Julio’s Musings Around Columbia County, New York

If we outsource our Software Development , we can save considerable labor costs. For each USA based employee we can have 4 or 5 based on current ratios of India development resources. True, if the disparity between where the resources are currently located and where they will be outsourced to is large, you will save some personnel costs but is that the sole determinant whether it is a good idea or not?
Dispersing technology development/support (or operations) throughout the world has benefits besides cost and based on labor rate differentials. If you have a large enough inventory of sites to support that operate 24/7, having a team of System Administrators that overlap various timezones should improve the responsiveness when things inevitably go wrong. Also allows for system maintenance during the slow hours in whatever market the particular site has it’s lull. Also, you can smooth out the demand and supply imbalances in actual engineering resources that make acquiring engineering resources problematic regardless of what the pay scale is in certain markets.
On the other hand, if you are working in a domain that is subject to large amounts of uncertainty and market pressures in leap frogging features, what does a lower labor rate coupled with the latency inherent in time differences and maintaining context get you except 2nd , 3rd or further down in timely meeting the market need?
I have worked in situations where design is in the Eastern Time Zone and Web development on India time. A change in design would easily take 48 hour turnaround just to get the correct understanding of what the feature represented and how it fit into the rest of the product/design flow before anything could possibly be engineered. Given that Frontend Web development is relatively low technology this minimum latency is dysfunctional and has an attendant cost in frustration on the part of the involved product team including executive management as well as missed opportunities in the marketplace.

The aforementioned should not be cast as a criticism of engineering in India as those engineering teams are thrust into a position where success is not achievable.

I thought I would have gotten into the habit of blogging regularly , like everyday. Alas that has not happened yet with all I am doing which sometimes seems like it is always filling out one paper form or another. Lets face it what has automation and computers truly done for us other then sometimes helping us consume our day with one or another type of administrative work. Since Administrative Assistants are largely a thing of the past and who is actually going to do it for your personal life unless you are child , this grunt activity seems to be what we actually living for.
Anyway, this is probably a half baked rant about why I have not been able to blog on a daily basis.

Actually the form filling is being done for a host of exciting developments for myself. One for instance is the completion of my second Bachelor’s degree. Way back during my youth I decided to go for a Bachelors in Computer Science and Mathematics. It was a redundant BA as I already had one but I figured what I would learn and the actual confirming piece of paper would serve me well. I completed all of the requirements for the Degree except for those College specific general requirements like a Gym class and an additional English Comp. Class. I was not able to complete those 2 fundamental requirements as the act of living and making a living trumped pure academia. Fast forward a decade or two and I still have the desire for the “piece of paper” validating the investment in time and knowledge acquired. The gym class is no longer a requirement which is natural given 300 pounders are now the norm instead of the exception and in place of English I have a diversity class requirement in the Africana and Puerto Rican Studies Department. I decided to sign up in the spring semester 2010 for the Africana/PR class which is an intense reading and writing class. The first day of class was beautiful as the crew from “Revolution Books” sold the course texts in between a speech around class struggle and such. Revolution Books is the publishing wing of an avowed Communist Organization based partly in New York City (Where else!). At least the political slant at my beloved CUNY ( City University of New York) has remained consistent over the years from my original studies and degree and now that I know better it should make for an intense rapport during the actual class. Of course not so intense the Professor holds it against me during the grading process. The class professor is charming as well. Maybe half charming. When I asked about how to get reading assignments when a class is missed, I thought she was going to have a heart attack right there in front of us all that I could possibly miss a class. Well I have to miss a class and her suggestion of becoming a buddy with someone (a half clueless 18 year old) to get the assignment is dead on arrival. I will just read the entire course material which are presented by a short story anthology and a book of poems. Not a big deal! So far what I have read, (Collymore,Wickham,Marquez and Arenas) have been excellent except for Marquez’s one sentence “The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship”. I just can’t deal with a 5 page run on sentence even if that is the way we think and the short story is basically a stream of consciousness.
The pimply faced student at the Computing Center was helpful or as helpful as he could be telling me it would take about a week to get my Hunter ID so I could avail myself of the campus wireless network. Given the fact this is something that can be setup or revoked in seconds in a relatively well run Private business, the good is they have wireless which is not something they had back when I was there originally, the bad is academia still has this lack of appreciation for time like we treat it in the real world. At least for the first few days, looks like it is Starbucks Wireless or sufficing on smartphones.

As I was working during the time of the New York Jets Playoff game on Saturday January 9th, 2010 (working on the computer that is) I decided to experiment with Google’s Realtime feature and a query of New York Jets. Of course I could have turned on the radio or streamed video of the game but I wanted an apparently less intrusive medium.



