Jon, Vicki, and Matt at the Ithaca 5&10 Race

One peril of software development is that there is too much sitting going on.  The mind and spirit get exercise, but not the bod.  We’ve experimented with knee stools, yoga balls, and stand-up desks at GORGES with mixed results.  Several of us walk or bicycle to work.

This fall our office manager Vicki has pushed a fitness challenge on the staff.  For those who volunteered (or were conscripted!), we divided up into three teams and are placing checkmarks on a master schedule when we exercise.  GORGES has sponsored trial memberships at the Finger Lakes Fitness Center for their six-week fall challenge.

In previous years we have taken the crew to the Hoffman Challenge Course at the Cornell Team & Leadership Center, and this year’s fitness challenge can certainly be labeled team-building.

The fall results aren’t in yet, but and unfortunately some of the fitness gains may be erased when we hold our gluttonous end-of-fitness-challenge party.

GORGES was well prepared to participate in this discussion, as we are contributing to this job growth in upstate NY, which has lost over 100,000 manufacturing jobs in the last five years.

Don introduced GORGES and pointed out a key challenge we face in our continued growth.  Many other business representatives delivered their input and suggestions as well.  The Senator was focused and well-spoken, and clearly motivated to learn from this elite group of individuals so that she can advance legislation and reduce barriers to help these growing businesses thrive and contribute jobs and economic prosperity to the region.

From 12:00 to 2:00 on the 15th, several of GORGES staff will attend the GORGES booth in the Statler Hotel Ballroom. This Technology, Business and Resource Expo is open to the public and an excellent opportunity to learn about the many GORGES projects developed for the Cornell Community.

Of course GORGES is interested in Cornell University as a client, not to mention its family and friend connections. Beyond that, many GORGES clients are entrepreneurs. During the first three months of this year GORGES has entertained three requests from entrepreneurs to invest computer programming sweat equity in their start-ups. GORGES is already engaged in equity arrangements with other entrepreneurs.

Team Mini-Figures: Willem Magre, Samuel Bazarov, Gaelen Walsh, Quinton Clark, Trevor Clark, Geoffrey Clark

The GORGES offices have been host to a Lego Club this school year.  About twice a month, a group of lego enthusiasts have met at GORGES to prepare a project and poster for the Junior First Lego League, the youngest category of the national organization FIRST.

The contest theme this year is Body Forward, and the directive was to create a project for biomedical engineering.  The team, who named themselves Team Mini-Figures, interpreted this as building a hospital that has advanced devices to help people, and several medical vehicles (ambulance, helicopter, boat) to transport people to the hospital.

Head extractor with spare parts in the hospital room.

One requirement of the project was to have at least one item that moves.  The team created an automated stretcher transporter and a windmill.  Ideally wind would drive the generator and provide electricity for the hospital, but for demonstration purposes the boys connected a battery to the generator so the windmill blades would spin.

Pictured to the left is my favorite device.  Samuel and his teammates created a head extractor in case someone needs a replacement.  There were spare bodies, heads, and legs in the extractor room for quick access.

On January 29th, 2011, the Mini-Figures team presented at their first competition.  The judges awarded the “Best Environmentally-Friendly Hospital” award to the team.  Thanks go out to the Cornell NanoScale Facility for sponsoring the local Jr. First lego event.

Our pro bono effort to help with Gulf oil cleanup (www.gulfsaversolutions.com) was a type of singular environmental action. That’s worthy, but what counts largest are the routine actions.

Here are some routine efforts that we make at GORGES.  If you would like to know about our experience with any of these, please contact me or Don.

Communicate electronically:  We send invoices electronically unless we are explicitly asked to send by postal mail.  This significantly reduces paper use, and we have found as a bonus that clients often pay more quickly with this method.

We send newsletters by email. It’s rare that anyone we are talking with declines to receive the newsletter. We use a service to send it and monitor the sending, and almost one-half of our recipients open the newsletter.  If given a choice, we ask businesses that send print newsletters to us by postal mail, or other recurring correspondence to switch us to email. If they are not setup to do that, we offer to help with the advances.

Reduce paper usage:  Over the holidays some of my family visited and we toured the GORGES offices.  My sister marveled at how little printed paper there was in everyone’s work area.  It’s true – we have set up collaborative file repositories and work almost exclusively electronically.  There are days when our group of seventeen prints nothing.

Turn off appliances:  This is obvious, but it does work.  Even devices on standby mode consume some power.  We supply power strips to each workstation area and encourage staff to turn off the entire strip at the end of the day.  Turning monitors off is common enough; turning the whole computer off helps even further.

