Chan's Personal Blog

Yahoo! Hack Day Q2 2012

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:37:58 -0700

This last week was the second Hack Day at Yahoo! for 2012, and I entered a team to compete yet again. This time it was a bit more personal. After winning two awards at the last Hack Day, I thought I had earned the credibility that I'm the real deal, and my ideas were worth paying attention to. There were still naysayers who thought the double win was a fluke or a one-time anomaly. I set out to prove to myself that this wasn't a fluke, and I intended to win Hack Day again. As I was recruiting for my team with a couple rough idea drawings in hand, the question came up, "why should I join your team?" I was a bit taken aback, and then answered, "because we're going to win this thing."

The Preparations

For this Hack Day, I scoped out a rather large project, much more complex and ambitious than the last one. I formed a team with five members. To make it even more challenging, I decided to pull in two noobies who had not competed in Hack Day before (just to spread the wealth), and to give them a taste of victory.

The night before Hack Day started, I sent out an email to my team entitled, "The Hack Day Survival Guide," which outlined what to expect and what to bring. I explicitly told each team member to wear their geekiest t-shirt to the event because it was key to winning. I also warned anyone who came in with a collared shirt would be mercilessly mocked. Surely enough the next day, as I'm gearing up to go to Hack Day, I see a team member walk in with a collared polo.

Me: Ummm.... so.... you ready for Hack Day?
Mr. Polo: Yeah.
Me: What's with the collar?
Mr. Polo: What?
Me: You're totally overdressed for Hack Day. Are you trying to make us lose? Where's your t-shirt?
Mr. Polo: I couldn't find a geeky t-shirt that fit me, I've gained weight.
Me: Wait here. (I walk over to my cube and tap into my strategic reserve of t-shirts). Take one of these t-shirts and wear it.

Serendipity

With that critical problem fixed, we headed over to the Hack Day event, and I setup my computer. I noticed a message from one of my friends in Victoria saying that he heard I was competing at Hack Day, and if I knew this one guy from Yahoo! who was famous for writing a Javascript library. I responded, nope, Yahoo! is a big company. My friend sent me a link the famous programmer's twitter account, and I saw the guy's photo. I look up across the room, and I see the famous programmer sitting right there. Strangest most serendipitous event in my life. I went over to talk to the famous programmer and shared this strange coincidence with him.

No Sleep Til Brooklyn

We got down to business and started hacking code. The hours just seemed to fly by, and more and more food kept coming in to fatten us programmers up. As we entered the late evening, people were breaking out the Red Bulls to re-energize. I refused to take any performance enhancing beverages; I've concluded that my body produces its own caffeine.

I escorted one of my quality assurance team members to her car as she was heading home. On the way over, she thanked me for the Hack Day experience, she said she felt like a real engineer today. I thought that one statement made Hack Day worth it, even if we didn't win.

By 6:30am, I saw the sun rising, and I was the last man still awake, hacking away. Most my team had gone offline, so I decided to take a quick one hour nap. I figured, I could claim a partial victory for being the last man standing.

The final hour is always the most exciting. We had to close out as many bugs as possible before dropping our keyboards. It was 9am, and we had one more hour left to go, and most my team had come back online. We finished and submitted our project with exactly two seconds left on the clock. What a photo finish.

Round #1 Judging

The rules this time changed for Hack Day. Every team is given 24 hours to turn their idea into a working prototype. Once the 24 hours expired, you entered into a two-staged judging process. The first stage, you had to pitch your idea in front of an executive and his team of experts for a given category. The pitch would be 3 minutes, followed by 2 minutes of Q&A from the judges. The finalists would move on to a much larger venue where spectators would see the pitches.

During this first stage of judging, Hacks could also proceed to the finals if they had enough vote for it. My team mates were furiously asking their friends to vote for our hack. I chose to abstain from that because I wanted my product to speak for itself, and win on its own merits. I didn't want to win by popularity contest.

I was next in line to pitch to the SVP of Commerce. I put on my headphones, and got my fight music tunes on, and got fired up. Unfortunately the team that presented before me decided to pitch way longer than the 5 minutes allocated to them. They ended up taking about 10 minutes in front of the judges, and I'm thinking, if you can't sell your idea in the first 5 minutes, you're not going to be able to sell it with another 5 minutes. My team mates started giving death glares to that team, and laid the charge of cheating. I was much more nonchalant about it. I've come to crush the competition, I had nothing to fear.

My turn came up, and I did my pitch. I was very calm and collected. When I looked up at the judge's faces, they were visibly amused and delighted by what I was selling them. The time flew by very quickly, and I answered all the questions very quickly and naturally. I thought the pitch went well.

Once all the pitches wrapped up, all the hackers were invited to a private BBQ lunch. The food was wonderful: beef brisket, grilled portobello mushrooms, bbq chicken quarters, corn on the cob, fresh strawberry lemonade, and apple pie. We sat outside in the warm shade with a slight breeze. I sat there completely content, watching my tired yet joyful team trade war stories about Hack Day. Time just seemed to stop momentarily as we enjoyed each other's company, and there was not a worry in the world.

As we returned from lunch, the finalists were announced. Twenty out of the forty teams would advance to the finals. As the judges read out the list, we heard #26 had qualified for the finals. We were moving on.

Round #2 Judging

We moved downstairs to the bigger venue, URL's cafe, where the Hack Day finals would be broadcast live around the world. The room was filling up with spectators (150 people I would guess). The rules were simple, the 20 finalists would be pitching their ideas to all the judges now (rather than just the judges from a certain category), you had 2 minutes to demo your hack.

The strategy for my second pitch was simple, win the crowd. The pitch was like a stand-up comedian's routine; I had lined up a bunch of jokes with a big finishing punchline. I even used the term 'carbosaurus' (a mythical beast that loves eating carbs) in front of SVPs and executives. As I got up to do my routine, the crowd reacted delightfully to the first couple jokes I had. As I walked through my demo, I could see the judges looking up at the screen curious to see the punchline. I hit the punchline, and the room filled with laughter. I nailed it.

As I walked off stage and into the crowd, I got high fives, pats on the back, and people asking how they could access my hack. I told them, well, I don't have an appstore yet, but if you give me a dollar, I'll give you the hack. I saw a dollar bill head my direction, and then someone interrupted saying, wait.... this is the Yahoo! appstore, they take $0.30 out of this transaction, $0.70 goes to the developer. Amusing.

I saw a lot of really incredible demos go after me, I thought the level of competition was greater this time around than last. I saw things that made my jaw drop. Let me tell you, innovation is alive and well at Yahoo! As the last demo concluded, the judges left to deliberate, and a ton of pizza was brought in for the audience to enjoy.

Thirty minutes later, the judges came back and started naming off the winners. I sat there and never actually anticipated losing until they got to the last category, the category in which we were registered for. They read the winning team, and the winner was the famous programmer that I serendipitously met earlier. I thought.... oh no, did I just lose Hack Day? I had promised my team that we would win. As I was trying to comprehend what had just happened, the judges announced the Hacker's Choice Award, as voted by the people, team #26. We won. I was relieved.

As I walked up to the stage to collect my prize, one of the judges does a double take and asks, wait... where I have I seen you before? I told them, we won Hacker's Choice Award last time as well. Lightning does strike twice I guess. The winners were quickly whisked away for photos. I've included some of the photos here:

Fall by Daft Punk on Grooveshark

As I left the Hack Day event, I was walking with my boss, and I highlighted he had a big problem. The majority of his team has now won Hack Day, and the chances of the team being left intact would be slim since we'll be pursuing these hacks. He responded, well, that's a high quality problem that I'll have to worry about.

