There’s tons written about the world of startups and even freelancers, but almost nothing written about the world of software development services. The underbelly of the startup world, shops which get hired to do a lot of the dev work. I’ve decided to start blogging a bit more about it, mostly adapting emails i’ve sent to my team . Hopefully they won’t kill me for using them as an example. The joy of being a consultant is that you’ve got more freedom over your time, the downside is that eventually your time is logged and billed to a client hourly. That means rather than just reporting what you’ve done in a sprint retrospective, you’ve got to keep a log. At Cubox, we use minutedock , it’s nifty and comes from New Zealand, a country which like Uruguay, is small, was invaded by the british, has the southern most capital in it’s hemisphere, and has way more sheep than people. When developers are billing their time, they need to track what they were doing. It’s hard for clients to know if you spent the day playing call of duty, or fixing some complicated bug. The time logged in minutedock is provided to clients in our invoices, as written. It is the primary way in which everybody knows what you were working on, how the project is advancing, and if there are problems. When clients are worried about how much things cost, they use these items to dispute payments. All entries in the time log need to be detailed. They need to say specifically what you were doing and what value it provides to the client. Remember these may be read weeks, or months after you wrote them, by somebody who does not understand the code or architecture of the application. All work we do should have an associated ticket in pivotal tracker, if it doesn’t exist when you start to do the work, add the ticket. It’s how we track things, it’s how our clients know what we’re working on. All time logs in minutedock should have the full ticket title. If you’re working on a sub-part of that ticket you should include that information. Examples of from the logs; The good, the bad, and the ugly. GOOD – “Implement Connect Flow Header to Confirmation step, routes modification for testing, style changes, copy modification” GOOD – “Clean up validations of Deal/PurchaseOrder. Fix bug with Purchase order and refund” GOOD – “Updating rubydeps for ruby 1.9 to create a dependency graph” GOOD – “#meetings discussing high-level architecture, services, jobs, and the implementation of the customer FSMs” GOOD – “Fix purchase order creation for new customers WIP” GOOD – “Fixing template error in collect_address_data partial” BAD – “We have a bazillion pending tests. See to that.” BAD – “Analytics, resque, etc.” BAD – “Changes in coffeescript models” BAD – “Changes for KM and GA” BAD – “oauth” BAD – “Pairing with pablo” BAD – “Pairing with pote” BAD – “Js client” BAD – “Meeting with Clark” BAD – “Fixing Mixpanel gem bugs” BAD – “Fixing sign up issues” BAD – “integration tests” BAD – “Improve site usability” UGLY – “” (Thursday Feb 2 – 0:45) The good ones are clear and descriptive. They include more text and i can understand what was worked on even if i wasn’t following the project day to day. The bad ones are vague, sometimes not related to the work at all. Often the bad ones are like 12 hours ‘oauth’ or 8 hours ‘integration tests’. Sometimes the bad ones include abbreviations which aren’t explained or documented anywhere. Very few programmers are judged by the quality of code itself. Ironically enough, we judge programmers by the window dressing around their code. That is, those blog posts, talks, readme files, and application as a whole which is judged. Star programmers are known for what they built and how they communicated it. When doing contracting, as we do at cubox, a big part of that communication are the tickets we write when we log our time. It feels dumb, and less important than the real work. What’s more, it’s a written language, not code. It’s important, and it’s how we’ll be judged.

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Logging consulting hours – The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

On The Disney Blog, John Frost describes the upcoming rule-tightening for FastPasses in Walt Disney World. FastPass is a ride reservation system: park visitors visit a ride, feed their entry ticket to a kiosk, and it spits out a coupon that can be redeemed later in the day for admission via a shorter queue. Until now, FastPass expiry times were not enforced (that is, the pass might say it was good for 3-4PM, but you could use it any time after 3), which led people like me to collect FastPasses all morning (you can get one every hour or so) when the lines were short, and then use them all in a bunch in the afternoon when the lines got longer.

Frost says the rule change is a precursor to a much more dramatic change, a FastPass replacement (?) called xPass, which allows visitors to reserve their ride-times far in advance, over the Web, simultaneous with their other bookings — dining, hotel, etc. This feels like it would suck a lot of spontaneity out of Disney World visits, though for certain very slow-loading/long-queueing rides, it would be nice to guarantee a ride in advance.

Meanwhile, Frost has some excellent suggestions for ways to fine-tune the new FastPass system:

Here are a few tweaks I would like Disney to do to improve the FastPass system a bit.

