wrong tool

You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool.

02 The architecturalist papers: things I have done

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My career has been a lot of fun. And as a career, I hope the best is yet to come.

There are three major pieces of technology that have shaped my view on software architecture.

The first was the delivery of a streaming media cache at NetApp. The streaming media cache was a feature of the NetCache product line. In this project, I was an individual contributor working with some of the best software architects I have had the good fortune of working with. What we built was a system that allowed us to sit between a windows media server or a quick time server or a Real Networks Server and delivery media at a lower cost per $ than having a bunch of servers.

The second was the set of products that I delivered as part of the storage management team at NetApp.  The first was a performance monitoring tool that created the first client-server product NetApp had called Performance Advisor. The second was a radical data protection tool that used policy-driven data management that was too far ahead of its time. And the third was the first solution to integrate storage and virtual machine management.

The third was my time at Zynga. What I did at Zynga, was to create a centralized operations team that delivered a shared back-end with a large of collection of services that reduced the OPEX and CAPEX of managing Web-scale infrastructures while simultaneously improving uptime. Some of the stuff we did was open sourced, like zperfmon and zbase. Our infrastructure and team were so amazing that after a mistake and a bug in a partner product, we were able to restore a 12 million DAU game with several thousand servers in less than 12 hours. The capstone of my time there was the delivery of an API infrastructure that took all of Zynga’s different backend services and put them behind a REST API that made it significantly easier to deliver features and services and enable 3rd party feature development.

Since then, I have had the good fortune to work at VMware, and a lot of what I am doing there I can’t talk about so will not. Although one thing that was accomplished as part of the 6.5 release, was an architectural review board that I chaired that reviewed many vCenter features.

The theme of my career, and what I view as strategic software architecture, is that I didn’t architect a single product. Most of the architects were people who I advised. What I did was to create the context that allowed them to deliver miracles. There were times, of course, where I had to step in, and advice requires technical understanding, but it wasn’t about me writing all or any of the code.

And this is where the confusion happens. I remember sitting in a room with a manager at NetApp. And she was screaming at me, telling me I was good for nothing worthless software architect. That a software architect created a working prototype like her husband. She was pissed that she was forced to work with me.

Given it was early in my career, I freaked out.

And I get her reaction a lot. Every time someone looks at me, and what I do they think – he doesn’t write code, so he can’t be any good. He just talks and talks and talks. And he doesn’t understand what’s really going on.

And then three years later they are like that woman who screamed at me. After we shipped the first version of the product, and more and more of the set of products started to adopt that unifying vision, she realized that I actually added a lot of value. That the whole org of over 200 people was moving in the same direction even though they were working on a variety of products. That what I did was create a context that enabled very large teams to work together well.

All that talking and probing and pushing and getting people aligned and providing the technical depth that allowed people to get unstuck produced a staggering amount of software, more than anyone human being could write in a year.

Because what I do is to figure out what are the strategic lever points, and use those lever points to move the world.

 

 

01 The architecturalist papers: prologue

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About a month ago, my wife and I attended a performance of Hamilton in San Francisco.

And afterward, as I was sitting in the car, I realized that there was a story I wanted to tell in defense of software architecture.

More precisely a story that was a  defense of the kind of software architecture I do. Because it’s a kind of software architecture that is extraordinarily valuable, and extremely undervalued: strategic software architecture. What strategic software architecture is and is not will be something this set of essays will attempt to define, describe, characterize and explain. In a nutshell, the central thesis is that for any business the strategic 5 -7-year question of how to marshall people and technology and product to deliver outsized business results is actually a software architecture problem that tries to impose structure and chaos on a fluid situation while providing flexibility in the choice of tactics.

A mouthful indeed.

And in honor of Alexander Hamilton and the Founding Fathers, I decided to write a series of Essays titled the architecturalist papers, a pompous homage to the Federalist papers, that tried to explain and defend strategic software architecture.

The struggle I faced in putting the finger to keyboard, was the daunting task of doing research. After all, shouldn’t I do some survey of the state of the, and show where my thoughts fit into the general understanding of software?

