Author: Tim Jarrett

Technical skill set for product managers

We’ve been working on hiring a product manager here at Veracode, and it’s gotten me thinking about technical literacy.

The one thing you don’t want in a product manager is someone who thinks he can write the code better than his/her developers. That sets up a major problem with boundaries–you want the product manager to worry about user experience and whether the customer’s business need is being fulfilled, not whether the developers are implementing the feature the way that he would.

But you also don’t want a product manager who’s technically illiterate. That way lies unrealistic feature requests and their cousin, unrealistic customer commitments; communication breakdowns; and overreliance on engineering for decision support.

I think there’s a middle ground: a set of technical skills that the product manager will use to do his own job, and that will help him communicate better with his engineers, without getting into their business.

In my client-server days, the skill set might have included (in addition to normal technical literacy, e.g. ability to run Office apps):

  1. SQL
  2. Excel pivot charts
  3. Windows batch scripting

These days in the SaaS world, it seems like the skill set might be:

  1. Basic statistics
  2. XSLT
  3. Excel pivot charts
  4. CSS
  5. SQL (it never goes away!)

What’s your favorite technical skill that you use all the time as a product manager?

Probably not what he had in mind.

In other musical news, the first ten seconds of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms makes a pretty good ringtone:

Recording courtesy the Internet Archive, who had a copy of a 1931 78RPM recording of the symphony conducted by Stravinsky the year after it premiered. I’ll be singing with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and Boston Symphony Orchestra when we perform the work, alongside the Mozart Requiem, at Tanglewood on July 16, reprising our performance from last fall.

Song of the day: Sage Francis, “The Best of Times”

I don’t plan to make a habit of this, but I had to post Sage Francis’s “The Best of Times” today because it woke me up and made me think this morning. It’s a richly funny and sad look at growing up. Plus! The rhymes are not wack, as the kids would have said when I was growing up. Check it out. (Via KEXP Song of the Day; buy the full album at Strange Famous Records.)

[audio:http://www.strangefamousrecords.com/sfr-audio/_common/Sage_Francis_Best_of_Times.mp3|titles=Sage_Francis_Best_of_Times]

Blogaversary 9

Happy blogaversary to me! This year, I’m not going to do a year in review like I did in past years. I’m going to look ahead.

Nine years ago today, I was an intern at Microsoft, on the other side of the country from my wife and family, confused about my work, my direction, and my life. So I opened up a web form and started typing. At first I just wrote about my life and what I was doing, but over time the writing, which I tried to do every day, started helping me think more clearly, and I started to think about what I wanted to do. I wrote about software strategy, customer relationships, music, family life.

Nine years later, I’m living the dream. I have a great job at a company that’s going to take over the world. I have a wonderful family. I sing with one of the best orchestral choruses on the planet.

But I’m not writing much any more. I’ve been pretty much microblogging for the past year–my Delicious feed is most of this blog. I think I want to change that.

We’re going to try an experiment, this first month of my tenth year of blogging. I’m going to try to write something every day. It may not be long, or meaningful. It may not even be good. But I need to try to get back to making my thoughts into words on a daily basis. Like last time, I think I’m going to be surprised at what comes out.

Background reading: My past blogaversaries in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009.

Glee Club history: Student leaders of the early 20th century

Thanks to Google, the UVA library, and other online resources there is now a wealth of information available about the early 20th century at the University of Virginia–so much so that we can start to trace the history of individual student leaders of the Virginia Glee Club, not just the group’s directors. Two examples stand out from the Glee Club of the period from 1910 to 1920–Malcolm W. Gannaway and DeLos Thomas, Jr.

Malcolm W. Gannaway bears the unique distinction of having been president of the Virginia Glee Club twice, in discontinuous years. He was there in 1910-1911, when the Club reformed under the direction of M. S. Remsburg, and graduated in 1911. He seems to have been not just a leader but also quite a fine singer, having been tapped to sing at Baccalaurate in June 1911. Leaving for a fellowship at Harvard, he picked up a Masters there, but seems to have been unable to escape the gravitational pull of Mr. Jefferson’s University. He returned to UVa as a summer session instructor for the years 1912-1914, then enrolled as a law student. While he was there, the Glee Club reformed again under the leadership of A. L. Hall-Quest, and Gannaway apparently stepped up again as president.

