Sea Breeze and Biz

Family Sailing Vacation - The Full Guide

We just got back from a sailing vacation with the kids.
The destination, as always, Gocek in southern Turkey.
The party was, Alona, my wife, our 2 kids (8 and 5) and another friends family with their kids in the ages of 4 and 2. And of-course the skipper... me.
Sailing vacation in Gocek is always fun but with 4 kids in varying ages is, somehow, a challenge to get prepare to. As with every sailing vacation it is essential that you will pick your party adults carefully and make sure you all can get along together. If you miss that... especially with the kids - it can ruin a lot of the boat atmosphere. On our case, the choice was terrific and we all got along very well.
Unlike many other vacations, sailing vacations put people in slightly different conditions like boat movement, lack of "personal space" and privacy. It is sometimes tough for adults but fortunately kids are much more "adjustable" and get along very well.
Some tips for boat behavior with family:

• kids that experience sailing the first time are "unpredictable" in terms of sea sickness. better have the right drugs that you know may help them and if you feel they are getting "unhappy", get a bucket next to them.
• Yacht toilets are not the standard they know so they might need an escort every time they go. always good to have a bucket with a bit of water at the cockpit in case of "emergency need".
• In tougher conditions it is better for kids to not wonder below deck.  moving objects and closing doors might harm them. The last thing you want is a bandage over kid's finger.
• Kids are happy when busy, bring them toys, books and other games.
• Boat furnishing is rather expensive - try to use toys like books, cards and figures that wont scratch and hurt furnishing.
• Going a shore for a little trip or having dinner in a restaurant can get beyond the kids hours. Get yourself a stroller for just in case.
• The water in the turkish coast are simply great for swimming so take all the inflatables you have at home and ask for foam Noodles. 
• Important info, every restaurant in Turkey serves Schnitzel and fries so... you are safe with kids dinner. If you like to try seafood - turkey is a great place for it.

Here are some tips for the skipper.

• The first rule for family vacation skipper is... be patient!!!
• It also worth to plan ahead with your adults crew who will do what and when. Brief them about anchor handling and mooring procedure.
• Be aware that at least one of your crew members will have to stay in the cockpit watching the kids so 2 hands are off your stuff.
• Don't push yourself to the limits. You have limited crew that can help and some don't have any experience so try to keep out of tough maneuvers like, windy anchorages or tough sails handling.
• Jib riffing is much easier then main riffing. If you want to set sails (recommended) prefer Jib.
• When sea is a bit wavy from the side, I always prefer to set the main sail to prevent the boat from rolling all the time. That's usually make people feel better.
• In Turkey, at many anchorages you use anchor and a stern line to shore. Usually the guy that swims to shore is doing a knot around a rock or a tree. If your man is a good swimmer but not that experienced in knots you better use my trick. I brought with me a spring shackle with a little floating buoy which made the whole maneuver much easier and faster.

Most important - Don't miss the Turkish Ice-cream show. the ice-cream itself is not that good, but the whole show makes the kids lough a lot.

The film below shows some more photos from this great time we had:

My take on cloud services

Cloud services are a big hype now in the tech/internet industry.
Engineers love it - very easy to get an instance of machine and run development tasks and testing.
VCs love it - it makes development cycles shorter and turns CAPEX to OPEX.
IT engineers - well, they will have to get used to it but eventually will also master this also.

Lots of people keep asking me what is my take on cloud services. Does outbrain use it?
So... here it is:
I think cloud services with Amason AWS as the leader in this field are doing a great technical job. they truly made a revolution in the IT space and made computing resources cheap and available on demand. This is not only a big capital investment but also a huge engineering effort that requires lots of time of great IT talent.
To be honest, I think there is nothing technical that cannot be done on cloud service. Take as an example the adoption of Map/Reduce method. It was initially created by Google, then shifted into the open source as Hadoop project and about a year later, as the demand for it grew AmazonAWS also offered it as Elastic MapReduce. Today i noticed they released first Beta of CloudWatch - the missing piece of monitoring and load balancing.