Thankfully, a friend of mine remarked that many researchers in her field are not empiricists. And first I had to look up the word empiricist and discovered that it meant

a person who supports the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses.

And it became apparent, that I had a lot of experience in this space, and there was a lot of knowledge to be derived, and some more abstract thinkers could figure out general models that were more valuable.

What clinched the deal, was another exchange with my wife about common sense. Common sense, I had read somewhere was defined as the set of accumulated wisdom from experience. When we say someone lacks common sense, what we mean is they lack the accumulated experience or don’t have access to that experience and make poor decisions.

This set of essays is an attempt to share my collected set of experiences and will allow others and myself to derive knowledge from the entire experience and hopefully share some common sense ideas that have proven to be very useful over the years.

The next essay will be a survey of what things I have been involved in that forms the basis of my experience.

 

 

Why was bill o’reilly fired? Because we all said, not this time m-er f-er.

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Because some Americans thought it was okay to elect a p**y grabber.

And then millions of women decided to say no.

And then hundreds of people decided to tell advertisers that advertising on Breitbart wasn’t okay.

And then an NPS  ranger decided to say no when Trump told her to shut up.

And then when Bannon told the press to shut-up, the press said no.

And when Miller told us that our brothers couldn’t come from abroad, the ACLU and hundreds showed up to say no.

And when Paul Ryan wanted to give me a tax cut, a cut I didn’t want, thousands reached out to their representatives and said no.

And so when Bill O’Reilly got exposed as the ass-hat that he apparently is, we were all very used to saying say no.

Or perhaps, in terms, Mr. O’Reilly understands, if we liberals are a bunch of snowflakes, enjoy the winter.

The brakes have brains

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Fascinating article about Bosch (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601502/boschs-survival-plan/).

A couple of things that popped out:

  1. Factories are turning into computers. The interconnections between machines, originally a human task, is now a machine task. In 20 years, a human on the shop floor may be as ridiculous as humans swapping out transistors in an x86 processor.
  2. Data-driven optimization is getting faster.  A core fallacy of data-driven product design is that it can drive new products. However, the use of analytics can make existing products more efficient. The use of pre-existing wireless networks will allow devices to communicate with home base very efficiently, coupled with factory floors that can be optimized faster, this has tremendous implications on product life-cycle.
  3. Humans who rely on brawn or physical stamina are losing value fast.
  4. There is an interesting singularity when the entire manufacturing pipeline when 3d printing and data-driven design and fully automated factories intersect in a meaningful way. Factories will be able to retool instantaneously to meet instantaneous demand and insight.

The world of yesterday is going away so fast, the only question is whether we will survive to get there.

Trump’s Order is Ethnic Cleansing

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The Trump White House would really like for all of us immigrants to go home. His chief advisor thinks we have too many Asians as CEO’s in Silicon Valley.

And so the question is how?

For those who are US citizens, the obvious approach is to create an impossible set of choices. Suppose you have an elderly parent in Yemen. And now the US government won’t let you bring her into the USA. As a family person you have two choices, abandon her in Yemen or leave.

If you leave, you take your family and your community with you.

For those who are not US citizens, you don’t let them come in as students. That ensures that we don’t have those pesky students who stick around and create value for all of America, thus again reducing the number of annoying (Muslim) people – also called Vermin …

For those who are Green Card holders, you make it clear that any point time their Green Card status can be revoked. But wait you say, it’s only a temporary travel ban. Except a temporary travel ban that lasts 6+ months can result in you losing your Green Card. And if you have a mortgage, and can’t work for six months, then you can’t pay the mortgage so again you are forced to abandon your community and family or never travel. And then you see the problem about your family and you start to make alternative plans about your plans in this country.

The goal of the executive order is to force people to choose between family and America. To terrorize them into abandoning America.

In the Balkans, we just send killers to rape women and massacre children. I suppose it’s says something about the USA that we dress our ethnic cleansing in fine legalese about protecting America.

