[UPDATE] I've got too many emails. Please, I'm only going to talk with *local* recruiters (Seattle and vicinity) and don't send me your standard cold-call boiler plate, at least do some work and look at what Sampa does and what we are looking for at our jobs page.
We are looking for a Recruiting service to help us fill out some technical positions. Mostly, we are looking for a senior .NET developer and a VP of Engineering that is also a coder to begin with. If you are a recruiter and specializes in startup and technical positions, do contact me at marcelo@sampa.com.
We want to work with local (Seattle-based) recruiting firms that will not charge an arm and a leg (we are a startup!).
About a month ago we released a new feature that allows users to upgrade their Sampa site from version 1 to version 2. Instead of letting all users do at once just to find out some small bug was causing some sites to lose all data, we took a very slow approach.
Basically, we created about 10 knobs to control which users would be displayed the option to upgrade. The knobs include things like number of blogs, number of photo albums, number of pages, etc.
We started slowly, found some bugs, fixed it, and kept increasing those knobs. They are still not at 100%, and we expect to take another month or so to let all users upgrade. This way we can find out issues with V2 and upgrade as they come, instead of all at once.
For now, users are displayed a message asking them to upgrade, but they are not forced to do. That would be a second phase of our upgrade plan. We are hoping that by September or October there will be no more version 1 sites and we can "shutdown" that service and make it part of the memory of Sampa.
Yesterday watching the NBA finals with my son, I thought we would have a great time since he’s two-years old and loves basketball (and soccer, and golf, and baseball, …), but instead, I was on stress mode on every interval and timeout.
Sports are considered TV-G, which means that anyone of any age can watch, but the commercials during the interval are just insanely violent. From what I can recall, there was a guy run over by a car (for a series on ABC), a Playstation 3 war game ad, and countless other ads where the content was absolutely not TV-G.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love violent movies and violent video games, and I do know everything my son’s watch on TV (and I watch with him), but commercials for adult products on a family show are just wrong. I much rather my son see sexy girls making out or non-nipple display on the Super Bowl than people shooting each other.
There has been a lot of chatting today about the release of Firefox 3. I was absolutely not looking forward to that, the same way that I'm not looking forward to Internet Explorer 8.
The reason is simple: One more browser platform for me to have to test Sampa with.
We support IE 6, IE 7 and FF 2. Now with FF 3, as soon as it reaches a couple percentage points of penetration (which should happen in a month or so) we will need to support it as well, but we won't be able to drop FF 2 support either because a large percentage of our customers are still using it.
Now, look forward a few months and Sampa will have to be compatible with IE 6, IE 7, IE 8, FF 2 and FF 3. Maybe we'll add Safari to the mix.
The problem rises from the fact that each new version fixes previous bugs that we had to work around to make sure Sampa worked well on those browsers. Now, these workarounds might break on the new version of the browser. What's a developer to do?
In fact, there is absolutely no actionable item that I (or any other engineer) can take to fix this mess. That's one of the reasons Web 1.0 was full of crappy web solutions, because there were too many incompatible browsers (aka, platforms) and the cost of supporting most of them were just too high.
I don't wish Mozilla would take back FF3, but I wish they've focused this version in improving perf, stability and fixing tons of known bugs, instead of adding features. Then, when they move to add new features, they are working on top of a stable platform.
My conclusion is that Flash and Silverlight will win the "Web war" this time around, simply because they are more compatible across OSes, across browsers and across their own versions.
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October, 2007