Saturday, September 29, 2007

lucy's ears


lucy's ears
Originally uploaded by wck
end of the summer fun... kids and rabbits playing in the vegetable garden. Kate and Ana have 2 rabbits, Lucy and Lenny, who are the softest, sweetest little snuggly things ever. Their dad decided that the thing to do on a sunny afternoon was to toss all 4 of them out into the vegetable garden. It has a fence all the way around it... good for keeping rabbits and kids inside.



apple shirt

lenny

Friday, September 28, 2007

pintucks

It was rainy out here this afternoon, and really muggy all day. I was home sick today with a headache. Not so fun. So to take my mind off it I made two shirts for Kate and and one and a half dresses for Ana. (The second one will be finished tomorrow probably.) I wasn't really in a good state to take pictures of what I made, so here is a dress from last weekend. It's hard to see from the close up, but the skirt is a 6 panel trumpet shape, which looks too cute on a 4 year old. Hopefully I'll get a "live action shot" on her soon. And yes, I went ribbon crazy on the skirt. I need to replenish my ribbon stock really soon since every dress lately has had a ribbon hem.

Dress Closeup

Monday, September 24, 2007

sunset


sunset
Originally uploaded by wck


If that isn't a "move to seattle" ad, I don't know what is.

Monday, September 17, 2007

erector set jr


erector set jr
Originally uploaded by wck
That's Kate playing with her erector set, making a little truck. She made a great discovery last week. She was making some brownies from a mix that I'd bought, and she turned to her mom and announced, "Aunts buy more brownie mix than moms do." That's right, she's 4, and she's discovered correlation. I've long maintained that successful software testers need to understand two things: that correlation does not necessarily imply causation, and how to make and test a hypothesis. So since Kate has correlation down she's on her way to being a nerd.

AB Testing

37 signals just did a blog post on "Secrets to Amazon's Success. Here are my favorite three points:


Use measurement and objective debate to separate the good from the bad. I’ve been to several presentations by ex-Amazoners and this is the aspect of Amazon that strikes me as uniquely different and interesting from other companies. Their deep seated ethic is to expose real customers to a choice and see which one works best and to make decisions based on those tests.

Getting rid of the influence of the HiPPO’s, the highest paid people in the room. This is done with techniques like A/B testing and Web Analytics. If you have a question about what you should do code it up, let people use it, and see which alternative gives you the results you want.

Have a way to rollback if an update doesn’t work. Write the tools if necessary.

- http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/600-secrets-to-amazons-success


That matches up to two of the biggest things that I learned at amazon- you don't know what your customers will do, so you shouldn't guess, you should A/B test. And you're going to screw up unbelievably, and constantly, so you need instant rollbacks. Here's the thing. Amazon was my first job out of college, so I really didn't know any other way to do things. One of my first testing jobs there was to test the very first automated A/B mechanism on the retail site (a version that had died long before I ended up leaving the company- like all features I worked on my first few years, it was re-done a few times to be better than the first version). Testing it wasn't all that fancy, we just checked that visitors were dropped into buckets, saw the treatments tied to those buckets, and reporting worked correctly. The bigger impact on me was the lesson that this was the most important way that new features were going to be launched. It's an incredible testament to the success of A/B testing in the company culture that when I left 7 years later, nearly every new update (and even little tweaky things) to the site was launched initially as an A/B test. Russell used to have all of his launch plaques up on the desk over his wall, with a couple flipped upside down. The upside down plaques were- yes- the projects that bombed in the launch A/B testing phase.

I couldn't even begin to describe the number of rollbacks we did over the years. If you can think of it, we screwed it up. The important part was that we could recover quickly by backing out the change, and that we had a culture of learning from the screwups. In the retail world, there was a tradition of writing "How I broke the website" emails. I will admit to writing a couple- they went out to all the engineers, and carefully analyzed how you had, well, broken the website. You discussed how the problem should have been caught, and what you were going to do differently going forward to prevent that from happening again. Now that I've been at some other companies, I can see how critical the emails were. Breaking things was bad, but more important was sharing how you messed up, and taking the time to do a post mortem of the mistake, and then freely circulating the information. It wasn't the mea culpa that mattered- although accepting responsibility was a big part of it. Larger, really, was the learning you shared with the teams, and the environment where you learned how to recover gracefully from large messes.

37 signals mentions the 'just do it' awards that Jeff handed out. Less known outside of amazon are the 'door desk awards'. I'm not sure that they're still given out, but they used to be handed out at every All Hands meeting. A door desk award was similar to a 'just do it' award, but it was given to an individual who tried something- without their manager's approval- and failed. Their feature bombed in an A/B test, their code blew up, the project never launched, whatever. It was another piece of making an engineering culture where you should just go for it, because failure wasn't the end of the world.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

declan's blog

declan


What I've been up to in the last month since I posted here: going to the beach with Kate & Ana, starting a blog for declan, riding the PATH and the ferry to work and enjoying a mostly-Penn-Station-free month, visiting the midwest for a wedding, and watching Thomas grow even bigger. Farewell summer!