When we switched offices last summer I changed our phone extensions from using many individual power adapters to a single power-over-ethernet switch device in our server closet.  The energy savings may be marginal, but the added benefit of reduced wires and freeing up a workstation power outlet was nice.

The biggest savings come from deactivating devices entirely.  By upgrading some servers at our co-location facility, we have decommissioned five servers in favor of two new ones.  An added benefit is reducing number of our uninterruptible power supply units, which require expensive lead-acid batteries that only last 2-3 years.

Reused & recycled items:  We built out our office with re-purposed furniture, saving thousands of dollars.  There may be a scratch or three on the new desks, but it sure beats the fold-up tables we had during our early startup years.  And old items and equipment are not always sent directly to the trash – we are regular contributors to the Finger Lakes ReUse Center.  Of course we also do the standard office paper, plastic, and metal recycling.

Plants:  We have many indoor plants. They are great to look at and help to clean the air, particularly in rooms with minimal air movement or no windows. Employing electrical devices to do the same is costly, annoying, and boring.

We have an active thermostat control program. We are after all a bunch of techies, so we can handle programming the devices!  We can all handle an extra degree without being uncomfortable, and this reduces our power consumption.

Location:  We love working downtown, and have remained here despite seeing other tech companies move to the office parks and ‘burbs.  Several staff (including myself) walk to work, and others bicycle or take public transportation.  We have one client who provides bus fares to all employees for going to and from the office (and even to travel to meetings).

In summary, I’m sure you can think of other ways to reduce your power or materials consumption in your own office as well; it all counts.  Let us help if our experience or technical skills can contribute to reducing consumption.

I have been developing software since high school, and building software and web applications for about thirty years.  If there is one thing I can count on, it is that the software business will continue to change.

Ten years ago we had primitive web browsers, and web pages were usually exclusively HTML.  Microsoft and their proprietary ActiveX technology dominated the browser wars.  As a developer, there were few debugging tools and no decent server-side or Javascript frameworks.  Developing web sites took time, and the results were clunky and crude by today’s standards.

I am pleased at how efficient we are nowadays and how much value we offer, since we develop great solutions at a fraction of the time and cost compared to the days of web infancy.  We have learned to leverage existing open source or proprietary packages as much as possible, and have a wealth of development, debugging, and deployment tools in our arsenal.  If we are allowed to target “modern” browsers such as IE7/IE8, Firefox and Safari, then we can count on browser support for features required by web 2.0 graphics and behaviors.

The web server hardware industry has also had amazing strides, and every year we see better value and better prices.  For example we recommended a single modern server for hosting a client’s complex web application instead of their previous vendor’s recommended 3-server cluster approach; the resultant performance has been similar to our estimated model, and every month for the last three years our customer has saved thousands of dollars since hosted cluster solutions are expensive.

Back to the blog title:  in our business, if we do not continue to learn from and embrace technology improvements, then we will lose our competitive edge.  The obvious result would be that we will no longer be quality or price competitive in the web development market.  Few other industries have this sort of pressure – consumer electronics and mobile phones are probably other examples.

It is interesting to note that only the software industry allows small firms to compete with larger ones, since creating new hardware products require so much more capital than software development.  That is one reason why there is so much more innovation and creativity in the software industry, which really has exploded now that laptops and app phones are ubiquitous.

What will the web world look like in the future?  Prognostication is not one of my strengths, but I imagine we will see more web applications tailored towards mobile solutions (app phones & differently-sized tablets), continual improvements in frameworks, and probably the browser battles will continue to be fought between Microsoft, Firefox, and Google.

And as for myself, I plan on continuing to learn and adapt.

Chris climbs the tower.

In October we engaged the Cornell Team & Leadership Center for our annual retreat.  We spent an afternoon at the Hoffman Challenge Course, located just a few miles outside of Ithaca.  The weather could not have been better.

Jim Volkshausen, Paul Louis, and the other Cornell Outdoor Education staff were great,. They led us in team building exercises as we pushed ourselves through new challenges.

The first was to add one person at a time to a giant teeter-totter.  It took a while, but we were able to get our entire team on a seesaw platform without it tipping.  As you can imagine, it took planning, communication, coordination, and (you guessed it) teamwork.

Mia Climbs Wall

We moved on to other challenges, such as having four of us climb separately and then stand together on a very small platform on top of a tall pole while team members on the ground managing our safety ropes.  Once we were up, there was only one way down – trusting the rope team and just jumping! 

The Cornell Outdoor Education staff helped us understand our “high-functioning” team behavior. Every event challenged our communication and problem-solving skills. And, it was all great fun.

Other activities included climbing the 64-foot-high tower wall and shooting down the zip line. We jumping off the tower free-falling 10-15 feet before swinging in a giant arc through the tree tops.