* More surprise fastpasses. Standby queue dropping below 15 minutes? Send a digital fastpass to guests on their mobile phones.
* Shorten the wait time required to get an additional fast pass later in the day.
* Let guests pick their return window. Maybe just morning, afternoon, or night. But at least that way you have an option if you arrive at a fastpass machine only to find out you have an restaurant reservation scheduled for that same time.
* Allow locals to get a digital fast pass for one ride from home the night before. Make it for afternoon or peak dining times only. This solves the having to show up at the crack of dawn problem.
* Rides with a through-put of more than 2000 guests an hour should not have fastpass. Instead move those machines to spinners and other low capacity attractions.
* Display publicly the number of fastpasses that can be redeemed an hour. Perhaps as a % of the standby queue. This will help guests decide if they need to get a Fastpass for the attraction or not.
* Limit the number of Fastpass that can be issued before 11AM to 50% of the day’s fastpasses. This saves some Fastpass capacity for guests who arrive later in the day

Fastpass Changes Coming to Walt Disney World

(Image: Rockin Rollercoaster Fastpass Walt Disney Hollywood Studios, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from kathika’s photostream)

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Walt Disney World tightens the rules on FastPasses

That’s twice in two days. Yesterday, security firm Zvelo discovered a potential exploit against rooted phones. Today, tech blog TheSmartphoneChamp discovered how to accomplish the same feat on non-rooted phones. More »

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Google Wallet Hacked Again [Video]

Every graphical and technical advance the game industry has seen from Pong to Crysis has been a small step toward the end goal of a real-time, photorealistic 3D world that is truly indistinguishable from a real-world scene. Speaking at the DICE Summit Thursday, Epic Games founder and programmer Tim Sweeney examined the speed and direction of computing improvements and determined that we “might expect, over the course of our lifetime, we’d get to amounts of computing power that come very close to simulating reality.”

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How close are we to truly photorealistic, real-time games?

Like most hacks, this discovery of a way to find an Android phone’s Google Wallet PIN requires a lot of initial access but is disturbing nonetheless. Google knows about the hack and is repairing it. Discovered by Joshua Rubin of Zvelo, the hack is one of the most interesting attacks on Google Wallet so far.

In short, this hack allows access to credit card data and purchase history and could, in theory, allow a hacker to use a Google Wallet freely in the wild. However, it does require the hacker to have unfettered root access to the phone. Using a small program, the exploit simply brute-forces a file found in the phone, thereby revealing the PIN and unlocking the wallet.

Again, the hack requires a rooted Android phone – a state that is trivial to achieve if your phone is stolen – and a bit of know how. Rubin recommends:

Google recommends that anyone with Google Wallet call their toll-free support line at 855-492-5538 to ask that their prepaid card be disabled. They also recommend setting a lock screen.

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Android Hack Exposes Google Wallet PIN On Demand

Wolfram Alpha has made some fairly big strides in its few short years of existence, but the so-called computational knowledge engine has now rolled out what founder Stephen Wolfram says is the “the single most important development for Wolfram Alpha since the original website launched in 2009.” That development is Wolfram Alpha Pro, a new premium service that will run you $4.99 a month (or $2.99/month for students) and give you access to a wealth of new options for both input and output. On the input end, you can now upload images, audio and other files (over 60 types in all) for automatic analysis and a detailed report — according to Stephen Wolfram, the ultimate goal being “to do what a top data scientist would do if given the user’s data.” As for output, you’ll now be able to take advantage of a number of richer download options, including the ability to interact with and tailor the reports to your liking. As you might expect, however, that’s just scratching the surface — you can get a detailed look at the new service at the links below, or take it for a spin yourself with a free trial subscription.

Continue reading Wolfram Alpha Pro now available, $4.99 a month will let you throw almost anything at it for analysis

Wolfram Alpha Pro now available, $4.99 a month will let you throw almost anything at it for analysis originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wolfram Alpha Pro now available, $4.99 a month will let you throw almost anything at it for analysis

Cutting_Crew writes “As we all know brick and mortar stores have been closing left and right recently. We had CompUSA, Borders and Circuit City all close their doors within the last 4 years. According to an article on Forbes.com, it is spelled out pretty clearly why Best Buy is next in line to shut its doors for good. Some of the reasons highlighted include a 40% drop is Best Buy stock in 2011, lack of vision regarding their online services, management too concerned with store sales instead of margins and blatant disregard for quality customer service.”

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The Gradual Death of the Brick and Mortar Tech Store

The iconic VW camper van paved the way for the modern motorhome, but they were barely big enough for a couple of hippies. So a UK company has created the Doubleback with an extending pod that can fit a whole commune. More »

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Extending Camper Vans Give the Modern Hippy Plenty Of Leg Room [Video]

That’s twice. In two days. Yesterday, security firm Zvelo discovered a potential exploit against rooted phones. Today, tech blog TheSmartphoneChamp discovered how to accomplish the same feat on non-rooted phones. This is not good. More »

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Google Wallet Has Been Hacked Again, Now You Should Panic [Video]