Our hosts for December were Temperance of High on the Hog and Jen of Delightful Delicacies. (The pictures through out this post are from Temperance of High on the Hog and Jen of Delightful Delicacies) Here is Temperance's post.

When appetizers won our poll for the holidays I knew just what I wanted to do Gougères, I am a cream puff fiend and a savory version just had to be good. For my second choice I wanted something with lots of meaty goodness. I went thru alot of different options before settling on Oysters en Brochette (angels on horseback). Ironically these are the first two things I ever bookmarked on Foodgawker.

Gruyère Cheese Gougères
Copyright 'The French Laundry Cookbook' By Thomas Keller, November, 1999
Makes about 4 dozen gougères

Gougères are a classical preparation often served at wine tastings in France. The puffs are made from a savory pâte á choux, or cream puff dough-flavored here with Gruyère. They are best served hot out of the oven, offering that creamy-dough gratification. Don't add the cheese, and the puff is a base for a dessert.

1 cup water
7 tablespoons (3-1/2 ounces) unsalted butter
1 tablespoon kosher salt, or more to taste
Pinch of sugar
1-1/4 cups (5 ounces) all-purpose flour
4 to 5 large eggs
1-1/4 cups grated Gruyère (5 ounces)
Freshly ground white pepper

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with Silpats or parchment paper.

In a medium saucepan, combine the water, butter, salt, and sugar and bring to a boil. Add all the flour at once, reduce the heat to medium, and stir with a wooden spoon for 2 minutes, or until the mixture forms a ball and the excess moisture has evaporated (if the ball forms more quickly, continue to cook and stir for a full 2 minutes).

Transfer the mixture to the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle and beat for about 30 seconds at medium speed to cool slightly. Add 4 eggs and continue to mix until completely combined and the batter has a smooth, silky texture. Stop the machine and lift up the beater to check the consistency of the batter. The batter in the mixing bowl should form a peak with a tip that falls over. If it is too stiff, beat in the white of the remaining egg. Check again and, if necessary, add the yolk. Finally, mix in 3/4 cup of the Gruyère and adjust the seasoning with salt and white pepper.

Fill a pastry bag fitted with a 3/8-inch plain pastry tip with the gougère batter. Pipe the batter into 1-tablespoon mounds on the baking sheets, leaving about 2 inches between the gougères as the mixture will spread during baking. Sprinkle the top of each gougère with about 1/2 teaspoon of the remaining grated cheese and bake for 7 to 8 minutes, or until they puff and hold their shape. Reduce the heat to 350 degrees F. And bake for an additional 20 to 25 minutes. When the gougères are done, they should be a light golden brown color. When you break one open, it should be hollow; the inside should be cooked but still slightly moist. Remove the pans from the oven and serve the gougères while hot.

Notes:
These were good hot or cold. I did two different sizes (Tablespoon and Teaspoon) and had a slight preference for the smaller ones. Feel free to try using a different cheese, it makes a big difference in the taste. You can make them up in advance and stick them in the freezer, let them thaw for 10 minutes and then bake in oven as usual and you have warm fresh Gougères. I also thought that stuffing them would be a really good idea.

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From Wiki: Oysters en Brochette is a classic dish in New Orleans Creole cuisine. Raw oysters are skewered, alternating with pieces of partially cooked bacon. The entire thing is then breaded (usually with corn flour) and then either deep fried or pan sauteed. The traditional presentation is on triangles of toast with the skewer removed and topped with a Meuniere sauce. When done right, the dish should have a crispy exterior and a soft savory center with a textural contrast between the bacon and the oyster. It was usually offered on restaurant menus as an appetizer; but was also a popular lunch entree.

At one time it was a ubiquitous option on menus across the spectrum of New Orleans restaurants. Today it is rarely seen (no doubt owing to health concerns over the combination of fried oysters, fried bacon, and butter). An exemplary version can still be found at Galatoire's.

A variation served as an hors d'oeuvres is Angels on Horseback. Single oysters are wrapped in partially cooked slices of bacon, each skewered with a toothpick. They are floured and deep fried and then passed on cocktail platters with a dipping sauce.

Galatoire’s Oysters en Brochette
Copyright New Orleans Times-Picayune December 21, 2000
Serves 4 as an appetizer or two as main course

12 strips bacon, cut in half
2 dozen oysters, raw
1 egg
3/4 cup milk
Salt and pepper to taste
Flour
Oil for deep frying
Toast point and lemon wedges for serving

Fry bacon until not quite crisp. Alternate six oysters and six half strips of bacon folded on each of four 8-inch skewers. Make a batter with egg and
milk and season well with salt and pepper. Dip each skewer in batter.
Roll in flour and deep-fry in hot oil until golden. Serve on toast points
with lemon wedges.

Meuniere Sauce:
Copyright Tom Fitzmorris's 'New Orleans Food: More than 225 of the City's Best Recipes to Cook at Home (New Orleans Cooking)'

2 sticks butter
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce

1. Start the sauce before the Oysters en Brochette. Place the butter in a small saucepan over very low heat. Let it melt, then let it bubble until it stops. Skim the foam off the top. Keep the butter over the lowest possible heat on your stove top. (you want it to brown)

2. Add the lemon juice and the Worcestershire slowly to the butter sauce just before serving. Careful! This may make the butter foam up again and perhaps splatter!

