2 pistons

Been talking to a business partner recently and he was sharing that his 3D company’s current workflow is still not ideal and is looking at advancing it to the next level. I did some quick search and stumbled upon what I feel is almost exactly what they should be looking at. Unfortunately, the software is still in beta stage but do look through the demo to see what it’s capable of. It’s really cool!

http://www.shotgunsoftware.com/

It’s been a long while since we really had time to do something for ourselves as we have always been real busy developing systems for our clients to improve their business processes and make them potentially more profitable while greatly neglecting ourselves to improve our own systems. For the past 2 months since things have been slightly quieter, we have managed to get a few internal things going

1. Open LDAP

We have managed to get ourselves on OpenLDAP. This essentially eliminates the need for us to assign different usernames and passwords for the different systems we have (which is quite a lot). The next steps are to really get all our systems to be using OpenLDAP for usernames and password. The final icing on this piece would be to have SSO so that staff just needs to login once and can get to any of our internal systems without having to login to individual systems. I will surely update this when we achieve this as we have been getting more and more enquiries on implementing SSO solutions. Why not just use our own company’s setup as a case study

2. TAC Gallery

Being a company that has been in existent for close to a decade, we have quite a few classic photos that we would like to put in a central repository. We have used php’s Gallery application for quite a while but we did not have the time to properly set it up to call it our own. Recently due to some staff/company events that happened, we managed to take a few more photos that we would like to keep forever! I finally managed to upgrade the gallery to the latest edition which fixes quite a few bugs from the previous version to make it now a complete gallery. I got the help from our fame designer Tuck to come up with a few images and header graphics to customize the look. Going through the system’s setup and configuration impressed me a lot. Coming up with an application that is so well thought of in almost every respect is really one of the targets I would like us to be able to achieve in the near future.

3. Maintenance Tools

I am sure we have encountered one time or another having to do maintenance work for our client where we had to adhere to certain standards like producing HTMLs in a certain way, packaging ready files in a certain structure and all these are very prone to human errors. We have decided that enough is enough, we need a way to not only speed this tedious process up but make it more accurate. Hence we have developed an application that would handle the necessary HTML conversions and packaging. I will share the results once this application has gone through a few weeks of usage.

As some would know. I have been actively cycling for the past year after a decade plus of absence. What actually surprised me a little was that I could actually keep this going for so long (and there is no end in sight) as it was initially thought to be another one of my fads in life where it would die off after a few months tops. A few of the factors that I think helps are as follows:

1. Competitive Environment
(Cycling)
As I am always in a semi-competitive situation whenever I cycle, there is always this rush to be pushing myself to the limits and  it feels
good to be able to beat a targeted cyclist or to beat my personal best time.

(Work)
Even though a lot of us do not think this way, we will always be competing with our colleagues at work whether we intend to be or not. Competition keeps us on our toes and makes sure we do not rest on our laurels and keep pushing ourselves to be better than the rest, to constantly set the bar higher for the rest to follow instead of the other way around. Recognition ultimately goes to the ultra performers

2. Camaraderie
(Cycling)
Cycling to me is a team sport. Without having people in the team to push each other on to improve, it would make it that much harder
to sustain. I can’t remember the countless times where I would have given up waking up to cycle if it had not been for those ‘voices’
telling me to get my lazy ass up and go train with them.

(Work)
To me in all jobs, we do need a team to be supporting us. It is never easy to do everything alone. Team members would be there to encourage us to drive us on. Personally I have benefited a whole lot from working with a team rather than by myself as we have complimentary skills to ensure that the final product would be a better one than if it had been delivered alone.

3. Cycling does not make me feel like exercising
(Cycling)
Why other forms of exercise have failed for me is that they felt too much like a chore. “I must reduce weight!” comes to mind every time
I start to jog. I just did not have fun doing that at all. Cycling is so much fun! Every time I get down to cycling, I feel that I am having a
fun outing and thus I want more after every ride!

(Work)
To excel, I think it is important that one’s work must not be seen as work as that would hamper progress. It should be something that one is happy to be doing and enjoy the process. Every obstacle should be seen as an interesting challenge.

4. Seeing results drives me on
(Cycling)
Perhaps one of the most satisfying factors is that I can actually see results from my cycling. Improved fitness, weight reduction. This is
something that I have always wanted to do but could not do prior to cycling. Once I get to see the results of my hard labour, it just
becomes a drug where I want more of where that comes from.

(Work)
In this aspect, once you see the fruits of labour from your work where you learnt something new and is now capable of doing your work more effectively, you would naturally want to carry on doing what you are doing and even improving further to make sure you get more success

Everyone has heard of the phrase ‘building a pipeline of ….’ Loosely speaking, it is building something sustainable over the long term. A book I read was basically describing the life of 2 friends whom were in the same situation. Poor but able. While Tom decided to make use of his physical strength to carry as many buckets of water he could per day (paid by number of buckets of water he could deliver), his friend John took the approach of earning less at that moment by carrying less buckets of water but instead spend time to build a pipeline to deliver water to the village. This pipeline took a good 20 years to build but John ultimately reap the rewards of his long term vision.

Applying this to a company’s perspective, we have been operating ‘happily’ like Tom. We are getting projects out the door and collecting the money without optimizing our total approach. After being in the industry for a good number of years, it is time to recognize that we need to change this approach to that of building a pipeline where most projects should ultimately flow through and be delivered at a faster rate, with less effort and more accuracy. Once this pipeline is up, efforts spent would be on strengthening the pipeline instead of wasting time reinventing the wheel. Optimizing the delivery from design to templates production to backend integration would form the basis for this pipeline.

Nobody says it is going to be easy. Many would feel that it is a waste of time because delivery of projects, while building this pipeline, is a painful and slow process with lots of hiccups. What is important is to know that this pipeline is going to revolutionalize how things are done in the company and benefit everyone in the company

We are constantly looking at ways to improve our web application delivery and came across this.  Code Review.

Actually in our daily work, I am sure we have done this one way or another with our colleagues, it is just that it was never formalized into a process which lead to inconsistent results where some of our deliveries are better than the others.

To me, the most important factor of code review is that it acts as your 2nd pair of eyes. As developers, I have always felt that sometimes when in the thick of a project, one would be in a zone where we might end up writing silly algorithms or forgetting to do some checks that are essential for security purposes. Having a simple peer code review definitely helps in this area which if done as a process would certainly improve quality of delivery whether it is required by our clients or not.

Of course, this might mean a few things
1. Our cost of delivery increases because we have to spend time to do reviews which does take up time
2. We would encounter situations where reviews might be taken negatively as it means ones code is under scrutiny

For 1.  It might be argued that although it takes time to do the review, the time spent on fixing bugs might be reduced due to better code quality thus offsetting the former.

For 2. If developers keep in mind what the objective of such reviews are for and the person doing the review remembers that it is not a “Who is the superior developer”. The end result benefits both the developer and ultimately the company. I certainly have benefited from the peer reviews I had with my team mate back in the days when I was still actively coding.

This is one process that is worth adopting as a standard