I’m running the numbers, and I didn’t really believe them. So I put them in a chart, and I’m still not sure that I trust them.

Here you can see our income per month for the past year. Yes, July was pretty bad with everyone on vacation and no one is buying.

March 14 was pretty good, with people buying RavenConf tickets are a lot of excitement around that. September and October were great. In fact, October was out best month ever.

And then we get to February 2015. In other words, this month. In other words, this month where we still have 10 more days to make sales.

I’m pretty happy . But I wished that I had hard numbers on why.

The major portion of the RavenDB core team is co-located in our main office in Israel. That means that we get to do things like work together, throw ideas off one another, etc.

But one of the things that I found stifling in other work places is a primary focus on the current work. I mean, the work is important, but one of the best ways to stagnate is to keep doing the same thing over and over again. Sure, you are doing great and can spin that yarn very well, but there is always that power loom that is going to show up any minute. So we try to do some skill sharpening.

There are a bunch of ways we do that. We try to have a lecture every week (given by one of our devs). The topics so far range from graph theory to distributed gossip algorithms to new frameworks and features that we deal with to the structure of the CPU and memory architecture.

We also have mini debuggatons. I’m not sure if the name fit, but basically, we show a particular problem, split into pairs and try to come up with a root cause and a solution. This post is written while everyone else in the office is busy looking at WinDBG and finding a memory leak issue, in the meantime, I’m posting to the blog and fixing bugs.

I’m reading a lot, and I thought that I would post a bit about my favorite subjects. I decided to summarize this year with great books that don’t really fall into standard categories, which I really enjoyed.

The AlterWorld – By a Russian author, and with a great background there (how to identify a Russian was great), and are really good. The premise is that you can get stuck in a MMORPG and it is beautifully done. Unlike a fantasy book, the notion of levels, gaining strength and power is really nice. Especially since the hero isn’t actually taking the direct path to that. There is also a lot of interaction with the real world, and in general, this is a fully featured universe that is really good. It looks like there are going to be 3 more books, which is absolutely wonderful from my point of view.

Those books were good enough that I started playing RPGs again, just because it was so much fun reading the status messages in the books. If you know of other books in the same space, I would love to know about it.

NPCs tells the tale from the point of view of Non Player Characters, which is quite interesting and done in a very believable way.

Caverns & Creatures is a series of books (lost count, there are a lot of short stories as well as full length books) that deals with the idea of people getting stuck in RPG world. This one is mostly meant for humor’s sake, I think. And it does get to toilet level humor all too frequently, but it is entertaining.

Waldo Rabbit tells the tale of a guy that really tries to be an evil overload, but his idea of scary beast is a… rabbit. It is a really well written, and I’m looking forward for the next book.

 
Wizard 2.0 talks about finding proof that the entire world is a computer simulation, and what happens when certain people find out about it. My guess is that this is written by a programmer, because the parts where they talk about software and programming wasn’t made up in whole cloth and didn’t piss me off at all. This is also really good series, and I’m looking forward to reading the 3rd book.  I especially liked that there isn’t some big Save The World theme going on, this is just life as you know it, if you are a bunch of pixels.

Velveteen is a “superhero” novel, but a very different one than the usual one. I’m not really sure how to categorize it, but it was a really great read.

Daniel Black’s is a single book series, with a second book, Black Coven set to follow Fimbulwinter. It is a great book, with a very well written background and story. What is more, the hero doesn’t rely on brute force or the author to rescue him when he stupidly gets into trouble, he thinks and plans, and that is quite great to read. I’m eagerly waiting for the next book.

So, we are done with the holidays here. The last month was basically very little work, because a lot of our people were out for the holidays.

Internally, we are gearing up to finish the website for RavenDB 3.0, while another part of the team is focused on stability and performance. We just hired another new guy, and he is going to be working pretty much on distribution from now on. I’ll report more on that in a few weeks.

Looking at the blog, I’ve mostly been talking about RavenDB, and I want to do a small shift and talk about other topics, so I’m declaring the next two weeks to be RavenDB free weeks. I’m going to continue to blog regularly, of course, but I’m going to be talking about other topics for a change.

Don’t worry, we haven’t stopped working on RavenDB, it is just that it is pretty boring to hear about things like test clusters, or how we work on issues from the people trying out the RC builds.

It is a good day, so I decided to share some joy.

For today only, we offer 21% discount for all our products. You can get that using coupon code: bzeiglglay

This applies to RavenDB (Standard, Enterprise and ISV), RavenDB Professional & Production Support and NHibernate Profiler and Entity Framework Profiler

This offer will be valid for 24 hours only.