Notes:
For a GF option leave off the breading and stick it under the broiler. If Meuniere isn't your sauce of choice there are alot of other options out there. To prevent wooden toothpicks and skewers from burning soak them in water first.

~~~~~~~~~

For our last appetizer, we wanted to be courageous and try something we thought we’d never really try otherwise. There’s always been hype for the combination of blue cheese, walnut, and pear; so we decided gorgonzola and pear crostini would be perfect. Neither of us necessarily like bleu cheese, but after this, who knows?

WARNING: If you or any of your guests are expecting, or might be expecting, there is danger in eating un-pasteurized cheeses/other dairy products. There may also be a threat in eating any ‘blue-veined’ cheese. It may be a smart idea to buy pasteurized blue cheese, or study up on it, and decide if this is the appetizer for you and yours. Just to be safe.
Which cheeses are safe to eat when you're pregnant, and which aren't?
Week 13 of Pregnancy: Foods to Avoid
Eating Right When Pregnant

This recipe is easily altered to be gluten free; just use any gluten free bread of your choice for the crostini.

Blue Cheese, Pear and Walnut Crostini:

a baguette, thinly sliced about ½ inch each
olive oil
mascarpone, for spreading (optional)
any type of bleu cheese (gorgonzola, Roquefort, stilton), thinly sliced, or crumbled
freshly hulled walnuts
a few pears, peeled and sliced into small cubes

1. Brush your bread slices with olive oil, line on a baking sheet, then toast in a hot oven for a few minutes until browned and crispy. You can broil them as well, if you prefer.

2. Remove from heat and spread each toast with some mascarpone.

3. Lay bleu cheese slices, or spread some crumbles, on each toast and add walnut pieces on top. Return to a 375-400°F oven for a few minutes, just until the cheese is melted.

4. When the cheese is nicely melted, take the crostinis out of the oven and top with a few cubes of pear. Serve soon after.

Notes:…If you don’t use the mascarpone, just go straight to melting the bleu cheese step.
…Of course, it’s always a great idea to use the freshest ingredients you can find.
…You can even mix all the ingredients together and just dollop a spoonful on and melt, or keep it as a sort of dip.
…Feel free to add ingredients, it’d be interesting to see what you pair with it.
…Obviously there are no specific measurements, this is because it’s all according to what you fancy. You can even make just one, just to try. Who know, you may just love it!

There are numerous types of bleu cheese. See here: Blue Cheese from Wiki
The most common types, that I found at most every one of my markets, were bleu, stilton, Roquefort, gorgonzola and ‘amish bleu’. The cheese man at my market told us that gorgonzola is a bit milder than regular bleu. Of course, they both smelled like feet to me, so who knows. Jen

Some pictures and other helps for inspiration:
Pear, Walnut and Gorgonzola Bruschetta from FX Cusine
Search results from Epicurious
Recipe from Hunt County Wines

From the Forum:

Being Christmas time we were all very busy and saved our writing for our journals, so no quotes this month. It was all good though, trust me :) Temperance

When I wrote earlier about how to conduct a good technical interview, I had only a few things to say about how to assess if the candidate fits in with the team, including this:

This responsibility falls squarely to the hiring manager. You need to have a point of view about how to put together a coherent team, and how a potential candidate fits into that plan. Does the candidate have enough of a common language with the existing team (and with you) that you'll be able to learn from each other? Do they have a background that provides some novel approaches? Does their personality bring something new?

A few commenters have taken issue with the idea that it's solely the hiring manager's responsibility to assess fit, arguing correctly that the whole team should participate in the evaluation and decision. I completely agree. Still, I do think fit is a quality that requires special treatment, because it is the hardest attribute to evaluate.

Unlike the other attributes we look for in an interview candidate (like drive, brains or empathy) fit is not an individual quality. It's caught up in group dynamics. Worse, it has a self-referential quality to it. The very team that is making the assessment is being asked to assess itself at the same time as the candidate. How else can they tell whether the new team that will be created by the addition of this person will be superior to the team as it is presently constituted?

I have found James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds particularly helpful in thinking through these issues. This book is Tipping Point-esque, full of anecdotes and interesting social science citations. Its central thesis is that, under the right circumstances, groups of people can be smarter than even their smartest single member. I find his observations compelling, and I feel good recommending the book to you, even though I know there are many among us who find "argument-by-anecdote" irritating. You don't have to buy the argument, but the facts and citations are worth the price of admission.

Let me briefly summarize the part of the book I find most helpful (leaving a few out, which aren't germane to today's topic). Not all crowds are wise. In order to get optimal results from a group-based effort, you need three things: diversity, Independence, and an objective method for aggregating results. For example, we conduct elections with a secret ballot, which ensures Independence (since nobody can directly influence your vote); we let everyone vote, which ensures diversity (since even extreme opinions can be heard); and we use a numerical count of the results (which, recent experiences notwithstanding, is supposed to mean that everyone's vote counts equally according to an objective formula). Similar mechanisms are at work in the stock market, Google PageRank, and guessing an ox's weight at the state fair.

Remove any of these essential ingredients, and you can find examples of groups gone bad: the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco, market bubbles, and pretty much every one of Dilbert's team meetings.

Anyway, back to fit. Surowiecki has helped me in two ways:

1. Assessing fit in the context of what makes a good team. In order to improve the performance of a team, it's not enough just to keep adding smart people. You actually need to find a diverse set of people whose strengths and weaknesses complement each other. The problem most teams have with fit, in my experience, is they confuse it with liking. Many great engineers I've worked with (especially the type I talked about in the hacker's lament) seem to think that if they get along well with someone in an interview, they'll be a good addition to the team. This kind of homogeneity can lead to groupthink.
   
   
2. Putting together a process for helping a team assess fit. Another dangerous group dynamic in fit questions is that people are very sensitive to the opinions of their peers when talking about the group itself. In order to make an informed decision, the team needs a process of gathering and combining their opinions without having anyone's voice stifled.
   

For example, let's say you are on a team that prides itself in its all-hands-on-deck-at-all-hours style of working. There are a lot of great teams that work this way, preferring a series of sprints and lulls to a steady pace. Now let's say you're interviewing someone who doesn't seem to like to work that way. They work steady hours, but not for lack of drive; their references say they have exceptional output. Now picture the group meeting to talk about this prospective candidate. First up, the alpha-hacker on the team says something like "we should pass, this candidate is lazy."

Now it's your turn. Even if you are convinced that this candidate would make a great addition to the team, how much courage does it take to say so? You might convince the group, but you might not. And if you don't, will it raise suspicion about how dedicated you are? Will you be implicitly calling into question the validity of the team's values? Will they then be watching you for signs of laziness in the future? What about that vacation you've been planning to take... and so on. In my experience, there are plenty of situations where dissenting voices simply opt out. There's a clear danger to speaking up, but a pretty murky benefit.

If you find this line of reasoning confusing (nobody on my team feels that way) or paranoid (let's just all be rational), you may be surprised what the other people in the room are thinking. Take a look at some of the social science research in this area, like the Asch conformity experiments. In those, a group of people are asked to answer a simple question about their observations, one at a time. The first few people are actually actors, and they all give the same patently false answer. The experiment measures the likelihood that the last person in the sequence, the real experimental subject, will conform to what the previous people have said, or dissent. Even though the answer is obvious, and the other people in the room are all strangers, a surprising number of people choose to conform. I have found the pressure is much higher in situations where the answer is unclear, and the other group members are coworkers.

Combating these tendencies is the real job of the hiring manager. If that's you (or you are on a team whose hiring manager abdicates that responsibility), here are three suggestions that have worked for me to take advantage of the wisdom of crowds in hiring. Each of these are based in changes I've made to my hiring process in response to five whys analysis of previous hiring mistakes.

• Before you meet the candidate, spend time thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of your team. Try to brainstorm some archetypes that probably would interview badly but actually be successful in filling out your team. Having been through this exercise in advance can help you listen carefully to what team members say about the candidate, and see if their objections are simply fearing what is different, or if they have a more serious concern.
  
