Week 5

Day 29: Panic!

Monday, 8th December 2014 23:07

If you’ll recall the Christmas break makes numbering the days at Techstars a little difficult. Until now the Techstars Clock of Doom has been counting down from 103 days. This morning it said there was a little over 74 days left to go.

The clock, adjusted for the Christmas break, with the expected 74 days remaining

Two hours later and it was a completely different story.

The clock, no longer adjusted for the Christmas break, and now showing substantially less time left

That’s right. They’ve adjusted the clock to remove the Christmas break. The 60’s lasted a little over 10 minutes, which is slightly shy of the more normal 14,400 minutes they should have lasted for.

The rationale for the change was because we weren’t at the correct level of panic for the amount of time actually left, as the 2 week Christmas break was artificially inflating that figure. It’s a valid argument, but one that would have rectified itself in two weeks anyway as the break started.

Worse than the panic, however, is the knowledge that we’re now really over one third of the way through the process and that’s quite sad. I’m really enjoying my time at Techstars and it seems to be passing too quickly.

Day 30: Dom likes cheese

Tuesday, 9th December 2014 23:15

So, how do you write an inference engine over a graph database? Not a trivial question, although it would appear the answer may be quite simple. The approach taken to get said answer was a fairly typical one for most developers¹:

Day 1: Pick suitably cool looking technology. Charge in. Get stuck.

Day 2: Replace cool and shiny technology with something a little more robust. Charge in. Get stuck.

Day 3: Decide that code isn’t the best place to start. Revert to pen and paper. Disappear up own backside. Pair up with second developer². Approach whiteboard armed with whiteboard pens. Attack! Some hours later come out with a really nifty (and simple) algorithm that does what you set out to achieve.

Day 4 will hopefully be a question of coding algorithm, plus sharing it with some very intelligent people who know huge amounts about graph databases in case we are setting ourselves up for a fall³. Meanwhile, anyone who cares to look at the whiteboard will find that we have asserted, with a very high degree of confidence, that Dom speaks English, despite liking Cheese⁴. Those reading this may care to argue with the assertion my being able to speak English.

Day 31: Clueless

Wednesday, 10th December 2014 23:51

One of the challenges we have with Rainbird is that the core of it is written in Prolog. Mentioning Prolog generally gets one of two responses. The first, and most predictable, is a blank look. Prolog is not exactly mainstream. The second response comes from those with a Computer Science degree and goes “Prolog… wow! I’ve not used that since university”.

So we’re replacing Prolog with a graph database. This still gets us blank looks from the first group of people, but that doesn’t matter, they don’t need to know how it works under the covers. What it does change is the number of people in the second group who understand the technology we’re using. This can be used to our advantage.

So I understand about using graph databases and writing programs to interrogate them. That’s not hard. What I don’t understand is how these databases behave under different conditions and what difficulties we may be setting ourselves up for later as we scale. This is where being at Techstars comes in useful.

Techstars set up a number of what they call “Office Hours”. Basically a period of time where useful people will be in the office and you can book a quick meeting with them. One of these was with Tony Blank from context.io. I mentioned to Tony that I could do with speaking to someone who knew more about graph databases than I did. Tony pointed me at the CEO of orchestrate.io because they know about databases. The CEO introduced me to their CTO and lead technical guy, and before I know it I’ve got them coming to visit to talk to me.

In the space of a week I’ve gone from clueless to having access to a huge wealth of information on how our approach is going to work, even at scale. This kind of useful introduction, and willingness to help and provide information goes on all the time which is one of the key things that makes this programme so useful for me. My next challenge for them is to arrange a meeting with the technical guys from the company who actually write the database we’ve settled on using. I don’t doubt they’ll deliver.

Day 32: Patient 0

Friday, 12th December 2014 00:08

Today’s All Hands meeting was a modified version of spin the bottle. The cohort sat in a circle while Jon spun a bottle in the middle. Whoever was pointed at by the bottle then had to pick someone from their company and say something positive about them, or something negative. The kicker was that positive or negative was determined by coin toss after you’d nominated who you were going to talk about, which leads to an interesting dynamic.

