp now then in college. One of the guys suggested that maybe this guy was great at teaching math, but Joel thought this wasn't the case.

As a former teacher, I would have suggested that as well. Good teaching can do wonders. But there's also the fact that math can get frickin hard, frickin quick. You think you understand some math now. Maybe some group theory. Maybe some combinatorics. But keep going up and up and up, and you'll cry for mercy. There's some level of math that will eventually defeat you. Either that, or Joel missed his true calling.

Having said that, there's something to be said about knowing a subject matter really well. The toughest courses in technical areas are often the earliest ones. When you first learn to program, that's the toughest time. As you get some proficiency, you learn how to learn. You're able to proceed at a much faster pace, partly because you have a wealth of knowledge to begin with (and partly because some of that extra learning is not conceptually hard, just new and dfiferent).

On Thursday, I met up with the guys while I was attending the talk on O'Reilly's Learning 2.0 (I'm getting a Headache 2.0 from writing that). Babak came in to watch the talk as well, which really, was not quite what I expected. The most interesting part was this guy from some company called Prolific, where the company actively encourages programmers to learn more, and improve their skills. OK, so these guys happen to write gambling software, but that's fine. The point is, in an area that is changing so quickly, software developers often miss even the biggest trends. Ajax has been touted for over a year, and yet, I've barely played with it (trying to, trying to!) while others don't know anything about it at all. Software companies need to be aware that these new technologies may provide a competitive edge, and be willing to invest in continuing learning throughout.

Furthermore, he raised a very interesting point. Remember the Meyer-Briggs tests? They measure you on four quantities. One is introvert-extrovert, which is often measured as "do you draw energy in a crowd, or away from a crowd". That's I vs. E. This guy was an E. Most programmers are I's.

There's sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. Sensing/intuition appears to be a person who prefers facts to someone who prefers ideas. Thinking/feeling is using facts for ideas, vs. a belief system or intuition. Judging/perceiving is whether you make decisions quickly or not. Some prefer to decide quickly so it can be decided. Others want to wait til the last possible moment.

These tests have been widely available. Last time I took it, I was INFP (Introvert, Sensing, Feeling, Perception). I think INTP's are the most common among programming types.

The point is, can this information be used to help employees get better. At companies like Fog Creek or Microsoft, presumably, the idea is "We hire smart people" and there are certain personality traits that the company expects people will have, and yet, that may not be true of everyone. Should a company be more aware of differences between folks, and learn how best to manage, due to those differences.

This topic has been of interest in academia because there are so few women in the sciences and in computer science. Can the way we teach those topics help?

So that talk was far more interesting for the one guy in the audience, than the two women that were presenting (it's sad that I think of lipstick and butch lesbians when I recall that presentation, because I'm conflicted about my reasons for thinking that).

Anyway, the following talk in the room was about hydrogen fuel cell cars. Babak had attended the Learning talk, but Ben and Brett had went elsewhere (oh, since they didn't have lunch served, I walked all the way to the Gaslamp quarter, probably some half a mile to a mile away, had lunch at a restaurant recommended to me by some employees at the Discovery Channel, where I bought this gaudy clock, so I could check the time, because I lost my cell phone, and then gave away the clock a few hours later to the woman working at the YMCA entrance just a floor below the main floor of the hotel I was at.)

I had a talks I had thought about attending throughout, and perhaps attended nothing close to what I thought I was attending. Most of the choices were made because of space (it's too crowded at this talk, I'm leaving) or because I simply chose to stay in the same room twice.

I wasn't planning on sitting in a non-techie talk about hydrogen fuel cell cars, but then all the Fog Creek guys showed up, and I thought the other talks weren't all that compelling either, so I decided not to leave. It turned out to be a fun talk. The woman clearly has done this kind of promotional, because she was experienced at it. She mentioned her son, who is into network security, while talking about how we're eventually going to move to hydrogen fuel cell cars.

I was thinking, there are all these tech talks that the Fog Creek guys could go to, why this? I thought some more. Several of the presentations were hawking new items. Foldera, Zimbra, etc. Is it worth attending a conference to watch someone demo their product? I think their thought was no. Attend only stuff that seems interesting. If the product is that cool, then you can check out the website later on.

Secondly, and more importantly, not every talk that you attend needs to be about computers. It's to the conferences credit to have a few off kilter topics that don't bear directly on a software engineer's job.

For example, I attended a talk about RFID (Radio Frequency IDs). I've been hearing this for a while from my housemate, who is always on the bleeding edge of what's new and trendy. This talk put things in perspective, giving the limitations of RFIDs now. It was also this woman's master's thesis. Interesting enough, I sat at another talk about information visualization with another woman doing her master's. I thought that was odd, but interesting.

Come to think of it, nearly half the talks I attended were presented by women.

Anyway, we decided to ride the hydrogen fuel cell cards. I think all of us honestly thought they would let us get in the vehicle and let us go where we please. In hindsight, that was completely silly, as these are vehicles that are nearly one-of-a-kind (I assume only a few hundred exist). Of course, they were going to have a chaperone with us.

