Gary Gygax affected my life quite a bit, affecting my imagination, my understanding of statistics, rules, processes, probability, ethics and many, many other areas.     One thing I have noticed is many people are celebrating how his work in the early days paved the path for the world of RPGs and MMOs today.

Don’t get me wrong, this is absolutely true, but one thing that I feel a need to stress is that it is always the early days.   Now, today, right this minute is the “early days” for some other major shift in the way a chunk of people think about the world.    This is the world in which you live - one where new ideas are constantly bubbling and frothing, and every month of every year provides an opportunity for someone to invent the next big thing.

Why can’t you be the person who came up with that next big idea?  Gary was in his 30s when he and Dave Arneson developed the ideas behind D&D.  And labored at it for years before it became successful.

Having gotten the Sunlight Foundation over the hump technologically with their Sunlight Media Services platform/product, it’s time to start looking for my next great success.

If anyone out there is looking for some project help, or some support/ideas on improving infrastructure, leveraging new technologies or development environments, I’m happy to start a conversation.

• Feb 21st, 1947 - “Take a Polaroid” enters the language
• Feb 15th, 2008 - “Take a Polaroid” exits the language

Megan discusses clinical trials:

But clinical trials for a single successful drug cost $500 million, and not because the labs have outrageous administrative overhead. Even if the government were in charge of running them, they would still be on the hook for that $500 million,

What? I hear you cry.  There’s no way they can cost that much.

Having written software to help reduce the costs of drug testing, I can assure you that they can.  Here’s why:

• Safety is of paramount concern here, and there are layers and layers of checks, balances, rechecks, spot checks, ethics boards, etc involved in making sure these tests are proper and well-structured.  That takes a lot of time, and a lot of people to make it happen.
• There are 3 or 4 phases of drug testing.   The first two are fairly small groups, typically to test that the drug doesn’t have  violent side effects, and that it actually fixes the problem in some meaningful way
• The 3rd phase is big - involving typically hundreds if not thousands of patients, dozens if not hundreds of doctors, ethics boards, referees, extensive evaluation periods and so forth.  And the Drug Company has to pay for all of this out of their own pocket.
• • Phase III is where the “statistically significant” analysis comes from.  Which means you have to have a statistically significant number of people from each population that can benefit from the drug.
  • Once Phase III is done, typically the drug can begin to be sold
• Phase IV is not always mandated by the FDA, but if it is required, it will usually be bigger than Phase III, and linearly more expensive.     Because, again, it has to be a rigorously controlled statistically significant analysis.

Clinical trials are significant projects, like putting a building together.  You have to recruit doctors, you have to interview them, you have to get them trained up on your drug and side effects and so forth.  You have to establish protocols and procedures for them to follow.  You have to hire people to watch over the doctors, make sure they have their paperwork done in a timely manner, make sure they’re following the protocol, etc.  You have to hire labs to do blood tests and so forth on every patient the doctor recruits.

Many doctors don’t find many patients, and you have to go through the effort of finding more doctors and more patients in order to get a sufficiently large sample.   Then, of course, you have to watch these trials proceed for a year or more in order to gauge short and long-term side effects, efficacy, interactions with other drugs, etc.   Often you have to do this in multiple countries,  which adds significant cost to the process as well.  Many of these trials can take multiple years to complete, and you have to pay salaries along the way.

And usually, you have to do more than one Phase III trial, and show effectiveness in each before you can move on to the approval stage.   This is assuming you actually do, in fact, show effectiveness, and can gain FDA approval for your drug.  Because if you don’t… well then you can’t sell it, can you, and all the money you spent on the trial just went down the drain.

Resources:

• The Tufts University study on Clinical Trial costs.
• The Wikipedia page on Clinical Trials
• Costs/Subject (Patient) for Clinical Trials

20% they said it would go up.   Well, my daily commute just went from $9.05 ($2.65 + $2.65 + $3.75) to $13.20 ($4.35 + $4.35 + $4.50) - a 45% increase.