DeLos Thomas, Jr. was never president of the Glee Club, but was present as an officer in the pivotal 1915-1916 and 1916-1917 seasons when the Club got back on its feet for good after a spotty existence in the early part of the century. Thomas served as secretary and treasurer under Gannaway’s leadership in 1915-1916 and went on to serve as vice-president in 1916-1917. Then the Great War happened, and Thomas joined the Navy, eventually becoming an aviator. He was still flying at the end of the war, when he led a squadron that helped to prove the efficacy of aerial bombardment as an anti-submarine defense. Quite effectively, too: his squad was to have been the first of three to attempt to sink a captured U-boat, but the following squads never got a chance to attack it as the U-boat sank after being hit with only about a dozen bombs. Thomas’s story sadly ends in tragedy, as his aircraft disappeared on a flight back from Bimini in 1923.

At the Salt Lick, Driftwood, TX

At the urging of about six Facebook friends, I make the pilgrimage from downtown Austin, where I am on travel for a few days, to Driftwood, Texas, tonight to visit the Salt Lick. It’s a barbecue joint that’s been around for about 43 years. As these things go, it’s commercialized and simple at the same time. Commercialized: mail order menus sit on the table; jars of the sauce line the entrance; there’s a separate function building. Simple: Four meats (brisket, sausage, pork ribs, turkey), three sides (potato salad, cole slaw, baked beans) that all come at once, free “condiments” (pickles, raw onion, white bread), pie, and soft drinks. (Driftwood is in a dry county, but they allow BYOB; I decide not to B my own B, since I have a 25 mile drive each way.)

I order a plate of brisket and sausage and an iced tea, and wait at an otherwise empty table.

The table in front of me is discussing old Texas home construction. “There would be a place in the parlor where you would have the viewings. With a stained glass window. Now it’s just a window seat, but then they assumed you would be hosting a wake. I remember two occasions where they had to open up the windows to get the casket out.” Behind me, a different technology: “So I had to convince them to take our quarter micron process and adapt it to the 3.3v work.”

Of course, Texas is, in terms of high tech, a hardware state. (What else?)

I sit thinking about old technology: cooking meat in smoke.

The food: Brisket is absolutely lean and supple. The sausage is saucy: well spiced, juicy, flavorful. The pecan pie is an inch of custard with a single layer of pecans on top–not at all my grandmother’s recipe–but the pecans are completely evocative of autumn nights with a nutcracker at the dining room table over a layer of newspaper.

As I stand to leave, I get the salty tangy burning in the eyes of the woodsmoke. It conjures other fires, and other cuts of meat with perfect pink rings from the smoke: 12 Bones in Asheville, Big Jim’s in Charlottesville, Dixie’s in Bellevue, WA, Three Pigs in McLean, and of course Pierce’s Pitt Bar-B-Q south of Williamsburg.

And even though I am full to bursting, it all makes me homesick for Carolina pulled pork in a bun.

Next week: Austin, TX

You’ll be able to catch me in my professional capability twice next week. I’ll be giving a talk on Tuesday in Austin, TX to the Austin chapter of ISACA (the Information Systems Audit and Control Association) on “Best Practices for Application Risk Management.” The argument: the current frontier in securing sensitive data and systems isn’t the network, it’s the applications securing the data. But just as it’s hard to write secure code, even with conventional testing tools, it’s even harder to get a handle on the risk in code you didn’t write. And, of course, it’s the rare application these days that is 100% code that you wrote. I’ll talk about ways that large and small enterprises can get their arms around the application security challenge.

I’ll also be joining one of our customers to talk in more depth about a key part of Veracode’s application risk management capability, our developer elearning program and platform, in a webinar. If you are interested in learning how to improve application security before the application even gets written, this is a good one to check out.