Anyways, special thanks to my team for sacrificing their time to help me work on my crazy ideas. It was an important milestone for myself personally. I had to prove to myself that I haven't peaked yet, and my former wins were not a fluke or an anomaly. I had to prove to myself I could still compete at this level consistently.

As the great song writer, Mike Shinoda, once said:

This is ten percent luck
twenty percent skill
fifteen percent concentrated power of will
five percent pleasure
fifty percent pain
and a hundred percent reason to remember the name

Now lets see if I can get some funding for this new idea. Stay tuned. If not, see you at Yahoo! Hack Day Q3 2012.

The Road Less Traveled

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Tue, 08 May 2012 23:15:09 -0700

Today was the big day, I was pitching my Hack Day idea to two different audiences in the hopes of getting funding, and turning the idea into reality. This was the great culmination of this leg of the journey.

Pitch #1: Design Pitch

The morning started with me scouting out the conference room I was supposed to present in for the SVP of Design. Its been a habit for me to do reconnaissance ahead of a presentation. It's important to understand the room's layout, whether your laptop will work with the projector, where you would stand, where would the audience sit, what are the acoustic properties of the room, etc. Good thing I did the morning recon because the room didn't have a projector. I reported the problem, and the executive admin quickly changed the room, and she managed to get me a room in the the new Yahoo! Design studio. It was a gorgeous room to present in.

I set up my gear in the design studio and quietly waited for the SVP. The SVP entered the room, and my adrenaline started kicking in, the game was on. As I walked through my presentation, I saw the SVP deep in thought and nodding his head in agreement. It's always much easier to present when you see your audience responding with their body language. The presentation concluded and he loved the pitch. He quickly got up and went to a whiteboard to sketch out some additional ideas and theories. It turns out his group was working on a project that could complement what I was working on, so he wanted to schedule a follow-up meeting with his VPs to exchange ideas.

I told the SVP of Design that my main investment pitch was happening later in the evening. The SVP pledged his full political support behind our cause and promised designers if I was able to secure funding for engineers to work on the idea. I was blown away, the outcome exceeded my expectations.

Pitch #2: Investment Pitch

Later that afternoon, I went to my meeting for the main investment pitch. There was another group that would present ahead of me. I was a bit disconcerted when I found out the SVP would be unable to attend, and that he would be sending two of his VPs instead. One of his VPs was going to be tricky to convince because I had no insight into what motivated him or what he was passionate about. Thankfully at the last minute, that VP also couldn't attend.

As the first group presented, the VP of Engineering started his line of questioning, and the first group seemed ill prepared to answer. They had only gotten to their third slide and they were already encountering heavy resistance. In the end, they crashed and burned because they hadn't done their homework, and they hadn't talked to the right people before presenting.

I think my pitch had a couple key advantages over the other the groups that had presented. I was given a couple sample presentations that people had used as pitches. My immediate reaction was that a lot of those presentations were really ugly. Lots of text, bad stock photos with watermarks, and incomprehensible graphs. I made an effort to ensure that my presentation deck was beautiful and entertaining. I set the bar pretty high, and I wanted to demonstrate, if we put this much time and effort into the presentation, imagine what we'd be like if we were actually building this product.

As I started my presentation, the audience was blown away that we had a TV commercial showcasing the product we were pitching. I got this idea from an Apple talk that I attended; apparently at Apple, they start every pitch with a sample commercial to ensure they stayed focused on the customer. The brilliant thing about the TV commercial format is that you have 30 seconds to catch your audience's attention and communicate what you were trying to sell. If you couldn't explain what your product did, then it was too complicated, and it's a signal to go back to the drawing board.

Surprisingly as I walked the audience through my presentation, there was very minimal resistance. People were very engaged with the story I was telling. The people in the room were pretty impressed that two engineers had drawn up mocks, built a prototype, and even came up with the business case. They also responded well to the fact that we had gone through very non-traditional channels like Hack Day to attract attention. Every time the audience asked, "have you met with X, and what did they think?" I had an answer because I had spent a ton of time gathering allies across the organization, so we were well prepared.

At the end of the presentation, this wonderful conversation started:

VP of Engineering: "Who's the product manager driving this project?"
Me: "Uhhh... there's no product manager."
VP of Engineering: "What do you mean?"
Me: "It's just us two engineers. This is purely an engineering driven effort from the grassroots."
VP of Engineering: "Hahaha, at a boy. That's how it's done. Engineering!"

The VP of Engineering was thoroughly amused that we had broken every traditional role in the organization; typically product managers initiate new ideas, not engineering. We destroyed that mold.

The final question was about resourcing, how many people would the organization have to commit to make this dream a reality. I proudly declared that the SVP of Design had promised the support of his designers if we supplied the engineers. They asked how long ago did I secure that commitment, and I said, I secured it at 11am this morning, so the offer is still fresh and valid.

"Approved. Thumbs up guys," said the VP of Engineering.

The meeting suddenly ended. I couldn't believe what just happened. It was done. I was expecting far heavier resistance. It felt almost too easy. It's going to take a day or two for reality to set in that I will be getting my own team.

Thank you everyone for their kind words, prayers, and support. I couldn't have done it without you.

I'll end with the soundtrack that I used for my commercial:

Words For Arabella by Maybeshewill on Grooveshark

The Fleet

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Mon, 07 May 2012 22:56:41 -0700

Previously in the last episode, we left you with a cliff hanger. There were impending layoffs at Yahoo!. Thankfully I survived the reaping. This was the fifth round of layoffs that I have encountered, and I'm still standing. Unfortunately this time felt different, there were definitely some good folks that we were shocked to see go. In previous rounds, you sometimes had a feeling who might be targeted, this time seemed very unpredictable. We couldn't save them all. I salute those who have fallen, you give the rest of us another day to fight.

Through these dark trying times, there are glimmers of hope. I had all but given up hope on getting a green card because any time a company lays off enough workers, the Department of Justice puts the company on a labour blacklist, and the green card process freezes. Three weeks back, I attended an immigration forum, and it was completely packed out by agitated and angry folks looking for answers about their immigration statuses. Miraculously, the next day, the immigration folks contacted me saying that there's a small batch of green card applicants from 2008 that have small window of opportunity to proceed in the process. They managed to prove that there are no other qualified Americans that could do my job. This blew me away. I had been waiting for over four years for this, and it came during some of the most chaotic times. Thank God for that.

When the layoffs concluded, and my position was safe, I began fleshing out my Hack Day idea, and started putting together a formal pitch. My thinking was, as soon as the dust settles, I would need to be ready to present. There were some free resources floating around most likely, and I needed to capture them before they were committed to other projects. The last three weeks, I've been working furiously on the pitch. During the day, I've been traveling across the company gathering allies, advocates, and influencers for feedback and political support for my idea. Rallying support to our side would be critical to success.

Finally, last week I got an email telling me that I had been granted an audience with the leadership team to pitch my idea on May 8th. The game was on.

I decided to do a test run of my presentation. I invited a dozen folks from across my division to hear me out. It went really well, except I had one person in the audience who was a nay-sayer. They questioned the value of what I was proposing. It really got to me, and I felt pretty bad after my presentation. The odd thing was, a lot of folks came up to me afterwards telling me they really liked the idea and can't wait to use it, but my mind was too distracted by that one person in the audience I couldn't convince. It's probably human psychology where we give more weight to negative comments. I felt exhausted because I thought my presentation was complete, and it was a masterpiece; but there were definitely things that I didn't think of. Over the weekend, I drastically beefed up my presentation to better counter the arguments that my nay-sayer brought up in the presentation.

I was talking to a friend over lunch about this experience, and I realized that I was focusing too much on pleasing everyone. While getting a full consensus is a nice idea, in reality, it's nearly impossible to get everyone to see things your way (unless you have a room full of yes-men). After that realization, I made peace with my presentation experience. Convincing 11/12 people that my idea has merit is good enough. There are diminishing returns if you try to go after that last final person.