  One experience I had was with a candidate who was absolutely convinced that our development methodology wouldn't work. He spent an inordinate amount of time grilling us on exactly how we work and why, asking smart but tough questions. He made us nervous, but we took a risk and hired him anyway. After we hired him, he spent weeks driving the team crazy with his critical (but, we had to admit, accurate) eye. Then, all of the sudden, a remarkable thing happened. Another new hire started to complain about the way we worked. Our former critic promptly set him straight, shooting down his complaints with the same ruthless efficiency he had previously devoted to analyzing our work. He had been converted, and from that point on acted as "defender of the faith" far better than I ever could.
  

• Maintain strict Independence for each interviewer. Our rule was always that each interviewer was not allowed to talk any other interviewer once their session was concluded. The first time we'd exchange any words at all was during the end of the day assessment meeting. This prevents a previous interview from biasing a later interview. For example, I've seen situations where even a positive comment, like "wow, that candidate is smart!" cause disaster. The next interviewer, armed with an expectation of brilliance, chooses harder questions or becomes disappointed by an "only above average" performance.
  
  
• Aggregate results carefully. When sitting in a room talking about the candidate, I have had success with two precautions. First, we would always share our experiences in reverse-seniority order. That meant that the most junior person would be forced to speak first, without knowing anything about what his or her manager thought. As the hiring manager, I would speak last, and I'd do my best to avoid giving any indication in advance of what I thought.
  
  We'd also have a structured discussion in two parts: in the first part, each person talks only objectively about what happened in the interview, without giving opinions or passing judgment. Others are allowed to ask "clarifying questions" only - no leading questions or comments. Only in the second round does each person give their opinion about whether to hire the person or not. This helps get the facts on the table in an objective way. If our team had ever struggled to do it, I would have insisted on written comments shared anonymously. In other words: do whatever you have to do to get an objective discussion going.

If you've been the victim of groupthink in hiring, or have suggestions for ways to avoid it, please share. All of us are team members, family members, coworkers and leaders. Tell us what you've learned in those different contexts. Maybe it'll help someone else avoid the same mistakes.

PR Secrets for Startups

Hello Friend, from Long Lane Honey Bee Farms!

We are David & Sheri Burns helping you discover and enjoy being a beekeeper! In today's lesson, I'll be giving you information on how to improve your chances of pulling your bees through the winter, and I'll show you some new inventions I'm working on to remove winter moisture from the hive. Before we get into today's lesson, let me encourage you to get ready for spring by ordering your hive and bees!


Call now to order: 217-427-2678.



LESSON 44: Poor Winter Hives

Now that most of the USA is facing exceptionally cold temperatures beekeepers start to worry about bees and they should! Many beekeepers make the mistake of trying to winter weak and questionable hives. We all do it at times. As a result, many hives fail during the winter months, primarily during the months of February and March. Those that do survive are so weak, they are not very impressive during the following year.

Right now, in most hives, there is excess and dangerous moisture. Moisture develops from the bees themselves and from the stark difference in temperature between the cluster's 90 (f) to the very cold temperature outside the hive. Condensation develops on the inside of the hive and collects on the top cover and drips back down on the bees. Bees can be cold and stay warm effectively, but not with cold water dripping on them.

I've been conducting moisture tests on my hives this winter and already the findings are alarming. The amount of accumulated top cover moisture dripping down was much worse than I thought.

I've been opening my hives and observing how much moisture is on the underside of the top covers.

This photo was taken from my experiments conducted on December 17th at 6:00 p.m. with an outside temperature of 43 degrees (f)

Ventilation can help, but still the threat of cold water dripping on the bees requires more attention than just a few extra points of ventilation.

My brothers is the engineer of the family and we had a discussion the other day on the problem with moisture in the hive. He recommended that I build a particular device to attract the moisture and cause it to drip outside the hive. I took his ideals, headed for my shop and came up with several devices that I am experimenting with.

The first one is a bit more complex than the others. Two pvc pipes 1 1/2 run through the top cover at an angle. The pvc pipes are vented on the top. Metal pipes run through the middle of the pvc pipes and extend 4-5 inches outside. The idea is that the cold air turns the metal pipes cold and that cold is transferred on to the pipe as it runs through the pvc above the brood nest are where the heat is and draws the condensation onto the metal pipes and drips into the pvc pipes and runs out of the hive.

The next one that I am trying is a device that holds an angled piece of metal above the cluster. The air is cold above the metal and the warmth of the cluster is under the metal, thus forming condensation on the bottom of the metal. Since it is angled, the water run out side the hive.

The metal extends outward beyond the back of the hive so that water runs along the angled metal and drips outside the hive.

Another approach to reducing condensation in the hive is to insulate the inside of the top cover. A glass of ice tea condensates on a warm summer day because the water temperature is much colder than the air around the outside of the glass. By wrapping the glass in a thin layer of insulation, the stark contrasts of cold and warm is eliminated and no condensation will form.

By merely insulating the inside of the top cover, much condensation will be eliminated. Here's how you can do it. Go to your local sign shop and ask for scrap pieces of plastic corrugated sign material. I call it plastic cardboard. Politician signs are made from this material.

You can also find this material at most office stores and sometimes at Wal-mart.

Then, go to you local home improvement store and buy a role of floor padding that goes beneath laminated floors. Some call it floor sound barrier material. It is very thin, about 1/8 of an inch, slick on one side and textured on the other.

Now, staple two layers of plastic cardboard on the inside of your top cover as shown in the photo. Then, staple in a piece of the floor covering with the textured side facing the bees. The two layers of corrugated plastic will help insulate the top of the hive where the heat rises. And the textured side of the floor covering will also serve as another layer of insulation but it will also help absorb moisture as well.

Here's what the final work looks like:

It is fine to leave this material on the hive all year long.

These are a few examples of what I'm experimenting with this winter in helping to remove moisture from the hive. Bees are the opposite of fish. Fish need water and cannot live long in the dry. Bees need a dry environment and cannot survive in a wet and moist environment. The modern day beekeeper must place more emphasis on keeping colonies dry and thus keeping them healthier.

OTHER WINTER SURVIVAL TIPS FOR HONEY BEE COLONIES

It seems that many beekeepers fail to realize they must keep their hives extremely strong during the bee season. The hive must always have a good laying queen producing many frames of solid sealed brood. A poorly laying queen must be replaced immediately. DO NOT keep a poorly laying queen. Your hive might survive the summer, but it will not produce enough foragers to gather much honey, and it will probably not survive the winter. This image shows how a good queen will produce solid frames of sealed brood. Limited brood or spotty brood will make for a weak summer hive and a hive that is certain to die during the winter.

The larger the quantity of bees in the hive means the colony will be of better quality. Most people are prone to care for the sick or injured. Some try to nurture an injured bird back to health. We really can't afford to do this will honey bees. A weak hive only means that certain diseases and pests are merely days away.

What surprises most beekeepers is that two weeks ago the hive was strong, two weeks later the hive is weak. What happened? The loss of colony strength can be assessed by an experienced beekeeper. Is it mites? Is it a brood disease? Is it noseam or tracheal mites? Most of the time it is not. More often it has to do with the expansion of the hive being limited and the hive entering into swarm mode or queen replacement mode. If a colony is not satisfied with their queen, they may decided to keep her or replace her. Both are risky. While we believe colonies can successfully replace a failing queen, remember that they usually make more than one queen cell, and when several queens emerge they fight and sometimes they are both killed or injured. Now the hive cannot produce a queen because there are no one day old eggs left.

A lack of hive expansion is another problem why hives fail to survive the winter. They may build a honey dome above them as bees do. This dome can become a barrier. Therefore, the beekeeper must monitor the honey dome above the brood nest and continue to break up the honey dome by putting in frames of empty drawn comb, giving room for the brood nest expansion during the summer.

Poor winter hives are nothing more than poor summer hives. When beekeepers say winter killed off their hives, they really should say that the hive never prepared properly during the summer for the approaching winter. If water leaks through my roof during a rain storm, I can't blame the rain for penetrating my roof. It's my fault for not preparing my roof for a rainy day.

Winter is what it is, cold, snowy and long for those of us in northern states. For those of us losing hives in the winter, we must re-think how we keep bees. We must thing "strong hives". We must have heavily populated hives. When we remove our inner covers, we must have so many bees that we can barely see the tops of our frames because of the number of bees as in the photo below.

