Change management

I have been thinking to start sharing my experience as an entrepreneur through blog posts.

As someone wise once said, you can’t make everyone happy or completely happy. It’s so true, we all realize sooner or later in our personal and professional life.

The context of this blog post is, how some of changes in an organisation can upset some people, even though changes were done with good intention and bring good results after some time.

It’s just little more than an year, since I moved back to rejoin this company, where I am also co-founder.

First couple of months, I was just focused on doing some projects (as solo contributor), talking to team, helping them, sharing and observing various things around here. In little over three months time, I figured out, all aspects of this organization needed some sort of change.

Team, culture and process were three top most important things, we wanted to start fixing. When I say “fixing”, it means to make things great when things were just good enough. I wanted to have culture, I have experienced in some of the best companies like Macromedia, Yahoo!, etc.

We made a decision to move into a better facility, which is lot better than earlier one. It was critical to do it for all good reasons we know - comfort, productivity, pride, etc.

While in parallel, we were fixing thing other areas - HR, Accounting, Administration, etc.

We started to spend most of our energy on our team and clients. I wanted to have a team of individuals who are smart and passionate, better than me. I wanted a process, which is simple and solid enough to handle complex projects as well as our future products.

Internally, we were trying to help our team to get more organised and focus on right things i.e. the approach instead of just getting things done in any manner. In long term, our success comes from our learning, experience and a great team. If we don’t focus on doing things in right way, we would never learn, hence never achieve one of our visions - a great team together, a great company.

When I look back, I see we are different company now, but there is a long way to go. It’s all getting better with each passing day, however, while “fixing” - people, operating-systems, tools, development-methodology, philosophy, vision and many other things changed - we couldn’t make some people happy.

Had I bootstrapped a company from scratch last year, I would have spent half of my energy which I did “fixing” things in this company. But I learnt a lot of things, which I could have never learnt in total new company. Managing change is tough job, we did in good way, it would be better next time.

I couldn’t keep this post as short as I wanted to, in fact, I had to delete some paragraphs to keep it to this length. I would keep sharing my experiences, perhaps you can relate to some of those.

iSync: SyncSession record validation failure

ISyncSession record validation failure: Value other pushed for enumeration property service on com.apple.contacts.IM is not an allowed value.

If you get above error while synchronising your OSX addressbook with Google Contacts, you might want to remove various IM types (Skype, Google Talk, etc) specified for contacts. OSX AddressBook can only accept “AIM”, “Yahoo”, “Jabber”, “MSN” and “ICQ” as types.

Another Common Early Start-up Mistake

In most common early start-up mistakes, Mark Suster talks about very interesting and insightful points. However, I feel like adding one more point, quite known but often taken granted, more specific to software or web start-ups.

If you are a software or web start-up, it’s really important to use the experience of founders (if they are come from technical background) or your core team to have following in order, as soon as possible.

Guidelines and best-practices: code, documentation (wiki), version-control (branching/tagging - when and how?), bug-tracking, testing (unit-tests, functional-tests), deployment, performance objectives and related stuff.

I would not go crazy (get distracted too much) about these initially but have these in place and encourage(mandatory - certain cases) everyone to contribute, follow, discuss and document. It’s lot easier to adapt things at an earlier stage rather than later.

I strongally recommend you to read Martin Fowler’s article Technical Debt to learn more about the importance of having things in order.

BarCamp Kanpur

I still remember the day, when Jon Boutelle shared his idea of organizing first BarCamp in India (i.e. New Delhi) and wanted to know, if we (Manish Jethani and I) can connect him to someone at Adobe Noida for venue. Then the first BarCampBangalore, how idea started and how some of us met initially to plan, though I had to drop out just before event due to health reasons.

I must say, I have been fortunate to be part of some of the first events in India, be it Bangalore or Pune.

I really miss events like BarCamp in Kanpur, hence been planning to organize BarCampKanpur, if I can find more like-minded people and collaborate with them. Last year, I sent an email to couple of mailing-lists (including BarCampBangalore) to share the idea and request contacts, if any, who can help us.

Thanks to all those who sent me offline emails and shared the contacts from their connections. I tried to reach out couple of those but it didn’t work out. I couldn’t really follow up a lot.

