This year’s annual review process swung around fast! It seems like the team joined Ingram Digital just months ago. I’ve done them a few times, but this was the first review process I’ve done at ID. Reviews are a time for reflection. A time to make and receive input on how we’ve performed. A time to realize and face weaknesses and understand our strengths.

There were five appraisals of my developers, and one on myself. To normalize the results I did my self-appraisal first. I had everyone on the team do their own self-appraisal, too, but I avoided reviewing theirs until I’d done my appraisal of them. This was to make sure my scores weren’t skewed and to look for any disconnects.

I started by reading status reports I sent for the year. For the weeks without status reports I re-read email to make sure I didn’t miss any accomplishments. This was time consuming and highlights the need to maintain a tighter journal of deeds. I’ve done this for myself over the last ten years. Keeping a separate journal for one’s team is highly valuable and I’m going to start doing this beyond status reports.

My team rocks, and my entries in my self-appraisal are the result of their efforts. As I listed each accomplishment I thought, “My team made this. My team created that… I worked my face off, but what specifically did I do?” It’s strange to reflect on what one was responsible for, but did with the hands of others.

Appraisals for my team were less demanding after my own. For one, after this point I’d compiled the full list of the team’s accomplishments. For two, it’s easier to judge others after judging one’s self.

Some additional links on performance reviews:

• Employee Performance Reviews
• Conducting Effective Performance Appraisals
• Why Annual Performance Reviews are a Waste of Time (I don’t agree with the writer, but it highlights what we should do during the year so reviews are effective and aren’t a surprise).

A Saturday thought on failure…

I’m not kidding in the title. You should be looking for areas to fail in. You can’t succeed without it. If you’re not accustomed to pushing yourself to the limit, you’ll never reach a goal that exists at the limit.

You should put yourself in situations that significantly challenge your ability to persevere as often as possible (without being reckless). Be used to being in this situation. The most successful people are consistently diving in to difficult situations and using the experience to push them to the next level.

It might mean you have to push yourself to the physical limit while running a marathon. It might mean having to cram 14 hours per day of studying to learn a new technology. In the end, the push to overcome potential failure makes you stronger. And in the beginning, you’ve calculated some risk and chosen a course of action to succeed.

Partners, friends, co-workers, and bosses who push your limits are the best kind. They keep you going and stretch your abilities. You’re on the right track with these folks. These people are the ones who will mercilessly help you reinvent yourself and bring you a better career and appreciation for life.

Get out there and find things you could fail at, calculate the risk, and choose the course of action that overcomes.

“Ingram Digital, an Ingram Content company focused on solutions for digital content management, hosting, distribution and promotion, today announced it has acquired the iofy digital audiobook platform from Audiofy Corporation.”

It’s official. As described in the press release, the iofy digital audiobook platform is now part of Ingram Digital. I’m happy about this move. This is the iofy development team I lead and I’m confident our acquisition will bring incredible value and additional ingenuity. We’ll now be building something amazing, which iofy wouldn’t have had the resources for on its own.

Other than some title changes, the team and focus are unchanged. Cartwright Reed, iofy’s President, is now in the role of Vice President of Product Development at Ingram Digital. My team is continuing the charge to build the best audiobook platform available (look for continued web service goodness).

The culture at both companies is driven by growth, creativity, and building solutions. I’ve had only positive experiences working with the folks at Ingram. They’re great people, and we’re looking forward to being part of an Ingram company.

Early Sunrise in Valley Forge – 2003

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In Stephen R. Covey‘s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, shared traits and behaviors of effective people are described (at the strategic level). I’ve found one habit, at the functional level, which seems to span every effective person I’ve met. I do it too.

It’s waking up and doing something you enjoy. By starting the day and doing something focused, for yourself, you’re establishing a sort of leadership over your day. Instead of waking up and being ruled/owned by the clock, it’s getting up and taking control of the day.

Personally, I run. It starts with getting up, stretching, and hitting the pavement. This time is my time. While my legs are spinning, my mind is churning through any challenges or plans for the day. Most everyone I’ve met who are business leaders do something for themselves first.

