Inbound Thinking

I read Ellie’s post of this same subject and it was such a great idea that I had to try it myself.

In most modern browsers when you start typing an address there are suggestions offered. Here are the top suggestions from Google Chrome (my browser) for each letter of the alphabet. It’s a meme in the making!

A. abdinoor.com
B. blog.hubspot.com
C. cornerhub.com (this is my local development environment a.k.a. localhost)
D. digg.com
E. etrade.com
F. facebook.com
G. google.com/analytics
H. hubspot.com
I. is.gd
J. jira.atlassian.com
K. kyle-james.com
L. login.salesforce.com
M. maps.google.com
N. netflix.com
O. order.beautys-pizza.com
P. [none]
Q. [none]
R. riseclub.us/boards
S. search.twitter.com
T. twitter.grader.com
U. usaa.com
V. video.google.com
W. websitegrader.com
X. [none]
Y. youtube.com
Z.  zipcar.com

Karen, Biz, Me

Last Wednesday Rebecca Corliss came by my desk at work and asked “Did you know Biz Stone is coming to Boston?” This question was the start of a hectic couple of days (for Rebecca, not me) to organize a Biz In Boston Tweetup. Luckily, Rebecca is awesome at this sort of thing and she pulled it off beautifully.  However, going into Friday, the day of the Tweetup, we had no idea if Biz would even be attending. Luckily we found out about 20 minutes ahead of time that he would actually be coming by for a short while.

Around 3pm the Tweetup kicked off with beer and local burger chain B.Good brought a ton of tasty sliders.  Biz was there early and chatted with everyone for a while. It was very cool to meet Biz; just the prior week I had seen his interview on The Colbert Report, so to be having a beer with him the next week was kind of surreal.  We even managed to snag him for a quick interview for HubSpot TV (embedded below).

Thanks to the Tweeple of Boston for coming out to the Tweetup, thanks to Rebecca for getting it organized and thanks to Biz for being the guest of honor.

At around 7pm tonight I was working at my desk  when one of the HubSpot sales managers, Heidi, came over and asked “Do you want to go to F1 go-karts tonight?” Obviously, I jumped at the offer. So a group of 8 HubSpotters headed out to Braintree and F1 Boston for a little fun and competition.

The F1 facility was surprisingly cool. I figured it would be some sort of warehouse with a track, but it was much more. There’s a huge entrance area with actual race cars and a collection of tricked-out go-karts on display. There are also a billiards room, a bar, and a few function rooms.  Since HubSpot booked a corporate outing, we had our own function room along with a buffet of pub grub. After eating and filling out waivers, we got a little presentation about F1. Our speaker, Tom, walked us through the whole process and explained the flags and track signals. He was totally hilarious and mentioned that he’d been doing this for 9 years, he really had the presentation down to a science, if he ever wants to join sales at HubSpot, he’s hired.

After the presentation we got suited up: racing suit, head-sock, helmet and neck support. We were on the track and in our karts a few minutes later.  There are a total of four races, three 10-lap races to qualify and a final 15 lap championship race. Each race starts with a full caution lap and then the green flag comes out and you start racing. The karts are quick, they can get up to 40mph. I managed to clock the fastest lap of the night in 21.166 seconds at a top speed of 39.12 MPH. The track record is 19.780 seconds, so I still have a long way to go. The HubSpot team is rather competitive so there was a lot of bumping on the track but, as they say in Days of Thunder, “rubbin’ is racin’.” Unfortunately, I got penalized in the championship race for bumping another kart in a turn and lost my lead: I finished 5th overall. I didn’t feel so bad since there were a LOT of penalties handed out to our group. Katie Farrar won the championship race and is now the reigning HubSpot karting champion.

Overall, it was a great time: The karts are fast, the course is fun, and, if you bring the right group, it’s a serious battle. I will definitely be going back again soon.

Retired Llamas Lane and Chad

A couple of weeks ago I started reading Emergency by Neil Strauss. The book follows Neil’s journey toward self-reliance; being able to survive without civilization as we know it. At first I was skeptical; I didn’t think there was much chance of civilization breaking down entirely. But I began to think more about what we call civilization and just how quickly it can collapse, just look at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or the NYC blackouts. In a matter of hours the entire system can collapse.

So I’ve decided to leave the rat race and get away from civilization as we know it. I’ve purchased a 100-acre parcel of land in northern Arkansas. It has a small lake on site and there is a reliable aquifer passing below the south-east corner of the property. I plan to move there this summer and start a non-profit retirement farm for alpacas and llamas. I also plan to plant a 10-acre farm growing soybeans, corn and carrots. With this plan I’ll have water, food and wool for clothing if (more like when) they system breaks down. I’ll be able to survive without outside food, water or electricity.

I’m still working on a name for the compound but I’ve got a few ideas: “Alpaca Acres”, “Llama Land” or “April Fools”.

Over the weekend I got a chance to visit the Museum of Science and see one of their new IMAX films: Roving Mars. The film was put together by Disney and Lockheed-Martin(strange bedfellows) and chronicles the construction, launch and missions of the two recent Mars rovers: Spirit and Opportunity.

The story begins at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California where you spend some quality time in the clean-room assembling one of the rovers. When they pack up the rover for launch the movie switches to mostly computer animation, including the launch and all the mission “footage” on Mars.

Watching anything in the Mugar IMAX theater is awesome. The sound system is a monster and it really got pushed during the rocket launch scene. The film was educational and entertaining, and, like most IMAX films, lasted just under an hour. If you’re into robotics or space exploration you’ll absolutely love it, if not you’ll still probably find it mostly entertaining.

