THIS POSTED in 2009:

Hello from Long Lane Honey Bee Farms, and welcome to today's lesson in Beekeeping, as we look at the best way to start up a hive, whether it be package bees, a nuc or buying an existing hive. Don't know what a nuc is? Then read on. Today's Blog/Lesson will be a lot of fun. I'll show you some questions from the master beekeeper test and you can see how well you would have done. Plus, information on our upcoming class and photos from the EAS meeting in Ellicottville, NY.

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You can easily unsubscribe at any time and it's free. Since these lessons are free, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it does take money and time to put each lesson together. We receive alot of "thank you" emails and phone calls, telling us that these lessons have helped beekeepers greatly.
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I made it home from a week in Ellicottville, New York attending the Eastern Apicultural Society (EAS). Wow! What a jammed packed week of super lectures, demonstrations and new and helpful information on beekeeping.
Being able to attend workshops of the most well known entomologists in the country was very informative. Almost all of the speakers were more than approachable throughout the week, and needless to say, I picked a few brains. I was really impressed with the Holiday Valley Resort. It's really designed for golfers and skiers, but it quickly became home for over 400 beekeepers.
Here's Dave Tarpy giving an outdoor class on queen rearing and grafting. Dave is extremely intelligent and has an effective way to translate his knowledge down to the average beekeeper.
As I told you in my last communique, I've started my journey on becoming a master beekeeper. I studied long and hard and did the best I could. This master beekeepers certification used to be associated through Dr. Morse with Cornell University, but was taken over in 1981 by the Eastern Apiculture Society under the direction of Dr. Clarence Collison.
It is a very vigorous and thorough program. I tested in all four areas hoping to pass at least one my first year, and did better. I passed two! And only missed the third one by 6 points. This will give me 51 weeks to study up and try to pass the other two sections next year. (These are various pictures taken from the convention).

Let me give you a few questions from the written test to give you an example: "The retinue of attendants that form around a queen first occurs: (Multiple choice answer)
a) within the first 24 hours after a virgin queen emerges from her mating flight.
b) when the queen begins to lay eggs.
c) after the queen begins to lay eggs.
d) just before the queen is ready to take a mating flight.
e) when the queen is 3 weeks old


The answer is: D

"Individual cells and tissues within the honey bee receive oxygen directly from the:
a) Blood
b) Air Sacs
c) Tracheae
d) Spiracles
e) TracheolesThe answer is: E

"The ovaries of worker honey bees have _______ovarioles.
a) 51-100
b) 2-12
c) 100-129
d) 28-50
e) 130-180
The answer is: BHere's a picture of Gary Reuter who works with Marla Spivak on the Minnesota Hygienic Queen. Gary is a swell guy and always a lot of fun.
Here are a few of the True or False questions from the master beekeeper test. See how you might do:

Queens infected with nosema disease cease egg-laying and die within a few weeks of infection?
The answer is: TRUE

The principle component of the alarm pheromone associated with the mandibles is isopentyl acetate.
The answer is: FALSE (the correct answer is 2-heptanone)

The commercial production of apples requires cross-varietal pollination.
The answer is: TRUESacbrood infected larvae are unable to molt from the larval to the pupal stage.
The answer is: TRUE
One essay question asked to give a detailed explanation of how to use the "Demaree Technique."
The lab testing contained tables set up with various medicines, real infected frames of various diseases and tables with beekeeping equipment. The microscopes were set up with various pests in which we had to identify pests such as a male mite versus a female mite. So as you can see, it is a pretty thorough test.
I have the highest respect for EAS. I believe it is one of the best beekeeping organizations that I know of, and I would highly recommend that all beekeepers attend the EAS. LESSON 60: WHICH IS BEST? A NUC OR A PACKAGE OF BEES?
People are already calling us trying to reserve package bees. This year, everyone sold out faster than normal and left many beekeepers disappointed that they did not secure their orders earlier in the year. It happens every year. So let me give a brief run down on the proper way to make sure you purchase bees in time for a great spring.
There are three options: Packages, nucs or to purchase an existing live hive. Now, let me give you the pros and cons.
A) A Live Hive. This is probably the most difficult to purchase. Very few beekeepers want to sell a good, live hive. For example, one hive can earn me around $500 per year in producing nucs, queens and honey. So why would I want to sell it for half that price? So when a beekeeper wants to sell, the big question to ask is why? If the answer is understandable, like maybe the beekeeper is moving or has become allergic to bees or passed away, then that may be a good deal. However, when you purchase a live hive, you are also purchasing all the existing problems such as small hive beetles, tracheal mite, varroa mites, wax moths or diseases such as nosema, American Foul Brood or European Foul Brood or deformed wing virus, just to name a few.
Never purchase a live hive until it has been thoroughly inspected by a state apiary inspector and given a clean bill of health. This might be a good approach, but you have to find a beekeeper willing to sell a hive, and then make sure it is a clean hive. Remember, American Foul Brood can live on equipment for up to 80 years! Never buy used equipment if you are a new beekeeper!
B) Packages. Packages have been the way beekeepers in the North have received bees from the South for over 100 years. Southern beekeepers shake bees out of their hives and into screened cages. Sometimes it may take shaking bees out of three different hives to equal three pounds. Then, a new queen, in a separate cage, is placed in among the bees along with a can of either hard candy or sugar syrup. But there are some concerns. Let me list a few:--Will the queen be healthy and properly mated.
--Since they are from the south, could there be a chance of Africanized genetics, making a
more aggressive hive?
--Shipping stresses, such as too much time in the package and excessive temperatures can weaken both
the bees and the queen.
--Some packages/queen cages are medicated with chemicals that has been shown to effect
both the reproductive ability of drones and queens.
So, while this is the "industry standard" and has been for a century, it is not risk free or fail safe.
C) NUC. What is a NUC? A nuc is a short expression referring to the nucleus of a live hive. The nucleus, or nuc, usually contains four or five frames from a complete hive. Those frame include brood in various stages and frames mixed with honey, pollen and brood. The queen has already been accepted and is the mother of all the bees including the brood in the frames. Below are two lists, the first will be the advantages of a nuc, and the last will be the disadvantages.
Advantages of a nuc:--The frames are from a proven, successful existing hive.
--The queen is released and has been laying among the frames for some time.
--You receive the existing frames of comb, honey, pollen and brood. You do not have to
wait for the bees to draw comb.
--Since nucs are picked up, there are no shipping stresses.
--It is easy to transfer the frames into your own equipment.
Disadvantages of a nuc:
--Are not usually available until June.
--You receive comb from another beekeeper that could contain pests or diseases.
--More expensive.


In conclusion, any of the three above options can work and work quite well. If you work through the pros and cons, then you can see which options is best for you. I'm not afraid of starting with a nuc or a package. But, I would be very nervous about buying someone else's live hive. I probably like the idea of packages better, because I can get a two month head start. Some say that time wise, a June nuc will be as far along as an April package in June. But that is not entirely true. An April package will be weeks ahead of a nuc by the same time in June.

In my opinion, there are as many chances to be taken by buying nucs as there are packages. Nuc providers are not above small hive beetles, mites or diseases. When we sold our nucs this year, they were inspected frame by frame by our state inspector. They passed with no problems. But state inspectors do not inspect for Nosema or Tracheal mites. So I'd say the playing field is pretty even as to which is better, a nuc or a package.

That's it for today's lesson and I hope you've enjoyed our time together. Our next lesson will be about how you should manage your hives now that summer is heading into fall. We'll talk about combining weak hives with strong ones, and how to treat for mites and how to feed hives that are low in stored honey for the winter.

Today I received many calls from folks thanking me for these informative lessons, and we do enjoy sharing our knowledge with you. We also want to thank you for your business. We realize you could purchase your beekeeping supplies from the "big-boys" so we appreciate you supporting a hard working family business.