We also thought we could rotate drivers. Who knew that the trip was only around the block and lasted five minutes? We volunteered Babak to drive. I personally didn't want to drive, and only do so out of necessity. It was pretty cramped because, oh, did I mention it, the Fog Creek guys are huge! Well, I don't mean they look like comic book collector guy, but that they are very tall guys.

All of a sudden, Joel's vaunted screening technique for hiring the best seemed to me to reduce to "Does your name start with B? And, are you above six feet tall?". I know, silly.

In fact, when I realized there would be five of us in the truck, I thought I should wait to get the next vehicle, but the guys asked me to join along. Unlucky Ben is crammed in the center, while Babak and our chaperone takes us around. Brett and Babak were all interested in the chemistry/physics behind the how the fuel cell car works.

This reminded me of something I recall way back in grad school. I know this guy, who's now a professor, who was working on some problem. My thinking, at the time, was that he lacked enough algorithms skill to do an adequate job, but there he was plugging away at it, which reminded me, of a few years earlier, when I was eating lunch at a Cornell dining hall, listening to two girls speaking French.

I understood nearly everything they said. It's not that I was so fluent in French. Despite five years of French, my skill is rudimentary at best. No, it was because these girls stuck to the minimal vocabulary that they knew and I knew. Where I might have been resigned to thinking, there's no way I can speak adequate French without a far larger knowledge of French, these girls were doing perfectly well, despite that. The point is, they tried.

Similarly, this grad student, despite not knowing a great deal of algorithms (which means, he took an undergrad and grad course on it), was still trying. I assume the Fog Creek guys only had basic college chemistry, and were using that to figure out what was going on. Reality may be that there are more subtle things going on that we, as rank amateurs, don't get.

That's not the point. They asked the question, and they were curious of the answer, even though it was in an area that wasn't their expertise. And, that, I'd have to say, was the most impressive part of meeting these guys.

Which then goes back to the thought I had way at the start. When you're out in public, and others can drop in and listen, is there a sense that you are trying to impress others? I mean, I have coworkers that talk about video games all the time, and they're clearly not trying to impress anyone. It's the geek equivalent of talking about American Idol.

Do Fog Creek guys think "we have to be on our best behavior out there, because we represent!"? I like to take the Occam's Razor approach and say, no, that's just the way they are.

Now to be perfectly fair, we're all trying to impress in one way or another. One of my housemates often likes to make a "bad" first impression. He says something a little off-color, but not truly offensive (he wouldn't say something racist, but he might say something slightly sexist, but merely to be provocative). After a while, you realize he's a funny guy, and that he reads Jared Diamond books. Thus, the first impression ("he's crude and crass and a jokester") is replaced by someone who reads and thinks.

Even when I blog, I write far more provocatively than I would generally talk. I'm trying to be hip. I do say a few things that I try to replay in my mind about what people will say. For example, I said, in a previous blog that Brett seemed a bit queeny.

In the back of my mind, I'm thinking "What if Brett reads this? What will he think?". Realistically, I don't think he'll read it, but then Betsy read the blog, so he might. Should I leave it out? I don't even consider that as something bad. (I was at a party once. A large African American fellow, who was a theater major, asked this young woman to come near her. He goes "Come here!". He is probably aware that there's some concern when a large black man wants to talk to you, so he tried to assuage her fears by saying "Don't be afraid. I'm a homosexual." Nothing like using that term to relieve fears. At which point, my housemate turns to me, and says "Now, why can't you be more like him!", a comment he says he can't recall making, though he feels isn't out of character with what he'd said).

That "queen" comment was indeed brought back to my attention as I was showing photos on my digital camera to a friend who was reading my blog.

So, those are the kinds of things that one worries about when writing the kind of blog I write. You'll note Joel doesn't write this kind of stuff, since he's respectable and all =).

Of course, I feel like some giddy groupie when talk about the Fog Creek guys (er, I'm not a groupie, I'm a band aid---see if you can figure out that movie reference), which would be completely embarassing if I could get myself to act more giddy. (This reminds me of my cousin's fiancee. We were in a restaurant celebrating the birthday of one of my cousin's and his fiancee's birthday. She recognizes someone coming into the restaurant, and starts to scream. I mean, I was thinking, she's the whitest Asian chick I know. She runs over to these people and starts to hug them, and say hi. That's the kind of giddy I should have mustered, which would have lead to some kind of ETECH restraining order).

Rather than end on this rather odd note, I will end on a different odd note.

Those who attended ETECH may remember a guy, who appeared to be Indian (of which kind, I can't be certain) with longish hair. He would assist on technical setup on stage, and reminded me of a witch doctor. Thoughts of incantations uttered in some dead language praying to the Internet gods to provide more bandwidth flitted across my mind.

Oh yes, I have a new cell phone.

It's a Samsung.