Archive for the ‘Business’ category

Goodbye, Yahoo! Tech

February 9th, 2010

Note: see “Disclaimer” in the sidebar. This does not represent an official statement by Yahoo!, but merely my personal reflections and memories.

Yahoo! announced today that Yahoo! Tech will be closing on March 11, 2010. This has a very personal resonance for me, because I was the lead engineer for the construction of Yahoo! Tech.

tech.jpgYahoo! Tech represented an important milestone, not only in my personal career, but also in the history of Yahoo! At the time it was launched (April, 2006), it was the first new property launched by the Yahoo! Media group in over five years. It was one of Yahoo!’s first forays into original content, and one of the first Yahoo! sites where video (the online show Hook Me Up) was a primary factor. It was one of the first, if not the first, sites at Yahoo! to rely primarily upon original content (bloggers) rather than aggregating content that was created elsewhere. And, it was considered very “cutting edge” in its design and frontend features—the rounded corners and bold colors (green and orange? seriously?) were very much in vogue at the time (an early review called it “an explosion in the web 2.0 factory”) and a wild change from the traditional Yahoo! designs. See the Wikipedia article for more details.

From a web technology standpoint, Yahoo! Tech was also groundbreaking. It was the first site at Yahoo! to be built entirely on a service-oriented architecture, meaning that all of the content for the site was accessed via web services (mostly REST-style HTTP requests) instead of older, more traditional methods. The front-end was rendered entirely using XSLT; another cutting-edge technology that had been little-used in Yahoo! before then (and little used afterwards, too, I might add).

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How to write a performance review

January 17th, 2010

We’re in the midst of annual reviews at my company; unlike some companies, which schedule an annual review on the anniversary of the employee’s hire date, we do ours all at once, at the beginning of the year. Part of the review process is “peer feedback;” that is, each employee has the ability to request feedback from co-workers on his or her performance throughout the year. In addition, each employee creates a “self-assessment,” where he or she analyzes his or her own performance over the past year. Having recently finished reading dozens of these, I’d like to share what I find most helpful in a well-written peer or self assessment.

(Note: your company’s process is most likely somewhat different than mine, so feel free to adapt this to your particular situation. I do think, however, that the general principles are common to most business settings.)

The first rule of thumb is: be on time! A review or self-assessment that arrives before my deadline for reporting on you is infinitely more valuable than one that arrives later. When I have to tell my manager about your performance, I’m going to have to rely on my (imperfect) memory about your work if you don’t give me your self-assessment to remind me. Six sentences scrawled on the back of an envelope (who uses envelopes any more, any way?) is far, far better than a dozen pages that arrive 24 hours too late.

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How to give a presentation

October 22nd, 2009

presentationYou’ve done the research, gathered the data, created your beautiful charts and graphs, maybe even added a video or a soundtrack. Now you have to take your precious PowerPoint or Keynote presentation and, well, present it. You can either shine like the consummate professional you are, or you can have all your hard work hidden behind a distracting facade of blunders and missteps. Here’s some of my top tips for making sure that the presentation goes smoothly.

Practice makes perfect

Actually, a better phrase is “Practice makes permanent, so always practice perfect.” It’s astonishing to me how often someone will give a presentation when it’s obvious that they haven’t looked at it in months, if at all. Nothing reduces your credibility quite like saying, “Huh, I didn’t know that,” when the slide of last quarter’s sales figures comes up on the screen. Always make sure you run through your slides in a rehearsal before you present, or otherwise you’ll look like a loon. A rehearsal, by the way, does not mean merely skimming through and reading silently; you actually need to plan on saying what you’re going to say in the presentation (see the next tip).

When you rehearse, you should pretend that you’re actually presenting; make sure you allow time for questions, and make sure that you know how long the presentation will take. You look like a fool if you are on slide 31 of 60 when you’ve reached the end of your allotted half-hour and there’s a crowd of people standing outside waiting to use the conference room. You should know, within 10%, exactly how long your presentation takes.

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