Here's our contact info:
PHONE: 217-427-2678
EMAIL: david@honeybeesonline.com
WEBSITE: http://www.honeybeesonline.com/

Until next time remember to BEE-Have yourself!

David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farm
Fairmount, Illinois (Central Illinois)

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Over the past few months, I have been engaged in another customer discovery exercise with passionate early adopters of the lean startup methodology. I am now ready to move into the customer validation phase. This idea is the brainchild of several venture-backed startups that participated in the lean startup workshops. I like it because it will allow companies that want to engage with me directly to also get support from their peers. Although it is expensive, it is significantly cheaper than my very limited consulting practice. So if you're a lean startup earlyvangelist, read on.

Here's the pitch: a group of 10 companies would meet once a month for six months to develop their capacity to run lean. Each company would enroll two leaders in the series, one on the technology side, one on the business side. These companies would be carefully screened for fit, readiness, and to ensure that competitors are not in the same group.

At each half-day meeting, we'd work as a group on a specific lean startup technique. In particular, we would cover customer development, continuous deployment, minimum viable product, and actionable metrics. In between sessions, this cohort of companies would have the opportunity to act as a learning community, sharing what they've learned and supporting one another as they try to put the techniques into practice. Each month, we'd hold each other accountable for making changes to our product, process, and team. I would also be available to the participants to answer questions one-on-one and act as an advisor to each company. This program would be by subscription only; each company would pay $3000/month. Each half-day session would be held in downtown San Francisco in the late afternoon; dinner is included.

Because of the cost and intensity of this program, it is designed for startups with significant venture backing or who have reached profitability. I continue to work on additional programs and products for bootstrapped and angel-backed startups, as well as for enterprise and future entrepreneurs. If you have thoughts about a product you'd like to see created, please feel free to drop me a line.

If you're interested in participating in the inaugural Lean Startup Cohort, please click Here to fill out an application.
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My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. One of the topics that raised heated debate was whether I had conflated technical design with product design, because I made the admittedly counter-intuitive claim that sometimes good technical design actually leads to increased technical debt. You can follow some of that debate here and here; I continue to believe that this idea is correct.

The argument itself got me thinking a lot about design and its role in building products. As a profession, we have a set of intuitions about what good design looks like, and I've come to believe that some of these intuitions have become obsolete. In this post, I'd like to explore the reasons why.

I thought a good place to start was with the origins of the idea that "software design" should be considered a discipline in its own right, on par with computer science, software engineering, and computer programming. Over the years, many people have advocated for this idea, but I wanted to go back to an early source: Mitch Kapor's original Software Design Manifesto. We owe a lot to this seminal document. Re-reading, I was struck by how much of it we now take for granted. And as Kapor himself points out, the core ideas have even older origins:

The Roman architecture critic Vitruvius advanced the notion that well-designed buildings were those which exhibited firmness, commodity, and delight.

The same might be said of good software. Firmness: A program should not have any bugs that inhibit its function. Commodity: A program should be suitable for the purposes for which it was intended. Delight: The experience of using the program should be pleasurable one. Here we have the beginnings of a theory of design for software.

This simple three-part framework underlies almost all discussions about technical design today, and it was clearly on display in the recent debates over technical debt. What's interesting to me is how much we have tended to focus on Firmness and Delight as the key elements of technical design. A Firm design is one that works reliably, that has a transparent internal structure, and is easy to change. Great engineers see it and smile. And Delight is a similar feeling, but for a different constituency: the end-user. In the more than ten years since the original Manifesto, we've made strides in both areas. User-centric and interaction design, test-driven development, continuous integration, services-oriented architectures - the list goes on. Although some of these practices are counter-intuitive, they all have been gradually adopted as their benefits become clear.

But what about Commodity? I think this is the area where our intuitions are most out of step with the new reality we are living in. In antiquity just as much as in the early days of software engineering, Commodity was rightly understood as a mostly static quality. Sure, during the requirements and specification phases, there might be a lot of prototyping and iterating. But once the design was locked and implementation began, the intended purpose was relatively well understood and not subject to revision.

To be clear, that didn't mean that the design didn't change. Kapor addresses that directly:

In general, the programming and design activities of a project must be closely interrelated. During the course of implementing a design, new information will arise, which many times will change the original design. If design and implementation are in watertight compartments, it can be recipe for disaster because the natural process of refinement and change is prevented.

These principles are every bit as true today as then. What's changed is that these interactions used to be confined primarily to the implementation phase of the project. The kinds of "new information" in the quote above are implementation details. The design may call for a certain look-and-feel that is impossible to implement, or has negative performance implications, which would require changes in the design, which might uncover additional issues, etc. This back-and-forth would continue up until the project entered its certification phase. Over time, if everything's working right, the magnitude of the design changes should become smaller and smaller, as the team converges on the final design.

But notice something interesting about this process. At no point is the overall purpose of the design changing. It doesn't start life as a toaster and end the design process as a microwave. Of course, it's possible that after the product is shipped and customer feedback is solicited, the next product design might be different. But think of the time-scale involved - in antiquity as well as a few decades ago. Building a cathedral takes years, and so even if the design of one cathedral affects the next, that's not particularly relevant to practitioners in the here-and-now. The same is true of a traditional waterfall-style IT project (although hopefully measured in months or years, and not decades). Yet a huge class of modern software projects are being developed in a very different context.

When it becomes possible to build products "live" with customers, the cycle time changes and design becomes a much more dynamic process. We still struggle to create Firm software that is defect-free, and it still requires customer insight (and maybe some customer development) to discover what will Delight. But it's Commodity that has become the most unstable. Every time we execute a product pivot - changing some elements of our vision but not others - we change the very purpose of the product being designed. My belief is that it's this increase in the rate of change that is what is causing our technical design intuitions to go haywire. It's like our compass no longer points to true north (like on Lost).

Let me quote an example that I used recently:

Remember IMVU's initial IM add-on product? It had a pretty good technical design. Here why:

- it kept each IM network in its own separate module, and made it really easy to add new IM networks by composing a set of common objects
- it separated the underlying transport from the IM "session" itself, so it was robust in the face of the underlying client acting strangely, going away, or even having conversations switch clients altogether
- it compacted all of its information into brief, human-readable text messages that could be sent over any IM network in the clear

Those were strictly technical design decisions, and I think they were really good. Unfortunately, when we realized the product design was not what customers wanted, we had to pivot to a new product. But we had to bring that old codebase with us. Now the assumptions and abstractions that had served us well started to serve us badly. When we became a standalone network, it didn't matter how easy it was to add new networks, since we never did. And having the session abstracted from the transport made debugging much harder. Worse of all, the plaintext codes we were used to sending were considered non-authoritative, since they could be pulled off a third-party network. This made the actual transport much more difficult on our first-party network than was really necessary.

As a result, we have had to be constantly refactoring this design, a little bit at a time, to smooth out these rough edges. These design changes feel a lot like the interest payments incurred by technical debt. My argument is that there is no distinction to be had. That "good design" turned out to be technical debt, after all.

What I object to most is the idea that technical design is a linear quantity. There's no such thing as "improving the technical design" in any absolute sense. You can only improve it with regard to whatever the purpose of the current product is. When that purpose is changing, we're necessarily chasing a moving target.

There are huge opportunities that become unlocked when we recognize this change. For one, we have to abandon any pretense of a linear design process, that imagines that we'll design something, implement it, and then get feedback on it. As has been going on in the world of manufacturing for many decades now, we have to engage in these activities concurrently. This is called set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE). [1] We also have to recognize the important impact of batch size on the work that we do. When we work on a product in small increments, we accelerate feedback to each participant who works on the product. This includes the designers as well as the engineers and product managers. This is what allows them to have a constant stream of insights about the true Commodity of their design, and to change it when it's time to pivot.