Fast forward to today, I received a remarkable email. I had sent an email a week back to an SVP asking for support. It was a long shot because the SVP was from a totally different part of the company, and I've spoken to him only 5 minutes in my entire career. I figured he'd be too busy to answer emails from commoners. The email I got was from the SVP, he hadn't forgotten me, and the email was asking for a separate audience to see the pitch. This was a far better outcome than I expected. Lesson learned, there's no harm in asking. The worst he could have said was 'no'.

Later this afternoon, I was walking back to my building and I came across the nay-sayer. He told me that after further consideration, he had a change of heart, and he thinks there's some legs to what I'm proposing. He has a potential client that may be interested, and if the client likes it, then don't even worry about resources for the project. Wow. 12 out of 12.

Tomorrow is the day I've been waiting for. I've got two audiences to pitch to. I've built up the fleet, an alliance across all parts of the organization. The chances of success are low given all the chaos still erupting around us, but through the breech we go. Your thoughts and prayers are much appreciated.

I'll end with this video that I watched one late night at work that gave me a second wind of energy as I was working on my presentation.

P.S. People think I'm crazy. Despite all this stuff that I'm working on, I'm also putting together plans to compete for the next Hack Day which is this coming Thursday. I'm putting together another team.

Waiting For The Fleet

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 23:09:32 -0700

Its been a couple weeks since my last blog post and I keep getting asked when is my big pitch for funding on my Hack Day projects. Unfortunately everything is currently frozen at work due to rumoured layoffs and restructuring at work. I have to wait until the restructuring is done because no executive has the appetite to be making any big bets in this atmosphere of uncertainty. Furthermore, there's no sense in getting a project funded if I end up getting axed, or the reinforcements that work in incubating ideas get axed.

My boss had been asking me whether I wanted to use more traditional channels to get my idea funded. I told him I was waiting for the dust to settle, and waiting for the fleet to arrive, e.g. my reinforcements. I'd be in a much stronger position and timing is everything; after all, you only get one first impression in front of a high-level audience. I believe it's wise to wait. I've seen too many ideas fall on the wayside because the person pitching couldn't score a decisive victory, and the executives answer with a strong 'maybe.' I'm looking for a definite 'yes' or a definite 'no.'

In either case, it's kind of surreal right now, this is literally the last day of normal. Once the restructuring happens, everything will change. This disruptive change is perhaps exactly what I need right now, because I'm too comfortable and entropy is setting in. The greatest rewards seem to come when you live way out of your comfort zone. Creative destruction is healthy, it is defined as the "disruption and downfall that occurs to certain industries and people when a revolutionary new idea takes hold."

It's scary and exciting at the same time; however, as ronin with nothing to lose and everything to gain, I choose to embrace change. I'm looking for a new war to fight. I'm looking for a deus ex machina ending to this chapter, and the beginning of a new chapter in this story.

See you on the other side.

Onward

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 23:58:00 -0700

Its been a couple of weeks since my Hack Day win, and I'm currently waiting for pitch day to come. Pitch day is where you present your idea, and try to attract funding from the Product Leadership Team and the Catalyst Group (incubator) to make your idea a reality. The interesting thing is, there are risks associated with project failure (much like in real life business), it could even be a one-way ticket. There's also a leadership reorganizing going on right now, so the future is quite cloudy. I've been debating this internally for quite some time, and reading a lot of different sources to find direction and inspiration.

Tonight, I started reading a book by Howard Schultz (CEO of Starbucks) entitled "Onward: How Starbucks Fought For Its Life Without Losing Its Soul." This paragraph was exactly what I needed:

There are moments in our lives when we summon the courage to make choices that go against reason, against common sense and the wise counsel of people we trust. But we lean forward nonetheless because, despite all risks and rational argument, we believe that the path we are choosing is the right and the best thing to do. We refuse to be bystanders, even if we do not know exactly where our actions will lead.

This is the kind of passionate conviction that sparks romances, wins battles, and drives people to pursue dreams others wouldn't dare. Belief in ourselves and in what is right catapults us over hurdles, and our lives unfold.

"Life is a sum of all your choices," wrote Albert Camus. Large or small, our actions forge our futures, hopefully inspiring others along the way.

Was listening to this song while reading the above quote which made it even more epic.

I Was Lost Without You by Clint Mansell on Grooveshark

I also had the pleasure to attend a talk by Adam Lashinsky, author of "Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired and Secretive Company Really Works." He talked about how when Steve Jobs came back, he bet the whole company on a radically new design for the iMac. Michael Dell (CEO of Dell Computers) in 1997 suggested that Apple should "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." In an alternate universe, the new iMac could have failed and Apple would have been finished, and there would be no iTunes, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, etc. What a remarkable risk that Steve Jobs took going all-in on the iMac. What a pivotal turning point in history.

I was talking to one of my co-workers at dinner about this potential one-way ticket to ride to ruin or glory. I asked him, am I crazy for pursuing this given the risk? His answer was... mmm, nope sounds like something you'd do.

Yahoo! Hack Day Q1 2012

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:54:10 -0800

This chronicles my journey through my first Hack Day at Yahoo!

What Is Hack Day?

First, let me get the Hollywood image of hacking out of the way first. We're not breaking into computer systems, we're not launching distributed denial of service attacks, and we're certainly not Anonymous. The technical term for those malicious activities is actually 'cracking'. Hacking in this case refers to "a person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a computer system."

The core of Hack Day is as follows:

Come up with an idea that solves a problem.
Recruit talent to help you work on that problem.
Hack for 24 hours.
Present your hack.

Project Inception

Back in my academia days, I was exposed to "The Cathedral and The Bazaar", which is one of the most influential essays in the open source software movement. The essay argues that every great piece of software starts by scratching a developer's itch. The ideas I came up for Hack Day did in fact originate a need which came from a fairly frustrating period of time at work, in which I took three weeks of vacation to recover from. After that experience, I thought to myself, I don't want anyone else to have to go through that, and then a lightbulb went off. Rather than complaining about the problem, I was going to help solve it. If I could recreate the Matrix as I saw fit, this was what I would do. So, during my vacation time, I actually fleshed out two separate Hack Day ideas.

With two ideas in hand, I had to recruit enough talent to staff two hack teams. Some folks thought the ideas were cool, but didn't have time to participate. Some folks thought I was a mad man and wanted nothing to do with it. In the end, I was able to recruit four engineers to back me. I would act as team captain for both teams.

We Came, We Saw, We Hacked

Hack Day officially started on Thursday at noon. My team packed up all their gear, and we relocated to official Hack Day venue. The room was setup with four-man workstations with ample power supplies for our electronics. The sides were lined with drinks and snacks. The back had a couple bean bag chairs for people to rest. The Hack Day organizers gave their inaugural address, and the competition began. I gave my team their marching orders, and we started our 24 hours of hacking. I put my headphones on, put on my coding playlist, had my geekiest t-shirt on (a Battlestar Galactica t-shirt) and away we went.

The team gelled really well together. I had an A-list of talent, so everyone were masters in their respective areas of expertise. Everyone collaborated really well. Any time we ran into a problem, we were able to come up with quick solutions.

Hacking and bootstrapping code was quite liberating as you don't have to worry so much about edge cases, scalability, performance, etc. The whole goal was to get something quick and dirty working in a very short amount of time. It didn't need to be pretty, it just had to work.

By 8pm, the mood started changing at Hack Day. The atmosphere was a bit more laid back as people started getting tired. The Hack Day organizers setup a turntable.fm room, and folks in the room took turns DJ-ing. It was a really cool collaborative experience. When it was my turn to DJ, I went with my go-to techno artist, Rob Dougan. I got lots of props for throwing that on. Someone in turntable.fm complimented my playlist. The music started getting kind of weird at 5am in the morning, someone had put on some really bizarre sounding jazz.