A beekeeper keeping ten weak hives would be much better off to combine the ten hives into five strong hives. We are so fearful of our hives swarming that we keep them running far below strong numbers, through divides and splits. We need to re-think this and allow our hives to be "boiling over" with bees like mine in the picture.

Strong hives have a better chance at controlling Small Hive Beetle, V. Mites, American Foul Brood, Chalk Brood, European Foul Brood, wax moths and other diseases and pests. We must remember that a honey bee colony is a single organism. The stronger the hive is in population, the better the organism functions.

So many times I watch beekeepers open up their hives and I am ashamed of how few bees I see in the hive! We must keep strong hives! We must learn to have more bees in a colony through better management practices of better laying queens and breaking up the honey dome to allow brood expansion.

Strong colonies know how to prepare for winter. The stronger they are the better they are at winter preparation. The weaker they are the less they will adequately prepare for winter.

Interview ten beekeepers and ask them how old their queen is and how well she was doing in the month of October, and probably more than half will tell you they do not even know if they have a queen for sure.

Not only do colonies need to be heavily populated, but they need ample stores of both honey and pollen. Most beekeepers only think of honey stores and not pollen stores. But, bees need both pollen and honey. Honey is the carbohydrate and pollen is the protein and bees need both even in the winter.

Winter-Bee-Kind For Winter Feed For Bees
In The summer of 2011 we introduced our Winter-Bee-Kind after several years of studying overwintering hives. We could barely keep up with production they were in such demand. We still make them right here at Long Lane Honey Bee Farms but we've expanded our production methods to keep up with demand. So many beekeepers told us that these were the only thing that got their hives through the winter. This year, it's time for the 2014 production year. We even mix the sugar and pollen and right here and pour the candy into the Winter-Bee-Kinds. WHAT IS A WINTER-BEE-KIND? It is a one piece candy board that provides food, ventilation, upper insulation and an upper exit/entrance to help bees remain healthier during the winter. Someone said it insulates, ventilates and feed-i-lates. With the built in upper vent, you don't have to worry about snow covering up your hive's lower entrance. The bees can still go in and out through the top vent spacing. We avoid shipping Winter-Bee-Kinds in hot weather and start shipping each September-March. You can place our Winter-Bee-Kinds on your hive anytime, even in the winter. Because it goes on top of the hive in place of the inner cover, and you are NOT removing any frames, it can be placed on the hive in cold weather. Just do it fast. Open the top, remove the inner cover and place the candy side down and the vent slot toward the front of the hive and you're done. Click here to order your Winter-Bee-Kinds Some form of a candy board has been around for a long time. Beekeepers of long ago placed candy in their hives to provide enough food for their bees to survive the long months of winter. There are various mixtures and receipts for candy boards. Some are made with soft candy and some with hard candy. The end result is still the same. The bees will consume the sugar as they need it. We've always been concerned about the amount of condensation that can develop in the hive during the winter. The bees produce heat within their hive and as the temperature is very cold outside the hive, condensation will develop on the warm side, just above the bees on the inner cover or top cover. This condensation can accumulate and drop down onto the winter cluster of bees below. Bees can stay warm in the winter but they must remain dry. If this cold water drips down onto the bees, it can reduce their ability to keep their cluster warm. The insulation on our Winter-Bee-Kind helps reduce the excessive moisture and even puts some of that moisture to work, as it accumulates on the candy and makes it easy for the bees to consume the sugar. Thus, a Winter-Bee-Kind can help lessen two winter stresses, the lack of food and excessive moisture. We make our Winter-Bee-Kinds with sugar and a healthy amount of pollen powder. Many beekeepers make the mistake of only feeding their bees sugar in the winter, but the bees also need protein which they obtain from pollen. Our Winter-Bee-Kinds come with pollen mixed in with the sugar.. Click here to order your Winter-Bee-Kind today. We recommend that you place candy boards on your hive by December 22 (Winter Solstice). But anytime during the fall or winter is fine. Even if your bees run out of honey in February put a Winter-Bee-Kind on in February if you have too.

Commonly Asked Questions
Q: Which way does the candy face in the hive?
A: The candy faces down just above the winter cluster. Normally, this means that the Winter-Bee-Kind would be placed on the brood box that contains the cluster. For example, if you overwinter your bees in a single deep hive body, the Winter-Bee-Kind would be placed on this deep hive body with the candy facing down toward the cluster. If you are using two deep hive bodies to overwinter, then the Winter-Bee-Kind would be placed on the top deep hive body. It is best to disregard the use of an inner cover, and simply place your top cover over the Winter-Bee-Kind.

Q: What about winter moisture?
A: Moisture can develop in the winter from condensation, a contrast of the heat the bees produce in the hive and the extreme cold temperature outside the hive. Condensation accumulates on the warm side, which means moistures collects on the inner cover or top cover above the hive. This can drip down on the bees and chill them during the winter. A Winter-Bee-Kind takes the place of an inner cover and any moisture that develops from condensation aids the bees in consuming the candy.

Q: How long will a Winter-Bee-Kind last on a hive?
A: On average about 3 weeks. However, a colony that has ample stored honey may not consume the candy board as fast or not at all until they need it. A colony close to starvation may consume a Winter-Bee-Kind within a week or two.

Q: Since Winter-Bee-Kinds are placed or replaced on the hive in the winter, can I open the hive up on a cold day?
A: It is best to place the candy boards on a hive when the temperature is above freezing and try to place the candy board on and have the hive sealed back up within 1-2 minutes. It should not take over 1 minute. Do not remove any frames in cold temperatures, only place your Winter-Bee-Kind on and off quickly. If you can choose the warmest day during the winter, that would be best. Try to avoid very cold, windy or rainy days.

Q: How do I refill a candy board?
A: It is best to send back your candy board and we will refill it for $7 plus shipping. If you are a good candy maker, you can do it yourself.

Q: How do I get one with a pollen?
A: Our Winter-Bee-Kinds contain pollen as well.

Q: Can I make my own?
A: You can, but you must experiment, because you do not want the candy to be too hard or too runny. The exact mix depends on your altitude, heat source and other conditions so it will be different from one location to another.

Q: Why was some liquid sugar dripping out of my Winter-Bee-Kind when I received it?
A: It is the nature of candy boards to be a bit on the dripping side even though the top may be hard. Do not be concerned if you see liquid sugar dripping out of your boards when you receive it. It usually means it was left on end during shipment for a prolong period of time. The bees will clean everything up and enjoy this soft liquid.

Q: How much sugar is in one Winter-Bee-Kind?
A: Approximately 5 pounds

Q: When do I put a Winter-Bee-Kind on my hive?
A: Any time! Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb are good months to place on the boards.

Q How often should I check my Winter-Bee-Kind?
A: Every three weeks, take a peek.

Q: Do you make Winter-Bee-Kind for 5 frame nucs or 8 frame hives?
A: Yes, check out our website to order, but carefully read the description to make sure you are ordering the correct size and type.

Q: Can the candy break loose from the board on the hive?
A: It rarely happens, but during extreme winter weather, the candy and separate from the board while on the hive. This is not a problem. The bees will continue to consume the sugar.

Q: When I place it on the hive, do I use my inner cover. Just how does it go on?
A: Winter-Bee-Kind takes the place of your inner cover. Simply place the Winter-Bee-Kind on the top of your upper hive body or super with the candy facing down, then place your top cover on top of the Winter-Bee-Kind. Be sure to use a rock or brick to make sure the wind does not blow your top cover off. There is overwhelming enthusiasm about our Winter-Bee-Kinds. Click here to order now. 

Make sure, during the summer, that your bees are storing plenty of pollen in the lower brood chamber. This will help them have a jump on early spring brood production.

In our next lesson, I'll address insulating hives, whether it helps or hurts and I'll show you some experiments I'm conducting with winter wraps.

Check out Studio Bee Live at the upper right side of this blog or by logging on to: http://www.honeybeesonline.com/studiobeelive.html

See you next time and remember to Bee-Have yourself!

David and Sheri Burns www.honeybeesonline.com

217-427-2678

STUDIO BEE LIVE QUESTIONS CALL 217-427-2430

Is it really almost Christmas (as in five hours away?).

Merry Merry Christmas. Hope it's a love-filled day and a heart-filled year.

Fa la la la love, Maureen

Ethan Zuckerman on how to engineer serendipity online"Zuckerman has seen again and again that people love what the Internet can provide them, but they have no idea how much they are missing."

There's a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. Today, I was comparing notes with Ed Baker (one of the gurus of viral growth). We were trying to broaden the conversation beyond just viral customer acquisition. Many viral products have flamed out over the years, able to capture large numbers of users, but proving transient in their value because they failed to engage customers for the long-term. Our goal is to understand the metrics, mechanics, and levers of engagement.

Levers of engagement
Let's start with the levers of engagement. What can you do to your product and marketing message to increase engagement?