This has big implications for where we should spend energy. As I mentioned in the technical debt piece, our choices are usually framed as a set of either-or trade-offs between quick-and-dirty hacks and slower but more elegant designs. Lean methods present a third option: to invest in our process so that our design gets more feedback sooner and is more adaptable to changes in purpose. (The economics of these process trade-offs are discussed in the Principles of Product Development Flow.)

Returning to the subject of technical design, this yields a new criteria for a good dynamic technical design. It should still be Firm, and still promote Delight for our current customers. But it should also be resilient to changes in purpose, even dramatic ones. That means that the internal design of the product is now inseparable from the process that is used to build it. It is time for software design to grow up, the same way manufacturing had to evolve beyond Taylorism. And as with all scientific evolutions, it's not that the old principles are discarded or proved to be false. What's new is that we have learned to apply those principles in new contexts, like the extreme uncertainty that is the soil in which startups grow. We may have to change our practices to adapt to this new reality, but that doesn't mean we don't owe a debt of gratitude to those who helped us get here. So, in that spirit: thanks, Mitch. We'll do our best to leave the next generation something of comparable value.

[1] For more on SBCE, see this MIT Sloan Management Review article. Here's an excerpt:

In a previous article, we called Toyota’s product development system the “second Toyota paradox.” TPS was the first; its features seem wasteful but result in a more efficient overall system, such as changing over manufacturing processes more frequently (presumably inefficient) in order to create short manufacturing lead times. The second paradox can be summarized in this way: Toyota considers a broader range of possible designs and delays certain decisions longer than other automotive companies do, yet has what may be the fastest and most efficient vehicle development cycles in the industry.

Traditional design practice, whether concurrent or not, tends to quickly converge on a solution, a point in the solution space, and then modify that solution until it meets the design objectives. This seems an effective approach unless one picks the wrong starting point; subsequent iterations to refine that solution can be very time consuming and lead to a suboptimal design.

By contrast, what we call “set-based concurrent engineering” (SBCE) begins by broadly considering sets of possible solutions and gradually narrowing the set of possibilities to converge on a final solution. A wide net from the start, and gradual elimination of weaker solutions, makes finding the best or better solutions more likely. As a result, Toyota may take more time early on to define the solutions, but can then move more quickly toward convergence and, ultimately, production than its point-based counterparts.

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Sememangnya isu cinta ini telah dibahas begitu banyak sekali. Namun ia tetap masih hangat dibicarakan di mana-mana. Masih ada yang belum mengetahui hujung pangkal masalah cinta yang dihadapi mereka. Tidak kurang yang memberi pendapat tentang percintaan. 'Ustaz-ustaz cinta' muncul bagai bidan terjun. Menceritakan pendapat-pendapat mereka tentang percintaan yang bagaimana dibolehkan dan yang bagaimana dilarang. Sebahagian yang menulis dan berkata-kata berdasarkan dalil Quran dan Sunnah amat dikagumi. Mampu berhujah menggunakan sumber hukum agama menunjukkan semakin ramai yang celik agama. Ada juga yang masih mengatakan "Pada pendapat saya boleh, sebab.." dan pelbagai gaya bahasa yang membawa maksud yang sama, iaitu pendapat sendiri. Bagi mereka ini pula, menunjukkan masih ada yang belum mengetahui bahawa sesuatu dalam Islam itu perlu dilakukan berdasarkan dalil yang jelas, bukannya pendapat semata-mata. Allah telah menegaskan:

(Pahala dari Allah) itu bukanlah menurut angan-anganmu yang kosong dan tidak (pula) menurut angan-angan Ahli Kitab.
[4:123]

Bagi mereka yang mengatakan boleh bercinta sebelum bernikah, amatlah disangsikan kata-kata mereka. Dari sudut apa boleh berlakunya percintaan di antara dua insan berbeza jantina yang tidak mempunyai ikatan yang jelas?

Sebelum itu, perlu difahami bahawa mencintai adalah berbeza daripada bercinta.

Mencintai bermaksud

menyukai, menyayangi dan menaruh hati kepada seseorang. Ia merupakan fitrah yang masih boleh dikawal.
Manakala bercinta pula adalah perbuatan cinta-mencintai atau berkasih-kasihan. Ia merupakan perbuatan saling yang berlaku antara dua insan. Dan apabila ia berlaku antara lelaki perempuan yang bukan mahram, maka itulah yang dilarang dalam Islam.

Ada yang mengatakan bahawa boleh bercinta, menzahirkan rasa cinta kepada seseorang dengan tujuan benar-benar untuk melamarnya bagi dijadikan isteri. Berpendapat bahawa zaman sekarang tidak mungkin seseorang itu dapat lari daripada ber-couple dan bercinta walaupun cara dan kaedah mereka nampak Islamik (menjaga hawa nafsu dari maksiat), termasuk mereka yang bercinta selepas berkahwin. Katanya, hal ini kerana mereka yang bercinta selepas berkahwin akan melihat bakal isteri sebelum Ijab dan Qabul.

Setakat melihat itu bukannya bercinta. Memang ada hadith yang menceritakan Rasulullah menyuruh melihat siapa yang bakal dinikahi:

Dari Abu Hurairah, ia berkata: Pada suatu waktu, ketika aku sedang berada dekat Nabi shallallahu ‘alaihi wa sallam, tiba-tiba datang kepada beliau seorang laki-laki meminta nasihat, lalu dia berkata: Aku akan mengawini seorang wanita Anshar. Bagaimana pendapat baginda? Rasulullah shallallahu ‘alaihi wa sallam balik bertanya kepadanya: “Sudahkah engkau lihat wanita itu?” Jawabnya: Belum. Kemudian sabda beliau SAW: “Lihatlah dia dahulu, karena dalam mata orang Anshar ada sesuatu.
[H.R. Muslim]

Rasulullah hanya menyuruh untuk melihat, bukannya menzahirkan kecintaan, berkenal-kenalan dan bercinta dahulu sebelum diikat kedua insan itu dengan pernikahan. Kepada yang berpendapat, kembali soalan dipertanyakan, pernahkah Rasulullah menyuruh para sahabat yang ingin bernikah berkenal-kenalan dahulu, mengetahui isi hati dan yang sewaktu dengannya lalu baru menikah? Belum pernah lagi ditemui hadith yang menceritakan seperti itu. Mungkin penulis tersilap, maka jika ada, sila bawakan.

Apabila kita membicarakan boleh bercinta sebelum pernikahan, maka kita perlu ingat, orang umum akan menganalisanya. Mereka yang membaca, terutamanya rakyat Malaysia kita ini (yang sebahagian besar terkenal dengan sifat malasnya, hanya mahu mengambil apa yang mudah dan disukai hati dan nafsu mereka) akan menganggap mudah hal ini. Maka ruang untuk mendekati zina akan terbuka. Allah melarang 'menghampiri' kerana Dia sebagai pencipta amat mengetahui kelemahan manusia ciptaanNya. Manusia apabila menghampiri zina maka akan terjebak dalam penzinaan. Kisah Adam yang kecundang terhadap buah larangan merupakan bukti yang jelas. Zina bukan hanya zina secara zahir, malah ada zina hati. Dan ini tidak dapat dielakkan oleh sesiapa pun yang bercinta tanpa pernikahan. Hadithnya jelas dan boleh dibaca di dalam artikel penulis sebelum ini.


Jadi bagaimana? Masihkah boleh menikah tanpa melalui fasa percintaan terlebih dahulu? Sudah tentu boleh!