 

Sorry Priebus, I will never forget that the Holocaust was about the Jews

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Why am I writing this today? Because an old friend shared a story of a crime. In 1941, his great grandfather was granted a visa to the USA. Unfortunately the USA joined the war, the next day, and there was no way to go the USA. He was a Jew. He was murdered in Auschwitz 12 months later. We know this because of great grandfather’s diary.  I am alive because another bureaucrat in Athens made another decision. When I see what the Trump administration is doing with Muslim refugees, I can not remain silent. And will not. I do not apologize to those who are offended or wish I wrote about tech.

I grew up in Canada. I happened to go a great progressive school in Montreal called St. Georges. In that great progressive school, there was a book about the Holocaust. In 1979 or was it 1980, at the age of 7 or 8, I learned what the Holocaust was.

Later on in life, I found out about the horrors Nazi Germany practiced on my people in Greece. I am alive because my grandparents were villagers, and my great grandmother is Italian, and during the great famine of Athens, some Italian bureaucrat decided her life was worth saving.

And even later in my teens, I learned about Kalavryta.

And still, later I learned of the ten day Nazi occupation of Santorini, and how in those ten days, the Nazi’s managed to hang several young men.

And I later on in life learned about the resentment that some Greeks had towards the Jews appropriating the entirety of the Nazi evil. And I also learned that a lot of Greeks were anti-semitic. And I had the misery of sitting a dinner table once, where a bunch of respected Greeks was discussing how Hitler wasn’t all that bad. And I had a classmate in Greece make a series of Holocaust jokes (jokes about one person dying are not funny. never was. still isn’t.)

And then I learned from a Jewish friend in Greece, why there are so few Jews in Greece. And  I found out that this man had stayed in a friend’s house in Northern Greece where he had presided over resettlement … you know the mass extermination of the Jews.

And I could forgive those Greeks, because well it’s easy to hate something you don’t know.

The Holocaust was not just another garden variety massacre. The world had many of those.

The holocaust was a systematic attempt to kill Jews. Others were caught in the vortex. However, this is the only important fact, Jewish babies were consigned to die because their grandparents were Jewish. And the world just watched. Babies, that happened to be born, were killed with no appeal to any humanity because they were deemed non-human.

And yet this was only part of the horror.

 

The actual horror of the Holocaust I learned later.

What most people don’t get, is that Germany, in spite of the mess known as the first world war, was viewed as the most civilized place on Earth before Hitler. The German working class, the German intellectual, were admired. The German military was respected. Being a Philo-German, was a matter of pride for many of my great-grand father’s generation.

Germany was the place a Jew could assimilate. Germany was safe from the insanity of a barbaric world.

And so to discover, that the most civilized, the best part of Western Civilization could decide to kill Jews because they were Jews, and deploy the full arsenal of the state to kill them was horrifying.

It was like discovering that your dad was a serial killer. Your mother butchered her family. The idea that the Germans would do this was inconceivable.

Now, that the Germans have spent 70+ years atoning for the evil of their grandparents, it’s easy to forget that they were once not viewed as evil.

And I later learned in my life, that the neo-Nazi movement did a lot to fight the holocaust. First, they tried to deny it’s existence, and then they tried to normalize the event. And you normalize the Holocaust by making it just another historical crime no different than any other.

And because I know you’re not a neo-Nazi Mr. Preibus, I’ll assume your support of the Trump announcement comes from that well of resentment I, as a Greek,  know too well.

And so, Mr. Preibus, I, a Gentile,  a Greek who is alive because of an Italian,  remember the holocaust because the most civilized people on earth decided to exterminate other women, and children and babies and old men and old women, because they were alive and had the wrong grandparents. This underlying evil in our souls, this willingness to do such evil acts, can not and must not be forgotten.