We got a call to the office.

We have a huge problem with our system, you need to come and help us right away. This is a critical system and we need immediate response.

That kinda of annoying, of course, but it is all part of the service. So, in order to log the appropriate items into our system, we asked:

What is your order id? And what is your support contract number?

And the answer was:

Oh, that was handled by another department, I’m not sure.

So we asked them to figure that out and send it to us, and waited. The call came at noon, but 7 PM, I sent them an email.

The reply I got back was:

We’ll try to find the order details tomorrow.

I guess it isn’t so huge, critical and immediate problem any longer…

One of the things that I found out is that as Hibernating Rhinos grows (and we currently have over a dozen people working full time), I’m seeing two very interesting changes in my own behavior.

The actual velocity is increasing by leaps & bounds. We can do a lot more now, and we can do that faster and with a greater degree of parallelism.

My personal development is growing less, as I am doing a lot more of business type things. One aspect of that is that I do a lot of reading of contracts, legalese, and other stuff that takes time from actual development work.

I try to compensate by running the tests while I’m reading contracts, and then I found the following in a contract I’m reviewing:

Nice to know where that stand. And I emphasize.

I mentioned that a quick way to setup things for me to think that a candidate is a bad idea is to send us a UI project. This is usually a very strong indication that the candidate doesn’t really have any idea what they are doing. They have been doing Win Forms projects, so they write the code for the task at hand in buttom1_Click event handler. Or inside the Page_Load code in an ASP.Net WebForms application if they are “web developers”.

On the other hand, here is a strong counter example. We had a candidate send in a WinForms project, as I said, that is usually a bad sign. But then I actually looked at his code:

And here is a single method:

This code is several levels of too complex for the task.  It can be easily simplified to a great degree quite easily.

But the key point from this, and the reason that this candidate has an interview later this week, is that this demonstrate a bunch of things:

• Understanding of separation of concerns.
• Code that actually does what it is supposed to do.
• Proper integration between UI & backend code (for example, we are working with large files, so we have progress bars and off-the-UI-thread work).
• The UI doesn’t look like it was put together by a hiccupping monkey.

I can work with this. There are things that need to be improved for what we do, but there appears to be a SOLID foundation here.

Sometimes, reading candidates answer is just something that I know is going to piss me off.

We have a question that goes something like this (the actual question is much more detailed):

We have a 15TB csv file that contains web log, the entries are sorted by date (since this is how they were entered). Find all the log entries within a given date range. You may not read more than 32 MB.

A candidate replied with an answered that had the following code:

   1: string line = string.Empty;

   2: StreamReader file;

   3:  

   4: try

   5: {

   6:     file = new StreamReader(filename);

   7: }

   8: catch (FileNotFoundException ex)

   9: {

  10:     Console.WriteLine("The file is not found.");

  11:     Console.ReadLine();

  12:     return;

  13: }

  14:  

  15: while ((line = file.ReadLine()) != null)

  16: {

  17:     var values = line.Split(',');

  18:     DateTime date = Convert.ToDateTime(values[0]);

  19:     if (date.Date >= startDate && date.Date <= endDate)

  20:         output.Add(line);

  21:  

  22:     // Results size in MB

  23:     double size = (GetObjectSize(output) / 1024f) / 1024f;

  24:     if (size >= 32)

  25:     {

  26:         Console.WriteLine("Results size exceeded 32MB, the search will stop.");

  27:         break;

  28:     }

  29: }

My reply was:

The data file is 15TB in size, if the data is beyond the first 32MB, it won't be found.

The candidate then fixed his code. It now includes:

   1: var lines = File.ReadLines(filename);

Yep, this is on a 15TB file.

Now I’m going to have to lie down for a bit, I am not feeling so good.

Sometimes it takes very little time to know that a candidate is going to be pretty horrible. As you can probably guess, the sort of questions we ask tend to be “find me this data in this sort of file”.

Probably the fastest indication is when they send me projects like this:

Now, it is possible that someone skilled will send us real projects like that, but the experience so far has been that this isn’t going to be the case. If you have someone sending a UI project, it usually indicates that they can’t think about it in any other way.

The code they send pretty much justify this concern. Some code snippets from those projects:

Yup, this is the kind of error handling I want to see. Just for fun, if there hasn’t been an error, this function would return a comma separated string of values.

Which make it just slightly worse than:

And then we have this:

I guess someone really like O(N**2) on 15 TB files.

And then there is this:

I guess we have different definitions on what configurable means.

And then there was this person:

Yes, they did send me code inside a PDF file. That was the only way that they could find to send code around, I’m guessing.