Grrrrrrrrrr.

So after providing technology to make storage simple, and make setting up computers trivial, Amazon adds a database system on top.

I wonder what happens when they run out of things to virtualize?

You know how sometimes you forget to do something, and then you forget that you forgot, and then you feel bad that you forgot and it just seems awkward…

Well, I wrote this just before Thanksgiving. Since it’s still the holiday season, it’s still worth saying:

• I want to thank Pamela Slim, and J Timothy King for helping inspire me to try something new
• I want to thank Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok from Marginal Revolution for providing the economic justification to try something new
• I want to thank all the good people at the Sunlight Foundation for helping introduce me to non-profits, the inner workings of democracy and most of all, their interesting points of view.
• I want to thank my wife and kids for putting up with selling the house and moving and all the strange new things that come along with it.
• I want to thank all my wife’s friends for being incredibly helpful and supportive when she was trying to get the house ready.

Interesting article in the Harvard Business Review:  Manage your Energy, not your Time.

Summary:

• You’ll be more productive if you spend less time at your desk and more time renewing your energy
• You can renew your energy by:
  • Reducing unhealthy habits
  • Exercising more
  • Sleeping a decent amount each night
  • Taking walks during the day
  • Having more frequent, smaller meals

There’s more, but I’ll let you read it for yourself.

Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path, writes:

My biggest takeaway from the TED Conference this week is that we — that is to say, all of us in the world — have an execution problem

we know a lot about the world’s problems, and we don’t lack for vision and data on how to solve them.  A few of the things we heard about this week are the knowledge — and in many cases, even real experiences — about how to:

- Steer the evolution of deadly disease-causing bacteria to make them more benign within a decade

- Build world class urban transportation systems and growth plans to improve urban living and control pollution

- Drive down the cost of critical pharmaceuticals to developing nations by 95%

- Dramatically curb CO2 emissions

We have the knowledge, and yet the problems remain unsolved.  Why is that?

Why is that?  Because there are opportunity costs involved in every plan of action.   (Opportunity costs are the costs of the things that you don’t get to choose when you make a decision.  For example, if you choose to take a taxi from the airport to your hotel, you can’t also choose to take the bus.  And you pay more because of that)
In a given organization, there is a centralized hierarchy for decision making that makes these “choose the taxi or the bus” decisions straightforward.

In the wide world, there are no such hierarchies, and, I would argue, it is a very, very good thing that there aren’t.  Because while hierarchies are effective at making decisions, they are not effective at representing the views of the population.

I can’t speak to Matt’s first example, because I’m not familiar with steering the evolution of bacteria. But on his other three examples:

• Build World Class Urban Transportation
• Drive down the cost of pharmaceuticals
• Reduce CO2 Emissions

All three of those represent significant tradeoffs - in order to build world-class urban transportation, tax money will not be spent on something else.   Driving down the cost of pharmaceuticals - which already happens when the patents expire - could have harmful effects on drug research.  And reducing CO2 emissions would also represent a significant re-allocation of money and time.

Deciding that “We want to build a world-class transportation system” will require that people give up on other things… things that they want (or think they want) more than a world-class transportation system.  Because we live in representational democracies, it is not appropriate to force these people to give up what they want.  Instead, we have to persuade, and persuasion takes time, and involves compromise (give me some of X, and I’ll give you some of Y)

And world-class execution does not work when you have to make significant compromises.    And, I will add, given the choice between (sloppy execution and representational democracy) vs (world-class execution and benevolent dictatorship) I’ll take sloppy execution, every time.

A while back I had a great discussion in the comments about the right number of founders.   My “antagonist” felt that one was just as good as two, and I disagreed, feeling that at least two is key to iron out weaknesses, etc.

