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Recently, I spent a weekend camping with my son, Caleb and his Cub Scout pack. It was a fine time to spend outdoors and everyone had a blast. After dinner one night, everyone gathered around the fire for skits. My son and I did a skit that I made up called “Sure Beats Walkin!” In addition to being a fun, entertaining skit, it has a deeper meaning as well… one that resonates here at Healthtalker.
The skit starts with me walking into the scene with Caleb on my shoulders. The Cubmaster, standing off to the side, asks “Caleb, why are you riding on your Dad’s shoulders?”
Caleb replies in an upbeat voice: “Sure beats walkin’!” Exit stage left.
Next scene: I walk in with Caleb on my back. The Cubmaster asks, “Caleb, why are you riding on your ...
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Working in a small, start-up company has it’s pros and cons, for sure, but one of the biggest benefits is the sense of camaraderie… family even... that can develop when the company is small and the people are all working closely together, such as here at HealthTalker. I mean, if you think about it, we are together 8+ hours for five days each week. That’s more time than I’m around my family, practically speaking.
The interpersonal dynamic, much like a family, has it’s ups and downs. And much like a family, when people get along, it’s really a lot of fun to be with them. Working with people you respect is important… and if you like them as well, it makes your day enjoyable. The work becomes less “work”.
In most companies with TONS to do (like ...
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I had the unique privilege to go hear Seth Godin speak in downtown Boston a couple weeks ago. As a recent convert to the Seth-Fandom tribe, it was quite a treat to hear him live and see what he’s really like. I was not disappointed.
Seth took the audience on a brief catch-up of his books and how the story weaves through them. He ended up by talking a lot about the concepts from his latest book: Linchpin. If you haven’t yet read it, I highly recommend it. It’s a refreshing look at what it means to work passionately.
After speaking for a bit, Seth opened it up for question and answer time. I took the plunge and asked one: “You speak about the need to ship as well as the goal of treating work as art. How do you deal with them when they are in ...
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Let me tell you a story of how one company dropped the ball on customer service, and then, much to my pleasant surprise, picked it up and shot a three-pointer… nothin’ but net!
One of our fun family traditions is Pancake Saturday. We have a Rival® double-burner stainless steel table top burner, just like the one on the right. We then put a two-burner griddle on top of it and cook away! It’s simple, convenient, and works well. The kids, of course, particularly enjoy Pancake Saturday. We’ve used the burner for about 6 months, three or four times each month.
In late January, the knob on the right burner broke. I took the whole thing apart in an effort to possibly fix it or find a reasonable work-around. Alas, no such luck. I ...
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Fire. *
It can shine forth as a candle lighting the darkness. Or it can burn everything in it’s path, leaving only ashes and ruin.
How does your team handle fire drills? When things go bump in the night (or smack dab in the middle of a work day), is it an opportunity to shine? Or just a tempestuous conflagration that destroys attitudes, team unity, confidence and business value?
I had the opportunity to “fire-test” our tech team this week. At HealthTalker, we are working toward running our entire infrastucture “in the cloud” using Citrix’s XenServer platform. Cloud computing provides all sorts of useful infrastructure features that make our platform that much more robust.
One component of this infrastructure is having SAN systems set up to ...
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I’ve spent a fair amount of time the past few weeks working out the kinks in our development workflow. By “working out the kinks” I include “creating”, since there was no real workflow beforehand, at least not any formalized workflow. We use source-control solutions to manage our codebase and multiple environments to formalize the testing and quality assurance of our code. We are moving towards greater test coverage and will eventually include CI (continuous integration). We have a defined process for how client software moves through the environments. We are building out utilities to make the workflow simple and as error-proof as possible. We likely will institute constraints on who can move code where, deploy code, update certain ...
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You may have heard of the software and business principles DRY, KISS, and the 80/20 rule. Excellent philosophies, each, but have you heard this one: Don’t Borrow Ahead Trouble. I’m not sure I can claim invention of this principle, but I certainly can claim the value of it.
What do I mean by “Don’t Borrow Ahead Trouble”, you may wonder. Let me briefly explain by referring to a real-world case I wrestled with here at HealthTalker.
HealthTalker made the decision a while back to partner with Bronto as our email campaign provider, leveraging their extensive API for communicating between our systems and theirs. We build solutions using the Ruby on Rails(tm) framework. Unfortunately, Bronto does not include an Ruby libraries, so the integration ...
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Observations, commentary and perspectives on word of mouth, life in a start-up, and the challenges of the pharma industry.
