Sea Breeze and Biz

Outbrain and tech support

One of the things we understood in a very early stage of the outbrain product life is the space we are acting in and the huge influence it can have on the company. We are in the zone of the reporters. We consider every blogger as a reporter with massive audience. The truth is that every blogger can start a bad WOM (word of mouth) on us which will be very hard to revert.
One of our biggest missions is "stay on the positive side of the WOM".
So we took few considerations to do it:

• We are monitoring our WOM closely. We have a google alert on us as well as twitter alert. So we know of any potential WOM, good or bad, at the time it starts.

• We put great effort on quality. Formal QA as well as software automated unit test that are running upon every commit to the SVN.

But as we all know, no software is 100% perfect and there will always be glitches. Especially if you are acting in such dynamic space as the blogosphere, there is no way to predict all the HTML variations to act on.
The way we handled that is to create a "support culture" within the company.
We initiated a support forum based on getsatisfection, which is a great tool for interacting with your support needed. We are all registered as mail subscribers for every issue being raised there. It includes CEO as well as the latest engineer that just joined. We are all equally responsible for our support responsiveness.
When needed, an engineer will drop anything he is currently doing in order to give support promptly.
We get very high appreciation from the bloggers on this.
The bottom line is that we convert potential criticizers to big fans of us. Since they are all reporters, we count on them to stand on our side for every nasty criticism that will come in the future.

Support is a tough, routine job which is basically not as cool and innovative as other design and development work. However, it is so rewarding when you get the warm words of a blogger that you were willing to assist him. We sometimes find ourselves helping bloggers with other nasty widgets that crap their blogs.

Our ability to give this great support, is mostly due to the team members themselves that took it as a personal mission. So thanks Daniel, Uriel, Tom, Gabi, Itai, John and mostly Rotem. You are all doing great job on this.

BTW: this post is written on my IPod touch. Also great story of customer support.

Blogs Discovery news

This morning an email was waiting for me from Oren, one of our researchers with a list of blogs that are semantically similar to my blog. On the top of the list were blogs I'm mostly familiar with and reading on a regular basis. But... I was delighted to find there at a pretty high place the blog called SeaWay with great articles and photos from the sailing and yachting zone.
Enjoy the new blog, as you can all enjoy posts and articles discovery from... outbrain.

Made it to the homepage

No, No... my stories did not make it to DIGG homepage nor any other service.

So, here is what happen yesterday.
Alona, my wife, took the kids to playground. While hanging there she got a call from an artist friend who congratulate her for her achievement.
Under a surprise Alona asked her what is she talking about?
She said, "You made it to the Etsy homepage!!!, the whole Etsy Forum  in Israel is talking about it."

So... here is Alona on the Etsy homepage:
No, not the model in the center but the piece of Jewelry marked with the arrow.

If you are are already asking, no purchases were done ;-)

Anyway, it's a great recognition to her artistic work.

Well done Alona, and well done Etsy.   

Friday Morning Surf

We had a great paddling on Friday morning.
It began with long paddle to Givat Olga which was great and on the way back we stopped at the 'rock' to catch some surf. I wasn't planning to surf that day but the waves were so... PERFECT that I couldn't help it.
The 'rock' is a spot of maybe 30 meter which is good to get the surf on and we were about a dozen kayaks there which is pretty crowded. Some of us... (like me) were breaking the club security rule of wearing a helmet and I was a bad enough boy to not pay attention to other surfers around.
I think I managed to get both Hadas and Steve (our instructors) worried and got  some of their polite 'comments' about that.
Actually, I can understand their worry,  as I was an instructor myself and I know the danger of kayak riding a wave. It can get very dangerous.
Anyhow... It was great fun. See the video Steve  created.

BTW: the water are getting very hot and get up to 30 degrees. the see is filling up with Jelly Fish.

Build the right team

We are now intensively hiring in outbrain and will extremely grow the team in the near future. As the head of the Israeli tech team, I took the lead on the hiring effort. Alen Stern wrote nicely about it here
and I agree that the higher manager possible should be the one to lead the hiring effort.  A co-founder and CTO is the most appropriate one to lead the effort of hiring tech people.

Good people are coming from many sources and I learned not to judge any of them.  I never say no to CVs coming from recruiters, nor head hunters. I judge the CVs by their content only.
We have a great team in outbrain. It is professionally balanced between experienced people and those who are 'young' and eager to learn. We have those who are family people and those who are young singles. We always encourage them all to have the right life/work balance.

I want to keep the larger team on that balance and looking for the right people to be contributers as well as contributed during their time in work.