By 11pm, all of my team had went home. I decided to drive home to take a quick shower, and I came straight back. At 1am, one of my team members rejoined me at the Yahoo! campus, and we continued hacking through the night. Another one of my team members was working remotely at home. At 7am, everyone got kicked out of the Hack Day room because they had to reconfigure the room for judging later in the day. We relocated our command center to a booth in URL's Cafe. Unfortunately we were stuck on a major bug that was blocking progress, and we were waiting for one of our team mates to come into work to help solve the problem. At 8am, I saw my team member slump over in the booth and fell asleep. I thought okay, maybe now is a good time to rest while we're stuck. I slept for about 15 minutes (it felt like an hour) before waking up to the sound of classical music; lucky us, the sound technicians were doing an audio test of the whole building that morning.

10am, team member fixes the critical bug in our system, and we're unblocked. By 11am we had one hour left; we were frantically killing off bugs and implementing features. Even more awesome, the primary laptop we were working on was running out of batteries. At exactly 11:55am we finished everything and submitted our hack. Talk about a photo finish. We opted to skip eating lunch because presentations started at 1pm.

The Pitch

The rules of presenting at Hack Day were simple. Every team gets 90 seconds to pitch their idea to the audience and the judges. Powerpoint presentations were absolutely banned. Teams must present working prototypes. The judges represented key leaders from across the company including Senior Directors, Architects, Senior Vice Presidents, and the CTO. Winning teams have an opportunity to be funded by The Catalyst Program which helps incubate ideas and turn those ideas to real world products for the market.

We went to sign-in for our hack, and picked up our official Hack Day t-shirts. There were a total of 65 teams competing. My presentation slot was #31 and #32. Unfortunately I had to present both ideas back-to-back, and my stronger idea was up first; ideally, I wanted the order reversed because I wanted to end on a climax when presenting. Oh well. As I watched the first 15 presentations, I saw some really strong presentations, so this was quite a crowded field. I threw back on my headphones, put on some fight music, and got into the zone.

#31 was called, and it was show time. This was our time, our moment. I opened the presentation stumbling a bit with my words, but then found my groove as I started seeing some judges nod their heads in approval. As I finished my opening statements and logged into my hack, the crowd started to thaw and laughter started to fill the room. My adrenaline started kicking in and I went with the flow, and the crowd looked absolutely delighted. As the clock ran down, I ended with my punch line and the crowd responded with loud applause. It was probably the loudest the room had been all day. Later when I walked off the stage, one of my co-workers in the audience said, "dude, you owned the room." I managed to present a very subversive idea in a funny way, and showed an incredibly simple way of solving the problem. As I came off the stage and sat down, my team member showed me an email that had just come in. One of the VPs had sent an email saying how much he loved the idea.

After a 90 second break, #32 was called, and I had to go through the second pitch. I felt a bit more confident and talked a little bit slower. I didn't quite get the same visual feedback from judges, nor did I get the same audible feedback from the audience. The presentation also went about 10 seconds overtime unfortunately, and one of the key features we were trying to demo broke at the end. Oh well.

The other presentations finished, and the pizza party began as the judges left the room to deliberate. I was exhausted, and the team had given it their all. There was nothing left to do but wait. Some of my team members already went back to the office not really expecting to win. 45 minutes later, the judges came back from a deeply contested decision. They started running through the list of winners. Then I heard, "The Hack Day Design Award goes to #32." I thought to myself, what on earth, the weaker idea and weaker presentation won? I got onto my instant messenger and recalled my team members to get over here, we had won! As I'm trying to regroup my team, I heard "and the Hack Day Hackers' Choice Award goes to #31." My team members exchanged looks of disbelief. I guess lightning does strike twice. We went up to claim our prize, and a special black Hack Day t-shirt.

I don't really recall precisely what happened after this, but we were instantly whisked away by media folks. There were a lot of photos taken, and a lot of video interviews. I wasn't really in the mood for photos because I looked hideous; I hadn't shaved, and I hadn't slept at all. It was a very strange experience, everyone suddenly wanted a piece of you.

When the media was through with us, I packed up my gear and started walking back to my office. One of my co-workers along the way asked, "how does it feel that you've won big?" My reply was, "I'm the same man I was 24 hours ago, and I'm still the same man today, and the same man tomorrow. Besides, it wasn't me, it's the team. I couldn't have done it without them. It would have been impossible for me to get those two ideas off the ground without them."

That night when I got home, I crashed on my bed and had the greatest sleep ever.

Big thanks to my team, Andrew, Huge, Melissa, and Srini for helping me with my crazy ideas. You said yes when my idea only existed as scribbles on a piece of paper. Those 24 hours at Hack Day has potentially changed the future.

The Photos

Lose Yourself by Eminem on Grooveshark

The Business Day After

As I walked through campus, I noticed I started getting double-takes from strangers and faint whispers of "hey, that's the guy from Hack Day." At lunch time, I was in line for some food and a guy comes up and introduces himself as the lead of The Catalyst Program (the idea incubator).

Catalyst: "hey, I'm the guy that was chatting with you on turntable.fm, I was really liking your music on Hack Day. Rob Dougan is so awesome."

Catalyst: "So how long have you been with the company?"

Me: "4.5 years."

Catalyst: "How come I've never heard of you?"

Me: "Because I wasn't ready yet."

Catalyst: "Ah understood. Well, I'll be meeting with you later to talk. Great idea! Looking forward to working with you."

One of the questions I get is, "How did you pull off that pitch? I didn't see you even bothering to practice before you went up." The answer is mastery. This doesn't happen accidentally, and it doesn't happen overnight. It is a very deliberate investment of time. No one sees the many of hours behind the scenes that were spent preparing for this one moment. For example, during my vacation, I watched about 200 different business pitches on Dragon's Den. Watching that many pitches, you're bound to learn what works and what doesn't work.

Fast forward to today, and I'm still doing various media spots. Some of it will eventually be made publicly available for you to see. For now, all my interviews and such are internal only. I'm waiting to be summoned by the Product Leadership Team and The Catalyst folks to pitch to them. We'll see if my ideas get funded. The entrepreneur in me is quietly awaiting that opportunity. This is one of the cool things about working at Yahoo!, they invented Hack Day.

I'm feeling very blessed these days. This was Act 1 of Empire Building. This blog post wasn't meant to be bragging. I just noted earlier in a blog post that we tend to always remember the bad things that happen. Perhaps it's good to dwell on some of the good things that have happened.

Empire

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 01:35:54 -0800

2012 marks the fifth year of my five year plan which began in 2007, that fateful year where I decided to do a blind jump to Silicon Valley. This blog post is the battle plan strategy for 2012. The reason why I'm posting this is, I heard from a friend that people who post their goals for the year are more likely to succeed in achieving them. The rationale is you're more accountable to achieving the goals, and the document serves as a reminder of what you need to prioritize.

Before diving into the strategy, let me paint a backdrop of how 2011 went. A modern philosopher of our time, Eminem asks, "If you had one shot, or one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?" The unfortunate answer is, I let it slip. The other unfortunate thing is, when you look back in time, your brain is wired to remember lost opportunities more than past victories. That's likely why we ponder the couldas, wouldas, shouldas so much.

"Men like us we never get back the things we love." - Deus Ex: Human Revolution

If I had to use one word to summarize the theme of my 2012 strategy, I would use 'Empire.' A critical leadership lesson I've been learning is focus on your strengths, and bring on people to help fill your weaknesses. As an engineer, my strength is building things, so this year I will focus on empire building. Last year, I was met with great resistance in trying to achieve my goals, so this year I have a lot of lost progress to make up.