Four Jump Together Backward from Pole

Our toughest moment wasn’t physical but emotional – Rasmus’s wedding ring flew off during a high-pole maneuver. We could not find it in the wood chips and leaves, but Chris and Paul succeeded the next day with a rented metal detector.

Belaying Team Supports the Jumpers

Alex caught the ring’s descent on video camera, and was able to send the movie to Chris’s smartphone to direct the search. It had flown much farther than anyone thought, and without the video help it could have been lost forever. Hurray for high-tech gadgets!

We love the Cornell Outdoor Education crew, and hope to keep going back.  Jim and his crew were quick to point out that we had only touched on a few of the many activities that they offer.

Foremost is a Linux command-line tool originally developed by the U.S. Air Force. If you’re using a debian-based Linux distribution (e.g., Ubuntu), you can grab it using the command sudo apt-get install foremost. Foremost can recover common file types such as txt, jpg, avi, and etc.. It was last updated in 2008 which means that its knowledge of file headers is, at best, two years dated.

Photorec is part of the testdisk suite, which is a set of Linux command-line tools. If you’re using debian-based Linux, you can install it using the command sudo apt-get install testdisk. Testdisk not only “tests your disk” but also rebuilds your partition table. This is the tool to use if your hard drive’s master boot record or partition table is corrupt. Photorec, like foremost, recovers files (not just photos) based on file headers. In fact, photorec supports more file types and is more up-to-date than foremost, which is evident by the fact that I was able to recover more files with photorec than foremost.

The problem with both foremost and photorec is that they recover file content but not file names. So you end up with directories of randomly named files with only the file extension preserved. It’s not ideal but it’s still better than not having the data at all.

See also:

http://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

GORGES CEO Chris Grant meets with Congressman Hinchey

When the Congressman asked me about GORGES, I let him know about our rapid business growth over the last 5 years, primarily due to our innovation in Internet technologies, and our ability to help our customers businesses grow.

I also mentioned that we are actively keeping software development work from heading to offshore development companies, as our expert developers, low cost of living, and proven processes compete very well on the global market.  While our hourly rates may be higher than India, for example, our total cost to complete a project is often lower.

There are many reasons for this, foremost among them dedicated project management, a willingness to understand our clients’ business needs to create the right-fitting solution, as well as in-house experienced web developers and designers.

After hearing this, the Congressman remarked ‘Now this is the kind of company that America needs to create jobs and move this economy along’.

Just what we were thinking….

Frameworks generally belong to one of two camps, “pure frameworks” and “full stack frameworks”.

Most frameworks don’t make a distinction between “framework” and “application” features, and as a result they become cluttered. They also become more daunting to newcomers, with their sheer volume of classes that attempt to solve every practical problem a web developer might ever encounter – user management, document and image handling, upload and downloading, etc.

My favorite PHP framework, Yii, is a pure framework – free from the burden that many frameworks drag around, namely a full “application stack”. Yii consists almost exclusively of components and features designed to support certain practices or paradigms.

One of my favorite things about Yii, as compared to “full stack” frameworks, such as Zend, is that Yii only comes with components and architecture that can be rightfully said to belong in the “framework” domain, and not the “application” domain.

Of course, it may be hard in some cases to draw an exact line between the two, and I think the first criteria for selecting features that belong in the framework, and not in an application stack, should be:

• Is it absolutely general-purpose?
• If not, is it fully extensible?

Certain features, like the URL manager or Active Record, are not absolutely general purpose, in the sense that they may not satisfy every possible need anyone could ever have. But they are sufficiently general purpose in the sense that almost everybody is going to need at least the core functionality of those components. And because they are fully extensible, developers can build on top of them, rather than having to replace them, if they find that a component does not fully cater to their specific needs.

The reason why I do not want application features in a framework, is because I know from experience that these will not meet my strict requirements. I will eventually end up replacing many of these features and the existing features provided by the framework are reduced to baggage.

Everybody is different – we all have different goals, and even if we share some goals, we usually have different means for reaching those goals.

I believe the reason why we web developers converge around a framework, is because we agree on certain practices. The framework is designed to leverage those practices in a convenient and streamlined way.

The subtle art of the framework is to achieve accepted practice, without getting in the way of individuality – to enable us to adhere to the good practices that we agree upon, while still allowing us to be as different, as versatile and as colorful as we can!

In short, frameworks enable us to focus our efforts on “business logic”, the functionality that has real value to the website users. Thanks to the framework, we can focus on the practical requirements, without sacrificing the values that professional software developers care about: clean, maintainable and extensible code.

With a good framework, we can deliver value and high code quality, without charging extra for quality!