Ramai yang telah melakukannya. Mereka tidak pernah bertemu dan berkenalan sebelum bernikah. Cuma bertemu sebentar dalam majlis ta'aruf yang telah diaturkan, kemudian berlaku perbincangan, istikharah dan mengeluarkan kata-kata sepakat. Tidak lama selepas itu terus disatukan dengan pernikahan. Perjumpaan dan interaksi yang berlaku di sela waktu itu hanya untuk menyelesaikan masalah-masalah yang bersangkut-paut dengan pernikahan mereka. Segala-galanya hanya bermula selepas pernikahan.

Inilah keindaah hidup berjemaah. Ada yang sistem pernikahan muslim yang dikenali dengan pelbagai nama seperti Bait Al-Muslim ataupun Bait Ad-Du'at. Mereka semua sama-sama cuba membaiki diri menjadi insan yang lebih baik kerana meyakini bahawa Allah akan menjodohkan mereka dengan pasangan yang sesuai dengan keimanan mereka. Oleh itu mereka akan mengikuti majlis-majlis ilmu, usrah-usrah dan sebagainya bagi memastikan mereka sentiasa berada dalam jalan yang diredhai Allah.

Lalu muncullah mereka yang selalu bising-bising di belakang, "Orang-orang baik ni, yang nampak alim ni, pentingkan diri mereka sahaja. Mereka cari yang golongan-golongan mereka je. Kami yang biasa-biasa je ni, melepaslah nak dapat calon yang baik.."

Cik Abang dan Cik Akak, mereka bukanlah mementingkan diri sendiri. Tetapi bukankah itu memang firman Allah?

Wanita-wanita yang keji adalah untuk laki-laki yang keji, dan laki-laki yang keji adalah buat wanita-wanita yang keji (pula), dan wanita-wanita yang baik adalah untuk laki-laki yang baik dan laki-laki yang baik adalah untuk wanita-wanita yang baik (pula). Mereka (yang dituduh) itu bersih dari apa yang dituduhkan oleh mereka (yang menuduh itu). Bagi mereka ampunan dan rezeki yang mulia (surga).
[24:26]

Oleh itu berusahalah memperbaiki diri. Maka pasti akan berjumpa dengan mereka yang juga berusaha memperbaiki diri. Berusahalah menjadi mereka yang beriman, pasti akan dijodohkan dengan mereka yang juga berusaha menjadi mereka yang beriman.

Jangan tertipu dengan hubungan yang masih belum jelas statusnya. Apakah akan berakhir dengan pernikahan ataupun perpisahan. Jodoh dan rezeki telah ditetapkan oleh Allah. Tiada guna kita berusaha melalui jalan-jalan yang tidak sesuai dengan syariatNya. Lakukanlah menurut apa yang telah digarisinya dalam agama.

Buat yang sedang bercinta, segeralah bernikah. Allah pasti akan membantu mereka yang ingin bernikah.

“Ada tiga orang yang pasti (berhak) mendapat pertolongan Allah SWT: al-mukatab (hamba yang berupaya memerdekakan diri) yang hendak menunaikan tebusan dirinya, Lelaki yang bernikah kerana ingin menjaga kesucian dan kehormatan dirinya, dan mujahid (pejuang) di jalan Allah.”
(Diriwayatkan oleh at-Tirmidzi, Nasa’i dan Ibnu Majah)

Jika bernikah merupakan sesuatu yang masih belum mungkin, maka bersabarlah, anda seharusnya menutupi pintu-pintu yang bakal mengundang dosa. Walaupun berat, percintaan itu terpaksa ditinggalkan. Yakinlah Allah akan memberikan sesuatu yang lebih baik. Dan sekali lagi, jika memang jodoh anda, pasti akan bersama akhirnya.

Sabarlah menanti
Usahlah ragu
Kekasih akan datang
Sesuai dengan iman di hati

Sabarlah menunggu
Janji Allah akan pasti

Bila di dunia dia tiada
Moga di syurga dia telah menanti


Dimohon membaca artikel-aktikel saya sebelum ini untuk lebih memahami tentang isu ini. Ia telah diterbitkan dalam iluvislam.com dan blog saya:
umairzulkefli.blogspot.com

Nak Ber'couple' Boleh Tak?
-->Blog Saya
-->iluvislam.com

Bagaimana Bercinta Dalam Islam?
-->Blog Saya
-->iluvislam.com

Cerpen Cinta
http://www.iluvislam.com/v1/readarticle.php?article_id=922

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Saya dapat email ini, meminta agar diberi pendapat. Saya kira ia perlu dikongsokan bersama. Semoga bermanfaat.

Assalamualaikum warahmatullahiwabarakatuh..

Sebenarnya sy mempunyai satu tujuan yg sy rasakan begitu penting kepada diri sy dan mungkin juga masa depan sy yg mendatang. Saya ingin bertanyakan pendapat terhadap saudara tentang masalah sy dan sy rasakan saudaralah orang yg dapat memberikan pendapat terbaik kepada masalah sy ini.

Saudara, tidak dinafikan bahawa sememangnya lumrah manusia lelaki akan tertarik kepada perempuan. Terutamnya remaja seperti sy (16 tahun). Menurut kajian sains, golongan remaja akan mempunyai 'rasa' sedemikian lebih daripada golongan lain kerana pada masa ini hormon2 seks yg terdapat dalam tubuh remaja tersebut dikatakan paling tinggi kerana berlakunya proses kematangan.

Terdahulu izinkan sy menceritakan serba sedikit tentang diri sy. Sy merupakan seorang yg boleh dikategorikan sebagai seorang yg pemalu, pendiam, dan tidak berani untuk memulakan sesuatu perbualan melainkan orang lain yg memulakannyadahulu. Sy akui tahap keyakinan diri sy ini terlalu rendah, jika dibuat level keyakinan diri sy, berani sy katakan yg sy berada dlm tahap 2 daripada 10. Setelah muhasabah diri, sy ketahui bahwa ianya berpunca daripada diri sy yg kurang dalam pergaulan sosial(walaupun dalam keluarga sendiri). Sy malu dan tiada keyakinan untuk berhadapan masyarakat. Sekiranya berada dalam kalangan orang ramai sy akan mula gelisah dan takut kerana masalah confident ini yg terlalu rendah hingga menyebabkan sy tidak membuka mulut untuk bercakap dengan orang lain(sungguh tidak elok perilaku sy ini).

Saudara,berbalik kepada masalah sy tadi. Naluri remaja sama belaka walaupun seseorang remaja itu berbeza antara satu sama lain. Sy mempunyai satu perasaan terhadap seorang perempuan. Itulah masalah utama sy yg ingin sy kongsikan kepada saudara. TAPI, dengan keadaan sy yg begitu rendah tahap kepercayaan dan keyakinan pada diri sendiri ini menyebabkan ianya begitu sukar untuk sy. Hal ini kerana, perempuan yg sy minat tersebut 'SEMPURNA' pada pandangan sy. Dia memiliki personaliti menarik, tahap keyakinan diri yg tinggi, tahap pergaulan sosial yg bagus (terutamanya terhadap keluarga krn sy pernh ke rumahnya beraya di sana) terhadap kawan2 samaada lelaki mahupun perempuan, bijak dalam semua aspek termasuklan akademik, dan juga cantik(menyebabkan ramai yg terpikat padanya terutama kawan2 sy). Saudara, jika dirinya hendak dibandingkan dengan sy, termatlah jauh sekali bezanya. Dalam akademik dia jauh lebih bijak dr sy dan juga semua aspek lain. Senang cerita dia tu lebih baik daripada sy. Semestinya saudara akan menyuruh sy mencontohi dan menandinginya dlm pelajran kan? Amatlah berat bg sy dan susah kerana sy mempunyai 'PERASAAN' terhadap dia. Perasaan ini tidak membantu sy sedikitpun untuk menandinginya dalam pelajaran malahan lebih memburukan diri sy sendiri. Buat pengetahuan saudara, setiap kali belajar dlm kelas(kami satu kelas) fikiran sy akan melayang terhadap dia menyebabkan sy sukar untuk belajar. Walhal, dia tidak ada apa2 pun. Ini kerana sy merahsiakan dlm hati sy dan tidak berani untuk meluahkan pada dia(dia tidak tahu apa2). Perkara ini menyebabkan jiwa sy begitu terseksa. Kesannya, setiap kali peperiksaan keputusan sy merosot. Pernah terjadi pada satu peperiksaan hari tu, sy tidak dpt menjawabterus satu kertas kerana jiwa ini terasa pedih sgt kerana terlalu memikirkan terhadap dia dan sy selalu melihat dia ketika peperiksaan. Perasaan ini seolah2 beban buat sy.