The blogosphere also have some gems about picking the right people for your team.

Joel wrote a great post about it long ago. I call it the "Smart and get things done" criteria for recruiting. The people he is hiring are the people how have those 2 attributes together, they are smart and get things done.

Greg Linden, in one of his last posts quoted someone else about the people who are "Done, and get things smart". Those are pure gold to the team.
They do their work well but also improve stuff and get the rest of the team smarter.

I like it and advice everyone who is building a team or interviewing people to read them.

enjoy

Yacht Trip in Gocek, more visuals

In addition to my last post here are some more photos.

And to those of you who are interested in the sailing area and our route - here is the Goggle Earth/ map of the area.

The blue pins are the locations we visited.

View Larger Map

More Details here.

Back to Gocek - Damn how I missed it

After I skipped my annual sailing trip on the 2007 season, this year i felt it is too damn missing to me and I have to do it. My family was feeling that too. Well, at least my wife and my elder daughter that have sailed with me few times before. My younger son did not have the chance to experience it yet.
We have arranged a family crew based on us 4 plus my sister's family and one of my (many)  nephews that came over to assist with the ship handling.

After a sleepless night we managed to arrive to Gocek pretty early in the morning and the boat was not yet ready for us.

To Mariners: this year the only boat that was available in Top Yacht Gocek for these 4 days was their Sun Odyssey 49 DS  'Able Tasman'. The boat is very roomy and very comfortable and we could hardly tell we are 8 people there. one of the best features of this boat is the bow thruster that made it very easy to handle and maneuver in and out anchorages. To those of you who don't know Top Yacht standards of boat maintenance, they are super high. although this boat is fairly new (2 years) you cannot tell it is a charter boat. Top yacht are also maintaining a relatively high minimum inventory and equipment on the boat. However, I found Able Tasman a bit below the standard of the other Top Yacht fleet. these are small things like electric winches, chart plotter in the cockpit, windlass control from the cockpit and a performance rig that are missing to me. Bottom line, the boat is big but nice and quick and very easy to handle.

We got organized and left Gocek at about 15:00 towards Kapi Creek. on our few last legs we managed to catch a nice sailing condition to try the sails handling. it was great fun to see this big boat on 8 knots. the kids felt wonderful and we all enjoyed the quite sailing and the views of the southers Skopea Limani.

To Mariners: The Skopea Limani (bay) is about 7 miles long and about 2  miles width. all rounded by islands with narrow passages and high hills. the prevailing winds are hiting it's southern part and sliding from the mountains to the bay. although there are many wind direction changes, the conditions for sailing are brilliant there.

We arrived into Kapi Creek at about 5:30pm and made a little swim with the kids before it will get dark. Kapi Creek is like the season gauge, if it's not too crowded with boats then the season is fairly low. I guess it was the Euro 2008  soccer cup that left many people at home. This made a nice room for us to find ourself a good berth for the night.  We had a nice dinner on the water front but we retired to sleep very early due to the lack of sleep from the night before.

A lovely sunny morning welcomed us and after easy wake-up we left Kapi Creek towards Fethiya.

Fethiya is a nice town with a big sheltered harbor.  and a big Marina inside. we decided to save our money and not spend the night there just to get there for a visit and buy some fresh provisions to the rest of the trip. It was about 2 hours of motoring that got us there. I decided not to take a marina spot but to drop an anchor next to the marina and so we did. We had the traditional Late breakfast which is usually fairly good and then we dropped the dinghy boat to the water and drove the people a shore to the town dock. I stayed on the yacht to clean the breakfast and arrange the boat. but most of all to do an anchor shift to see the boat does not move.

To Mariners: Fethiya is a very sheltered from waves but it can get very windy there, so if you plan to anchor there, better use all your anchoring skills and stay away from other boats. If you don't ave anchoring skills... better not to sail in Turkey.

After 2 hours, my crew came back and we headed towards Gemiler Island. usually the leg from Fethiya south to Gemiler is a bit bumpy due to waves hitting the rocks, so I decided to take leg into the bay by sailing and then back south. it was a good decision as things were smooth and calm and we even had a chance to see a 3 foot sword fish jumping out of the water right next to our boat.  We reached Gemiler and dropped the anchor for a short swim and of course a debate with the Turkish boats that are coming near you and insist that you will buy  ice cream from them.

