Marcelo Calbucci

    I'm trying to hunt down a problem where some people are complaining that some email messages sent to me are bouncing. If you sent me an email on the last 3 days and it bounced, would you mind forwarding the bounced message to mcalbucci@hotmail.com?

    Preferably, attach the message to a new message, but if you don't know how to do that just forward me the bounce message.

    If you want to go one step further, send me an email with the subject "Email Test" and I'll reply with "got it". If you get a bounce send it to me, if you don't get a reply in a couple of hours send a message to mcalbucci@hotmail.com.

    Thanks.

 

    Tomorrow at 6PM, Roy Leban, Sampa's Director of User Experience will talk about the redesign of the Sampa service that we worked from November until the official launch in the end of March.

 

     Come to StartPad and learn what it takes to chop the head of a Web product gone wrong and starting from scratch.

 

    What: StartPad Countdown 7 - Extreme Makeover, Web Edition

    When: 6 PM, Tuesday, June 24th 2008

    Where: StartPad offices - 811 First Avenue, Suite 480, Seattle.

    Price: Free (Pizza and drinks will be served)

 

 

    Since we are interviewing so many candidates I thought I explain a bit of a strange statement that I usually make and it appears on our job's page:

 

    "Sampa is built with C#/.NET but not ASP.NET"

 

    That wouldn't be strange at all if Sampa was creating a client software that you download, but we are not. We are doing server-side development for a Web-based product. So, how is it possible that we are not using ASP.NET?

 

    First, let me explain that Sampa has two big customer facing parts: The Sampa.com website and the customer's site.

 

    Sampa.com is a marketing site to "sell" Sampa to users. It contains almost no intelligence, being made mostly of static content. The only part of the site that has "intelligence" is the signup/account system. So, Sampa.com is done using ASP.NET (hence the *.aspx pages) and has a SQL Server backend. Very simple and straighforward.

 

    However, when a customer creates a site with Sampa, she's sent to the "Sampa Site Web Server", that is where our product really lives. That service is where most of our development work goes and is developed with C#, .NET, JavaScript and static conent (HTML, CSS, etc.), but *not* ASP.NET.

 

    Again, for most people that is a bit absurd. Can you have a .NET application running your webserver that is not based on ASP.NET? Yes, you can! (trademark by Barack Obama).

 

    ASP.NET is a mix and mesh of multiple parts. When people talk about ASP.NET, mostly they are talking about server controls, ASPX engine and many goodies that make ASP.NET the perfect choice for many sites. But Sampa has some serious perf requirements and from previous experience on MSN, I know the right way to implement Sampa would be to not use those ASP.NET facilities. And that's what we did.

 

 

   

 

    Check out the new logo for the Seattle 2.0 blog. Let me know what you think.

 

 

    I applied to use Google Ad Manager last week but haven't heard back from them yet. Does anyone has a contact that I can use?

 

    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.

 

 

    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.

 

    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.

 

[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!).