1. Synthetic notifications. The most blunt instrument is to simply reach out and contact your customers on a regular basis. This is such an obvious tactic that a surprising number of companies overlook it. For example, IMVU runs frequent promotional campaigns that offer discounts, special events, and other goodies to its customers. From a strictly "promotional marketing" point of view, they probably run those campaigns more than is optimal (there's always fatigue that diminishes the ROI on promotions the more you use them). But there is a secondary benefit from these activities: to remind customers that IMVU exists, and encourage them to come back to the site. The true ROI of a synthetic notification has to balance ROI, customer fatigue, and the engagement effects of the campaign itself.
   
   When you live with your own product every day, it's easy to lose sight of just how busy your customers are, and just how many things they are juggling in their own lives. A lot of engagement problems are caused by the customer completely forgetting about the provider of the service. Direct notifications can help ameliorate that problem.
   
   
2. Organic notifications. Facebook, LinkedIn, and other successful social networks have elevated this technique to a high art. They do everything in their power to encourage customers to take actions that have a side-effect of causing other customers to re-engage. For example, from an engagement standpoint, it's a pretty good thing to automatically notify a person's friends whenever they upload pictures. But it's exponentially more engaging to have each person tag their friends in each picture, because the notification is so much more interesting: "you've been tagged in a photo, click to find out which one!" Similarly, the mechanics of sending users notifications when new friends of theirs join the site is a great organic re-engagement tactic. From the point of view of the existing customer, it goes beyond reminding them that the site exists; it also provides social validation of their choice to become a member in the first place.
   
   As with synthetic notifications, organic notifications are subject to fatigue, if they are not used judiciously. On Facebook, "poking" seems to have fairly high fatigue, whereas "photos" has low (close to zero?) fatigue. Ed adds this account: "When I first joined Facebook, I used to poke my friends and get poked back for the first few weeks, but now I rarely, if ever, poke people. Photos, on the other hand, is probably the primary reason I go to Facebook every day. Because they are constantly new and changing, I doubt I will ever get tired of looking at my friends photos, and I will probably always get especially excited to see a new photo that I have been tagged in."
   
   
3. Positioning (the battle for your mind). The ultimate form of engagement is when the company doesn't have to do anything explicit to make it happen. For example, World of Warcraft never needs to send you an email reminding you to log in. And they don't need to prompt you to tell your guild-mates about the new epic loot you just won. The underlying dynamics of the product, your guild, and the fun you anticipate takes care of those impulses. This is true, to a greater or lesser extent, for every product. After you've acquired a customer, why would they bother to come back to your service? What do they get out of it? What is going on in their head when that happens?
   
   I wrote about this challenge for iPhone developers, in an essay on retention competition: the battle over what icon the user will click when they go to the home screen. At that point, there's no opportunity for marketing or sales; the battle is already won or lost in the person's mind. It's analogous to walking down the aisle in a supermarket. Just because you're already a Tide customer, doesn't necessarily mean you'll always buy Tide again. However, if you've come to believe that Tide is simply the only detergent in the world that can solve your cleaning problems, you're pretty unlikely to even notice the other competitors sitting on the shelf. Great iPhone apps work the same way.
   
   Marketing has a discipline about how to create those effects in the minds of customers; it's called positioning. The best introduction to the topic is Positioning (I highly recommend it, it's a very entertaining classic). But you don't have to be a marketing expert to use this tactic; you just need to think clearly about the key use cases for your product. Who is using it? What were they doing right before? And what causes them to choose one product over another? For example, a common use case for teenagers is: "I just got home from school, I'm bored, and I want to kill some time." If your product and its messaging is all about passing time while having fun, you might be able to get to the point where that is an automatic association, and they stop seriously considering other alternatives. That's exactly what the world's best video games do.

Seeing the engagement loop
We're just starting to weave these techniques into a broad-based theory of engagement, that would complement the work that has been done to date on viral marketing and viral loops. Notice that all of these techniques are attempting to affect one of a handful of specific behaviors that have to happen for a product to have high engagement. Do these sound at all familiar?

1. A customer decides to return to your product, as a result of either natural interest, or a notification (organic or synthetic).
   
2. They decide to take some action, perhaps influenced by the way in which they came back.
3. This action may have side effects, such as sending out notifications or changing content on a website.
4. These side effects affect other customers, and some side effects are more effective than others.
5. Some of those affected customers decide to return to your product...
   

This is essentially a version of the viral loop. Let's look at a specific example, and start to think through what the metrics might look like if we attempted to measure it:

1. Customer gets a synthetic message saying: "upload some photos!" Some percentage of customers click through.
   
2. Some percentage of those actually upload.
3. Those customers get prompted to tag their friends in their photos. Some percentage of them do (A), and these result in a certain number of emails sent (B).
   
4. Each friend that's tagged gets an email that lets them know they've been tagged. Some percentage of them click through. (C)
   
5. Of those, some percentage are themselves convinced to upload and photos. (D)
   

Calculating the "engagement ratio"
If we combine the quantities A-D using the same kinds of formulas we use for viral loop optimization, and the result is greater than one, we should see ever-increasing engagement notifications being sent. This will lead to some reactivation of dormant customers as well as some fatigue, as existing customers get many notification. Our theory is that the key to long-term retention is creating an engagement loop where the reactivation rate exceeds the rate of fatigue. This will yield a true "engagement ratio" that is akin to the viral ratio.

This makes intuitive sense, since the key to minimizing fatigue is to keep things new, exciting, and relevant. For example, user-generated content that includes of friends, especially if it includes you ("Joe tagged you in a photo. Click here to find out which one!") is usually going to be newer, more exciting, and more relevant than synthetic notifications ("Did you know you can know upload multiple photos at a time with our new photo uploader?"), or even than more generic organic notifications ("You've been poked by Joe."). High "engagement growth" with low fatigue is how you get the stickiness of a product to near 100%. You can try to churn out, but your friends keep pulling you back in. That's an engagement loop at work.

Seeing the whole
Engagement loops are a powerful concept all by themselves, and they can help you to make improvements to your product or service in order to optimize the drivers of growth for your business. But I think the value in this framework is that it can help make overall business decisions that require thinking about the whole rather than just one of the parts.

For example, let's say you have a viral ratio of 1.4. Your site is growing like wildfire, but your engagement isn't too good. You decide to do some research into why customers don't stay involved. When asked to describe your product, customers say something like "Product X is a place to connect with my friends online." Turns out, when optimizing your viral loop, this was the winning overall marketing message. It's stamped on your emails, landing pages, UI elements - everywhere. Removing a single instance of that message would make your viral ratio go down, and you know that for a fact, because you've split-tested every single possible variation.

As you talk to customers, you notice the following dilemma. Customers have a lot of options of places to connect with their friends online. And, compared to market leaders like Facebook and Myspace, you discover that your product isn't really that much better. Consequently, you are losing the positioning battle for your customers when they get home from school and ask themselves, "how can I connect with my friends right now?" Worse, your product isn't really about connecting with friends; that's just the messaging that worked best for the viral loop, where customers aren't that familiar your product anyway.

To win the positioning battle, you could try and make your product better than the competition, or find a different positioning that allows you to be the best at something else. Let's assume for the sake of argument that your competitors offerings are "good enough" and that you cant' figure out how to beat them at their own game. So you decide to try to reposition around a different value proposition, one that more closely matches what your product is best at. You could try and drive home that positioning with an expensive PR campaign, superbowl ads, and whatnot. But you don't have to - you have a perfectly good viral loop that is slowly but surely exposing the entire world to your positioning messages.

Here's what this long example is all about. When you go to change your messaging, imagine that your viral ration drops from 1.4 to 1.2. Disaster, right? Not necessarily. Since your viral ratio is still above one, it's still getting your message out, albeit a little slower. But if your new positioning message improves your engagement loop by more than the cost to your viral loop, you have a net win on your hands. Without measuring your engagement loop, can your business actually make tradeoff decisions like this one?

