What we like, what we do & bump into

If I tell you that some frogs can solve your communication issues within your team, department or even the entire company, all that within one month, will you consider this crazy?

Well, I hope your answer will be “it depends”, so I get the chance to explain myself.

Here is an hypothetical situation in an imaginary company X: the people don’t know to communicate with each other, they don’t work together, they don’t help each other, for each issue there is always somebody else at fault, they often deliver late so the company X keep loosing clients … managers try to find out who’s fault is but no results – “trainings and team-buildings were useless.”

An external consultant magically appears and propose a game. He said:

“I’ll rent you some frogs.

There are red ones and green ones, all rubber.

Those frogs are trained to search and find issues within your company.

Here is how:

- each of you in this company will receive three numbered red frogs

- you’ll offer one of these red frogs to someone you consider closest to the root of an issue you may have (you can offer maximum two red frogs each day).

- a referee will keep track who offered a red frog to whom, recording also the reason / the issue

- if the receiver is in the other team / department then you should offer the frog to the manager of that team / department

- everyone should accept a red frog and keep it at least 24 hours.

- if the one that received the frog has a solution for the issue, then:

- the referee will change the red frog with a green frog, save the solution and close the issue.

- more than that, the referee will give back one new red frog so other issues can be detected

- else, the owner of the red frog should pass along the red frog to someone he consider to be closest to the root of the issue.

I’ll come back in a month to see what my frogs found”

Q1: What are the expected results of this game?

This could be the shortest way to find out what are the real roots of any issue within the company and, more important, the solution.

And you’ll get that while not the people but the frogs will carry all the emotions deducted from mark someone as the possible root of an issue.

Mainly, when the game is over, when we talk about the issues left open, there are 2 situations:

1. the red frog reached the root of the issue: probably low skills or low motivation for that person.

2. the red frog is in a loop back: there are big chances to have a huge issue since nobody took responsibility or had a solution. maybe a paradigm-shift is needed.

Q2: What are the data collected about teams, roles and information flow within company X?

One could find out all the tasks he is supposed to take care of.

Another one could learn how others rely on him, why his results are important, what is the value of his work.

A manager could optimize the processes within his department by removing the redundancy.

Q3: Do you see any benefit in implementing this game? Any drawback?

+ The issue and the solution are more important than who’s at fault.

+ frustrations and/or fears to address any issue will be gone, the frogs will carry this, not the people involved.

+ people will better understand their role within the company

- for a large company the game should be played more times.

- also for a large company the process of tracking frogs/issues/solutions does not seem to be handy

Do you have any other answers to Q1, Q2 or Q3?

Or maybe you will just want to add something.

Then feel free to post your comments.

P.S. I cannot take the credits for the story itself, nor point out the source. It is somewhere in the cloud…

I’ll go straight to the subject: you’ll ask “why use VM? It sounds like trouble!”

There is this myth that the host machine works terribly hard when VM starts and there’s nothing else you can do in the meantime. This is probably true if while web developing you also want to encode MPEG4 a raw video at HD resolution.

The virtualization technology has gone a long way in the past couple of years, and, thus, a decent host machine (dual core, 2 GB RAM) works well if you have a VM with Ubuntu 10.04 without Gnome/KDE (with no X) and with Apache, PHP, MySQL to which you assign 512 MB RAM and that will also run smooth.

There is also the myth that if you work by yourself for your projects, and not with a team whereby you feel the need of standardizing the development environment, you don’t need a VM. If your projects will always be for the same platform (Apache, PHP, APC, MySQl versions) and if they will be small, than you might be right. But, you may encounter the following situations:

• For the project X you will need a NGINX + PHP5.3 + FPM + MongoDB setup because it’s a great project developed on cutting edge technologies that incites you to the point of working on it day and night
• For the project Y you will have a APACHE + PHP5.2 + MySQL5.1 setup because it is a project you started two years ago and you have a great maintenance contract
• For the project Z you will have a APACHE + PHP5.3 + MySQL5.5 setup because it is a project you could not say no to; you’re doing it for a friend even though it brings no money and it’s quite boring, but it needs to be developed on a platform that requires the setup to be mentioned.
• You know that on a daily basis you need progress with each project  at least for 2 hours of work

The solution for this situation is to have a VM for each project. Joggling with work for the projects is just a matter of start/stop of the VMs.

However, as it probably happens to most of us, we work in one or more teams for several projects, each with its limitations in matters of hosting service.

It frequently happens that new people join one team or another, on one or more projects. Basically, using a VM, the time spent in enrolling into one project or the other decreases from several hours, or even one or two days for complex setups, to minutes.