According to everything I said above it would have been obvious for outbrain to use such cloud service. Actually... things are not that simple.
First, when growing your own application you need to optimize all your stack for the benefit of your application's needs. With virtually shared machines you cannot choose and optimize your hardware to do stuff like this. You just can't.
Second and most important is reliability. I know you open your eyes wide open and ask... 'does he think he can get better up-time and reliability then Amazon?' and the answer for it is... 'probably not'. A start up company, with limited resources, cannot get higher up-time then amazon AWS. The question that should be asked is 'What happen when the shit hits the fan?'
Here is one rule of the nature since the invention of the wheel - technological solutions will *always* break!!! sadly, even plains and submarines fail. The more the impact of the failure is critical the less common failures are but you can agree that no technological system is 100% fail safe.
I can assure you that even mighty AWS will fail to give it's service at least once a year. From my experience they will not even tell you there is a problem and you will hear a complete silence not to mention an ETA for the problem.
The bigger question is what do you say to your clients? can you give them ETA? can you tell them 'It's not us... its Amazon?'.
Running your own setup is defiantly harder and yes... you need IT experts in order to do it right. sometimes it even cost you more but such failures as we had with the cloud service could have cost us by the life of the company if we were not leaving AWS.

I think technically cloud services will always be a bit behind the cutting edge but will eventually close the gaps. The downside that they will never be able to solve is customer tailored solutions - just because there is no 'one size fits all in this business' and most important, support, support support. The AWS salesman says I can buy a Gold or platinum support which eventually give me the ability to pick up the phone and yell at somebody at Amazon, but it will not necessarily fix the problem. Having a great team of engineers that can control the setup will give you the fix faster and without yelling.
Your BD guy can always say to the customer, 'we have a problem- all our engineers are on it even it's past midnight in Israel, their ETA is one hour'. so the customer knows what to expect. With cloud service.... what can you say? And this can really harm your business.

Photo by DeZeen magazin

 

Amplifying Word of Mouth

At some points people get to ask me 'So... what does outbrain do?' - well that I already know quite well how to explain. The second question that comes up is usually 'and... how does that makes money?'. Here things get a bit complicated to explain.
It usually starts with me saying 'We have this concept called Sponsored But Good' and I start explaining all about it (as you can read in the link above).
That usually brings up the look of nodding pig having a swine flu and they change the subject immediately.
I bet you still want to know what outbrain does for a living. well... we are 'Amplifying Word of Mouth'.
Yes, we take pieces of content (from blogs or new sites) which represent a good Word of Mouth (WOM) about a product or service and amplifying it to a reach which is much broader then what it originally had.
Imagine a HydePark speaker that have his own small audience of listeners - there is no way his  massage is going to be delivered to everybody who might be interested. But how about we give this speaker a radio or television show at prime time. What do you think? Will he get his maggase through? I bet he will.
outbrain actually take it one step farther, the message will not get to all the audience in the reach but to the users at the network that might be interested in this message and get it to them without them getting to the HydePark.
In our case this message is the WOM about a product service or a brand.
In case you are an advertiser and have a branding message to get to the world and some reliable WOM is going around your product- outbrain is for you. Let us Amplify it.

#memthem - Israeli Memorial Day

Today is the Israeli Memorial Day for all those who sacrifice their life for the defense of the state of Israel and those who were killed in terrorist attacks and wars.
Unfortunately we have too many of those in Israel and this day is touching almost anyone of us here.
I was thinking, if any one of us will contribute a little twitt with the name of the person to remember and a link to a site, blog post, web page or even upload a picture to twitpic. Just add the tag #memthem.
I believe that way we can create a very big memory album for those we honor their memory.  

It's up and waiting for you.

On my last post I announced our intent to open a Job Board for the Israeli developers.
Yesterday the news spoke about more then 20,000 people who got fired in Israel, last month, and many of them are high-tech and software people.
Instead of just feeling sorry, we took some action and launched this site after we had the 3 first openings.

We invite you all that are looking to hire or looking for jobs or know about someone that... - refer them to the site.

If you just feel like listening to cool talks about software geeks stuff - in hebrew - then http://reversim.com is your place.

Ori

What did you do today to help others?

Well, that's the kind of question I'm asking myself from time to time. Few years ago i used to volunteer in Etgarim teaching handicap people to sail. It was great fun and a very satisfying activity. Later on my family grew and got very busy with the business and did not find pure time to help people.

2 things happened lately that made me think about it again:

1. we started podcasting reversim.com which is a Hebrew speaking tech podcast by me and Ran Tavory . Surprisingly or not, it became somehow popular and we get more and more listeners every day which we tend to believe they are software geeks from the industry. (who else would have spend 30-40 minutes a week listening to our mambling)
2. this is not a new story and we could have seen it comming to the Israeli high-tech industry. The ecomomy Tsunami is hitting us. When people ask me if I feel it in my workplace I say 'no' (which is true) but what I do see, is more and more people I know, friends from the paddling club, parents of kids from my kids schools, friends from the navy, simply losing their jobs and are now very much concern about their future.