Connecting engagement and viral loops
The two loops are intimately connected, in a figure-eight pattern. Customers exit the viral loop and become part of the engagement loop. As your engagement improves, it becomes easier and easier to get customers to reenter the viral loop process and bring even more friends in. And as in all dynamic systems, there's no way to optimize a sub-part without sub-optimizing the whole. If you're focused on viral loops without measuring the effect of your changes on other parts of your business (of which engagement is just one), you're at risk of missing the truly big opportunities.

Hopefully, this theory will prompt some interesting responses. We'd love to hear your feedback and hear your stories. Have you struggled with engagement and retention? What's worked (and not worked) for you? Share your stories, and we'll incorporate them as we continue to flesh out this theory. Thanks for being part of the conversation.

Today, I want to share with you about the importance of keeping hygienic honey bees. I will share why it is essential to only use queens that are hygienic and for those of you raising queens, I will give you step by step instructions on how to test your hives for strong hygienic behavior using the Liquid Nitrogen testing method. Before we jump into this informative lesson today, I want to share a few other things first.
Sheri and I have been having so much fun producing Studio Bee Live broadcasts, a daily audio podcast all about honeybees. Be sure and listen to our program. It is found on this blogspot lesson to the upper right or you can log in to: www.honeybeesonline.com/studiobeelive.html




HYGIENIC HONEY BEES ARE A MUST

Somewhat new to contemporary beekeeping is the phrase "hygienic bees". Now, typically we think of all honey bees as being hygienic. You know, honey bees rarely defecate in the hive. They fly out to void themselves, so we know that bees are somewhat hygienic. They keep a very clean hive.

However, over the last few years greater emphasis has been placed on hygienic behavior in how the bees monitor sealed brood. When we refer to hygienic honey bees, we mean more than just keeping a clean hive, we mean their are some honey bees that monitor sealed brood and if there is a problem, either disease or pest such as American Foul Brood or mites, they will open the cell up, and remove the larvae.

This is not as new as we might think. A notable work from the past on hygienic bees goes back to the 1930s. O.W. Park, in the early 1930s began this work and actually found that hygienic bees could cut American Foul Brood from 70% down to 10%. So for the last 80+ years, work continued off and on with developing a more hygienic progeny. The most prominent work and name associated with hygienic bees has been the work of Dr. Marla Spivak and her queens knows as the Minnesota Hygienic Queens. Dr. Spivak said that she thinks this hygienic behavior is found in about 10% of honey bees.

I heard Dr. Spivak's assistant speak last year, Gary Reuter, and he encouraged all queen rearers to consider testing for hygienic behavior in our hive selection programs. He showed pictures and gave examples of how easy it is to conduct these test. I will be interviewing Gary for Studio Bee Live next week.

I want to share how to perform the hygienic discovery test on a hive for those of you who are raising your own queens, but before I do, let me share with you how important I believe this really is.

I've traveled to some third world countries where my doctor warned me not to drink the water, eat the food or get a mosquito bite. Some of these countries have very poor hygiene. A lack of sanitation knowledge keeps some people believing that if you cannot see a germ, there is no germ. Thus, bacteria and diseases flourish.

A few times, I've caught the bug while traveling in these countries. As of late, I've tried really hard to be more hygienically aware because I don't like being sick far from home. But we do not have to travel to a third world country to get sick from germs. By not washing our hands, we can catch a cold after shaking hands with someone who is infected. Thus, the more hygienic we are, the healthier we stay. Same is true for honey bees too.

The less dust, mold and germs we have in our homes, the healthier we are and the same is true for bees. This is a MUST! We have to get off the medicine treadmill with our bees. We cannot continue to effectively keep honey bees by dumping medication in the hive. Try living your life the way you treat you bees, and any medical doctor would warn you that it is not a healthy lifestyle.

Producing queens that have a strong hygienic behavior, in my opinion, is the key to reducing mites, American Foul Brood and other issues related to cleanliness of the hive. Imagine having bees who are able to detect AFB or reproductive mites in a sealed brood cell, and then open up that cell and carry the contaminated elements out of the hive.

It is also my opinion that a large cause agent of CCD is the amount of chemicals beekeepers add to their hives that gets absorbed into the comb and becomes unlikeable to the bees or begins to affect the bees in negative ways. This may not be the only or major cause, but to me it has to be one of the components. Thus, by using hygienic queens, we can reduce the medications in the hives and achieve an equal success rate from this hygienic behavior.

As much sense that this makes, there are many queen providers who still make no effort to incorporate this hygienic characteristic into their stock. This testing does add another time consuming step to the equation of an already demanding process.

However, as more state queen rearing projects spread, and as more beekeepers seem interested in raising their own queens, I want to challenge all queen providers to sell only queens from known hygienic hives.

How do we determine this?

Gary Reuter was very helpful in the workshop I attended. He explained in detail how to perform this hygienic test. Anyone raising queens should and can do it. It is pretty simple. The test is performed using Liquid Nitrogen (N2), the cold stuff! I called around and the best place to purchase it is from a near by welding supply company, the ones that sell various welding gas. They will sell you Liquid Nitrogen. I decided to purchase a 5 liter canister made for (N2). The canister is pricey, between $400-$500, but it is the best and safest way. If you are not testing regularly, you could just put the (N2) in a cooler. But you have to be very careful, as it will immediately frost bite your skin. You have to wear proper protection, because an accidental spill or splash could cost you a limb. (N2) is cheap, at about $3-$4 a liter.

We will begin running our tests this spring by using metal cylinders that we make from 28 gauge galvanized metal, left over pieces from the metal we put on our top covers. These cylinders need to be at least 4" tall and 3" in diameter. The 28 gauge metal works best because it is thin enough to press into the sealed brood in the frame. 4" tall is important so that as the (N2) "boils over" as it freezes and kills the brood within the 3" circle, it will not boil over and out onto the rest of the frame.

It is important to pour in 10 ounces of (N2) on the section of brood within the metal cylinder. This is the sufficient amount to kill all brood cells. Be sure and make a note of any unsealed cells so that when you come back to count, you'll have a base number to work with. There are about 160 cells within a 3" diameter. It is recommended to pour in a couple of ounces first and wait for the edges to freeze or for the (N2) to evaporate then pour the remaining 8 ounces in.

So what you want to do with the (N2) is freeze kill a 3" diameter area of sealed brood. Then, you place that frame back into the hive for 48 hours. Be sure and mark the frame so that you can easily find your test frame in 48 hours. When you find it, now observe how much of the 3" area of dead larvae has been removed. If it has all been emptied, then you have a very hygienic hive to breed from. If not, keep testing other hives.

Like I said, pretty simple!!

Sunday, our temperature will rise to 52. I am planning to go into a few of our hives that have a large wind block as the wind will be strong from the South. When I go into these experimental hives, I will be observing the following:1) Amount of sealed brood or egg
2) Location of the cluster/queen
3) Amount of both stored pollen and honey
4) Evidence of excessive condensation in the hiveThree hives I am experimenting with are:
1) A series of 3 nucs with 5 frames, all stacked on top of each other. Each one has a 3" screened hole in the floor, allow one nuc to heat the one above it.

2) A hive that was compressed into a single deep, to observe how well a hive can overwinter in a single deep.

3) Two strong hives that were mere merged into one hive by placing two deeps from one hive on top of two deeps from another hive.Since we've already had several weeks of very cold weather and winds here in Illinois, it will be interesting to see where the bees are at in mid December. I'll keep you posted.We are getting closer to the end of the year, and as of January 1, 2009 we will raise our prices on our wooden ware. So you can save money by ordering your hives yet this year. Please get your hive order in as soon as possible for your 2009 beekeeping needs!Last year, our queens were in such demand, we were not able to fulfill all orders. Though we are vastly increasing our queen production for the spring, we are still looking at selling out. Therefore, we have decided to take orders for queens starting January 5th as well. These are our Illinois reared queens from our survival hives that have never been medicated and have proven to be winter hardy, good honey producers, gentle and hygienic. We hope to have queens ready to sell my the end of April or early May. First come first serve basis so secure your queen/s fast! We are planning on producing around 1,000 of these queens and probably about 500 - 750 will pass our criteria as sellable mated queens. These queens are held in their own nuc to demonstrate their laying ability for 14-21 days before they are sold.

We only ship our queens through express mail, 1-2 day delivery time.

Here's the number to call to order your hives, bees, nucs or queens:

217-427-2678

STUDIO BEE LIVE

We welcome your questions to Studio Bee Live. Call in an leave your question on our answering machine and we'll play your voice and our answer on an upcoming broadcast. We have a special number just for questions:

217-427-2430