Saya terlalu meminatinya..terlalu..tinggi menggunung harapan saya letak..

sy beranikan diri saya bagitau dia perkara sebenar..

tp jawapan dia bagi negatif sangat..dia dah...(msg xhabis..)

**********************************************************************

Wa'alaikumussalam...

Dia jawab ape..?
Maaf, saya dah ada orang yang saya minat.
Or,
Maaf, saya dah berpunya.

Akhi(Saudaraku)..
Nta kena ingat, tiada yang lebih indah daripada mendapat keredhaan Allah. Seindah manapun sesuatu itu dalam pandangan manusia, tanpa redha Allah ia tetap tidak berguna, walaupun sedikit.

Perasaan ingin dicintai serta ingin menyintai itu fitrah. Tak salah jatuh cinta. Dalam Islam ada cara untuk menyalurkan fitrah itu, iaitu bernikah.

Percintaan sebelum nikah tiada cara yang menghalalkannya dalam Islam. Buatlah macam mana sekalipun, ia tetap akan menghampiri zina. Sedar atau tidak, sebenarnya nta dah melakukan zina hati yang serius semasa asyik-asyik mengingati si dia. Sampaikan tidak mampu menjawab paper! Beristighfarlah wahai akhi...besar dosa yang telah nta lakukan itu..

Seindah manapun wanita itu, dia tetap manusia, yang akan tua, yang akan berubah wajahnya, yang akan pergi, yang akan mati.
Jika nta menyintainya kerana wajahnya yang cantik, ia akan pudar.
Jika kerana sifatnya yang dilihat baik dan menarik, itu hanya luaran, Ketika bercinta setiap orang akan menampilkan sifat-sifatnya yang terbaik, agar dapat memenangi hati pasangannya. Semuanya akan berubah setelah bernikah. Itulah yang berlaku jika percintaan itu dilakukan bukan berasaskan mencari redha Allah, tetapi atas desakan nafsu shahwat semata, kerana ingin mengisi kekosongan jiwa kononnya.

Allahlah sebaik-baik tempat untuk mengadu dan bercinta. Carilah kebahagiaan dengan mengenalNya. Berusahalah mendalami ilmu agama agar kita semakin dekat kepadaNya. Sedarlah...

Hendakkan jodoh baik dan solehah? Mudah..jadilah lelaki yang soleh. Berusaha sehabis mungkin untuk menjadi insan terbaik di hadapan Allah. Allah tidak pernah memungkiri janji-janjiNya. Dia akan menjodohkan nta dengan wanita solehah yang sama-sama beriman, menjaga diri dan bertaqwa. FirmanNya:

Wanita-wanita yang keji adalah untuk laki-laki yang keji, dan laki-laki yang keji adalah buat wanita-wanita yang keji (pula), dan wanita-wanita yang baik adalah untuk laki-laki yang baik dan laki-laki yang baik adalah untuk wanita-wanita yang baik (pula). Mereka (yang dituduh) itu bersih dari apa yang dituduhkan oleh mereka (yang menuduh itu). Bagi mereka ampunan dan rezeki yang mulia (surga).[Surah An-Nur(24) ayat 26]

Sifat lelaki yang baik, sudah tentu bukan mereka yang melanggar perintah Allah dan RasulNya. Ketika difirmankan:

Dan janganlah kamu mendekati zina; sesungguhnya zina itu adalah suatu perbuatan yang keji dan suatu jalan yang buruk.[Al-Isra'(17) ayat 32]

Dia amat-amat memahami bahawa dia perlu menjaga serta membatasi pergaulannya.

Dan apabila difirmankan :

Katakanlah kepada orang laki-laki yang beriman: "Hendaklah mereka menahan pandangannya, dan memelihara kemaluannya; yang demikian itu adalah lebih suci bagi mereka, sesungguhnya Allah Maha Mengetahui apa yang mereka perbuat".[An-Nur(24)ayat 30]

Dia akan amat memahami bahawa mata yang dipinjamkan oleh Allah ini tidak boleh digunakan sewenang-wenangnya untuk melihat wanita-wanita yang betul-betul halal baginya. Dia akan membatasi pandangannya dan menundukkan nafsu(keinginannya) daripada terus memikirkan tentang si dia.

Berusahalah untuk melupakannya.

Carilah Cinta Allah.

Cinta Teragung

Cinta Teratas

Wallahua'alam..

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One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. Its power is matched only by the amount of confusion that it causes, because it's actually quite hard to do. It certainly took me many years to make sense of it.

I was delighted to be asked to give a brief talk about the MVP at the inaugural meetup of the lean startup circle here in San Francisco. Below you'll find the video of my remarks as well as the full slides embedded below. But I wanted to say a few words first.

First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

Some caveats right off the bat. MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. If your goal is simply to scratch a clear itch or build something for a quick flip, you really don't need the MVP. In fact, MVP is quite annoying, because it imposes extra overhead. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics.

Second, the definition's use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgment to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense. As I talked about in a previous interview, IMVU's original MVP took us six months to bring to market. That was a pretty big improvement over a previous company, where we spent almost five years before launching. Yet in another situations we spent two weeks building a particular feature that absolutely nobody wanted. In retrospect, two weeks was way too long. We could have found out that nobody wanted the product a lot sooner. At a minimum, a simple AdWords smoke test would have revealed how utterly bad the concept was.

Without further ado, the video:


Slides are below:

Minimum Viable Product

View more presentations from Eric Ries.

Read More »

Hello from Long Lane Honey Bee Farms, and welcome to today's lesson in Beekeeping on hygienic behavior and testing for mites using a powder sugar roll.




As I have written nearly sixty lessons, I have never written a lesson on the bee dance. So today, as fascinating and complicated as it is, I want to teach on the way bees communicate through dance. Before I do, let me tell you about some things we are doing here at Long Lane Honey Bee Farms.


It has been a great bee year for us. Our hives have all built up nicely and are very strong, honey production has been great and best of all, no problems with pests or diseases since we have been free of using chemicals for nearly 3 year now. Queen production has been very robust!





I removed another colony of bees from a home in Champaign, Illinois. The location of the bees was another first for us. This time, they were harder to located because they were going into a hole between the wall and the top step on the back porch.





After some investigation, I determined that the steps had a hollow cavity in the middle, and so after the owner rented a jack-hammer and after we busted open the porch, we were right. In 1954 when they poured the concrete they placed a wooden whisky or pickle barrel in the middle to lessen how much concrete it would take. The bees thought this would be a perfect place for a hive.





As you can see they build layers and layers of comb inside this nice size cavity. This was the first time I ever operated a jack-hammer, and I now have a greater respect for those who run these things all day long.