Today, I decided to create wiki-page for BarCampKanpur and a google-group (mostly for mailing-list purpose for planners and volunteers). Following are the details:

• BarCampKanpur - Wiki
• barcamp-kanpur - Mailing List

I am very positive, we would soon have some volunteers to plan and organize the event. Venue should not be problem, I can manage to get one easily for first event and perhaps later.

Once we have some volunteers, we plan to have some meetup in local cafes or anywhere to talk about things (get to know each other, plan the event, share the responsibilities, etc).

Please spread the word and participate, if you can.

Making the case for ActionScript - my take

Peter Elst posted his thoughts about ActionScript and where it’s going. I agree with him and prefer to have simplicity we had once with ActionScript and Flash Platform.

I wrote my two-cents as comment to Peter’s post, that’s how it goes:

Nice post.

We have witnessed how Flash Platform evolved over the years, it has got more attention by people but at the same time, it has lost a lot of attention of those attached initially (as Keith said above).

Jeff Raskin, in Humane Interface, said something like that – complex tasks would require complex user-interactions but that’s no excuse to make simple tasks complex.

I believe, that’s what has happened. It’s not any more simpler to do simple things.

Adobe must think why they are doing it and for whom they are doing. If ActionScript is going to be clone of Java or C#, then why a new language – why not just use one of those?

There must be a philosophy behind a language and platform, what is that behind Flash Platform and ActionScript?

I had more fun in old days than now, just enjoyed the company of everyone (designers, developers, trainers, etc). It was because of simplicity that brought all of us together. I agree a lot of bad implementations were result of ease of doing things in Flash, but hey – there were far more good stuff then than now. A lot of innovation, cool stuff and apps to showcase. How much do we have now?

Open Source Media Framework (OSMF)

A few days back, Adobe announced Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), which was known as Strobe earlier.

A few minutes back, I received an email confirming that Open Source Media Framework website is up with all the information, specification, developer-documentation, source (Subversion repository), downloads (binary and source) and bug-database.

Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) has an interesting list of features and goals. I like it’s plug-in architecture, that would allow a lot of extensibility and various amazing plug-ins from different providers in coming time.

If you are a developer spending a lot of time developing various work-flows around online media-players (audio, video, images - players), I strongly recommend you to check out Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). I am sure, you would find it worth start using it and also contribute back whatever you can.

Following are the reasons, I am going to use OSMF and give up my existing frameworks:

• It’s open-source
• It would solve core issues (video playback, delivery and workarounds for various limitations in Flash Player, etc)
• It would adopt various standards (playback, cdn, advertising, etc)
• Larger developer base, that means bug fixes and various features would be available very often
• I love open-source and see myself contributing to OSMF in future, beyond my current projects.

Adobe India's support to community

Mrinal Wadhwa started a discussion, in Adobe India Community Champions mailing-list, to raise concerns about Adobe India’s role in Flex India community, he raised some good points.

It’s unfortunate to see how one of the Adobe evangelists took it personal and reacted publicly and made some personal attack on Mrinal.

You can check out Mrinal’s post to read what happened.

This is what I posted during discussion in the mailing-list.

My two cents after reading entire thread.

1) Adobe India works differently, the hierarchy and culture is different. More focused one engineering and marketing (to whom - God knows) than anything else. So any such event is aligned with sales and marketing needs. A lot of people who work enjoy their work but beyond that they don’t do much. A lot of them even maintain low-profile for various reasons.

2) Adobe India Evangelist team works differently compared to their counter parts in USA. In India, they report to engineering director of Flex or platforms team, which is not the case in USA, if I am right.

3) Expecting Flex team engineers to participate would be too much, it’s individual’s curiosity/passion to do that. If their managers make it as on objective/gaol, most of them would show up for sake (performance review, appraisal, etc) - we don’t want that. I have been through it and opposed the idea when my manager wanted entire team to do what we (Manish and I) were doing our own, due to our own curiosity.

I have always asked these questions (what Mrinal is asking) to myself and during discussions, but could never really understand. I have learnt that it’s better not to expect much from the Adobe India, it’s not really Adobe USA. Culture comes from top to bottom, and top management is not really anywhere close to what it’s in USA.

I like Evangelists in Adobe India, most of them are passionate and are there because they love technology and what they do. Unfortunately, when you work for a boss who got a different agenda or things, you can’t do much. As said earlier, Evangelist team reports somewhere to engineering director or someone like that, now you can imagine things.