Check out our website at: www.honeybeesonline.com and if you don't see what you need there, call us up and we'll make sure we take care of all your beekeeping needs!

See you next time and remember to BEE-have yourself!

David & Sheri Burns

Long Lane Honey Bee Farms

www.honeybeesonline.com

217-427-2678

EMAIL: david@honeybeesonline.com

How to Achieve Anything

YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money From the article:One year after YouTube, the online video powerhouse, invited members to become “partners” and added advertising to their videos, the most successful users are earning six-figure incomes from the Web site. For some, like Michael Buckley, the self-taught host of a celebrity chatter show, filming funny videos is now a full-time job.

Slowly, I am breaking my own rules. Surprisingly, it doesn't hurt as much as I thought it would. See, I use the pregnancy excuse (it's really very handy).

I do realize the slippery slope I'm on. Break one rule, two are right behind. It's like eating cookie dough. If I can resist the tiniest temptation to put butter+sugar+flour+vanilla to tongue, I'm saved. If I give in, even just a little bit, I'm doomed. A taste turns into a spoonful turns into sick-on-the-couch-with-no-relief-in-sight.

I'm doomed.

Why, you ask? Because I actually went to the mall to shop in my sweatpants. Today. And I was neither a) coming from a workout; or b) out of my mind.

And they weren't even cute sweatpants. They were six year old navy drawstring sweatpants that I have worn every night from 7p-10p for the past seven hundred and fifty three days (or thereabouts). In fact (if I'm going to spill it I might as well spill it all) they even have a toothpaste stain on the hem of the bottom right leg. I am reminded of this stain every night when little one says, "Mommy, you forgot to wash your pants again."

Which leads me to another rule: I go long long periods of time between washing the sweatpants that I wear to read to my daughter and unwind in at nighttime. The reason is attributed to the fear that these sweatpants-of-all-sweatpants will not be the same if I wash them. I know you know what I mean. Maybe it's not sweats for you, but it's something. You have (or have had) the same fear, haven't you?

But wearing them out IN PUBLIC takes it to a new level (or is it a new low). Maybe it was the rain, maybe it was the "have I done enough for everyone for Christmas"anxiety, maybe it was the baby growing in my belly. Whatever the excuse, there really is no excuse.

::

The problem with "Someday Syndrome" is that it can keep you from getting anything accomplished. Therefore:11 Ways to Cure Someday Syndrome

Let's start with the basics: Martin Fowler's original article lays out the mechanics of how to set up a CI server and the essential rules to follow while doing it. In this post I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of how to integrate continuous integration into your team, and how to use it to create two important feedback loops.

First, a word about why continuous integration is so important. Integration risk is the term I use to describe the costs of having code sitting on some, but not all, developers' machines. It happens whenever you're writing code on your own machine, or you have a team working on a branch. It also happens whenever you have code that is checked-in, but not yet deployed anywhere. The reason it's a risk is that, until you integrate, you don't know if the code is going to work. Maybe two different developers made changes to the same underlying subsystem, but in incompatible ways. Maybe operations has changed the OS configuration in production in a way that is incompatible with some developer's change.

In many traditional software organizations, branches can be extremely long-lived, and integrations can take weeks or months. Here's how Fowler describes it:

I vividly remember one of my first sightings of a large software project. I was taking a summer internship at a large English electronics company. My manager, part of the QA group, gave me a tour of a site and we entered a huge depressing warehouse stacked full with cubes. I was told that this project had been in development for a couple of years and was currently integrating, and had been integrating for several months. My guide told me that nobody really knew how long it would take to finish integrating.

For those of you with some background in lean manufacturing, you may notice that integration risk sounds a lot like work-in-progress inventory. I think they are the same thing. Whenever you have code that is un-deployed or un-integrated, it's helpful to think of it as a huge stack of not-yet-installed parts in a widget factory. The more code, the bigger the pile. Continuous integration is a technique for reducing those piles of code.

Step 1: get a continuous integration server.
If you've never practiced CI before, let me describe what it looks like briefly. Whenever you check-in code to your source control repository, an automated server notices, and kicks off a complete "build and test" cycle. It runs all the automated tests you've written, and keeps track of the results. Generally, if all tests pass, it's happy (a green build) and if any tests fail, it will notify you by email. Most CI servers also maintain a waterfall display that shows a timeline of every past build. (To see what this looks like, take a look at the CI server BuildBot's own waterfall).

Continuous integration works to reduce integration risk by encouraging all developers to check in early and often. Ideally, they'll do it ever day or even multiple times per day. That's the first key feedback loop of continuous integration: each developer gets rapid feedback about the quality of their code. As they introduce more bugs, they have slower integrations, which signals to them (and others) that they need help. As they get better, they can go faster. In order for that to work, the CI process has to be seamless, fast, and reliable. As with many lean startup practices, it's getting started that's the hard part.

Step 2: start with just one test.
You may already have some unit or acceptance tests that get run occaisionally. Don't use those, at least not right away. The reason is that if your tests are only being run by some people or in some situations, they probably are not very reliable. Startng with crappy tests will undermine the team's confidence in CI right from the start. Instead, I recommend you set up a CI server like BuildBot, and then have it run just a single test. Pick something extremely simple, that you are convinced could never fail (unless there's a real problem). As you gain confidence, you can start to add in additional tests, and eventually make it part of your team-wide TDD practice.

Step 3: integrate with your source control system.
Most of the times I've tried to introduce TDD, I've run into this problem: some people write and run tests religiously, while others tend to ignore them. That means that when a test fails, it's one of the testing evangelists who inevitably winds up investigating and fixing it - even if the problem was caused by a testing skeptic. That's counter-productive: the whole point of CI is to give each developer rapid feedback about the quality of their own work.

So, to solve that problem, add a commit hook to your source control system, with this simple rule: nobody can check in code while the build is red. This forces everyone to learn to pay attention to the waterfall display, and makes a failed test automatically a big deal for the whole team. At first, it can be frustrating, especially if there are any intermittent or unreliable tests in the system. But you already started with just one test, right?

The astute among you may have noticed that, since you can't check in when the build is red, you can't actually fix a failing test. There are two ways to modify the commit hook to solve that problem. The first, which we adopted at IMVU, was to allow any developer to add a structured phrase to their check-in comment that would override the commit hook (we used the very creative "fixing buildbot"). Because commits are mailed out to the whole team, anyone who was using this for nefarious purposes would be embarrassed. The alternative is to insist that the build be fixed on the CI server itself. In that case, you'd allow only the CI account to check in during a red build.

Either way, attaching consequences to the status of the build makes it easier to get everyone on the team to adopt it at once. Naturally, you should not just impose this rule from on high; you have to get the team to buy-in to trying it. Once it's in place, it provides an important natural feedback loop, slowing the team down when there are problems caused by integration risk. This provides the space necessary to get to the root cause of the problem. It becomes literally impossible for someone to ignore the failures and just keep on working as normal.

As you get more comfortable with continuous integration, you can take on more advanced tactics. For example, when tests fail, I encourage you to get into the habit of running a five whys root-cause analysis to take corrective action. And as the team grows, the clear-cut "no check-ins allowed" rule becomes too heavy-handed. At IMVU, we eventually built out a system that preserved the speed feedback, but had finer-grained effects on each person's productivity. Still, my experience working with startups has been that too much time spent talking about advanced topics can lead to inaction. So don't sweat the details - jump in and start experimenting.

One of the thrilling parts of working and writing in Silicon Valley is the incredible variety of people I've had the chance to meet. Sometimes, I meet someone that I feel a visceral connection with, because they are struggling with challenges that I've experienced myself. In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and I've written about their pain in The product manager's lament and The engineering manager's lament.

Today I want to talk about another archetype: the incredibly high-IQ hacker who's trying to be a leader. (As always, this is a fictionalized account; I'm blending several people I've known into a single composite. And please forgive the fact that I use male pronouns to describe the archetype. There is terrible gender bias in our profession, but that's a subject for another day. Suffice to say, most of the hackers I've known have been men. As a last disclaimer, please consult the definition of the word hacker if you're not familiar with the controversies surrounding that term.)

