• Edit: At whole foods deciding between workshops: colon cleansing or wine tasting. Hmmmmmm. Man my text messages are poorly typed! #
• また日本語の勉強です。 #
• Like Snoop before me: I don’t need no intermission, my life’s in high definition. Yeah yeah yeah. #
• Quick poll: what’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I say ‘Chicago’? Please dm me. #
• @tdf08 modelmetrics will be there. i won’t be a part of the team but those that are going will show great stuff. #
• Idea: the atheist cookie company – tagline – so good you know nature made ‘em! (Problem: man makes cookies. Needs refinement.) #

Dreamhost.com, the hosting company I use, over billed all of their customers yesterday. To the tune of $7.5 million. What did they say about it? The blog post is pretty detailed, but I like the email better:

Hi Reid!

Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we’ve accidentally attempted to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY (it was all due to a fat finger)!

We’re really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have received recently; we’ve already removed all those bum future charges on your account (#286633) and fixed everything up.

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE this won’t happen again. There’s no need to reply to this message unless of course you have any other questions at all!

Sincerely,
The Foolish DreamHost Billing Team!

You should host your website with this crew. Sure, this is a mistake, but they handled it exactly right.

As an exercise: think back to the last time you should have issued a blanket mea culpa. Did you? Did you manage to make it slightly entertaining? I hope so.

Two posts have caught my attention over the last day.  One is on programmer compensation, the other is titled “Don’t be ashamed of your code.”  The first lambastes managers who fail to perceive how their 3% or 4% raise will play out among the developers they employ, and the second explains–indirectly–why managers can only get to a measly 3 or 4.

The challenge is telling the difference between a developer who is traveling through a learning curve–which every developer does, all day, every day–and one who has, for whatever reason, stopped moving through it.  The problem is that there are a lot of these stalled developers out there but identifying them can be tough if you’re not familiar with the technical terrain.

A key part of the developer’s job is self education.  A key part of managing developers is encouraging this natural intellectual stretching and discouraging complacency.   If your business requires regular innovation, the only way you’re going to get it is by making sure your team grows in their technical skills.

And as long as I’m on a tear here, a note to business owners. If your business requires regular innovation, you also want to stay away from the notion that you want code maintainable by average developers.  This is something RUP pushes for and B-Schools and (even SE Schools for that matter) advocate.  And so you may naturally want the developers for whom 3-4% raises will be satisfactory, not the rock stars.  But you need to keep in mind that these rock stars are or will become your competition.  You need to hire them.  Hire as many as you need or at least as many as you can afford and keep them motivated and interested as long as you can.

OK enough of this.  I have to send an email to a customer.