Fabian Schonholz’s Blog

Recently there was a post in TechCrunch regarding Facebook’s hype. One comment to the post was that Facebook was already passe and “the new hype was being already developed by three guys in somebody’s garage”.

I recently wrote an post regarding Innovation In Technology and the process of creating new technologies; from the need to solve a problem, through making existing technology better, and creating new markets by “discovering” new ideas. I also wrote about companies generating fresh ideas and implementing them, and how these new ideas improve the bottom line. The problem of innovation affects us all, at all levels. From technology through education, stopping along the way in government and politics, healthcare and medicine, and economics.

“Three guys” in a garage can do some very powerful and life changing things. Think Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Yahoo!, Google, Hewlett Packard and countless other companies started in an actual or figurate garages. These people took everything they had, had the charisma to raise funds and attempted to execute on their dream and would not relent, are to be applauded. Even the ones that did not succeed; because on the shoulders and ashes of every failed company, a new idea is born with the potential to change our lives.

But is hype life changing? I mean, does a company like Facebook have the potential to change the way we live? Yahoo! and then Google did change our lives. So did Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Dell, etc. Even Friendster and MySpace have had an effect on how we communicate with the ones close to us. Linkedin and Facebook made this communication innovation their own and improved on it. But are they themselves life changing or disrupting enough? Both companies have the potential to be life changing or provides a change in a commerce paradigm the way eBay or Amazon have, for example. And there is no need to go into how Yahoo!, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc., have indeed change our lives. But potential is not enough. There has to be value for ALL users for that change to happen.

I am going to come clean: I like LinkedIn and extract some value from it, and I do not like Facebook because I do not extract “any” value from it. But strategically speaking, I think that Facebook has had some brilliant ideas and has executed well on them. So, I tip my hat to them. Their technology AND business innovation, as far as I know, has been converting their product into a platform where people can develop application for it; thus, extending the feature base at little cost and by that, perpetuating their freshness. However, and again, in my opinion, unless there are some true productivity applications developed for it, to me there is no value to Facebook.

Let’s be clear. What does it mean “to me there is no value to Facebook”? As a user, there is not much in the product and additional deployed applications that entice me to go back with any regularity. The only draw that the site has on me is when somebody posts a note on my wall or sends me a message or IM and the sites lets me know. I am curious to read it so I go back to the site. Otherwise, there is nothing yet that I have found of any interest to me.

On the other hand, If I was analyzing the company as an investor, there is ton of value (but $15B worth?):

First of all, because I may not find value as a user, it does not mean that others will not as well. The fact remains that hype or not, Facebook is drawing a lot of traffic and keeps on increasing. Then why would Google buy YouTube when they had Google Video? The answer is traffic and with it, the ability to experiment in different ways to monetize that traffic, within the context of the property. Facebook faces the same ability to experiment on different models of traffic monetization; especially with the Microsoft investment and the rumored additional funding.

Second, the Facebook platform is another traffic draw, perpetuating the point above, but beyond that, it provides the potential of added value; the potential to draw me back as a user; the potential to leverage not only the data in the so called social graph, but the social graph and the connections. Whether it is apparent to people or not, it is clear to me that we are in the midst of a paradigm change in computing and computing services, services in general and how all these are combined. Apple with the iPhone and iPod Touch is good evidence of this. As stated above, Facebook has the potential to be a contributing party to this change. I will go more into this last point in another post already named “Social Networks and Cloud Computing”.

In the end, as fun as it is to think of three guys working on their parents garage on producing the next hype, I would rather think of three guys creating the tools and means to usher the new way to interact with technology and once again, change the world.

A few months ago I started to blog. This is my second go at it and it is going far better. The first time around the focus was on personal thoughts and, in a way, documenting some of the things that were going on in my life, good and bad. I have to admit that my first attempt lacked form. It had plenty of substance, but that substance was expressed in the words of an angry person, because I was angry. And to make it more fun, I was also going through some fundamental changes in my personal life and belief system. The fundamental changes are still VERY ongoing, but the results can be seen already: I am not as angry as I used to be. That is good. Maybe I am just getting old. Regardless, A LOT LESS ANGRY IS VERY GOOD.

There are a few things that I learned from the first experience blogging and I keep on learning as part of the current incantation of my blogging experience. The first one is: Don’t be so serious. The second one is: Remember … somebody, anybody, everybody will read your blog.

Blogging exposes your ideas, thus yourself. Anything you write becomes permanent and lasting. Even if you turn your blog off, your content is possibly cached somewhere. I advocate that you are honest and open with your ideas, in other words, say what you think and mean it. But there are effective ways to do that, even in the case of the worse and most evil content.