We always use our bee vac for removal jobs and without it we'd never get all the bees. This was a very challenge removal just because the concrete was so old and hard. But once we got through and found the barrel, then we were able to remove the comb and bees. The owner was very happy that we found the bees and took them away!Remember, we really appreciate your business. We are here to serve all beekeepers as beekeepers ourselves, and as our customers will affirm, we do our best to answer your questions. So, when you are considering purchasing packages, nucs, woodenware, protective clothing, extracting equipment, queens, etc., please be sure to give us a call: 217-427-2678.

LESSON 59: BEE DANCE COMMUNICATION

We all probably remember in grade school that bees do a wagtail dance, sometimes referred to as the waggle dance. If we were paying attention in elementary school, we also learned this dance is performed by a foraging honey bee, a female bee that has discovered a great source of nectar and/or pollen from flowers and she returns to the hive and dances to tell the other bees how to get there. The dance communicates three things: 1) Directions to the source 2) A sample of the source and 3) How far away it is.

We have an observation hive at our honey bee farm and customers and students always love finding and watching bees doing the wagtail dance.

Dr. Karl Ritter von Frisch (1886-1982)receives the credit for spending his life working with bees and unraveling the dance mystery. As he continued to work with bees and other insects he eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. Others were, at first, skeptical as to the scientific merit behind his explanation of the bee dance.

Anyone can now study the bee dance with an observation hive, a bowl of sugar water and a few marked foraging bees. Foragers scouting around for nectar sources will land on a great find, maybe a large patch of flowers yielding much nectar and pollen. They fly back to their hive with a sample of pollen on their legs and nectar in the honey stomachs. Now, they must convince other foragers in the hive that it is worth the trip. They do so by giving the foragers in the hive a sample of the nectar and pollen. Then, with great vigor they dance in order to tell the other bees where the nectar is located and how far away.

Without becoming too technical, let me say that if the nectar source is less than 100 yards from the hive, then the foragers do what is called a round dance. They simply vibrate in a circle. This means that the nectar is out side near the hive, go and find it! We've also learned the difference races of bees have slight variations of dances, such as the Italians who use a sickle dance when the nectar is between 10 - 30 yards from the hive.

The dancer use the sun outside the hive to navigate to the nectar source, but inside the hive, she must translate the sun's location by gravity orientation on the comb.

The best example of how to explain this and see it at work is from North Carolina State University's website. You can actually interact with the location of nectar and see how the dance changes. I've used this site to locate where my bees are going based on their dance telemetry. Click Here

The forager doing the dance communicates how much energy will be needed to fly to the nectar source. This helps the other foragers determine the distance. And somehow, the dance also takes into consideration the changing position of the sun as it gets later in the day. Even head wind is taken into consideration in the dance. The dancer also gives off pheromones and sounds to assist as well.

As a beekeeper, you'll enjoy watching the dance when you lift out a frame on a nice warm day during a heavy nectar flow. You might see many bees on one frame dancing like crazy. Isn't it amazing how bees communicate?

And a late breaking discovering now tells us that bees change their waggle dance if the flowers poses some sort of threat. It's found in the journal Animal Behavior. BBC Earth News, Mark Walker reports that "Scientists Kevin Abbott and Reuven Dukas of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. that these scientist "have found that honeybees use the waggle dance to do more than just encourage others in their colony to visit bountiful flowers...They trained honeybees to visit two artificial flowers containing the same amount and concentration of food. They left one flower untouched, making it a "safe" food source for the bees.
On the other flower, they placed the bodies of two dead bees, so they were visible to arriving insects, but would not interfere with their foraging. A crab spider kills a flower visiting wasp.
They then recorded whether and how the bees performed a waggle dance on their return to other members of the hive colony. On average, bees returning from safe flowers performed 20 to 30 times more waggle runs that bees returning from dangerous flowers.

That shows that the bees recognise that certain flowers carry a higher risk of being killed or eaten by predators, such as crab spiders or other spider species that ambush visiting bees.
What's more, they factor this risk into their waggle dances, tempering them to steer their colony mates away from flowers that might be dangerous."

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You can easily unsubscribe at any time and it's free. Since these lessons are free, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it does take money and time to put each lesson together. We receive alot of "thank you" emails and phone calls, telling us that these lessons have helped beekeepers greatly.
We welcome your donations toward producing more free lessons. You can send your donation to: Long Lane Honey Bee Farms, C/O Free Lessons, 14556 N. 1020 E. Rd, Fairmount, IL 61841

We've improved our website even more, so be sure to visit us at www.honeybeesonline.com

We have been migrating more of our lessons from our blog site over to our website, so be patient with us until we complete the migration.

Here's out contact information:
Phone: 217-427-2678 (9am - 5pm Central Time Monday - Friday)

Email: david@honeybeesonline.com

Website: www.honeybeesonline.com

Online Class Registration: www.honeybeesonline.com/classes.html

I'll update the blog from New York if I have time and until next time, remember to BEE-have yourself!

David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms
Central Illinois

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Image via CrunchBase

It's been a long time since I did a post that was primarily a link to another blog with commentary, but I came across something today that I really want to share. One of the most common questions I get about the lean startup methodology is, "but what about Steve Jobs?" When I try to unpack what people mean by the question, here's my best take on what they are asking: "Look, Steve Jobs doesn't go out and ask customers what they want. He doesn't put out crappy, buggy products and then ask for feedback. And he doesn't shy away from big-bang launch events. He tells customers what they want, and he gets it right. So how do you reconcile his success with the lean startup, which seems to suggest the opposite?"

I rarely give a satisfactory answer to this question, because I don't know Steve, nor have I worked at Apple or Pixar. So I can't speak for what happens on the inside. Luckily, neither can most of the questioners who pose that conundrum to me. We all seem to have a mythical sense of how Jobs works, based mostly on speculation and our very human desire to believe in heroes.

My normal answer is that I don't really think that's how Apple products are built. Plus, the premise of the question misunderstands the lean startup, too. Like any good pundit, that lets me pivot back to talking about something I do know about.

So imagine my delight when I saw this blog post with excerpts of a Steve Jobs interview. Here's the key quote:

Steve Jobs on why Apple doesn’t do market research - Bokardo
It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.

The key phrase for me is "having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it." That's what so many techniques that I advocate are all about: customer validation, minimum viable product, vision pivots, and even throwing away working code. Getting customer feedback is emphatically not about abandoning your vision or abdicating responsibility for innovating. Instead, it's about testing visionary ideas against reality, to discover what really works. Put another way, feedback's not about you - it's about them. When a customer tells you how they feel about your ideas, that doesn't tell you anything about your ideas. It tells you something about what that customer thinks and feels. Figuring out whether and how to incorporate that new information into your vision is your job. As Steve says, "That’s what we get paid to do."

Now, I can't speak to what process Steve Jobs uses to get his team to do this market assessment. Maybe they do it at the whiteboard. Maybe they just have great gut instincts. Or maybe there is the occasional potential customer or early prototype involved. But I'm willing to make some guesses. Here's how I make sense of their success. From here on out, this is strictly my imagination talking. To be clear, I don't know if Apple really works this way.

First, note the important use of work-in-progress constraints (kanban). As Steve says in the source interview:

Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we've got less than 30 major products. I don't know if that's ever been done before. Certainly the great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products. We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

Having so few products means Apple can dedicate enormous resources to each project once it gets the green light. But it also means they have to be very careful kill projects if they are not trending towards something great. Which comes to the second major principle: halt work that leads to more waste, even if it means abandoning sunk costs. This is a version of the andon cord technique from lean manufacturing. Steve describes it like this:

At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn't great. It just wasn't great. We stopped production for five months.... We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn't had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar. "We called that the 'story crisis,' and we never expected to have another one. But you know what? There's been one on every film.