"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds." - Francis Bacon, English Philosopher

We shall wander the country side recruiting allies to complement where we are weak, gather our forces, and retake what is rightfully ours, and avenge our fallen master. We are as ronin, we have nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

Connectors

This year I need to shore up my social network in order to find the right partners; however I am horrible at networking. As an introvert, networking is an emotionally draining experience. Nevertheless, it's a critical thing I have to master. This article I found had an interesting spin on networking, "Forget Networking, How To Be A Connector."

We all know people like them, people who seem to know everyone. They're always able to help -- or if they can't, they know someone who can. You meet them for the first time and in 15 minutes, you're talking with them like you're childhood friends. They're successful, smart and funny, with a likable touch of self-deprecation. And they're interested in everything. Who are they? Connectors. [...] Gladwell describes them as having an ability to span many different worlds, subcultures and niches. [...]

Perhaps one of the most important attributes of a connector is a willingness to help and to reach out even if there is no obvious or immediate payback. That means thinking long-term.

I need to become a connector. "The Introvert's Guide To Networking" is also a good read.

Saying No Is Just As Important

I was reading my company's strategy document, and what was interesting was that it lists what we're going to do, and it explicitly lists what we're not going to do. Normally strategies don't mention what will NOT be done. Applying that idea to personal strategy makes a lot of sense. By saying no, you reduce the number of distractions, and it allows you to focus on key priorities. I would much rather do a couple things really well than doing many things poorly.

One area that I'm not going to do this year is buy a house. A lot of my friends have been asking why I'm not investing in real estate. It's currently not the right investment for me. As an investment, there are a lot of commission costs to both enter and exit a real estate investment which is very unattractive. Taking out a mortgage is essentially leveraging your money 5:1 which is also absurd (think about if you'd ever use that much leverage for stocks). I also need liquidity to keep my options open, and a house is definitely not a liquid asset. Instead, I've been investing in real estate income trusts which pays me a 13% dividend, and I don't have to do any work. I don't have to worry about tenants paying rent, property taxes, or dealing with home maintenance.

Investment Theme

First and foremost, I am going to continue aggressively diversifying my portfolio. Unfortunately my assets are still largely tied to tech companies.

Next theme is to focus on investments that require little time. One of the most interesting pieces of financial advice I read was 'how much money would continue coming in if you suddenly stopped working?' Since time is a scarce resource, I like the idea of putting money to work, and it comes back without needing a lot of attention or time. This means I'll be expanding my portfolio to include more dividend yielding stocks.

One area I've been fascinated by is the area of angel investors. Maybe I've been watching too much Dragon's Den, but the way those angel investors put their capital to work is really intriguing to me. My goal this year is to learn more about angel investing and investing in private companies. A stretch goal is to pull off a deal with other strategic partners. Hopefully that will setup a foundation for future investment partnerships. I'm also looking to pitch some ideas to investors to attract some investment for a couple crazy ideas I have. This year will be much more entrepreneurial than the past.

The 24 Character Strategy

The other day, I was reading about China's meteoric rise to power over the past decade. What's interesting was that the West was caught off guard by China's rise, but it didn't happen accidentally. China rose because of a carefully constructed strategy called "The 24 Character Strategy."

"Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership." -Deng Xiaoping, Chairman of the Communist Party of China

Such an excellent, profound, and concise strategy.

Time Is Finite

One of the big events that happened last year was when Steve Jobs died. There was an incredible outpouring of love for that man, yet it made me ponder. Even a man that powerful and wealthy couldn't save himself, and he couldn't even add one minute to his life if he wanted to. I re-read Steve Jobs' famous commencement speech that he gave at Stanford.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. [...]

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Very interesting insight, and it's causing me to urgently want to change the future while I'm still young and healthy. I've also read that the average programmer's career peaks at around 35-40 years old. So, now is a critical time to accelerate progress to secure the future before the peak comes.

I realized last year with all the crazy changes going on, I had used so much of my time trying to predict the future and the next thing that would happen. Rather than trying to predict the future, my time would be better spent building the future I want.

Fight the future!

The Bezos Test

Whenever I visit home, I'm constantly asked if I'm married yet. When I say no, I get a wide variety of strange reactions, as if there's something wrong with me. When church folk inquire about my marital status, my go to answer comes from Proverbs 31:10 - "A good woman is hard to find, and worth far more than diamonds." This was a problem 2000 years ago, and it's still a problem today, so this isn't exactly a new problem.

This problem reminded me of an article entitled, "The Inner Bezos," which covers the life of Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com. He had an interesting test to find resourceful women.

The limitation Bezos set for friends producing candidates for his "women flow" was more esoteric. "The number-one criterion was that I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison," he says.

"What I really wanted was someone resourceful. But nobody knows what you mean when you say, 'I'm looking for a resourceful woman.' If I tell somebody I'm looking for a woman who can get me out of a Third World prison.

I thought that was an interesting and novel way to limit his search criteria. Perhaps I'll apply that test.

Ronin

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:28:37 -0800

Ronin - A samurai with no lord or master during the feudal period of Japan. A samurai became masterless from the death or fall of his master.

As I draw up battle plans and objectives for 2012, I thought it was important to review 2011 as it's always important to draw lessons from the past. If I had to summarize 2011 in one word, I would use 'ronin'. 2011 was a bizarre unpredictable year where I lost a lot of masters that had authority over me in my professional sphere and personal sphere. I looked at my organizational chart, and for the first time, every single person up the chain of command was different/gone from the time I started at the company.

Big changes in leadership always produces a lot of distractions, and lost time as folks get up to speed in their various roles. Brand new leaders also have to spend a lot of time trying to earn their people's respect and loyalty which is not a fast or easy thing to do.

This constant state of change produced lots of strange paradoxes. My natural tendency and defence mechanism was to preserve the present in times of great change, but sometimes it felt like the more you resisted, the greater the change. A key lesson learned was, change is inevitable so you might as well embrace it and influence the outcome.

A side-effect to being masterless is this odd sense of freedom which is quite empowering. I had a lunch-time discussion with a friend at work who had recently become fully vested. He noted that there was this strange sense of freedom because for the first time, he wasn't worrying as much about losing his stock anymore, and he felt that he was now working at the company because he wanted to rather than out of financial fear. It's quite a liberating feeling having nothing to lose and everything to gain.

We are as ronin, wandering the country side in exile, in search of adventure and a way to avenge our fallen master and regain our honour.

Cross Discipline

One of the most revolutionary ideas I came across this year was the notion of a balanced information diet. Just as your body can't function properly if you ate all junk food, your brain can't function properly with all junk information. A balanced information diet requires learning about ideas that are relevant, important, uncomfortable, challenging, and even opposing ideas. This video by Eli Pariser eloquently lays out his arguments in this TED talk.

As a foreigner living in the U.S., I am often surprised by the civil discorse around politics. I wonder if arguments and debates would be of higher quality if people consumed a balanced information diet which includes learning about uncomfortable, challenging opposing views. At least maybe the debates would have more substance, respect, and empathy.

To further extend the idea, I often get asked by college folks, "what is the purpose of going through college and taking all these random classes?" My answer is, you learn how to learn in college, and when you get out, you should be able to learn new subjects quickly on-the-fly. Those random classes that were taken in subjects outside of your core major could lead to some interesting cross breeding of ideas. As a technologist, I can view problems in other fields through a fresh and different perspective and vice-versa. Perhaps other disciplines have novel solutions to problems in my field of expertise. That is why this last year, I placed more importance on being more well-rounded in my knowledge, and aimed to be more cross disciplined.