It can be anything… Coffee and a newspaper, yoga, morning television news, surfing, gardening, art, etc. You can start off by getting in to the office at 7:00am if that’s what you want. The point is that you’re doing this for yourself and not for anyone else. Your day is starting off under your lead.

This weekend my wife and I got an early start Friday to finish off our bathroom’s tile. I’ve been photo-blogging it to Flickr and periodically putting up notes on Twitter. The last couple weekends have been similar, doing plumbing, floor tile, prep work, etc.

Though there is so much to do (more blog posts, tons of iofy priorities, and building in a certain web service), this is still satisfying work… Something everyone 1/2 interested in real estate should do at least once. I’m a software engineer and dev team manager because I love to build things. I think other developers should feel this way too.

More pics after the jump…

Google Reader has a great feature for sharing articles. It’s been a terrific way to share interesting and pertinent information affecting iofy and to give like-minded folks easy access to my favorite RSS feeds.

You can access my shared page here.

Or pull the feed here.

And with any luck, a drop of the most recent items will be on the sidebar of my blog… Sharing is caring.

Rather than letting long must-read articles interrupt my flow, I’m using Safari and tabs to keep things organized. Lifehacker got me thinking about this with their Firefox Serial Flow article, but I find it even more efficient in Safari (and I’m on the whole WebKit thing).

I simply keep a separate window and open pages I want to review later in a new tab within that window. Periodically I save the set of tabs (Bookmarks -> Add Bookmark For These X Tabs…) to a bookmark, “ToRead”, in the Bookmarks Bar. One click on that tab opens all the ToRead bookmarks when I have to time to review.

We need a PHP programmer to join the dev team at iofy corporation. This is a full-time, based in Philadelphia, position.

The corporate version of the ad is on Craig’s List (also available after the jump).

If you’ve read this far you’ve probably laughed your ass off double-taked, “Philadelphia!?” … You’re right to do so. But seriously, we’ve grown in to a fast and agile web technology company in the heart of 19112.

Our work environment makes for a great life experience. We hire intelligent people capable of solving problems and enhancing the skills of those around them. People working at iofy are treated very well, with plenty of snacks and gadgets to keep mind and body entertained. The challenges we address both answer a need to paying partners and expand the knowledge of our teams.

In case you haven’t been following my blog, iofy builds web services to deliver media on the web. We harness our own services with AJAX and client applications on nearly every platform.

Drop a note with your resume and a unique statement of talent to developer@iofy.com if you’re the right fit. We love smart people.

On with the job req…

Web Services Developer – LAMP

iofy corporation is a fast paced web services and software company in Philadelphia. We have an open REST based API harnessed by our own client software and also by partners, retailers and customers. We are looking to add a key individual to join us in building out these and more web services and server applications.

The position involves development on the LAMP stack. You would be making tweaks to Apache, optimizing requests to MySQL, and parsing and rendering XML (RSS 2.0) in a *nix server environment. These technologies should already be second nature to you. You’ll be developing in PHP most of the time (we’re considering Ruby). Your web services will be used by many other programming languages, especially JavaScript.

Requirements:

• 4 years LAMP server administration/development.
• 4 years of real PHP development.
• 2 years JavaScript.
• HTTP POST, GET, etc.
• Prior web service experience, either harnessing or providing.
• XML parsing and generation.

Buzz-words:
PHP, JavaScript (jQuery), HTML, CSS, HTTP, REST, LAMP, Apache 2, MySQL, XML, RSS 2.0, XPAT

Start by sending your resume to developer@iofy.com. If selected for an interview expect to bring or provide links to code/applications/documentation for our review. A test of your skills will be performed during the interview (read: don’t fluff the resume).

iofy is located in a brand new building in the Philadelphia Navy Yard in South Philadelphia. The Web Services Developer position is in-house, where you’ll be inspired by views of mothballed ships, WW2 era brick buildings, and the Delaware river.