These two principles combine to free up tremendous resources for raw R&D and innovation, because so few people are stuck working on "death march" internal projects or maintaining low-success released products. What do all those other people do? For one, capacity development. Apple has a track record of creating lots of interesting enabling infrastructure, like Quicktime and Bonjour, which sometimes become key to their products and othertimes not. My guess is they have lots of people constantly working on interesting new tools for their designers to play with. Those new capabilities must translate into a constant stream of prototypes - most of which turn out to be utterly bad ideas.

The real question is: how do they evaluate a prototype to know if it's a good idea? If they were an unknown web 2.0 startup, they could release the app and see how customers respond. But that would be a disaster for Apple, so whatever testing they do has to happen in secret and behind closed doors. (For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) Regardless, they must cull a lot of bad ideas for every one that we hear about. Holding his team to a high standard for what constitutes a great idea is what I imagine to be the most value-creating part of his job.

Most executives, especially in startups, don't have the courage to hold their teams to a high standard for new products or features. Just because something looks pretty, or feels like a good idea, or has a lot of sunk cost in it, does not mean it should be pursued. Not even if it's generating revenue. The only efforts a new product team should be expending are those that lead to validated learning about customers. Here's hoping Steve will share those techniques with us someday. In the meantime, I hope some of you will find the lean startup a helpful framework.

Overall, here are the lessons I take from (the imaginary) Steve Jobs:

• Hold your team to high standards, don't settle for products that don't meet the vision, iterate, iterate, iterate.
  
• Be disciplined about which vision to pursue; choose products that have large markets.
• Discover what's in customers' heads, and tackle problems where design is a differentiator.
• Work on as few products as possible, keep resources in reserve for experimentation.
• Start over (pivot) if you find yourself with a product that's not working.
  

As I said, applying these principles in a startup is different from a very high profile public company. I've tried to abstract them a little so we can examine them at a level where they might translate. So far, everything I see is compatible with what I believe. So thanks, Steve, for the inspiration, the great products, and the great advice. Here's hoping future innovators who will follow in your footsteps are reading today.

Time for me to sign off - my Macbook Air is really burning up my lap. Hey, Steve, seriously, this viable product is a little too minimal...

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In my work, I come across a lot of great startups. A common question I get asked is "do you know someone amazing that we can hire?" Similarly, I get pinged by many colleagues, friends, and fans who are looking to find a job with a startup. I do my best to play matchmaker, but as those of you who have ever tried to fill a job in a startup know, the most important and elusive quality for a startup hire is fit. Unfortunately, as any good recruiter will tell you, this is not an easy thing to assess as an outsider.

So I used to wind up spending a lot of fruitless hours trying to play matchmaker, and generally having a hard time. Part of the problem is that I couldn't post a public link. Most of the jobs I come across are not listed in any directory, and most of the candidates are not officially looking - many don't even have a resume. Great startups are always hiring, if the fit is right. They may not have an open req for a specific job, but if the right amazing person walks in the door, they will always find something productive for them to do.

To solve this problem, I asked a friend to collaborate with me in building a new tool. It's incredibly simple, and it's called joblink.tw. Think of it as a bit.ly for jobs. Using it to recruit takes less than a minute.

joblink.tw lets you post a description of a job without having to reveal the name of the company who is offering it, or the contact information of the hiring manager. Who wants that stuff posted on the internet? Instead, each joblink has a form that allows anyone who's interested to contact the poster. The actual exchange of information occurs in private, in email.

The same process works for job candidates. Know someone who'd make a great engineer at a startup? Just write a few words about them, set their email address as the private recipient, and tweet about it. They can turn off these contacts at any time.

To see a list of the jobs that I've posted on joblink.tw so far, take a look at my joblink profile. joblink.tw also supports oauth, so you can log in with your twitter credentials. If you do, you can have your joblinks broadcast on the joblinktw twitter account. For updates about joblink.tw or to see joblinks that others have posted, follow on twitter.

So far, this tool has saved me countless hours, and made quite a few interesting connections. That means it's accomplished all of my goals for it. If anyone else finds it useful, too, that will prove a huge plus. And if anyone has feedback, please feel free to use our integrated uservoice forum or just post a comment on this post. I'd be happy to make it better (regular readers will recognize joblink as a minimum viable product).

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I'm very excited to announce a pair of events that will kick off a very busy fall speaking tour. I'll be in Boulder for two days. I'll let David Cohen of Techstars, who organized the trip, describe the plan:

On August 19th, Eric will be speaking at a dinner in Boulder. The event will include a talk from Eric on The Lean Startup over dinner, followed by moderated table discussion and then final Q&A with Eric. Tickets are available now and include dinner. A discounted price is available for early stage entrepreneurs and students.

On August 20th, Eric is leading a half day in-depth workshop on the Lean Startup. This is a great chance to really go deep on some of the concepts behind building Lean Startups. A very limited number of tickets are also available for this workshop. Early bird pricing expires on August 6th, so register early.

Traveling to new startup hubs is one of my favorite things about being able to do this full-time. I want to thank Techstars for putting this event together and giving me a chance to experience the scene, even if it lacks a name. For what it's worth, I like Silicon Mountain.

Brad Feld also had some thoughts on this event on his blog. I thought I'd share a little bit of that, too:

I’ve been interested in different approaches to software development going back to 1987 when – in my first company Feld Technologies – my partner Dave Jilk and I started talking about “semi-custom software development” (way ahead of its time). During the same period (1987 – 1990) and I did some work at MIT under Eric von Hippel on “user driven innovation with regard to software development” which today would probably fall under the heading of “open source software development approaches.”

In 2002 I became exposed to the idea of “agile software development” and subsequently was a first round investor in Rally Software which is now the market leader in Agile application lifecycle management software. Building on this, I’ve recently become fascinated with the notion of continuous deployment, a concept that has been popularized by Eric Ries and others.

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And for those of you who are in Colorado but don't know what my speaking events are like, please take a look at some previous posts. We've got slides, video, audio and twitter commentary. That way, you can know what you're in for in advance.

As usual, if you're a reader and can attend, please come say hello. Thanks!

(Speaking of the fall tour, if you're interested in hosting or organizing a lean startup event near you, feel free to drop me a line. So far, I'm going to be on the east coast at least three times, and in Europe twice. Stay tuned for more details.)

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Homeless Man Builds 5mln Dollar Website
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Financial debt plays an important and positive role in our economy under normal conditions. Yet, especially in times like these, it’s easy to rail against the badness of being in debt; it’s a very human feeling. Remember Hamlet?

LORD POLONIUS:
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

Technical debt works the same way, and has the same perils. Here’s one of my favorite introductions to the subject, courtesy of Martin Fowler:

In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future.

The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. Many conclude that technical debt is a bad thing, and that teams that incur technical debt are sloppy, irresponsible or stupid.

In this post, I want to challenge that idea, by talking about real-world situations where debt is highly valuable. I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. As usual, this will require a little theory and a willingness to move beyond the false dichotomy of “all or nothing” thinking.

I won’t pretend that there aren’t teams that take on technical debt for bad reasons. Many legacy projects become completely swamped servicing the debt caused by past mistakes. But there is more to technical debt than just the interest payments that come due. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage.

In a startup, we should take full advantage of our options, even if they feel dirty or riddled with technical debt. Those moralizing feelings are not always reliable. In particular, try these three things:

Invest in technical debts that may never come due.
The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. This is a sad outcome which we should work very hard to avoid. Yet there is one silver lining when it does happen: we wind up throwing out working code, debt-riddled and elegantly designed alike. This happened quite often in the early days of IMVU.