After a short swim in the refreshing water and a cold watermelon we lifted the anchor and moved just around the corner to Freshwater bay. This is one of my favorite spots. it is a very sheltered little bay with room for maybe 20 boats around it. The water there are extremely cold due to an underwater spring that is flowing into this small cove, so it's tricky to think about swimming there. However, while Alona was preparing us dinner we took the dinghy to shore and climbed the path up the hill to the scenery restaurant there. Not to eat but to watch the view.

After a nice Friday night dinner the kids went to sleep and we continued with some wine to enjoy the Sabat evening under the nice moon above.

To Mariners: At about 4am I started hearing the spinaker  halyard clapping on the mast and understood a high wind is blowing. I went outside and so was that. I first took the halyard away from the must to stop the noise and then started to check the anchoring and the lines ashore. There was no risk to the boat but I decided to continue the night in the cockpit for just in case. There was nothing critical but on 5:30, since the wind did not drop we lifted the anchor and left Freshwater bay.

A quite Sailing, while the rest of the crew is sleeping took us to the anchorage next to Hillside resort. This is another traditional anchorage we have which is perfect for breakfast and swimming. Since I had a rough night I took a nap of an hour or so till the breakfast was ready.

At about noon time we left there heading back to the Skopea Limani using sails only and a nice speed on them. until we moored in Tomb Bay. It was very nice there although on our short visit My son managed to step on a sea urchin. A cold watermelon made him, and us forget about it and we went straight back to Gocek.

We ended the evening on the superb Can restaurant that amazingly remember me year after year. and not surprisingly I remember them and their sea food and pepper stake...

It was well worth it. Not sure I will be able to survive a year before the next sailing.

A more pictures slid show... on my next post.

In case you forgot... Outbrain is Hiring

In case you don't remember or hear about it the first time.

OUTBRAIN IS HIRING !!!

For our cool office in Natanya, we are looking for:

• Java / SQL / back-end engineers (both seniors and juniors).
• Java / javascript web developers.
• Operations / IT engineers.
• QA Engineers.

All should be people who are fun to work with as well as hard working people.
If you are a blogger or like the blogging zone... you are in the right place.

If you are only looking for the next place to get the pay-check... you are not our type.

So... to apply,  just contact us.
a comment here or visit to our Jobs page or all the ways to contact us are  relevant

Amazon AWS - I was expecting more...

Amazon was a great promise for us in terms of high availability.  It supplies a distributed system for storage and computing in the cloud that really had been cost effective comparing to the other CDN (Content Distribution Network) solutions around.
So... we placed our bet on Amazon S3 and were satisfied with it's cost and performance. The graceful degradation mechanism our widget had was based on S3 high availability for serving our scripts. From there on, our script logic was taking care of the graceful degradation. 
All Amazon web services had a crash in February 08 but their servers immediately returned 500 error which made the pages simply skip the scripts execution. In the last couple of months their performance from around the globe were getting much worse and we started getting complaints from bloggers and publishers that we are slowing them down. A check we did with the keynote monitoring service did show that AMZ are the cause to the problem as well as complaints from other S3 users in the S3 developers forum.

The most annoying thing was that Amazon kept silence and did not publish anything about it. 

As Yaron posted in our blog last week, we have changed from S3 to another CDN solution and things have instantly improved.

Bottom line.
My believe is that in technical systems breakage happen, it is natural.  However, the bigger you are you are expected to have less breakage since you have many more resources to make sure it wont happen. Specifically Amazon that each minute of their downtime is  high cost you would expect it to be very reliable. Apparently some users (outside US) are less valuable for them then the American one and they maybe chose to not invest in S3 high availability abroad.
I can understand downtimes of twitter and small start ups with very high traffic.  Not pleasant but understandable. I totally did not expect this from AMZ.

I guess S3 lost a lot of customers  due to this failure and their silence about it.
It is sometimes better to say "We know there is a problem and working to fix it"  then not saying anything.

Independence Day

So... Israel is 60 now and we had great long weekend for celebrating it.

It all started with some paddling where Hadas arranged Flags for some of us to paddle with.
Here is Limor with the flag on the bow.

That was still the memorial day which I spent in the Kibbuts ceremony for the friends that are no longer with us. It is usually a good opportunity for me to catch up with some navy friends that usually come to honor Amit Sela every year.

We had great fun with friends at the evening for celebrating the official MANGAL (BBQ) day with a great dinner on our yard.
After we fed ourselves, we put the kids in front of some DVD films and set down to sing some Israeli culture songs. It was great fun.

It was really a long weekend with kids ;-) but it's over...

If you feel dry ... here are some "wet" photos of me going through the surf (Thanks Steve for the pictures).