Compensation is competitive – based on experience and aptitude.

As promised (but late as a post), we released iofy’s RESTful documentation. This is extremely exciting for both our development and management teams. We now have an open account management API enabling others to offer iofy’s account management and access to a customer’s digital libraries of downloaded audiobooks.

I’m proud of this accomplishment.

The iofy RESTful API covers the features for partner or reseller to offer downloadable audiobooks. These RESTful web services use standard REST calls, are language agnostic, retrieve RSS 2.0 feeds and enable:

• product listing and search
• account management
• financial management
• purchase and checkout

One can receive dynamic product feeds from ws.iofy.com/product/, where search parameters can include title, author, publisher, narrator, ISBN, and more. These feeds come complete with thumbnail image enclosures, MP3 audio sample enclosures, and all the metadata.

Via account management, described last week, customer accounts can be created, modified, password reset, and most importantly the customer’s prior purchases become available in a library. One can offer this digital library and account management solution without building it (or maintaining it). Just harness it.

The fulfillment API allows assignment of a digital download in a single call. We included PHP sample source code, but it could just as easily be harnessed in any other language.

JavaScript and PHP sample code is available which allows complete harnessing of both APIs. To learn more, email developer@iofy.com.

iofy td: RESTful API

iofy td: Fulfillment API

My dev team is prepping the release of our REST / RSS / JavaScript based account management this week. It marks the completion of building, then harnessing, a suite of RESTful RSS 2.0 feed based web services. The idea has been “avoid people wasting time, working on stuff they suck at focus developers on code they enjoy and excel at.”

We had problems with our 1.0 account management. User interfaces were tied too tightly to the back end. Heavy hitting framework and server programmers were working out UI kinks while artistic graphic designers were figuring out database calls. This was a huge waste. The site looked heinous and didn’t work the way we wanted it to.

Graphic designers don’t think in OO, let alone big-O. Server programmers don’t communicate visually.

It seems easy to fix, right? Just have heavy hitters do hard stuff and then have graphic designers make it look pretty? Make it look pretty first, then tie in the hard stuff? Not exactly. It requires a lot of planning and effort to coordinate and manage people’s time like that. It also requires serial development where people are waiting before they can start. All of which is a waste – this needs to be automatic and parallel. Don’t waste time trying to manage this if it can be done for you.

Enter REST. Enter RSS.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) came first. Dave Winer, back in ’98, grew it from XML. It allows for simplified packaging of data. One can package and list blog entries, offer an MP3 playlist, send table-of-contents information, or transport code via codecast. At iofy we use it as a container to package web service responses.

RESTful development is also based on simplicity (here’s a great doc on REST). Get things done in an HTTP packaged call. With a very simple request in JavaScript, the web service is queried and you’ve got an RSS feed as a response. Our designers have their functionality via web services. Our server coders don’t touch the front end.

The server developers make the RSS feeds. This makes them happy and gives them time to build the critical server components. The graphic designers use JavaScript to call iofy’s RESTful Web Services API (link coming Monday). We use jQuery as our base JavaScript library. It’s damned fast to dev.

This simplified my project management. Tasks became clearly defined. In the beginning I was worried the approach would put a wedge between roles, but it worked in reverse. People understood the importance of their own functions and became reliant on each other for success.

Parallel Development.

While the design team determined a desired look and feel, the back end team planned architecture and database schema. As feeds were developed and APIs took shape, so did the layout of the site. When feeds became ready for harnessing, pages were ready. Management of the nitty-gritty became unnecessary.

We launch account management this week. You too can harness it in your language of choice (we’ll provide JavaScript code which lets you do this simply by dropping some .js on your page and a script on your server). iofy’s services are controllable from your own site.

iofy’s development team builds client software, web sites, and web services powering audiobook content delivery. We move content securely from server, to client, to iPod, and SD chip. 

<prediction>We won’t be looking at an all-out brain-drain, but with the present economic climate in the US and the present growth in Asia, we’re looking at some movement of IT in the next five years.</prediction>