I recently had a conversation about leadership. The agreement was that a leader is a doer and an action taker that deeply influences others, especially in the case such person needs to do something that might go against his or her innermost beliefs. Leaders are not necessarily selfless, but do have a vision that transcends his/her immediate scope of influence.

We normally consider leaders in the context of good. Some may look at Churchill or JFK, or Mother Teresa. My favorite leader is Genghis Kahn, a little beastly, but seemed to understand his limitations, and through well crafted plans, overcame them and in  doing so, China under his domain, experienced great advances in many areas. But there are other more infamous leaders: Stalin, Hitler, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and many more. You might hate their guts, but whether you like it or not, they were powerful leaders and people would lay down and die for them

If you are going to blog, be a leader. Your ideas do not need to be novel or altruistic, but convey them in a powerful way; your words represent you and have the power to influence. Even when all you are writing may be just gossip.

Since I started to write again, I have been contacted by people from all over. Some to just exchange ideas, some to discuss a blog post - specially when the post deals with something interesting and I manage to write something that measures up - some to just network. A few months ago a got a call at around 7PM. It was the CIO of a company that had just gone public and was looking for management talent to expand their operations. He had found my resume on a job site. I decided to go to the interview just for grins. Why not!! The interview went well and I sort of got a job offer that was somewhat interesting. Since I was not exactly looking for a job I decided to experiment and told the CIO, who had not read my blog, to go read my blog and then he could decide if I was the right guy for the job. A few days later I called him and he quickly informed me that he was rescinding the somewhat interesting offer and had gone with somebody else. I was not surprised.

But the experience left me puzzled. So, what if you have a blog and you are looking for a job? I discussed it with a friend of mine over dinner and wine - the best way to discussed deep technical and philosophical questions such as this one. The conclusion was that even though a blog - such as mine - is indeed a personal marketing tool in addition to a vehicle for expression, it is also an effective filter. If prospective employers read your blog and still pursue you as a candidate, then even if they do not agree with you, they respect your opinions and are not frightened by thinking people. And that is a great way to start a new job. My wife agrees.

I am an entrepreneur and I am not ashamed to a admit it - Hello, my name is Fabian; I am an entrepreneur!!

And as an entrepreneur I have put together business plans for my ideas and gone after funding. I also have to admit that I have not been very successful in the fund raising department. But most of my ideas have eventually been validated and proven to be successes. Somebody else, later rather then sooner, also had some of the same ideas and implement them, eventually making loads of money. Some of my old ideas still have validity today.

So, how does having a blog affect you in this case? I do not know, but I will tell you when I confront the situation
I imagine that is similar to the job situation. The blog, if you exhibit leadership, can only help you.

I hardly ever run out of ideas to discuss. Let me restate that: I hardly shy away from a discussion on any topic, including “The Importance Of Tomato In The Discovery Of America”. Undoubtedly, there come some times that I have nothing to write about. I have a folder full of started posts; some of them include just the title. Having them started does not mean that I have something to write about. Maybe I had something to write about when I thought of the idea and documented it. Maybe it was just a cool idea that I will write about in the future. There is no point in either pacing or forcing yourself to write. You write when the words come to you.

But writing is not the problem, even when I stare into the abyss that my laptop screen sometime represents. The problem is when you have found an interesting topic to write about and you have done an equally interesting job with your writing. And then … you are under pressure to follow it up with an equally interesting new piece!! Oh my!! That is the problem. How do you meet your readers’ expectations? Most importantly, and with all due respect to my  very few readers, forget you, what about my own expectations?

There is one post I wrote a while back that I have not posted yet. It is “About Marketing And Technology”. My intention was to write an understanding post by listing the views from both side of the fence. Marketing and Technology are integral parts of any company and together with Operations and Finance, make the company. But more often than not, these two areas do not see eye to eye and problems arise. The intention of the post, again, was to show the problem from the eyes of the other group. The topic is of great interest to me, but the writing was not very powerful. I was not able to convey the information I have on the topic the way I intended it. Besides the fact that I spent a great deal of time and did not post my work, there is an emotional factor that goes hand in hand with the quality of the writing. In my case, I have to be at least content with the post before I will showcase it.

A while back a coworker of mine told me “if you live in a glass house, do not throw stones”. Unless you can deal constructively with comments, however people decide to behave, you should not allow comments on your blogs. Hey, worse comes to worse, you can always delete the comment I love it when I get comments. But I do not get enough of them; for some reason people do not  leave comments.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. Isn’t that the truth.

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Cool animation.

