Geeky Peek

We here at Peek, at least I think, are good at testing and getting bugs killed… or so I think compared to other places I have been at.

Why do I say that?

1. Everybody tests – even Amol (CEO), even the marketing guys, everybody.

2. We do crazy & weird stress tests to drive stability. Download 1000 emails with < 1% failure rate, open up 100 images in a row, reply all to massive emails 100 times, etc.

3. We use some outsourced expert testing/QA vendors (5-Mobile), coupled with our passionate Peek staff, to ensure we test effectively.

4. We have good (and getting better) test automation & harnesses to provide sheer test-case coverage.

Another example, we realized we needed to improve how we did performance testing. Well several months ago we stepped up, changed how we did performance testing and brought in some outside expertise on embedded performance (www.olivercoady.com). Now our office is littered with flip video cameras and stop watches.

The attitude that many other companies take to testing almost angers me. It is often considered the domain for interns, or developers in another country, or people transfered from the dev team who couldn’t cut it.

If you need quality software then testing is basically the biggest lever you can pull as a manager. In fact, if you are an executive and you want your project to be on-time, stable, with the features working to spec then you need to exert significant energy, resources & budget into testing. Early on you should start banging on your product or project manager and various middle managers for test reports. And you need to get actual working product from them and test it yourself… early! Ask for reports including clear quality statistics/metrics:
1. Mean Time Between Failure – how often does it go between crashes
2. Other failure rates – e.g. in our case we track lost emails, lost sends, lost sockets
3. Performance of key tasks
4. Coverage of functionality
5. Percent pass on your crazy stress cases (e.g. only 100 bytes of free memory available, spam your Peek repeatedly)

Well, I think some of you have noticed that Peek Pronto was officially announced this morning across the “media-o-sphere”.

Pronto is:
-push email
-up to 5 email accounts
-MS Exchange support
-Word & pdf support
-Ability to search your email
-50% faster

A lot of you gave great feedback before on what features we should add and what needs to improve – and we listened to bring this enhanced version out. The team here has been (and still is) in the crunch of getting this out after month’s of work, so I’m excited to get this in the people’s hands to start using.

Amol did a great video here telling more about the new version:

Peek Pronto. What’s the deal? from amol sarva on Vimeo.

Recently I’ve been trying out Joel Splosky’s FogBugz. We are always looking to use the latest & best processes and tools in how we track our bugs and ensure we’re killing them at a good pace. Nothing says “simple” like software that just runs well!

Right now we use Trac as our central bug system. With Trac, sometimes doing the simplest things can be so hard. For instance:
-a user can’t change their password via the GUI
-bugs require many fields including milestones, versions, etc
-changing reports requires knowledge of SQL
-the bug lifecycle can be strange

I know there are lots of plug-ins that solve some of these issues, but that requires me figuring out which plug-ins are best.

FogBugz solves a lot of these problems. Its been simplified for the basic use cases – filing bugs and looking at reports… oh yeah, and resolving is clicking a check box. But Trac is free & FogBugz is not, so instead I’ll have to figure out a way to make Trac more FogBugz-like.

The other problem I have is that currently none of the major bug systems are ‘mobile’. We make mobile products here at Peek but I have no way to file a bug from my Peek other than emailing myself a note about the bug to insert it later!!! Which drives me nuts because I find a lot of the best bugs while I’m on the subway going home, hammering away on the Peek.

I’d love to hear how others manage their bugs and the systems/processes they use.

Myself –
1. Facebook for friends and family only
2. Twitter I use to follow stars and people I think are interesting… I don’t really use it for friends though (e.g. I follow obama, david pogue, etc)
3. LinkedIn, I’ll let anybody with any remote business interest link me in.

I use ping.fm to post status to all three, though I feel weird updating status on LinkedIn.

How do the rest of you use these tools?
How do you think we should incorporate social networking into the Peek?

I did a little writeup on how we use Basecamp here at Peek. I thought you guys might enjoy it as it contains a few golden oldies from back in the day on how we used Basecamp.

http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2009/03/basecamp-helps-peek-team-deliver-value-and-affordability.html

Basecamp has some crazy messages from deep in the heart of launch last summer… when you’re never quite sure of where you are and if you’re going to make it. I have some very long historical messages from trips to the phone manufacturer that I used to call the “Fog of War”. If you guys are interested I’ll dig up a few and post, some of them are a bit amusing. But I will post this little nostalgic tidbit…

What is Pronto?

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/18/peek-pronto-is-a-new-peek-device-on-its-way/

I don’t have much to say, but I will give a leak away.. it is much, much faster in every way possible.

The time to open a menu on 1.08 is .09 seconds. The time to open a menu on Pronto, .04 seconds!!!!

Firstly, on March 12th Hotmail started having issues with logins. Turned out they had some sort of incident as covered here:
http://news.cnet.com/2100-7355_3-5172979.html

Then one day later Yahoo did almost the same thing. Unfortunately this blog post was the best I could find:
http://www.inquisitr.com/10604/yahoo-suffers-down-time/

Strange indeed.

As one of the tech guy who has to build a lot of stuff, it is my job to not only keep costs in-line, but to hammer down cost points. I spend a lot of time running numbers on things like Amazon vs co-locating, the vendors/partners we use, the choice of using open source, etc, etc. The point is its a daily struggle to keep costs low.

And it worked, we ended up building this for a million or so less than the average phone maker builds a “normal phone”, and its frickin’ cool on top of that! I love our keyboard and that metal feel on the back… it feels like its worth a million bucks!!!

I want you all to understand that our $50 price point with no contract and our unlimited monthly service price of $20 comes from a lot of purposeful sweat, tears and innovation. So when a lot of the bloggers did some voodoo math that said a BB or an iPhone was more affordable(!?!?!?!) I flipped my lid. After all that work to have people come up and say “what… this thing is more damn expensive than an iPhone”…. argh.

So I am super duper proud that the marketing guys have now put together this nice little website that really explicitly calls out the value of Peek and makes that voodoo economic theory disappear – www.peekonomics.com.

Seriously people, the iPhone days are dead… we’re in a recession… you need to re-think your communications and how much you pay per month.
Want to save money – ditch your cell phone, get a Peek and just use email and text!
Lost your job at a bank – ditch your BB and get a Peek!
Lost your job anywhere – ditch your iPhone and get a Peek!
Can’t afford internet at home and just want email – ditch your $50 high-speed connection and get a Peek!

I am using amazon’s simpledb for my task list app. With the simplejpa api it took me less than 30 minutes to setup and start using…. until i tried storing an xml blob which is becoming a bit of a nightmare for me. Something about an http interface to your db doesn’t sit right with xml blobs so far.
If any of you have examples of simpleDB, simplejpa and blobs i would love to see how you use them.

EDIT** The issue was that simpleDB has a limit of 1024 bytes for a “value”, pretty small. I guess thats why S3 exists. Well I in turn had to do one of those fangled rational db’s instead and make another table. I presume one day I will thank myself for doing that.**

Sent on the go from my Peek

And does it work? If it does i have figured out a secure option to post from my Peek which would be very cool indeed!
Sent on the go from my Peek