While in academia, I never had a chance to take any philosophy courses, so as a stretch goal, I decided to go through Harvard's online course on Justice and Philosophy. Very enlightening experience. When a politician on television talks about being a Libertarian, I can now safely assert, "you good sir know nothing about real Libertarian ideals, Nozick would be rolling in his grave."

Fail Quickly

One of the new philosophies that the leadership team at work has instilled is failing quickly. The idea is that it's okay to fail as long as you fail quickly. If an idea doesn't work out, change course and work on something else that might succeed. It's better to fail quickly than to have a long drawn out slow-motion failure as it's very costly. I thought this was a very liberating and counterintuitive idea. The entire academic system is built around the idea that failing is a bad thing; however, in the real world, failure is inevitable, and risk management / risk minimization is just as important as succeeding. Jim Cramer has a saying about investing which goes, limit your downside and the upside will take care of itself. That being said, failing quickly can apply to dreams, opportunities, relationships and other areas of life. I certainly wished I applied failing quickly to some relationships I tried pursuing; it would have saved me from chasing phantom dead-end dreams and the dreaded friend-zone.

I looked through my portfolio this year, and realized I had some horrible investments from 2006 that have lost a lot of money, and had become dead money. Hoping that the stock would rebound was a futile effort. The opportunity cost was just too high, so I purged my portfolio of all the deadwood and reinvested the money into more favourable investments. I wish I had applied failing quickly earlier.

Disclaimer: I'm not advocating to give up quickly on everything. Perseverance and being able to fight a long campaign is also very important. It's more of a matter of choosing your battles, and deciding which battles are worth fighting.

Purpose, Autonomy, Mastery

As I advance in my career, a management role might be in the cards in the future. I was asked about filling a management role, but declined because I hadn't maxed out my technical skills yet. Some people had asked me if it was a career mistake of not going down the management path, and my response is that I already take on some management tasks. Real leaders don't need to command fancy titles to lead. To further drive home the point, in the company employee directory, I list myself as the "senior summer intern" because I honestly don't care about titles. Sometimes that lowly title is even advantageous because unfamiliar people underestimate me and I end up overdelivering in their eyes.

In either case, as management is a possibility in the future, I spent more time learning about people and management. The video below was the most important management lesson I had ever learned. It blew my mind because it highlights all these bizarre beliefs we have about the workplace which are modeled after antiquated agriculture-based rules which don't apply in a skill-based economy.

The Empire Fund

In late 2010 I had started a couple lectures on financial literacy for young adults. My goal in 2011 was to extend that by offering more hands-on one-on-one teaching. I established something called 'The Empire Fund' which was a place for folks to learn more about investing and finances. It consists of a fantasy stock market league, and a Facebook group for Q&A.

Some results from financial advising this year:

3x 401K accounts opened.
1x debt consolidation.
2x investment savings accounts opened.
2x brokerage accounts opened.

Fear produces paralysis. Despite all this chaos occurring locally, there was a lot of macro fears as well. In 2011 we witnessed a double-dip recession which was fairly scary. The stock market actually has an index nicknamed 'the fear index' (VIX), and fear was at a 2 year high. There were dire fears about a breakup of the European Union which wreaked havoc on global stock exchanges. The US stock markets performed horribly for the most part, with only 1% upside for the whole year. I'm kicking myself for sometimes being too afraid to buy stock that had fallen a lot; I missed some big opportunities because of fear.

In terms of finances this year, I learned a whole lot about the power of dividend stocks and stock options. I'm currently employing both financial instruments in my portfolio. I have to admit that I was wrong for ignoring boring dividend stocks for so long. Dividend stocks are not as exciting as high flying stocks, but they sure save you in a double dip recession.

Worst investments of the year: Bank of America, Alcoa.

Best investments of the year: Lululemon, Amazon, Annaly Capital.

Volunteer Work

The street hockey league that I help run, Barn League Hockey, enjoyed its second year with 80% growth. We had 60+ people sign-up this year. We saw the average skill level rise, new faces, couple injuries, and an epic hockey fight.

Over at Bethel Church, had a good cake war at the Mission's Banquet. This year I was appointed to the Communications Committee where I sit as an adviser for their web presence. I also continue to help out as a sound technician there. Strangely I found myself doing sound and lights at a women's conference this year. Didn't see that one coming.

To Be Continued...

Stay tuned for the 2012 battle plan.

The Relaunch of VanessaJeweller.com - Behind The Scenes

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:43:32 -0800

This year, I was back in Victoria for three weeks for my annual Christmas vacation. I thought it was going to be quiet time, but I came across a project that amounted to three weeks of raw execution. My task, to modernize and relaunch vanessajeweller.com website in three weeks.

I rarely do private commercial websites these days but this project piqued my interest. I did a quick market analysis and found about a dozen jewellery stores in the Greater Victoria website. Many of the stores that are ranked high on search engines weren't really great websites to begin with. Besides the major jewellery store chains, a lot of competitor websites looked like something out of early 2000s. I felt there was an opportunity to crush the competition with everything that I know about the web now.

Web Development in 2005

The vanessajeweller.com website was first put up in 2005. Here's a screenshot of the old website we were working with:

Some of the primary problems:

Low quality photos.
Not a lot of content.
No content management system.
No search engine optimization.
No data analytics.

Looking back at 2005, it's pretty incredible to think about how much technology and the internet has changed since then. As a web developer, a lot of the modern conveniences we take for granted simply weren't in place back then.

Here's a taste of what the web was like in 2005:

Social media wasn't a big deal. Facebook for businesses wasn't around. Twitter didn't even exist.
Digital photography wasn't on-par with traditional film cameras yet. DSLR cameras were insanely expensive. Remember when you had to scan photos into the computer?
Open source content management systems were still very complicated to use and setup.
The mobile web as we know it today simply did not exist. There were no android or ios devices.
Web developer tools such as FireBug didn't exist. Debugging CSS/HTML/Javascript was a pain.
Internet Explorer 6 controlled 89% of the market. Firefox 1.5 had just come out, and controlled 6% of the market.
Tableless CSS-based websites were starting to gain traction. XHTML 1.0 was apparently the next hot thing.

Hack Day

I only had finite time to work on this project, and the whole thing needed to be shipped before I left Victoria. In the spirit of hack day, I started brainstorming on how I could rapidly bootstrap a professional looking site with a little cash and a little time.

Photography

Priority one was sexy photos for the website. I needed professional looking jewellery photos to maximize the wow factor of the site. I spent a night on the internet scouring for tutorials on jewellery photography. After I was done, I felt like Neo out of the Matrix saying, "woah, I know jewellery photography." A critical piece that I needed was a macroscopic lens; unfortunately they cost at least $400, and I wasn't going to drop that kind of cash for a one-time project. I ended up finding a place in town that rented them for $20/day.

Next, I needed a good digital camera to take photos with. My brother had a DSLR camera available, and he had taken quite a number of courses in photography, so I recruited him to the project. You can take a look at his side of the story on his blog.

Step three was lighting for the photography. A lot of the professionals were using white LED lighting to light up their jewellery. Normal lights give off a yellow-ish light which doesn't look good. I serendipitously found a solution for this while attending a games night at Patrick and Rebecca's. They were outfitting their cabinets with LED strips; they were completely self-contained, very inexpensive, and required very little soldering. I used to have to design circuits and solder together wire, resisters, and LEDs which was a lot of work. My friend Chad happened to have the LED strips with the exact colour temperature I needed, and Patrick gave me a couple power supplies. We bootstrapped together a LED light source, and we were on our way.

Finally, I figured out that we needed a couple plastic backgrounds to stage jewellery on. I needed a white plastic to give off a soft-reflection, and a piece of black acrylic for a dramatic reflection on a black background. I was able to source my materials from a local plastic vendor, and that set me back $60.

The Day Of The Photoshoot

With all our materials in hand, we did a day of photography on site.