On the record

The BSO announced two new albums this week. I’m looking forward to hearing the Carter, and am ordering multiple copies of TFC: Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Not because it’s my chorus (I’m not on the disc–these were small group recordings that went through the year I started with the chorus), but because the repertoire is astonishing. A pair of Bruckner motets, including the Christus factus est, the Lotti Crucifixus, the Frank Martin Mass, and of course Copland’s In the Beginning.

Of course there’s a small irony–the cover photo shows the group holding music! But it’s a great image of a large Prelude concert group in Seiji Ozawa Hall. One of these days I’d love to be in that setting; our Prelude performances have been done by small groups since I joined the chorus, so I’ve never performed in Ozawa.

Happy birthday, Mr. Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was born 267 years ago, on April 13, 1743. Seventy-six years later he would lay the cornerstone at the University of Virginia.

I’ll have a few more thoughts later about Mr. Jefferson, UVA, and Founder’s Day, but for now two thoughts from the man himself:

Determine never to be idle…It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.

Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.

Adventure looking forward

Chris Baldwin’s brilliant comic (I won’t belittle it by calling it a “web comic”) Little Dee ended today. He’s been winding it down for months, so it’s no surprise that it’s over. What is a surprise to me is how resonant the ending is, even in its first two panels:

baldwin_deefinale.jpg

It’s tempting, as I start to see forty up on the horizon, to think that all my adventures and all the beauty are behind me. Weeks like last week, when my father in law was in and out of the hospital and I was forced by illness to withdraw from a Tanglewood Festival Chorus concert run that would have taken me to Carnegie Hall, seem to reinforce that thought.

But then I watch my family, and I catch my breath a little bit at all the beauty that is yet to come.

Ten years ago

Ten years ago, give or take two weeks, I posted my first permanent update on my Manila site, the web site that morphed into this blog.

Userland Software‘s Manila was a hobby for me for a few months starting back in 1999. When I first got DSL (back when we still called it ADSL), it was new enough that no one really was clear about whether it was kosher to run a server from your house, and certainly new enough that Bell Atlantic (yes, this is before it was called Verizon) was filtering traffic upstream. So I ran an HTTP server on my Mac, using first personal web sharing and then Aretha to run a little web site.

Sometime later Dave Winer and Userland opened up EditThisPage.com, and I set up my own blog there, and that’s when it all took off. The site, originally hosted at jarretthousenorth.editthispage.com, was something I played with for a few months in early 2000. Then I went to B-school and stopped having time to play with things. Then I moved to Seattle for a summer by myself and had way too much time on my hands. And I started writing.

These days, I hardly have enough time to write at all, save for the occasional Glee Club history writeup. But I still think back to the technology that started it all, and I’m grateful to Dave for starting something big that turned into something big for me.

Stop, said God, holding his head

I am working this afternoon in my garage, having cleaned off the top of my workbench for the first time in recent memory. I find a cassette tape next to the workbench–the garage radio is the only one in the house that can play cassettes–and put it in. It’s the Virginia Glee Club and Smith College Glee Club at Smith, fall 1992. I listen to side B first—Smith sings the “Alice in Wonderland” songs by Irving Fine, a few other tunes, and then a reasonable joint performance of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. (Though I’ve never forgiven the Smith director for insisting that we use an alto soloist in the second movement instead of a countertenor.)

Then I flip the tape to side A. The Glee Club set that fall opened with a four-part meditation on the death of Absalom: Josquin’s “Absalon, fili mi,” the Sacred Harp tune “David the King,” Tomkin’s “When David Heard,” and our premiere of Benjamin Broening’s setting of “When David Heard.” In other words, a fine uplifting set. Then I heard—a hum. Some multi-tonal stuff going on. I go over and look at the tape liner notes. It’s “Time Piece.”

“Time Piece“! Written for the King’s Singers in 1972, it goes from polytonal to high comedy to low comedy. After a while, there are cuckoo clocks, roosters, and other vocal effects, and then C. J. Higley, bless him, as the voice of God, yells “STOP!” The chorus intones, “‘Stop’, said God, holding his head…” and then continues for another five minutes more. Total run time: about 15 minutes. The Smith chorus (and audience) were moved to laughter at more than a few points.