I had three failed attempts before managing to pull off the first successful project developed in VM. Today I use VirtualBox (excellent and free) and set up the VM with two network interfaces, this way:

• Adapter 1: Hostonly Adapter, Intel PRO/1000 T Server
• Adapter 2: NAT, Intel PRO/1000 T Server

I have manually set the first interface:

root@dev:~# cat /etc/network/interfaces
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.56.10
netmask 255.255.255.0

For easy acces to every system file on Windows  I forced under Samba user and group root:

root@dev:~# cat /etc/samba/smb.conf
#
# …………….
#
[totsystemul]
comment = Global Share
path = /
read only = No
guest ok = Yes
public = Yes
browseable = Yes
create mask = 0666
directory mask = 0777
force group = root
force user = root
[www]
comment = var/www
path = /var/www
read only = No
guest ok = Yes
public = Yes
browseable = Yes
create mask = 0666
directory mask = 0777
force group = root
force user = root

In a future article I’ll discuss about some other aspects of working with VM and I’ll show you a VM already set up with the help of which you can start working for your new project!

Magento announced the launch of Magento Enterprise Premium edition, designed for big e-commerce projects.

Even for its price and revenues we can conclude that it addresses only to serious e-commerce businesses.

Magento Enterprise Premium

What does it consist of (mong others)?

• Three year pass for two production servers and a development server (Enterprise variant);
• A system architect and code review offered by a team of consultancy experts belonging to Magento;
• 10% discount if another 3 year pass is bought for the production servers;
• 2 places in e-Commerce with Magento training (you can read more details here).

How much is it?

There hasn’t been announced an official price yet, but the bunde is around 89.000 USD.

For detailed information, we invite you to visit the Magento web site.

Source: Somfi.me

As we told you in a previous article, Innobyte attended the Percona Live Conference in London, represented by two of our web developer colleagues. They just returned and right away we talked to them in order to find out first hand what this conference was all about.

Ana: One of Percona Live’s subjects was about the challenges that appear when using MySQL and the best solutions for solving the problems. Did you get answers or solutions for the problems you deal with?

Florin: The conference was mainly about database problems of web sites that have a lot of products or users, such as online shops. The discussions were about ways of  overcoming these problems, how to improve the responding time with the help of cache solutions, what to do in order to obtain a better u-time for your web site when there is a problem with your server.

Ana: The list of people who were supposed to hold a speech at the conference was long and impressive. Which speech did you find to be most interesting and helpful?

Cristi: It’s hard to say. Alexey Rybak, Badoo representative held a speech for about 7 hours, showing tutorials as well, then there were Percona representatives with their partners who presented solutions for databases and systems that require a lot of traffic, solutions for when you have much data, which make a programmer’s life easier. Domas Mituzas, Facebook database engineer covered another field, regarding scalability in MySQL. Really interesting was Giuseppe Maxia’s speech. He presented the way a database and multi-master replication solution was created, being able to use at the same time Oracle, Postgres and MySQL.

Ana: What is the most valuable thing you gained by participating at Percona Live Conference?

Florin: We learned a lot of things, form how to conceive an architecture to the steps that need to be followed, how to research the market, how to choose the tools you need in order to build a web-site to how to avoid the problems in case a server goes down and you need backup.

Ana: By participating to this event, do you feel your performances as web developers will be improved?

Cristi: Yes! First of all we’ll know how to create a better design of the app itself; if we had certain questions about certain aspects, whether they should or should not be used, now we have a better idea. You see tutorials, you read on the internet, but until you talk to people that actually face these problems, that have 130 million users and 1 million active users, that can tell you how to test the code, you can’t truly understand some aspects. The experience of the people form this event was truly helpful!

Two of the Innobyte team members, Cristi Datculescu and Florin Patan, will participate at the Percona Live MySQL Conference, in order to learnthe newest info regarding MySQL.

Percona Live is an intensive two days summit about MySQL that will take place in London on the 24^th and the 25^th of October. At this conference the participants will learn how to decrease costs and improve performances with innovative solutions, they will find out important info from the best companies that use MySQL, they will discuss unique challenges in using MySQL and the best solutions for them and, also, they will make contacts and exchange ideas with gurus of this domain.

The list of personalities who will hold speeches at the conference is long and made up by experts such as Peter Zaitsev, Founder and CEO – Percona, Andrew Aksyonoff, Founder and CEO – Sphinx, Domas Mituzas, Database Engineer – Facebook, Henrik Ingo, MySQL Expert – Nokia, Stephane Combaudon, MySQL DBA – Dailymotion.

We can’t wait to participate at this event but we’re even more enthusiastic about the return of our colleagues so they can share with us the novelties they learned at Percona Live MySQL Conference.