It's common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. I know them right away - we can talk high-level architecture all the way down to the bits-and-bytes of his system. When I want to know about some concurrency issues between services in his cluster, he doesn't blink an eye when I suggest we get the source code and take a look. And as soon as I point out an issue, he can instantly work out the consequences in his head, and invent solutions on the fly.

This kind of person is used to being the smartest person in the room. In fact, it's a rare person who can be subjected to recurring evidence of just how stupid the people around them are, and not become incredibly arrogant. Those who have the endurance are the ones that tend to lead teams and join startups, because you just can't be successful in a startup situation without empathy. I would characterize them as intolerant but not arrogant.

When a startup encounters difficult technical problems, this is the guy you want solving them. He's just as comfortable writing code as racking servers, debugging windows drivers, or devising new interview questions. As the company grows, he's the go-to person for almost everything technical, and so he's very much in demand. He throws off volumes of code, and it works. When scalability issues arise, for example, he's in the colo until 2am doing whatever it takes to fix them.

But life is not easy, either. As the company grows, the number of things he's called on to do is enormous, and the level of interruptions are getting intense. It's almost as if he's a country that was immune to the economic theory of comparative advantage. Since he's better at everything, he winds up doing everything - even the unimportant stuff. There's constant pressure for him to delegate, of course, but that doesn't necessarily work. If he delegates a task, and it gets messed up, he's the one that will get called in to deal with it. Better just to take care of it himself, and see that it's done right.

When you're the physical backstop putting dozens of fingers in the damn to prevent it from bursting, you might get a little irritated when people try to "help" you. The last thing you need is a manager telling you how to do your job. You're not very receptive to complaints that when you take on a task, it's unpredictable when you'll finish: "you try getting anything done on schedule when you're under constant interruptions!" Worst of all, your teammates are constantly wanting to have meetings. When they see a problem with the team's process, why don't they just fix it? When the architecture needs modifying - why do we need a meeting? Just change it. And we can't hire new engineers any faster, because you can't be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time!

The picture I'm trying to paint is one of a bright individual contributor stretched to the breaking point. I've been there. Trust me, it's not a lot of fun. And I've also been on the receiving end; and that's not much fun either. Yet, quite often these dynamics play out with ever-increasing amplitude, until finally something drastic happens. Unfortunately, more often than not, it's the hacker who gets fired. What a waste.

What's wrong with this picture?

One of the most exhilarating things about a startup is that feeling of intense no-holds-barred execution. Especially in the early days, you're fighting for survival every day. Every day counts, every minute counts. Even if, in a previous life, you were a world expert in some functional specialty, like in-depth market research or scalable systems design, the compressed timeline of a startup makes it irrelevant. You get to figure things out from first principles all the time, experiment wildly, and invest heavily in what works. From the outside, it looks a lot like chaos. To a hacker, it looks a lot like heaven.

But even a tiny amount of success requires growth. Even with the highest standards imaginable, there's no way to hire just genius hackers. You need a diversity of skills and backgrounds. Suddenly, things slow down a little bit. To me, this is the critical moment, when startups either accept that "process = bureaucracy" or reject that thinking to realize that "process = discipline." And it's here that hackers fall down the most. We're just not naturally that good at thinking about systems of people; we're more comfortable with systems of computers.

If you've ever been abused by a bad manager in your career, it's easy to become traumatized. I think this is the origin of the idea among hackers that managers are idiots who just get in the way. The variations on this theme are legion: the pointy-haired boss, the ivory-tower architect, and of course the infinite variety of marketroids. But whenever groups of people assemble for a common purpose, they adopt process and create culture. If nobody is thinking about it, you're rolling the dice on how they turn out. And, at first, it's OK if the person who's doing that thinking is part-time, but eventually you're going to need to specialize. The alpha-hacker simply can't do everything.

Even in the areas that hackers specialize in, this go-it-alone attitude doesn't work. Building a good application architecture is not just coding. It's more like creating a space for other people to work in. A good architect should be judged, not by the beauty of the diagram, but by the quality of the work that the team does using it. The "just fix it" mentality is counter-productive here. Every bug or defect needs to go through the meta-analysis of what it means for the architecture. But that's impossible if you're constantly fire-fighting. You need to make time to do root cause analysis, to correct the systemic mistakes all of us tend to make.

And taking on too many projects at once is a classic sub-optimization. Sure, it seems efficient. But when there is a task half-done, it's actually slowing the team down. That's because nobody else can work on the task, but it's costly to hand it off. Imagine a team working from a forced-rank priority queue. Naturally, the best person should work on the #1 priority task, right? Not necessarily. If that person is subject to a lot of interruptions, as the people working on the less-important tasks finish, they're forced to keep working down the list. Meanwhile, the #1 task is still not done. It would have been faster for the team as a whole to have someone else work on the task, even if they were much slower. And of course there's the secondary benefit of the fact that as people work on tasks they don't know anything about, they learn and become more capable.

The reason this situation reaches a breaking-point is that it's constantly getting worse. As the team grows, the number of things that can go wrong grows with it. If a single person stays the bottleneck, they can't scale fast enough to handle all those interruptions - no matter how smart they are. And the interruptions themselves make looking for solutions increasingly difficult. Each time you look for solutions, you see a conundrum of this form: you can't hire because you're too busy, but you can't delegate because you can't hire.

All is not lost, though. When I get involved in companies that struggle with this problem, here is the kind of advice I think can help:

• Introduce TDD and continuous integration. This is one of the bedrock practices of any lean startup, and so it's a common piece of advice I give out. However, it's particularly helpful in this situation. Without requiring a lot of meetings, it changes the perspective of the team (and its leadership) from fire-fighting to prevention. Every test is a small investment in preventing a specific class of bugs from recurring; once you've been successful at building this system, it's pretty easy to see the analogy to other kinds of preventative work you could do. It also helps ratchet down the pressure, since so many of the interruptions that plague the typical hacker are actually the same bugs recurring over and over. TDD plus continuous integration works as a natural feedback loop: if the team is working "too fast" to produce quality code reliably, tests fail, which requires the team to slow down and fix them.
  
  
• Use pair programming and collective code ownership. These are two other Extreme Programming practices that are explicitly designed to counteract the problems inherent in this situation. Pair programming is the most radical, but also the most helpful. If your team isn't ready or able to adopt pair-programming across the board, try this technique instead: whenever anyone is becoming a bottleneck (like the proverbial hacker in this post), pass a rule that they are only allowed to pair program until they are not the bottleneck anymore. So each time someone comes to interrupt them, that person will be forced to pair in order to get their problem solved. In the short term, that may seem slower, but the benefits will quickly become obvious. It's another natural feedback loop: as the interruptions increase, so does the knowledge-transfer needed to prevent them.
  
  
• Do five whys. This is a generalization of the previous two suggestions. It requires that we change our perspective, and instead treat every interruption as an opportunity to learn and invest in prevention.
  
  
• Hire a CTO or VP Engineering. A really good technology executive can notice problems like the ones I'm talking about today and address them proactively. The trick is to hire a good one - I wrote a little about this in What does a startup CTO actually do? Sometimes, a great hacker has the potential to grow into the CTO of a company, and in those cases all you need is an outside mentor who can work with them to develop those skills. I've been privileged to have been the recipient of that kind of coaching, and to have done it a few times myself.

At the end of the day, the product development team of a startup (large or small) is a service organization. It exists to serve the needs of customers, and it does this by offering its capabilities to other functions in the company, and partnering with them. That's only possible if those interactions are constructive, which means having the time and space for people of different backgrounds and skills to come together for common purpose. That's the ultimate task for the company's technology leadership.

I strongly believe that all hackers have the innate ability to become great leaders. All that's required is a shift in perspective: at their root, all technology problems are human problems. So, fellow hackers, I'd love to hear from you. Does this sound familiar? Are you ready to try something different?