Since moving to Boston a couple of years ago I’ve had the opportunity to attend lots of events and conferences about different (and usually nerdy) subjects. One of the most interesting events I attended last year was Barcamp Boston.

Barcamp is an “unconference” meaning that the sessions are not predetermined but rather they are assembled on-the-fly. So, if you want to talk about web-scale database architecture you can write that title in an upcoming time slot on the schedule, grab a room and start talking. Usually the person who created the topic will give a 10-20 minute presentation, sometimes prepared sometimes not, then there is a group discussion for the remainder of the time. Barcamp attendees are from interesting and diverse backgrounds so you get great insight from angles you haven’t even thought of. It’s a great opportunity to not only share your knowledge with others but also to ask for help or feedback from a very intelligent community.

If you are at all interested in computer science, robotics, or technology in general, you should check out Barcamp. It’s being held at MIT the weekend of April 25-26 and i’s free to attend (although making a donation is appreciated). Make sure to register for Barcamp so the organizers can get an accurate headcount.

Internet Explorer security warning

While testing a new feature tonight, I stumbled upon a very unusual and annoying Internet Explorer bug.

I have an ASP.NET page with a form on it, when that form is submitted the result is a redirect to another website. The website that I am being redirected to has an invalid SSL certificate and it causes a warning to come up in Internet Explorer. The bug is that when you click to allow the security error it re-submits the form. That means your form gets submitted twice. Data might be stored twice, it might mess up your conversion rate tracking, etc.  I have not tested this with a non-ASP.NET page yet but I suspect the platform doesn’t matter. As long as the result of your form submission is a server-side redirect you will probably experience this bug.

I have only seen this behavior in Internet Explorer 7 and 8, the same form works fine in Firefox, Chrome and Safari. The good news is that this is easy to fix: Don’t redirect to an insecure domain.

One of the fun things about working at HubSpot is our many chances to get together outside of work and enjoy some food, drinks and conversation. When you work with cool and fun people hanging out somewhere other than the office is a lot of fun.

Once a month, we take just the Development team and either have dinner or do some sort of an activity. A couple of days ago we had a take-out party at Yoav’s for the March Dev Team event. We ordered lots of different food (Thai, Chinese, Indian, Wings, etc.) and drank some beers, Cava and some Sake (Yoav always has great wine and sake on hand). The star of the dinner table was the insanely rich cake that came from Finale. It had layers of chocolate cake, fudge, ganache and caramel and it was spectacular. I ate way too much and had a lot of fun.

Promo CDs from Universal Music

I don’t blog about it much but in addition to a software developer I’m also a DJ and House music producer. I play about once a month at the Boston after-hours club RISE. One of the perks of being a DJ is getting lots of upfront music. A while back a friend and fellow DJ, Joe Bermudez, dropped my name to a local representative from Universal Music and I’ve been getting little care packages ever since. Usually they are just CD singles but yesterday I received Common’s complete new album, Universal Mind Control. I don’t play hip-hop when I DJ but I’m a big Common fan and definitely looking forward to listening to this CD. If you’re interested in my music and DJing you can check out the website for my alter ego Daniel David, Boston House DJ.

When I got home from work tonight I switched on the TV saw an App Store commercial from Apple. The commercial talked about lots of random things that you might want to do and how there is an App Store app for each of them. It then occurred to me that Apple has become the new Microsoft.

In the 1980’s software developers were struggling to produce applications. You had to worry about very low level operations, memory management, disk I/O, cross-platform inconsistencies, all before you even got to work on the business logic of your application. And then along came Microsoft and basically said to developers “We’ll take care of the boring stuff, you guys just work on what your app is supposed to solve.” Microsoft provided a platform for developers along with APIs to access all the important parts of the computer that would be needed for an application. Life got better for developers, so they wrote more software, more of those applications became hits and sold more copies of Microsoft Windows. It was a lucrative, symbiotic relationship.

Now let’s fast forward to 2007: Developers are struggling to produce applications for mobile devices. They have to worry about the multitude of operating systems, the inconsistencies of networks, GPS chips and power management. Then along comes Apple, the master of consumer electronics, and tells developers “We’ll take care of the device stuff, you guys just worry about the applications.” Suddenly it’s the 1980’s all over again. Apple provides the platform and marketplace and developers provide the software. Consumers buy more of everything.

Of course, neither of these situations are quite as rosy as I’ve painted them. As it turns out Microsoft didn’t quite nail their operating system and developers were forced to maintain software on a buggy, quirky platform. They also had to worry about distributing their applications and getting upgrades to customers. Since distribution wasn’t free, neither were the upgrades. Sometimes users had to pay to just get basic bug fixes. That aggravated customers so developers started holding back releases until they had new features worth paying for.

Apple manged to get the operating system right by building on Unix and it’s 30+ years of (relative) stability. They got distribution for (nearly) free by using the internet and the iTunes software that every iPhone/iPod user already used. Upgrades and bug fixes went out for free, keeping customers happy and quickening the pace of releases. Apple took more pressure off developers. But with the peace of mind that Apple provided developers they managed to seal them inside a walled garden. iPhone/iPod is a closed platform and applications developed for it are not portable. Historically, closed platforms have not held developer’s interests for long, so I suspect that the future of mobile applications may be on an open platform, like Google’s Android. 

Both eras should were beneficial for developers. The important part of each ecosystem is that developers get to develop instead of messing with the low level things. Consequently, they get better at their craft, and whatever the next platform-du-jour may be, the developers are ready for it. So although I don’t particularly enjoy thinking about Apple as the new Microsoft, I have to congratulate them for it.