My brother and I at the photoshoot, using LED lighting, white plastic background, DSLR with macro lens, and a light box.

Staging jewellery on a black acrylic background.

Final product shot of engagement ring.

It took us about a day to finish photographing everything. My brother produced about two hundred photos. We went through the shots, and made a shortlist of thirty shots that would make it to the website.

The Web In 2012

With the photos in place, it was my turn to throw in my expertise. When I was scoping out the project, I knew I wanted to focus on the following areas:

Content Management System.
Search Engine Optimization.
Social Media Integration.
Site Speed Performance.
Data Analytics.

Each of these site features were areas that I could comfortably beat the competition in. Each of the features actually all support search engine optimization as well (which affects your Google/Yahoo/Bing rankings), so it was crucial to have a coherent strategy.

Content management systems have become commoditized and the open source versions of this software are very full featured, so I went with Joomla. There was no sense in reinventing the wheel. In addition, one of the non-profits committees that I sit on recently made a motion to move their site to Joomla, so I figured it was in my interest to learn Joomla. I spent about eight hours reading documentation, reviewing tutorials, playing around with its code, and was ready to build a site on Joomla. Cue Neo saying, "Woah, I know Joomla."

Having the content management system taken care of meant I could focus on writing content for the website. In addition, it gave me the infrastructure to host a blog on the site which is quite important because Google favours sites with fresh content.

Performance is another critical aspect of web development these days. Google has said site speed matters in search engine ranking these days, so it's very important to get it right. I spent a couple days optimizing the website code, and managed to shave off 500 milliseconds from the site so far. More optimizations to come as I collect more live traffic data.

The social media aspect of the website is still relatively new to me, and I will learn this as I go. Preliminary data is quite impressive, and I'm seeing more social referrals than organic web search referrals. That being said, a couple data points doesn't mean much, so we'll have to see the long-term trend on this.

The Finished Product

After three weeks of writing content, coding, and optimizing, I finally relaunched vanessajeweller.com.

I was quite happy at the speed of the project. We went from idea to finished product in three weeks. It was a nice change of pace. The websites that I typically work on these days are used by tens of millions of users, and you need to setup a ton of infrastructure to support that kind of traffic. When you operate on that kind scale, it's hard to launch things fast.

The other takeaway is just how much more a web developer can do today in 2012. If you asked me to build such a site back in 2005 in three weeks, I would have told you that it was impossible. As a programmer, we live in exciting times because we have so many tools, platforms, and infrastructure to build on top of.

Anyway, let me know what you think about the new site. I'm always look for feedback.

Chan Productions Joins Internet Blackout Against SOPA/PIPA

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:58:12 -0800

Yesterday, Chan Productions participated in the internet blackout in an effort to protest the SOPA/PIPA bill which is being debated in the U.S. Government. Other large websites such as Wikipedia, BoingBoing, Reddit, etc. blacked out their websites in protest. This is what our website looked like yesterday:

For accessibility, this is the blackout message I had on the site:

american politicians have introduced SOPA/PIPA legislation
which could damage the free and open internet
the success of chanproductions was only possible in a world with a free and open internet
for 24 hours we are blacking out the site in solidarity
and in defence of the internet

learn more

fight the future

The dust has settled from the online protest, and Digital Trends has compiled statistics about the blackout:

75,000: Approximate of websites that participated in the blackout, according to SOPAStrike.com, which helped organize the protest.

162 million: Number of people who saw the Wikipedia blackout page

4.5 million: Number of people who signed Googles anti-SOPA petition on Wednesday

1.458 million: Number of people who signed other similar anti-SOPA/PIPA petitions, according to activist websites Avaaz.org and Fight for the Future (FFTF)

35,000: Approximate number of people who sent letters to their senators and representatives as a result of the blackout

25: Number of senators who publicly opposed PIPA after the blackout went into effect

We'll see if this was enough to kill the bills. Learn more about SOPA/PIPA.

The Best of Chan 2011

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:42:48 -0800

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to present to you, the annual 'Best Of Chan' photo collection. This is a collection of my favourite moments from last year which have been curated from my Flickr photo archive. It brings back a lot of memories of all that had come in 2011, both the challenges and victories. I've also put together a sound track to complement your viewing experience, so please hit play on the Grooveshark Music Player below and lets start the slideshow.

Soundtrack:

'Venice Rooftops' From The Assassin's Creed Soundtrack - Jesper Kyd
'Set Fire To The Rain' - Adele

Enjoy!

P.S. I've got other 'Best Of Chan' albums from previous years as well. Here's the 2010 edition, and the 2009 edition.

Where Were You On 9/11?

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 11:59:00 -0700

With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, I came across a pretty incredible story from the Washington Post entitled, "F-16 pilot was ready to give her life on Sept. 11."

Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt. Heather Lucky Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and ready to fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The days fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.

The one thing she didnt have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.

Except her own plane. So that was the plan.

Because the surprise attacks were unfolding, in that innocent age, faster than they could arm war planes, Penney and her commanding officer went up to fly their jets straight into a Boeing 757.

I had a number of conversations about that fateful day. The typical question is always, "where were you when 9/11 happened?" I noticed that a lot of Americans view the event as exclusively an American event; however, it definitely affected all of North America, and Canada was definitely affected.

One of the conversations went like this:
American: Where were you on 9/11?
Chan: On a Canadian navy base.
America: Wait, Canada has an army?
Chan: ...
Chan: Who said anything about an army?
America: Why would Canada need a military?

In either case, to prove that Canada does in fact have a military, this was where I was on 9/11. Home of the Pacific Fleet:

The other really strange thought is that there are kids right now that know nothing about 9/11 because they were born after it.

A Delicious Reading Experiment

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 21:50:34 -0700

A year ago, I was lamenting how I had finished reading only two books. I was thinking, that's not good, I'm not reading as much as I used to. Was I get dumber? I had noticed that with my schedule, I rarely had large blocks of time that I could spend reading. Instead, I had these slivers of time available in-between tasks, 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there. This disjointed schedule was much better suited for reading articles and news on the internet.

It was hard to quantify exactly how much I was reading on the internet though. With a traditional book, you had page numbers, and back in my childhood days, we would always record how many pages you had read as a learning metric. Unfortunately with internet articles, it's hard to judge since every site varies in page layout, font, etc.

To help count how much I was reading online, a friend at work introduced me to Delicious, a social bookmarking utility. Basically every page I visited, I could bookmark and tag with metadata. It was also nice that my blog could pull the latest articles I was reading from Delicious (which you see on the left rail here).

Managing bookmarks on Delicious was incredibly useful because I used to use Firefox to manage all my bookmarks, but it was incredibly hard to find old bookmarks. If I was on another computer, I wouldn't have access to those bookmarks stored locally on my other computer (yes, I'm aware latest version of Firefox solves this problem with sync). I've also had Firefox crash on me, and I lost all my bookmarks before. So, it was settled, I would store and share all my bookmarks online with Delicious.

August 31st, 2010, I embarked on my quest to measure how much I read online. In one year, I have amassed 3679 bookmarks.

Here's some stats that I crunched.

Domain	# Bookmarks
news.yahoo.com	620
www.businessinsider.com	497
www.wired.com	494
www.youtube.com	105
www.nytimes.com	79
www.bbc.co.uk	64
www.guardian.co.uk	56
i.imgur.com	49
finance.yahoo.com	47
www.rockpapershotgun.com	38
www.telegraph.co.uk	37
www.time.com	34
en.wikipedia.org	32
english.aljazeera.net	31
techcrunch.com	27
www.washingtonpost.com	27
www.cbc.ca	25
online.wsj.com	24
www.huffingtonpost.com	20
www.reuters.com	17

Bookmarks By Day Of Week

Looks like I read the most on Mondays.