The screenshot is a point in time during the second quarter. I was impressed with the performance of the stream , most of it coming from twitter of course but also interspersed with a few from Blog/WebSites (Yahoo Sports). It wasn’t realtime as listening to it on radio or watching it on Television but it had it’s own charm as apparently most of the “tweets” were from New York Jet fans which was gratifying. The stream actually had the unintended result of ripping me from my concentration on work and plopping me in front of the Television to watch the remainder of the game in the conventional way. Listening to the broadcast with the un-biased play by play and color commentators I longed for the pure biased passion of the people who were inadvertently part of the realtime stream. There has to be a marriage somewhere in this. Watching sports is an emotional event whether you are rooting for your own team, rooting against a team you dislike, or just have money riding on the outcome (probably the most emotional circumstance).

Outsourcing is not a new topic especially when it comes to Software Engineering. I remember at the beginning of my own career ; the dinosaurs
represented by the mainframe applications and the developers that maintained them. Overwhelmingly Cobol/CICS applications , some of the applications were already a generation old (a human generation that is). Though these applications ran business critical functions, they were not in active development or even active maintenance until the Y2K hysteria took hold as the year 2000 approached.
Taking the little maintenance that was needed to keep the applications operational and packaging them for support overseas with cheaper labor made sense unless of course you were one of the Cobol developers who quickly saw their opportunities dry up. Anyway, with little to no change, tightly controlled operational environments, well defined and documented interfaces, few public facing expectations from mass market consumers and little competition, moving support and maintenance halfway around the world had minimally discernible effect on reliability and correctness of the systems and in many if not most instances had the attendant positive impact of reducing cost.

Fast forward to the world of today and the past decade with the ubiquity of the Web as we know it. Even though a website is more then it’s visual design (sorry Designers) just think of what the rate of change is for the typical website. The domains may stay the same but the user experience is constantly mutating and websites, save for portals have a life-time measured in months, not years. With this type of change, bifurcating development/design/product between far flung timezones creates challenges that though ameliorable, come at tremendous high costs that wash out almost all of the desired “cost” benefit of outsourcing to a longer unit labor rate locale. For anyone that has ever worked on a website, the idea that a visual design is ever final is a mirage. Instead the comps (when you have those) are a development starting point. As the development proceeds and the site takes on sufficient mass, constant revisiting of how the development site looks, feels and operates in a semi real environment drives what changes need to be made to the previous “final” set of design/product requirements. Try to manage this scenario when for example you have perhaps 2 hours of overlap between India and the Eastern Time zone of the United States which during part of the year is 10.5 hours difference. Though the changes come from realtime, usually co-located folks interacting with the current state of the site, the folks remote who are usually the development team are not part of that interaction. Before they can actually adapt they need to reset and understand what the changes are about. Given the small daily overlap between widely divergent timezones , you introduce a large amount of latency as the overlap is used to recalibrate an understanding of what the site is supposed to do now and then you have to wait another day to see how good the understanding was based on the work product from the remote team while you were sleeping.

Next Installment - What Of Web Development can benefit from Sourcing remotely.

As I rush headlong to a new chapter, I am spending even more time on all of these social networking sites which keep one connected in many different contexts (professional, Closest 1000 friends, etc).
Not like I am not already use to it as I am in the business of building web sites and large ones at that, Nevertheless, if one doesn’t exploit every avenue of connecting/decimating oneself on the web it’s like you don’t exist.
This time around as I update my resume, a soft Word Document file is not enough and actually quite nostalgic. Now I will have it stored and accessible on emurse.com , downloadable in various formats including Word Document, with built in analytics as to how many accesses/download and and on my own personalized url at juliomiyares.emurse.com
Does seem like self promotion has really taken off. No longer just for celebrities. Of course all the Social Networking sites has cute widgets that let you publish them as freely and broadly as possible.

It’s already been frequently repeated but what you put out about yourself is available to all with little effort. It’s like you have a slew of pavarazzi waiting for your every move. Of course these are not human pavarazzi but the potentially more dangerous automaton types. They don’t miss anything and They don’t forget either.

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Tags: Twitter, Emurse, Facebook, LinkedIn, jittr

Back in the day, slightly before the advent of the Internet or World Wide Web, the best way to either anonymously take a dig at someone or laugh at their expense was writing/reading the graffiti on the bathroom stall.
Mind you, I was never a writer - just couldn’t remember to bring a pen with me for those moments and I thought it was somewhat lame anyway. But reading it was a great way to spend the time you had.

Most bathroom stalls had no room for any more scribbling and it was just scribbling on top of scribbling. Sometimes it was racist, actually during a part of my growing up in New York when race relations were not what they should have been, it seemed like 1/3 of the scribblings were taking shots at every race with all sides freely involved.