 

Iranians of note

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Just to name a few notable Iranian-Americans who are REALLY MAKING AMERICA GREAT!
#dontbeignorant #geteducated #lettheworldknow #iraniansarenotterrorist #nobannowall #sickofpolitics #peaceandlove

• Salar Kamangar, CEO of YouTube, VP of Google’s web applications
• Pierre Omidyar, Founder of e-Bay
• Dara Khosrowshahi, President and CEO of Expedia, Inc.
• Sean Rad, Founder & CEO of Tinder
• Farzad Nazem, CTO of Yahoo!
• Ali Rowghani, COO of Twitter
• Ali Partovi & Mehdi Partovi, Founders of Code.org
• Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President of Google
• Hamid Akhavan, CEO of Siemens Enterprise Communications
• Arash Ferdowsi, Co-Founder & CTO of Dropbox
• Goldy Kamali, Founder & CEO of FedScoop
• Dr Firouz Naderi, NASA director of Mars project
• Lotfi A. Zadeh, mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley and Father of Fuzzy Logic
• Gholam A. Peyman, Inventor of LASIK eye surgery
• Anousheh Ansari, the world’s first female space tourist, co-founder and chairman of Prodea Systems, Inc., co-founder and former CEO of Telecom Technologies, Inc. (TTI)
• Mark Zandi, economist and co-founder of Economy.com.
• Christiane Amanpour, anchor of ABC Sunday morning political affairs program, former CNN chief international correspondent
• Shahram Dabiri, video game producer, lead producer of World of Warcraft
• Davar Ardalan, NPR producer of Tell Me More
• Azita Raji, United States Ambassador to Sweden
• Leila Vaziri, The current world record holder of the 50 m women’s backstroke
• Andre Agassi, professional Tennis player
• Cyrus Habib, 16th Lieutenant Governor of Washington, first and so far only Iranian-American elected to state office
• Sina Tamaddon, Senior Vice President of Applications for Apple Computer
• Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City
• Pardis Sabeti, world-renowned computational geneticist, Associate Professor at Harvard University
• Homayoun Seraji, Senior Research Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Nouriel Roubini, one of the leading economists of our age, professor of economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University and chairman of RGE Monitor
• Ghavam Shahidi, IBM Fellow, Director of Silicon Technology
• Babak Hassibi, Gordon M. Binder/AMGEN Professor of Electrical Engineering, Caltech
• Payam Heydari, Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Irvine
• Hamid Jafarkhani, leading communication theorist University of California, Irvine
• Ali Khademhosseini, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School,
• Abbas Milani, Director of Iranian Studies Program, Stanford University
• Ray Aghayan, Emmy Award winning costume designer
• Shohreh Aghdashloo Academy Award-nominated film/television actress
• Mayor Jimmy Delshad, Mayor of Beverly Hills, California
• Ross Mirkarimi, Former Member of San Francisco City Council and current San Francisco Sheriff
• Shayan Modarres – Civil Rights Lawyer and Activist, 2014 Democratic primary candidate for the U.S. House from the 10th district of Florida
• Faryar Shirzad, former Deputy National Security Advisor and White House Deputy Assistant for International Economic Affairs to President George W. Bush
• Maz Jobrani, comedian and actor
• Max Amini, comedian and actor
• Antonio Esfandiari OFFICIAL FAN PAGE, champion poker player

Iranian-Americans Reported Among Most Highly Educated in U.S.
Iranian-Americans also contribute substantially to the U.S. economy

http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2004/01/20040113191603atarukp0.6147425.html#axzz4X5qoxG00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Iranian_Americans

http://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethmacbride/2015/12/20/100-influential-iranian-americans-in-silicon-valley-and-beyond/#4d10467b4e52

http://www.ranker.com/list/notable-iranian-americans/famous-iranians

Click to access Factsheet.pdf

When you sit and wonder who these people are, read this list.

You don’t care enough, and other failures in leadership

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Twice in my career, have I sat in a meeting where an executive has harangued his employees about not caring as much as he did.

And, both times, the people who cared the most handed in their resignations within hours.

The executive was furious that the employees were not as concerned as he was. The point he was trying to make was that the employee should care about the business beyond the extrinsic rewards that the company provided. That this company, this employment opportunity was more than a job. The executive was frustrated that he was working with people who didn’t feel as connected to the mission as he did.