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Royal Family Kids Camp 2011

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 21:57:00 -0700

I just got back from a week in the mountains serving in Royal Family Kids Camp (RFKC). It's a summer camp dedicated to neglected and abused children which is sponsored by my church. This year, we had about 30 kids. Each cabin had two kids, two camp counselor, and one assistant counselor, so the kids get a lot of attention and supervision. The rest of this blog entry will just be a number of mini-stories from camp that comes to mind.

Home of the Underdogs

Before camp started, I was talking to some of the organizers of RFKC, and one of the problems they face was a marketing problem, in that people didn't know what RFKC was. I spent the week thinking about a clever unofficial tagline for the camp. I've come up with "RFKC: Home Of The Underdogs." There's two meanings behind it. First, if you look at the kids that attend the camp, they are the ultimate underdogs of society. The second meaning was by the people who volunteer to help out at camp. I looked through the rosters and thought, this is quite a ragtag band of people, how could this group of people possibly pull off a successful camp; yet, by the grace of God, we're able to pull off a great camp. There are definitely a lot of underdogs on staff.

Everyone loves an underdog story, and I love betting on the underdog.

I Am Chan

Since the kids are in the state foster care system, there are a lot of extra privacy and security concerns for the children. One of the restrictions is that we can't let the kids know our last names because the system doesn't want the kids trying to contact us after camp is over. Unfortunately most people call me 'Chan', 'Chan Can', 'Channy Chan Chan', and other variations. There were a number of times that the other counselors would inadvertently call me 'Chan' and I would give them this shocked stare; they would pause and then realize their folly and try to quickly change the subject before the kids caught on.

Hoarders

One of the things highlighted in our training is that some neglected kids who are not fed properly will develop a habit of hoarding food. Hoarding is a defence mechanism for them because they don't know when the next time they will be fed. This year I actually witnessed this behaviour in some of the kids. During meal time they would grab a plate of food, eat a little bit, hide some food in their clothes, and go up for more food and repeat. They also had a tendency of eating very quickly. We would explain to them that they didn't need to rush or hoard because they could eat as much food as they wanted, and there was plenty of food, but that doesn't work for the first couple days. Once you have a couple days of consistency, where you prove that there is plenty of food, and they won't go hungry, then their defence mechanism goes down and they start trusting you and start eating normally.

A Test Of Wills

Monday is typically the hardest day in my opinion because you get your kids, and the kids and counselors don't know each other very well yet in terms of social/cultural norms, expectations, and boundaries. We had one kid who was 11 years old who was quite challenging because mentally and physically he had developed slower and was more like an 8 year old. The kid was also attention starved, and would constantly talk and make noise to get attention. The constant talking made it quite interesting for bedtime because he would keep everyone up in the cabin. The other two counselors had the night off, so I had to take care of the situation. As a result, I stood next to the kid's bunk and told him that he needed to lay down and not make noise. I also explicitly told him that I could literally stand there all night. The challenge was on, and for the next 30 minutes he kept trying to test this boundary, and I didn't yield. I stood there and shushed him every time he started making loud noise again.

By the 30 minute mark he had given up and started sleeping; however, I had a feeling he wasn't going to get into a deep sleep, so I stood there as a precaution. Fifteen minutes later, he woke up again and tried to misbehave but he saw me standing there and gave up and slept. I assume when he fell asleep the first time, he lost track of time (it helps that the room doesn't have any clocks, and he didn't wear a watch) and when he woke up the second time, he must have thought I was really going to stand there the whole night if if needed.

The irony is that this kid would always complain about being tired and wanting to sleep during the day.

God Moments

All of the counselors arrive at camp a day early (Sunday) in order to setup and prepare. That Sunday night, Pastor Art gave communion and addressed us all about how important this camp was. He noted how we were doing God's work and we would be helping mend, restore, and encourage these neglected and abused children. The verse Psalm 82:3 came to mind, "Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed." As of late in my prayer life, the phrase, "if you tell me something worth fighting for, I'll fight that war" was a recurring theme. That Sunday night, I just knew through and through that I was in the right place, at the right time, with the right cause.

One of the exceptional things about this year was that all of the kids in the cabin this year wanted to pray at nights. Normally you have to coerce kids into doing things like pray, but they were all wanting to do it. Even during they day they would ask if they could pray at night. The kids were even fighting over who could pray during meal time. I guess that's a good problem to have.

On the final day of camp, it's easy to just turn your brain on autopilot and just cruise to the finish line because you're tired and the kids will be going home. Everyone stayed diligent and there were some pretty incredible stories from the final hours of camp. For my team, the kids were participating in the Hope Tree activity where they were writing down their hopes and dreams, and we would pray for that. It was kind of heart-wrenching that some of the simple things that we take for granted like seeing your own family is such a distant dream for some of the kids. Some of the kids opened up and talked about why they were in foster care because of what their parents had done, and it was just shocking hearing what people would do to children. What an incredible cost to children and society. In the closing ceremonies, the kids were just so appreciative for everything we had done for them. A lot of them didn't want to go home because for they felt like this was a real family.

The hardest part is coming home, and watching the kids go back to the environments they have to live in. [Read full story]

Continue reading "Royal Family Kids Camp 2011"

Things I Learned In 2010: Humble Confidence

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 23:12:00 -0800

I'm kicking off a series entitled simply, "Things I Learned In 2010" as a way to reflect on last year. I've been working on my battle plans and strategy for 2011 and I find it's always important to look to the past's lessons to inform the future. So I thought I'd write about my inspirations from last year before unveiling the 2011 theme.

Let me set the stage for the first topic of 'Humble Confidence'. In 2010, I saw a number of leaders (whom I respected greatly) step down from their respective roles and move on to other endeavours. These changes obviously took a while to get used to and adapt to because of the big shoes that had to be filled. People spoke of these leaders with high-regard and almost reverence. Their reputations precede them. I've heard it said that their presence is felt even when they are not physically around. I pondered what made these leaders great? What was the commonality amongst them?

Last year I also had the opportunity to give a talk about managing finances, and I invited some successful businessmen to help out as guest speakers on specific financial topics. These again were people I held with high regard, and I wanted to know what their secret was. This was definitely a change for me because I come from an environment full of negative encounters with genuinely evil people behaving very unethically when it came to business.

After a couple lunch time discussions with peers about what makes these leaders great, we concluded these were common attributes they had all possessed:

Had a humble confidence.
Had their facts straight, and talked straight with you.
Had a genuine interest in you as a person, rather than treating you as a resource.
Had unquestionable integrity.

When I was back in Canada, I was watching a lot of Dragon's Den, and there was this clip from season 3 where they interviewed the Dragon's (venture capitalists) about what made a good business pitch?

Robert Herjavec reinforces the point that successful pitches involves people with a humble confidence. These are folks who are not overly confident and seem arrogant. These folks are also not underwhelming in confidence to a point that they seem weak. The key is humble confidence and having your facts straight. Have you ever watched a presentation crash and burn because the person is spouting shaky incorrect facts, and they get destroyed in the question and answer period? Have you ever seen a leader take all the credit of his success without acknowledging his team, and you see his team members grumble under their breathe? It's an absolute train wreck.

The reason why I introduced good business pitches is because I think leadership implicitly requires you to pitch well. One of the keys to leadership is being able to articulate a vision and convincing people to follow you in that vision. I'm a firm believer in the idea of the marketplace of ideas, where ideas compete with each other, and the best ideas should survive. Being able to convince people that your idea is good is critical to your success in the marketplace of ideas.

In closing, I think one of the secrets to great leadership and success is the ability to maintain a humble confidence, no matter how far you've come, how much you've accomplished, or how big your salary is.

I'll end this quote, "For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted." - Matthew 23:12