Now it has moved to the WWW where the likes of Silicon Alley Insider (I won’t put the link as I don’t want to confer “link juice” to them) have become the bathroom stall but with all the inherent power of vast distribution / SEO and a multitude of contributors who previously wouldn’t dare take a chance at defacing public property.

You have a gripe with someone? now you can anonymously thrash them and think you won’t be caught by writing a slanderous comment about them on a post hopefully related to where they work. Of course if there is the will there is the way to trace who the suspected anonymous commented are but it does require a lot of “bothering” and generally isn’t worth the trouble.

Anyway, the bathroom stall lives on as a metaphor on the Web and for those that are lame enough to slander anonymously, think about it- no one cares enough even in a negative way to write about you!

Pretty impressive on first view! If I am not listening to “What the Web is listening to now (music.aol.com) or Spinner’s Song of the Day, this is what I listen to for free music.

Tags: Pandora, Jittr, Julio Hernandez-Miyares

Been thinking. What is the eventual fate of Google? Using myself as an example, of course I use it for 99.5% of my Search queries. It pretty much acts as a rudimentary “braincap”. Anything I don’t know but need or want to know , I start with Google.com. I use Gmail though admittedly it is not my primary address as I prefer a @mac.com address. But, I do use Google Mail to serve as the mail server for my company email @jittr.com. Though I have Dreamhost as my hosting provider, I have “outsourced” the mail service to Google for free and benefit from it’s high availabllity and excellent spam filtering. I use Google as my Content Distribution Network for static Javascript library files. In certain instances have used Google Docs and am actively considering it for future spreadsheet and word documents like activities as I am not inclined to continue to pay Microsoft the licensing fees for their services. I use Google Analytics for Web reporting and though it is related to Search, I use Google as a reference point for vanity (about me) communications.

At what point does the dependency on Google become so great it becomes a must have for the economy or for the national well-being?

Now , it were it were to become a government agency it would have to change it’s ranking algorithms to return results based on some Federal guideline for political correctness determined by whichever party held the reins of power at the moment. Creationism or Evolution, Pro-Choice or Anti Abortion, Public Health option or not, and on and on.
I don’t believe this is so far-fetched in the end.

Tags: Julio Hernandez-Miyares, jittr.com, google.com

Changing course is easy when you are providing that advise to someone else especially when the course you are talking about is what you do for a living. That is considered a “life change” event if one looks at how benefit plans characterize when you can change benefits after the “election” period.

It is difficult choice whether the economy is booming or is somewhat moribund as the present climate gives all appearances.

Admittedly being in the technology field with prime focus on “The Web” puts me in a distinctly good position. It is where most of the action is and will be (though Social Networking is “passe” and thankfully so) for many years to come as it’s utility and novel ways to be utilitarian evolve.

I have tremendous appreciation for the opportunities I have been provided over the past few years to not only work with people who know Search and the Web and have been leaders in those fields but also to be allowed to build things that millions of people have used and hopefully have enjoyed.

I love watching the iron workers starting with nothing but a pit and piece by piece soaring into the Manhattan sky the framework of a majestic edifice. I feel that being in technology development, we are somewhat of the iron workers of the new economy. Somewhat of a stretch at a certain level as we don’t risk plummeting downward with a single mis-step but it feels about the same when things go awry which they often do.

In the end, I have chosen of my own accord to start fresh and take the “plunge” leaving the caccoon of a large safe company and depend on myself or a small group of others to “create meaning” (as Kawasaki states in Art of the Start) .

What that meaning is I don’t yet know as this is the first day but an exciting day it is.

Tags: Julio Hernandez-Miyares, Columbia County

As I was raking leaves with my daughter this past autumn Saturday, a group of high school kids in all their glory passed by , jostling , joking and strutting. They seemed so carefree that I felt like dropping the rake and all my responsibilities and just tagging along. Well I didn’t. What I did was ask my 10th Grade daughter if she knew the kids? She said with a clear smirk she did and they were freshman. She went on to lambast them and say no one liked the freshmen , that they were wimps of some sort (it was getting cool outside and related to the cold). We got into it a little more and I asked her if she and her friends fraternized with them and she said “no way”. When I asked what she and her friends did when they came and sat on the same table in the cafeteria she said “we ignore them!”

Anyway, I just loved it. Though I am was not a girl it did bring some memories back from my own high school years. Mind you , I would and never did have the kind of attitude my daughter expressed as I would think it better to have a lively cafeteria table then a group of siloed cliques. Nevertheless there was just something raw about the whole thing and was wondering if I could bring the same approach to the work place. Well I am only kidding or day dreaming of course but that attitude if I don’t like you I am not going to deal with you even if you are in my face was something I had not thought about in a long time.

It has a certain power and finding something so trivial to differentiate as being in 9th or 10th grades
has a certain wonder to me as I contemplate the mind of a high schooler.