And in many ways, the minute the executive said that he had also admitted that had failed as a leader. If you feel the need to call out your team, a team you assembled then you failed.

And it got me thinking about caring.

As a leader, why people do the things they do is imperative so you can motivate them. Everyone’s motivations are different. Some people believe in the mission, some people do it for the money, some do it for the commute, and some do it for the sheer joy of doing it.

Your job is to figure out what motivates them and make sure that you align their rewards with their motivations.

Your job as a leader is to connect people to the mission every single day.

Your job as a leader is to connect people’s motivations to the mission every single day.

And the minute that connection breaks, you failed to do your job.

And I get why the executive felt frustrated. He had failed as a leader, and it was evident. And he was vocalizing his frustration at being unable to connect the company mission to the employee’s motivations. And he was taking it out on his team.

When that happens, and it will, what I found works better is taking a deep breath, and then asking your team what’s wrong. Ask your team why the team does not feel connected to the mission. Ask the team what all need to feel connected. Speak 1×1 with each key member and understand their needs.

Leadership is hard, and we can fail at being leaders, and when we fail our job as leaders is to recognize that and do the hard work to be great leaders again.

 

 

The problem with the mac

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Over the last several years, I have two discrete sets of workflows:

  1. Kostadis, the developer who wants a full Linux experience
  2. Kostadis, the guy who interacts with product managers, engineering managers and business leaders who require a complete Windows experience.

When IBM used to make the Think Pad, the solution was obvious: use VMware Workstation to create a Linux VM.

However, after IBM sold the ThinkPad to Lenovo, and Lenovo couldn’t retain the same quality, and the improvements of the Mac made the Mac an attractive compromise.

You could use a Mac and use Windows software like Outlook, while simultaneously having a native Unix development experience without dealing with the complexity of virtual machines.

The experience wasn’t Linux, and the quirkiness of Mac OS made things annoying, and yet it was close enough.

At some point in time, pre-Nadella, the crappiness of the Windows software on the Mac made a choice painful.  And at some point, the pain was significant enough to cause me to switch back to Windows.

A few months with the best Dell and Lenovo had to offer, and that transition lasted less than a year.

And after the utter underwhelming release of the latest Mac hardware, the opportunity to check out Windows hardware became an option.

And so I looked at what IT had to offer and discovered the Dell Precision 5510. The power of a modern PC coupled with improvements in virtualization software has meant that the overall value proposition of the PC + VMware + Linux to be superior to the Mac + Crappy Microsoft Apps + Not Quite Linux or Mac + VMware w Linux and Vmware with Windows or some flavor of those.

 

 

My Drow are Albino

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I’m Greek. And I grew up in Montreal and Athens.

Growing up, I knew one black kid. And he was my first friend. And slavery was always bad.

And I was a huge Dungeons and Dragons fan.

As a Greek and kid who did well in science, I knew that if you stayed in the sun, you were this color

And if you stayed out of the sun, you were this color.

And so it was very confusing why the elves that were good and lived in the sun were this color:

And the evil elves that lived underground were this color: 

For a Greek kid, that had no understanding of the evil racial history of the United States, this was very confusing.

If you lived in the sun, you were tanned. People who were white and did not tan were this color:

As I understood the world, people who lived in sunny climates tanned and were olive skinned, or darker. People who lived in climates in climates that were not sunny were very white and turned bright red.

And I stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons after I left Brown University. And I forgot about the Drow and their peculiar skin color.

And I didn’t give it a moment’s notice until I started playing with my six-year-old son. And he asked what a Drow is? And I said, well there are two kinds of elves. The good elves that are white and the evil elves that live underground and...

And I stopped talking. What was a mystery as a child, was sadly so clear as an adult. Of course, the good guys were white, and the bad guys were black.

And the blatant racism in the description of the Drow and Elves was evident.

And so I told Nick, a different story. The Drow because they live underground, are albino white and the elves that live above ground are olive-skinned and tanned.