These are some of my random, but based on my observation and experience, thoughts. No offenses meant to anyone.

I am keeping kind of low profile myself in Flex community, I realize community is doing good - there are far more developers than we had couple of years back. I also see there are far more passionate developers than before, you can judge that by seeing some regular names in lists/forums.

I am also sure, there would be far more people who are religious about Flash Platform and one can see tears coming out of their eyes while they talk about technology. As it used to happen with me :D

Expect the unexpected - the formula for peace of mind. Let’s talk, inpsire and act to spread the words about things we believe in and love. I have been working hard to find a smart Flash Developer for my team, yet to find. I want to contribute in my way, I would love to have people in my team contribute to SDK and other opensource projects, now that’s what I can afford to do now :-)

Thanks

-abdul

I expressed above based on my observation and experience, might not have been put properly as I wrote it quickly. But you might get my point there.

Google Apps - Too many simultaneous connections error

Somtimes Google would lock your IMAP account due to too many authentication tries using wrong password or too many IMAP simultaneous connections. I have not been able to figure out a solution to unlock it.

What I noticed, it gets unlocked after five days, yeah that’s right you would have to use webmail for those days. It’s also important to make sure, your email clients have right passwords otherwise they would keep making requests and getting IMAP locked.

BSNL 3G configuration - new access point name

It seems BSNL secretly changed the 3G access-point details around couple of weeks back, so my 3g connection stopped working. I looked over internet to figure out the latest configuration details, I couldn’t locate one.

I talked to BSNL 3G technical guys in Kanpur and to my surprise, most of them were also not aware of the change. Thankfully, one of the guys from BSNL Bangalore office, confirmed the latest access-point details, as shown below:

Access point name: gprsnorth.cellone.in bsnlnet

In case you are wondering, what all other changed, that’s it. JFYI! Old access-point name was gprsnorth3g.bsnlmobile.in, which doesn’t work anymore.

So if you have been unable to use BSNL 3G during last couple of weeks, perhaps new access-point name can work for you.

I am not sure, if there are different access-point name for different parts of country (north, south, east, west)?

TVersity: Media Server

I am sharing my experience while finding a good media-server (software that can store, transcode and serves various media formats to devices - computers, mobile, apple-tv, etc).

We all (parents, brother, sister-in-law, sister and myself) stay together, which means we have got more than one TV, various devices (mobile, computers, laptops, etc). We realized, it’s useful to host the media at one central computer.

• Storage
• Wiki - to jot down the links and ideas
• Development and Testing - when we work at/from home
• Media Server (software that serves media to various devices in home)

Most of the requirements (above) are sorted out except the last one “Media Server”. I looked at various options, some of these are listed below:

• TVersity
• PS3MediaServer
• XBMC (as UPNP server)
• Darwin Streaming Server
• VideoLan (VLC) as Server

I found myself more comfortable with TVersity, though it’s not opensource and only runs on Windows, for following reasons

• Ease in administration:
• anyone in my family can add/remove media using it’s easy to use administration interface.
• admin tool runs using Adobe Flash Player, has been built using OpenLaszlo framework and executable has been created using Zinc like tool.
• Ease while using:
• Web based interface for administration - runs on Adobe Flash Player
• Web based interface for media library
• Simple HTML
• Flash based (built using OpenLaszlo) - where media is transcoded and played using Flash Player, awesome, isn’t it?
• iPhone friendly interface
• Support for Open DLNA and UPNP
• Automatically detects (most of) devices, transcodes and serves media, if required
• That means, ffdshow and other tools can be used to add subtitle and apply various filters before serving the videos.
• XBMC/Boxee that runs on my macbook and apple-tv worked really well with TVersity

You can find the complete list of features on TVersity website.

So now life is simpler and easier, we all store our media at one place and can see it anytime and on most of our devices. Having web-based access to media makes life easier. I also feel, it’s lot easier to extend web-interface, which I plan to do in sometime.

I would love to post about detailed comparison between various options (media-servers and tools) mentioned above, perhaps in another post, sometime in future. Another post would be there to share how our home network looks like. Hope, I can spend sometime drawing diagrams which would be lot easier to understand.