For example, I’ve talked often about our belief that an instant messaging add-on product would allow IMVU to take advantage of a network effects strategy. Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product. The thousands of lines of code that made that feature work were a mixed bag – some elegantly designed and under great test coverage, others a series of hacks. The failure of the feature had nothing to do with the quality of the code. As a result, many technical debts were summarily cancelled. Had we taken longer to get that feedback by insisting on writing cleaner code, the debt would have been much deeper.

Accept that good design sometimes leads to technical debt anyway.
Discussions of technical debt are usually framed this way (again from Martin Fowler):

The metaphor also explains why it may be sensible to do the quick and dirty approach. Just as a business incurs some debt to take advantage of a market opportunity developers may incur technical debt to hit an important deadline.

This framing takes for granted that the quick and dirty approach will incur significantly more technical debt than the slow and clean approach. Yet other agile principles suggest the opposite, as in YAGNI and DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork. Reconciling these principles requires a little humility.

Most of us think we know a good design when we see it. Unfortunately, no matter how much up-front analysis we do, until the design is tested by actual practice, we can't really know. Outside the world of hypothetical examples, it's more important to make continual progress than to build the ultimate design.

For example, at a previous virtual world company, we spent years developing an architecture to cope with millions of simultaneous users. Unfortunately, we made two critically flawed assumptions: that customers would primarily consume first-party assets that we shipped to them on CD and that they would tend to congregate in a relatively uniform way. Neither assumption proved remotely accurate. The design failure meant that there was constant thrashing as the servers struggled to provision capacity according to the “elegant” algorithm we’d designed.

As in many scalability decisions, we’d have been much better off investing in agility, so that we could change the architecture in response to actual customer demand, rather than trying to predict the future. That’s what Just-in-time Scalability is all about. Sometimes quick and dirty actually incurs less debt.

Leverage product development with open source and third parties.
Financial leverage refers to investing that is supplemented by borrowed money. Similarly, product development leverage refers to situations in which our own work is fortified by the work of outsiders. For example, early on at IMVU, we incorporated in tons of open source projects. This was a huge win (and we were delighted to give credit where it was due), because it allowed our initial products to get to market much faster. The downside was that we had to combine dozens of projects whose internal architectures, coding styles, and general quality varied widely. It took us a long time to pay off all the debt that incurred – but it was worth it.

In addition, third-party services and API’s enabled us to do more with less, but at a cost: taking on the technical debt of products and teams outside our direct control. We’re not accustomed to accounting for technical debt that occurs in code that we don’t write, but this is short sighted. It’s important to learn to see the whole system that makes our product work: human as well as machine, internal as well as external.

For example, IMVU’s early business model was made possible by Paypal’s easy self-serve and open access payment system. However, we’ve often had to put up with unreliable service, caused by their inflexible internal architecture. We had to live with their technical debts without being able to repay them. It was still a good trade.

Not all debts are created equal.
Interest rates vary, so we should be selective about taking on new debts. Given the choice between incurring technical debt in a particular end-user-visible feature and incurring the same level of debt in a core system, I’d much prefer the former. Here’s why:

• There’s a chance that I’ll never have to pay for that particular debt, because the feature may have no value for customers.
  
  
• It’s possible that the feature, even with debt, might be good enough, and therefore not need revision for a long time. Technical debt manifests as rigidity or inflexibility. When modifying a part of the product afflicted by debt, the work requires a lot of extra – and unpredictable – clean up. But if a given feature is rarely modified, its debt is much less expensive.

The opposite is true with debt in a core system; it’s much more likely that this debt will slow down our ability to make changes later on. For example, an unreliable library deep in the core will manifest as intermittent defects all throughout the product, each of which is hard to localize and debug. Side-effects that reduce agility are the most damaging symptoms of technical debt.

Lean vs. debt
In the world of physical goods, the leaner a supply chain is, the less debt is required to operate it. This makes lean supply chains more robust in the face of the unexpected: if sales suddenly dry up, they are stuck with less unsold inventory and simultaneously have less debt to service. The just-in-time nature of the value chain reduces risk in the face of uncertainty and is also more capital efficient.

A similar relationship applies to technical debt. Teams that practice an agile or lean development process are able to minimize the accumulation of technical debt without sacrificing speed, because they work in smaller batches. They also take better advantage of debt, because they find out sooner if a particular investment has paid off. Traditional development teams, by contrast, often build and deploy large systems before learning if their early choices were sensible, and therefore wind up with a much larger debt to pay. In fact, by the time they become aware of it, they’ve already started to pay significant interest on that debt.

Invest in speed instead of features or debt
This relationship between lean and debt opens up new approaches for dealing with technical debt. The usual debate is phrased as an either-or choice between taking more time to “build it right” or taking a shortcut and incurring more debt. But those are not our only two options. Taking on technical debt does allow investing energy elsewhere, but other new features are not the only option.

We can trade technical debt for process improvement, too. If that improvement pays off (by reducing the batch size of our work, for example), it becomes easier to address all technical debt in the future – including the debt just incurred. And because any particular debt might never come due, this is a better trade. To take one concrete example, it’s often worthwhile to write test coverage for legacy code even without taking the time to refactor.

This reverses the standard intuition about what engineering activities add value, which usually concludes that test coverage is a form of necessary waste but a refactoring is value-added work. However, a refactoring (by itself) might go stale or introduce unintended side-effects. Adding test coverage will make it easier to refactor in the future and also reduce our fear of making changes elsewhere.

Investing in the dynamics of development is more valuable than investing in the static status quo. Startups are always moving, so invest in moving faster and better.

Technical debt in the real world
So far, all of these considerations have been framed in the form of abstract either-or tradeoffs. Real life seldom presents such comparable choices. Instead, we balance lots of unknowns. How much technical debt will a particular approach incur? How likely will customers ultimately use that feature? How painful will it be to refactor later? How much will it slow us down in the meantime? And how much more expensive would it be to do it right? Oh, and how likely is it that the “right” approach actually is?

Luckily, there are better options for these complex decisions than picking an easy extreme, like “never incur technical debt” or “anything goes.” Instead, we can choose a disciplined approach to making proportional investments in prevention and paying down debt, such as Five Whys. They work by focusing our energy on making process and technical changes in precisely those areas that are causing the biggest waste and slowdown.

This is better than making abstract choices about where to invest: better design, paying down old debts, or better process. Instead, techniques like Five Whys teach us to view the entire application and product development team as one integrated system. From this holistic viewpoint, we can optimize accordingly.

Once we can see opportunities for truly global efficiency gains, all that remains is to ensure our team actually makes room for those investments. To do that, we add specific speed regulators, like integrating source control with our continuous integration server or the more elaborate dance required for continuous deployment. This produces a powerful combination: the speed of just-in-time experimentation wedded to a discipline of rigorous waste-reduction.

One last thought. When I talk and write about the advanced product development process at IMVU today, like the cluster immune system or the disciplined approach we take to split-testing and interaction design, it may sound as if we had that capability from the start. Nothing could be further from the truth. The early IMVU was riddled with legacy code and technical debt. We spent endless hours arguing about whether we’d made the right choices in the past. And with the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that we often made serious mistakes. As one engineer recently told me, “Once we had money in the bank and were near-profitable, I think we would have been well-served by increased up-front product and technology planning. As a culture, we hadn’t yet learned how to make long-term decisions.” He’s right.

In the end, what mattered wasn’t that we did everything right, but that our fundamental approach was flexible and resilient. At no point did we stop everything and do a ground-up rewrite. Instead, we incrementally improved our process, architecture, and infrastructure, always learning and adjusting. The blur you see today is the result of the beneficial compounding interest of that approach applied with discipline over many years. Trust me, it’s a lot of fun.

(This post was tremendously enhanced by a number of early readers from the Twitterverse. You know who you are. Thanks so much.)

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