And then we wrapped up with another three song set of spirituals.

I can’t imagine doing such a long guest set today. I also can’t believe that we only performed “Time Piece” twice (once during the Kickoff Concert that fall, once at Smith). But by springtime we were on to Young T.J. and a totally different repertoire.

Alex Chilton RIP

I was startled and saddened last night to read about the passing of Alex Chilton, lead singer for Big Star (and the Box Tops). I came to the music of Big Star late, but became a full convert after arriving at the band via a Chris Bell recording. Big Star was really the band of the 2000-2009 decade for me in a way; I spent weeks with “#1 Record/Radio City” on repeat, put songs by the band on no fewer than 14 mix CDs, and posted a gushing love letter to the band on Blogcritics (where I was rightly remanded for my callowness).

It’s hard to believe he’s gone. I know he was a completely different artist after the first two albums–hell, even their third album is a completely different experience–but listening to “Give Me Another Chance” he seems like he should be immortal.

Other posts: Joe Gross on Alex Chilton’s passing; another link to an article about the recording of the classic Radio City album.

New mix: Happy time

The aftermath of a big flood feels like the right time to publish my first mix in about six months. Happy time is one part of a two part mix. This time, I might not ever get around to part two, because it’s the downside of this mix, and I’m enjoying the happy side too much.

Track list:

  1. Finest Worksong (Mutual Drum Horn Mix) – R.E.M. (Eponymous)
  2. Reena – Sonic Youth (Rather Ripped)
  3. Moby Octopad – Yo La Tengo (I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One)
  4. Scared Straight – The Long Winters (When I Pretend To Fall)
  5. Hot Pants Road – The J.B.’s (Pass the Peas: The Best of the J.B.’s)
  6. I’ll Take You There – The Staple Singers (Best of the Staple Singers)
  7. Helicopter – M. Ward (Transfiguration Of Vincent)
  8. Beautiful – Paul Simon (Surprise)
  9. Cello Song – Nick Drake (Five Leaves Left)
  10. It’s Not the Only Way to Feel Happy – Field Music (Field Music)
  11. Thirteen – Big Star (#1 Record – Radio City)
  12. Hopefully – My Morning Jacket (At Dawn)
  13. Fistful Of Love – Antony and the Johnsons (I Am A Bird Now)
  14. No Man in the World – Tindersticks (Can Our Love…)
  15. Happy Time – Tim Buckley (Morning Glory: The Tim Buckley Anthology)
  16. People Got a Lotta Nerve – Neko Case (Middle Cyclone (Bonus Track Version))
  17. Sweet Thing – Van Morrison (Astral Weeks)
  18. Number Two – Pernice Brothers (Yours, Mine and Ours)

Commentary: Did R.E.M. record “Finest Worksong” with the horns in mind, or was it a cynical touch by some producer when it was time to release the single? It reads as a brilliant move, though, 22 years later. I’m of two minds about “Reena”–such a simple song for Sonic Youth–but the fact that I can’t get it out of my head two years on settles it for me. Ditto “Moby Octopad”, which is less a song than an extended riff, but no less brilliant for that.

“Scared Straight,” on the other hand, is a song, and a flipping brilliant one. And the horns alone are worth the price of admission. The horns also provide a great segue into “Hot Pants Road,” which makes a very nice segue into “I’ll Take You There.” A nice little singer songwriter set–“Helicopter,” Paul Simon’s “Beautiful,” “Cello Song”–follows, before we get into the psychosexual set of “Thirteen,” “It’s Not the Only Way To Feel Happy,” “Hopefully,” and “Fistful of Love” (and only Lou Reed could set up that song).

And then the last set. I won’t say anything about it, except that “Sweet Thing” may be the greatest single song ever. How was it that I missed out on Astral Weeks for all this time?

(Update: now on Art of the Mix.)