Combining these 2 facts brought us to the conclusion we need to take action.
We have growing audience of software professionals (AKA. geeks). Some of them are, unfortunatly, unimployed now. We want to give them opportunities to find their next work place and better it will be a good one.

Long story short, we want to build jobs.reversim.com - the job board for hebrew speaking geeks.
We don't know yet the details of the format but few things we do know:

• So far, it will be free to publish jobs.
• we will promote it on our podcast, blogs, twitter, etc...
• the theme will be very favorable for our audience - we have some ideas.

We are looking for someone to partner us that can volunteerly administer the Job Board.

So... What did you do today to help others?

If you are thinking about it, shoot us and email to ran[at]reversim[dot]com or ori[at]reversim[dot]com

  

The Patagonia Expedition

They are done now, and they had a great trip.
Yossale, On and Roi, paddlers from our club (actually Yossale is our instructor) just finished a great expedition in Patagonia.
They paddled 1800 km in great 65 days. and all their story is told in their blog.
It was great following them as Hadas was updating it when they couldn't.
I would like to thank these guys for sharing the reality of "our own" dreams.

here are some photos they took. I envy.

Web Experts wanted!!!

For outbrain of course but not only ;-), now it's for our podcast (http://www.reversim.com)
As Ran mentioned in his Hebrew post, we are looking to host people who are experts in one or more of the following web developing platforms:

• RoR
• Django
• Struts
• ASP
• ASP.NET
• JSF
• Hibernate
• webwork
• and more...

We want to create some kind of a panel where people can describe the framework they like or favor and go through it's Pros and Cons.
We don't have a tight schedule for this and a session can be done with all of us in the room or recorded in skype.
There is only one constraint, It most be in Hebrew.

If you want to participate please write to olahav@gmail.com or to ran@reversim.com.

What's new in outbrain?

A lot!
Last week we announced a $12 million investment round in the company. For us, this round is a good evidence that we are on a good course towards our destination - 'a viable business that gives huge value to its users'. This evidence came both from  Carmel ventures, our new partners and from our current investors, Gemini, Lightspeed and GlenRock that follow us over the last 2 years and know how we run this ship.
Lots have beet written on this event and you can read a lot about it here, here and... here.

At time like this I'm always referring back to the post about Ships & Castles I wrote when we just began this journey, on summer 2006. Well, we have done quite a millage. We have passed some  obstacles and changed course till we found the right direction towards our goals.
Most of all, along the way, we gathered a great crew. A team of talented go-getters that are passionate about the product and most of all about the product users. After all, our main task is to make our users happy. We could not make it without them.

Its a good opportunity to mention that we are hiring, so if you want to be part of this great team. If technical challenges like massive amount of data, algorithms that understands user's mind, fastest response time,  scalable servers architecture, very unique way to design user interface, etc... you can find your way on board. Our Jobs page is the place to start.

Its quite interesting around here. It was very exciting all the way untill now and I'm sure it will be farther on.

Inventing Wheels

Lately I'm bumping into many conversations about re-inventing wheels. We have mentioned it on our latest podcast in www.reversim.com (Hebrew) and also read Jeff Atwood's post about it.

I very strongly support Jeff's attitude.
Generally, I'm not a wheel inventor, I always like to grab an open-source component and use it as opposed to "waist" time in crunching and writing (debugging and testing) a component that does the same  task. This is more extreme when the things you build is not the main task you are aimed to solve but some infrastructure you have to use to make your main problem solved. For instance, If you want to make your favorite salad dish, no need to grow the veggies, go get them at the store.
I think the point Jeff was trying to make is something I can strongly support just because I had to invent some wheels in my carrier and that taught me so much about infrastructures that are now almost commodity. here are few examples:

I know today much more about messaging mechanisms such as pipes, message queues etc... just because in my early days I build one from scratch.

I know a lot more about search technology, just because in Shopping.com we had to build the search engine line by line in C++. Yes - at that time there was no open source like lucene.

I guess today's young developers will be able to say that also in few years, it's just how life is.

So... what is my thumb rule of inventing wheels?

"Don't invent the wheel unless you are in the 'tyreing' industry" all other cases are just too  "tiring".

and one more take-away for you! - make yourself a habit and listen to reversim.com (Hebrew).