Dharmesh Shah has some additional information on this - apparently the “optimal” number of co-founders is 2.09

This headline blew me away:

11 Reasons to give Microsoft Vista a chance

Think about that for a second.  When have people ever had to attempt to justify or cajole people into trying a new Microsoft OS?    And then there’s Office 07. It’s even worse - people aren’t even trying to justify why you should “give it a chance”.  As far as I can tell, Office 2007 is DOA, in terms of excitement, buzz or anything.
First - kudos to Microsoft on Windows XP and Office 2003.  Clearly, those are two very effective and well done systems if people don’t feel any need to upgrade.

Second - what does this mean?  It seems quite ominous, in relative terms.  There’s no doubt that they’ll continue to make plenty of money, but it could be that the upgrade cycle is going to slow down considerably.  We shall see.

Robin Hanson, economist-philosopher talks about bias at Overcoming Bias.   This post, in particular, caught my eye:

A working paper by Ilan Yaniv says we do listen to others, but we weigh our opinion 70% and someone else’s equally qualified opinion 30%:

(There’s a lot more, but this is enough for me to make my observation)

When you talk with another, equally qualified individual, I think it’s not only unsurprising, but in fact appropriate to value your opinion higher than theirs.  After all, you have to live with the consequences of your decisions far more than some random other person.    If the other person had to face the same consequences as you did (for example a business partner) then I could see the two opinions being of equal value - and in fact, I’ve lived that exact scenario.

For me, evaluating the opinions of others is a combination of evaluating their knowledge, relative to mine, but also their effort expended in coming to their conclusion relative to mine, and the costs of error, relative to mine.

One of the things that works for me in terms of keeping up w/my resolutions is putting them out in the public view.  Here are mine:

1. Perform at least 1 Million pounds of weightlifting exercise (not all at once)
2. Run 300 miles
3. Lose 14 pounds
4. Run at least 1 sprint triathlon
5. Release one open source project
6. Finish writing book 3 of my paleo-fantasy trilogy
   
7. Attend at least 12 networking/tech meetings
8. Spend at least 100 hours on personal s/w projects
9. Get at least 2 characters to level 12 in Dungeons and Dragons Online (this way, I’m obliged to have some fun too!)

And, since I wrote it, I’ll use Bellygraph to track my progress, for the ones where it makes sense.

• Whenever someone throws out an idea, say “Interesting idea, but is it actionable?”
• Whenever someone suggests changing a process, say “I like the concept, but how do we measure success?”
• When your team starts a new project, say “We need to be clear what ‘Done’ means for this project”
• You can also say “What are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for this project?”

update, with some inspiration from PierG

• On a new project: “What’s the ROI for that?”
• “What synergies can we leverage?”
• “this is nice, but where’s the WOW!?”

I just registered the domain name EnterpriseRails.com; let’s see whether I can come up with something interesting to put there.

Here are some interesting links discussing the concepts around Enterprise Rails

• Martin Fowler thinks Enterprise Rails is an oxymoron, but he thinks Enterprise Ruby is a valid and valuable concept.
• Defendem.com has a book on Enterprise Rails deployments
• Justin Gehtland thinks that there’s a huge opportunity for Enterprise Rails, and ThoughtWorks is showing the way. (Here’s a direct link to some Thoughtworks Rails news)
• Stefan Kaes has some analysis of performance improvements in Rails
• Jon Tirson thinks it’s already more Enterprise ready than J2EE in some ways.

I reserve judgement for now on that last one.

Update:

• More performance improvements and tips

An interesting new website, that tries to “humanize” blog readers and create communities around the readers, instead of creating communities around the authors.

I think it’s an interesting idea - it might help you (or me, or anyone) discover other blogs that you might find interesting.  You have to sign up, of course, but once you do, it will keep track of which blogs you visit within the community, and who visits yours.  You get some interesting stats as a “perk” for signing up.

If you read this blog, consider signing up.  It might be a great way to improve your blogging experience.