At this point it helps to know that Techstars London is basically a plague ship currently with some nasty virus thing that’s been doing the rounds. Come the end of the Founder Stories meeting tonight Rainbird was down to 50% capacity with Nathan, Chris and Ben all out for the count. We’re not the only team affected - in fact there was a designated sick zone in the All Hands circle.

So the bottle lands on James who picks me as his victim target nominee. The coin toss comes up negative, because of course it does. Now there’s many ways this can go down and it’s interesting to try and second guess which of a long list of negatives is going to get aired. I guessed wrong.

James went for two negatives, one of which was that I was patient zero⁵. Which is an interesting thought. I think I was the first to go down with the death on day 19, although I’d been feeling ropey for a while which could quite literally mean that I’ve taken down quite a few people with me… erm… whoops?

The good news is that if they do have what I had then it’s only really bad for two or three days, with maybe a week of feeling knackered and then a cough that still hasn’t gone away… I’m really not helping myself here am I? The point is, if I suddenly disappear, it’s because I’ve been lynched by the other teams⁶

Day 33: It’s a family affair

Friday, 12th December 2014 20:38

Today marks the end of what will probably be my longest continuous stint in London for the whole Techstars process. Three weeks between visits home is possibly pushing it a bit far, although my wife has been fantastic throughout the whole thing.

Do any kind of background research on previous cohorts and the common theme is that your family have to make a big sacrifice while you’re attending. They’re not wrong. I have a heavily pregnant wife who, for 3 weeks now, has been making house and looking after our 3 year old daughter with no help. I know it has not been easy. Nor does she get a break this weekend, she’s working while I play daddy daycare. She then dives right back in to picking up the slack single handedly again.

I deliberately set expectations low before I left for London. I knew that, for three months, I was going to have to excuse myself from normal day to day life and eat, sleep and breath Techstars. Not going home on a weekend gives me 15-20 hours extra solid working time and time to seriously catch up on my sleep for the next week - but it also means no break for my wife, and my daughter only seeing me via video calls once a day. I’m not sure there are many spouses out there who would put up with that deal with very little complaint.

It’s also not been easy for us on the programme. I know everyone in the team finds it hard to say goodbye each time they leave their families. My FaceTime calls in the morning often leave me feeling quite low because they are no substitute for actually being there. I also know it’s going to be hard to leave come the end of the weekend. At least next week is just a one week stretch, followed by me living at home for two weeks over the Christmas break.

Day 35: Weekend off

Sunday, 14th December 2014 21:40

This weekend has, in some respects, gone slower that the previous week. It’s caps off the end of a 19 day period where I was either working or dead and has been a complete change of gear. My wife has been at work for most of the weekend so I’ve been looking after our 3 year old daughter, Willow. It’s knackering.

Not that this is anything new. I’ve been looking after Willow every other weekend for ages now and, at three, she doesn’t realise that I don’t have the boundless energy that she does; that I can’t get up and sit down every 30 seconds as we bounce between playing different games; and that my desire to play yet another round of hide and seek waned 5 minutes ago. I seriously don’t know how my wife does it the other 12 days every fortnight when I’m not in charge.

Despite having work that I really need to be doing, I’m using the journey back to London to relax and recharge a little. The train doesn’t get me in until gone midnight, so it’s straight to bed and ready to launch into the last week before we break for Christmas. Thankfully we’re in build mode now so I can spend most of the week completely checked out of real life and knee deep in code - I’m going to be too tired to do anything else.

It’s quite funny to think that, as the 5th week draws to a close, the prospect of a 70+ hour week coding between now and Friday seems almost restful and relaxing… and that the prospect of spending 7+ days away from the office over the 2 weeks of Christmas is almost scary.