Curious Rami

I am not sure if this story is true or false, however it makes a point that everyone in your organization should be informed about the dangers of the internet and should be trained to spot and avoid hackers’ attacks.

The attack strategy was the easiest one.

The usual milw0rm downloaded exploit delivered by email/click-on-the-link/open-browser/click-on-this-animated-icon/back-connect to some employee of Bloomsbury Publishing, the company that’s behind the Harry crap.

It’s amazing to see how much people inside the company have copies and drafts of this book.

http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2007/Jun/0380.html

Product managers, marketing managers, sales managers and customers will always push to add new features to your project. It is very hard for developers and engineers to argue against adding new features for many reasons including:

1-Customers and managers will always have a good reason for adding the new features (so they think). They are always so existed about the new features that they can’t listen to you.

2- Customers and managers will argue that you say “no” because you have to do it (in their mind; developers play Desktop Tower Defense all day long).

3-You, developer, are worried that they will go to someone else, and you will no longer be the go-to-guy.

So what to do?

Simply said: Play Their Game.

Managers and customers will always push the developers to add new features with the assumption that the golden three: cost, time and resources will not change.

So here is what you do:

1-Get really excited about the new features

2-Agree to add the new features

3-Congratulate them on coming up with the new features

Here it comes:

4-Tell them, very casually; that the new features will delay the project by 3 weeks and that you will need another tester for 1 week.

The magic:

Managers and customers will immediately stop you and tell you to forget about the new features and put them in the nice-to-have features list where they will stay there forever.

It works, give it a try, and let me know what you think.

As usual, comment, comment, and comment now!

PS: Wrote this post while listening to Dream Theater’s Systematic Chaos. Awesome CD!

When projects are behind schedule; most managers will push their team to work overtime and sacrifice quality in order to ship products on schedule.

Those managers need to understand two points:

1- Working overtime does not fix the problem. As developers/engineers work more hours, their productivity declines. Moreover, sooner or later the team will burnout and hate their job.

2- Sacrificing quality is a short term solution; it will most likely get the manager a promotion or a bonus. However, eventually, the product will fail or the code will break, the truth will rise, exposing the manager’s doings, damaging their reputation and costing the company a fortune to fix all the problems.

What to do when projects are behind schedule? Simple: The only way to successfully finish the project is to cut as many features as possible.

Here is a systematic procedure to accomplish this difficult reality:

1- Stop

2- Admit that something went wrong

3- Make a decision that you are going to do something about it and that failure is not an option

4- Prioritize the project’s remaining tasks (think big - major tasks only)

5- Assign cost, time and human resources required for each task

6- The magic: get rid of as many tasks (features) as possible based on priority, cost, time and human resources required

1, 2, and 3 are lame but required.

50% of all features will never be used and are purely added for marketing purposes, get rid of them.

Let me know what you think, comment, comment, comment now!

Disclaimer: I wrote this post while listening to “Just a Car Crash Away” by Marilyn Manson.

Bioengineering is the way of the future

I believe that there is a huge opportunity for engineering related social networks. The only engineering social website that I know off is http://octopart.com/, a very useful search engine for electronic parts (let me know if you know off other social engineering websites).

Today I developed a new social bookmarking site for engineers, EngBeat: http://www.engbeat.com. I say today because it took me 4 hours to design and develop EngBeat using CakePHP. EngBeat is very beta, right now you can only submit engineering links but I intent to add accounts, categories, rss feeds and comments soon.

Give it a try and let me what you think.

Last week I had an interview with Will Kern of Entrepreneur27.org, check it out:

http://www.entrepreneur27.org/archive/interview-with-rami-nasser-of-workhack/

sciencehack.com

I’ve been collecting science videos since forever; any video that is physics, chemistry, space, biology, math… My “favorites” folder was getting pretty big, so I finally dedicated some time to put all those science videos in one accessible place; Science Hack. Science Hack is my new blog. I will use it to bookmark all the cool science videos that I find. Eventually, I want to go beyond videos, with some longer and more detailed posts. If you find a cool science video, leave a comment here or on Science Hack, and I will post it and link to your blog or website.

Visit Science Hack and let me know what you think, how can I improve it and make it more useful.

Web 3.0 is a fancy name for “semantic web”, which is the concept of giving meaning to data. The internet has a lot of data that only humans can recognize. Using semantic web, we can give data meaning and thus make it possible for machines (computers) to do something with it. If you want to buy a new DVD, you will have to go to your favorite store’s website and search, read reviews, pick and buy the DVD. Using semantic web, the data on DVDs will have meaning, so now you could tell your computer to buy a DVD that is: newly released, action, PG rated, at least 4 stars rated, and costs less than $20. Throw in voice activated PCs (Bill Gates will love you for that), and you’ve got yourself a super cool computer assistant :).