Over the years I have either participated and/or was the main person in architecting large scalable web based solutions. In many cases I also built them, but in the last few years, I have directed the implementation and execution. There has always been a common thread to all of these build-outs:

”If you are talking about technology, you are missing the point of building a scalable system”

So, what should you be talking about? Three items:

•  Real Estate - Room to rack the servers
•  Power - Enough power and outlets to power the servers
•  Temperature - Right operating conditions to operate the servers

Truly, these should be the focus of the conversations and soon enough, these conversations would be only of any importance to just Cloud service providers. There is , however, an assumption in the above statement: The architecture accounts for lateral scalability. Indeed, this assumption is of a tall order. But not hard to obtained.

The trick to building laterally scalable systems is to architect around the concept of independent components that can be clustered. In other words, each functional block of a system should be a component operating independently from a different functional block (or component.) And given multiple instances of a component in a cluster, it should not matter which instance answers requests at any given time. Moreover, the instances should be load balanced; Furthermore, given multiple geographically distributed clusters, there should be load balancing and fault-tolerance between these clusters as well. In this case, if a server in the cluster goes down, another will take the requests. Similarly, if an entire cluster disappears, a different cluster should take over.

The implication is that components that need to cooperate can find each other regardless of their location. Obviously, the components know about the clusters through DNS, thus, the name space needs to be tightly configured. The other part of being able to mix, match and integrate geographically distributed functionality is to be able to deal with network latencies. This is easily masqueraded - performance drop will be hardly noticeable - by always connecting to the nearest neighboring cluster providing the needed functionality. In automating the switch over algorithm, we see that by thinking of the local cluster as the nearest neighbor, it follows that the entire switch over strategy becomes very dynamic but easy to manage as new clusters are incorporated.

More often that not, data bases (DBs) are needed as part of the web application. I consider DBs as just another component, thus, the DB architecture and implementation must support clusterization and geographical distribution just like any  other component in the system. I favor federated database systems, where only partial data sets are housed on each DB cluster, with the caveat that the set must be optimal. I will explain:

If you have multiple geographical instances running on multiple data centers, then you will route traffic based on network closeness to a data center. So, if the application is running on Los Angeles and Colorado based data centers, and I am in NYC, then most likely Colorado is closest to me from a network topology point of view and that is where I should be routed. Thus, and optimal data set in Colorado would be such that most or all of the data for users from NYC would be housed in Colorado. An optimal set does not imply that the data only lives in one place. Using this same example, if somebody in Los Angeles wants to access the same data as somebody in NYC, then the user in Los Angeles should not be routed to Colorado, but a copy of that data should be copied to the DB instance in the Los Angeles data center.

Another tool that I have found useful in building scalable web system is AFS (Andrew File System). If you are not familiar with AFS, a good way to understand it is “NFS on cacheing steroids”.  I have used AFS for many parts of the implementation, but in the end, AFS, as an infrastructure component, has helped me with helping, not only synchronize builds across data centers, by releasing to a volume and then “pushing” the volume to all data centers, including configurations; but also, in the management of all the releases.

Component Architecture

We all agree that separation of concerns is a good way to architect systems. By extension, it is a good way to architect components. The concerns in this case are the protocol, presentation, API, logic and data layers:

The data layer is the data bindings to the database. We already described above the DB as a separate component; this concern is the connection and abstraction to the DB.

The logic layer implements the business logic, and ultimately the functionality that users experience.

The API layer serves two purposes:

1 - It converts all HTTP requests to elements that the logic layer can easily interpret and on the way back, converts what comes back from the logic layer to XML.

2 - It isolates the layers below by creating APIs for the components they belong to. In this way, the entire components becomes part of a whole and by calling specific action, certain functionality is exposed.

The presentation layer renders the information (not data) coming back from the API layer - already expressed in XML - based on given and specific XSL style sheets. Effectively, this layer is an XSLT that provides, by choosing a discreet XSL, rendering flexibility.

The protocol layer makes the entire system device agnostic. In other words, it should not matter what device the application is being accessed from; whether it is accessed from a web browser or a cell phone or some new device, the protocol layer brokers access and selects the rendering methodology based on the device.

Conclusion

What I exposed above is a way to architect systems that scale horizontally based on three principles:

•  Real Estate
•  Power
•  Temperature

These principles reduce the problem of scalability to a simple budgeting exercise. And again, if you are talking about anything else, then you missed the point of scalability.

Public school curriculum is a joke - no child left behind, easy to say when you are not moving forward at all. The other day I went to my kids’ back to school event. I have to say that what I heard was a joke and I was not laughing.