1. Analysis Paralysis is real. Agile development methodologies deal with this at a fundamental level. Yes, it’s not perfect, but waiting too long is even less likely to get it right.
2. Trust is mandatory. Too many approaches seem to maintain an adversarial relationship between the different parties to the project. That’s an incredibly unpleasant way to make a living.
3. Test-Driven Development. Done right, Test-Driven Development captures and stores knowledge in incredibly concentrated form. Far more efficient than boilerplate documentation.
4. Mental Capacity of Users. Programmers, in general, are able to hold complex systems in their head, coordinating and visualizing the whole thing at once, able to understand how the various parts work, how they fit together and how changes in X will affect Y. However, most people do not have this ability, and furthermore, they don’t like to admit that they can’t do it. Unfortunately, these people are your customers and the ones who specify the project.
5. Release Early and Often. Release early and often is the fundamental of software startups. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a “Golden Rule”. It’s done this way because getting it in the hands of customers as early as possible is critical to getting good feedback about how the sofware should change. Most projects could do with this level of intensity and desire to please the customers. Not all, but most.
6. Build vs. Buy. The relative shortness of an iteration seems to increase the use of off-the-shelf software, reducing Not-Invented-Here syndrome.
7. Daily Habits. Short, daily meetings (Stand up or sit down, I don’t care) set a tempo for the organization, one that eventually turns into a habit (and in my mind, it’s a very good habit to have - brevity, efficiency and a sense of urgency)
8. User Stories. I find user stories much richer and more illuminating than use cases. Use cases often have more precise facts, and I use them, but I find the stories to be a better way to “get into the customer’s head.”
9. Post-Mortems - I don’t do these as often as I should, at least not formally, but I think they’re very important. And doing one every 4 weeks is very useful to updating the course quickly.
10. Fixed Iteration Deliverables - Again, like item 1 above, it may not be perfect to hold the deliverables constant for 4 weeks, but it works a lot better than the alternative in most cases.

You might be able to come up with another approach to software development that avoids these, but Agile development seems to embrace them all quite well.

I’m still a skeptic on a few things:

• Pair Programming - not against it, just not convinced, and not interested in trying to fight for it.  It seems like a wash to me.
• Integrated Customer - seems infeasible, and with a decent team, unnecessary.
• Growing the Architecture - I’m actually ok with this to some degree, except in communications between systems - in my experiences writing and implementing communications protocols, they need to be thought through more than other parts of the system, because they aren’t as malleable as the software itself.

I have joined the Hidden Network - a job board that uses blogs as its advertising medium. If you visit this site via RSS, come by once in a while and check it out.

• The jobs are all tech-focused
• They appear to be geographically filtered to be in your area
• The concept seemed so sound that I had my company’s HR use the service to post our existing openings

Thanks to Alex for putting this together.

If you’re a blogger, HiddenNetwork.com is a blog-focused recruitment advertising system. They’ll pay you for impressions on your blog for job reqs that they have.

(Hat tip: TheDailyWTF.com)

Seth asks ‘Why are you afraid of process?‘   Does it get in the way of intuition.

I dislike and yes, sometimes fear process because often they are used to avoid making hard decisions.   Or because they make it harder to do things differently.

There are all kinds of processes in this world.  I use processes every day to help me get things done faster and more effectively.   But I refuse to let those processes substitute for intelligent decision-making.  I’ve so often seen processes waste time and make the overall goals harder to reach, instead of easier.

For example, software architecture documentation.  There are document templates - that’s an example of a good process - it provides a framework for the vast majority of the common questions one might ask.  But then you try to fill it out, and in a broken process, there’s far more detail required in far too many sections that just don’t matter.   But according to the “process”, you can’t submit the documentation until every question has been answered.  Really?  Tell me, how does it matter whether this particular bit of software is ‘handicap-accessible’, when it is only going to be used inside an embedded device (imagine, if you will, the ‘next song’ algorithm on your iPod).

And yet there’s almost always some jerk who insists that you have to fill out the section explaining in detail why that particular part of the document doesn’t apply to you - because the process requires it.

There are good processes, and there are stupid processes.  At any point, changes to the world, changes to the business can cause a good process to become a stupid process, effectively perverting its original intent.
Those are the processes I fear.  The ones that make life harder, instead of easier.   And those are the ones that should be stamped out.