Before I continue, I have to say the following, otherwise I would be totally not fair: Dr. Newman, the principal at my kids’ school, is a great guy and capable professional. He really tries hard and goes beyond the call of duty for the kids. What differentiates him from the rest is his availability to parents and willingness to listen. I have had the chance to talk to him a few times. Not too many, but enough. He cares for the kids. He wants them to succeed. He wants to push them and propel them forward. He really wants them to learn and excel. My kids have special needs, especially my son Jared. They need more than most kids from an academic point of view and that is recognized and to the best of Dr. Newman’s wiggle room, caters to them. In addition to Dr. Newman, his staff also goes the extra mile. Or at least that has been our experience with the classroom and resource teachers assigned to our kids. So, this is a big “THANK YOU” to them as well. Both, my wife and I recognize what you do.

But back to “Back To School” night ….

One of the topics in the curriculum is “birth stones” where the kids will learn all about their birth stones. WHAT?? Is that geology? Sounds more like astrology to me. Next, we will be teaching them that the earth is flat and only approximately 6000 years old? I just find it appalling. If the purpose of studying birth stones is to make it fun, then I am all for it, but based on what I heard … there was no substance to the whole thing. The rest of the curriculum did not sound much better. In my opinion, and I am not an educator but just a parent, the kids are being robbed of their education. We pay our taxes but our kids are not getting our taxes worth in education. It is infuriating.

As a side note regarding certain topics: Should kids be taught about Creationism? Yes. I think they should, along side evolution. They should be taught comparative thinking and given choices. Creationism, and to be VERY CLEAR I do not believe in it, is what many people believe as truth. And in spite to all the evidences to the contrary - evidences in favor of science including evolution - it is a possibility that can not be discarded in teaching children how to balance facts and decide what works for them and what does not. Children are smarter than we are, and believe me, they will not get confused if the information is presented in a non-emotional manner.

We were thinking about putting our kids in private school. We looked around where we live and besides the snooty kids and the price tag, the education is not much better than public school. In that case, I rather keep my kids in the public school they go to now, where not only they will get better socialization skills, but I know that the teachers really do their best. And in spite of our disappointment, I rather have my kids with teachers that care for them even when their efforts may come short.

Let’s talk about the teachers. Unfortunately they get the short end of the deal. My wife taught for a while at South Central Los Angeles. As a first time teachers, fresh out of school, with no experience, no road under her feet, no real tools at her disposal, she was sent to teach at the war zone. Can you believe that she had to pay for her classroom supplies? For her own photocopies of materials to distribute to her kids? Well, the Bank of Fabian paid for them. Unbelievable. I can understand that as you progress in your career and you get seniority you should get rewarded with easier assignments than South Central, but to send first time teachers and to boot make them pay for their own supplies just makes no sense.

How would I manage the situation? Simple … first, of course, give them the supplies they need; not in excess but in a way where they become responsible for those supplies. Second, I would place the first time teachers not in the cozy neighborhoods, but in middle class, not too problematic areas where they can be exposed to a wide range of behaviors but not too out of the ordinary. Once they have been there for 3 or 4 years, then send them to places like Watts or South Central Los Angeles. They would be better prepared to deal with the sad realities of those areas. After a few years, then send them to the upper class areas where they can now bring their WAR YEARS experience and make good use of their knowledge.

As predicted, she did not last long, just as some of her colleagues did not last either. She became physically sick and emotionally drained. She had students that only ate what the school would feed them. Or had a close family member - dad, mom, brother, etc. - either dead or in jail for a felony offense. Some of them, their parents worked 4 jobs and lived with 6 other families all in the same apartment or the garage they were renting with no toilet. Again, as predicted, she only lasted two years. Teachers MUST be prepared to deal with those realities. And it is the job and responsibility of the government to prepare them.

We often look at counties in Africa or the Middle East - Iraq and Afghanistan. We see what those war ravaged places have done to their children and we weep. We decide to contribute to charity for those countries, for those children. We feel guilty that our kids have it so good, in spite of our being upset at the school curriculum, and we give money. But why look so far? Go no further than South Central or Watts. Go no further. Here in the United States we have WAR RAVAGED LANDS, with children that are just as shell shocked as the kids in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kids that experience drive by shootings every night. I helped fund a PowerPoint class through an online charity organization. Do I feel better for doing that? Yes; absolutely. Do I think I am a hero? Not one little bit. I am far from it because it was a very small contribution and a one time thing (even though I have contributed several one times I still do not feel I have done enough.)

There is a movie called Idiocracy, with Luke Wilson, that I watched a few weeks ago on TV. It is about two strangers participating on a cryogenic experiment that is supposed to last for one year, but lasts for several thousand. When they finally wake up, a few thousand years later, they find out that earth population has become dumb and can barely deal with basic technological obstacles, like cultivation. The movie is funny and in jest, but given what I have seen from our education, and not just in the US, it has become a sort of prediction.

Another must see: