Amazon Flex, Prime Now (One way to spend money. One way to make money.)

Signed, sealed, and delivered.

A friend told me that she recently started driving for Amazon Flex which is like Uber for Amazon package delivery. As a contract driver, she simply drives to her local Amazon warehouse and loads up her car. She scans each package, using the Amazon Flex app, as she places it in her car and the app determines the optimal driving route. Drivers have three hours to finish their delivers and return with any undelivered items.

As I looked into Amazon Flex, I noticed that Amazon Prime Now delivers groceries, similar to Amazon Fresh. I gave it a try since Prime Now offered free delivery for orders over $20 (plus an additional $5 tip).

I started putting items into my shopping cart, yesterday afternoon. When I went to resume shopping, this afternoon, I noticed that a couple items were no longer available which was clearly displayed. After adding a few more items to my cart, I checked out at 1:30 PM with a 2 PM – 4 PM free delivery window. I had the option, for $7.99, for delivery within the hour.

Ding Dong

Cooler bag for dairy.

About 75 minutes after I placed my order which was 15 minutes before arriving, I received a text message that Ryan was on his way, with a link to track him that updated in near real-time. I went out to meet him when I saw that he had arrived. As he walked to me I said, "You're Ryan, from Amazon, right?"

"Yes... this was an easy delivery," said Ryan.

"Do you drive for Amazon Flex?" I asked, catching him off guard.

"Um, uh, yeah... do you know me, personally?"

He was a bit baffled as I explained that I did not know him but I understood how Amazon Flex worked. Best part is that my order was exactly what I bought and the dairy was in a cooler bag with an ice bag.

Programming My Honda's Keyless Entry Remote

My self-programmed Honda remote.

The last time I took my Honda Accord in for servicing, my keyless entry remote stopped working. But, I didn't realize the problem until about an hour later when I tried to use the remote to unlock my car. Since I was still near Carlsbad, I took my car back to the dealership. I've always had great service at Hoehn Honda in Carlsbad, and this was no exception.

My service rep immediately recognized the issue – he jumped into the driver's seat, fiddled with the key while it was in the ignition and, voilà, my keyless remote fob was working. The reprograming process went so quickly that I didn't catch what the service rep did, but it was clearly a series of steps that took about 15 seconds to complete. When I asked him for the details he said that it wasn't easy to explain. I didn't pursue it since I was happy that the problem was solved quickly.

Last month, my Accord's remote stopped working, again. I figured that I'd wait until I brought my car back to Carlsbad for its next servicing since I could simply use the physical key to unlock the doors. But, that changed when I got a hankering after watching this Arby's ad around lunchtime, so I headed to Mission Valley for some roast beef. As I left Arby's, I noticed a Honda dealership next to the freeway. I drove up to the service department and spoke with a rep who did not understand my issue. Finally, I asked if, perhaps, there was someone else around who might have an idea of how to fix the remote? He went into the office where I could see him speaking to a Honda technician for a few minutes. They both came out and asked me if I'd ever had service done at that dealership. No, I told them. But I didn't tell them the obvious, which is that I always go to Carlsbad since dealerships do not share any customer records. The technician told me that I'd need to bring in both keys so they could be reprogrammed, together. After asking them, three times, what the reprogramming process entailed I caught the clue that they weren't going to elaborate beyond the fact that it would take about an hour and cost $95. No, thank you, and I headed home.

Programming My Remote

Once I got home and parked, I pulled up this Honda document on my phone: "Keyless Entry System Owner’s Manual." After a few unsuccessful tries, I was able to reprogram my car's keyless entry fob. The process is as simple and quick as what I saw the service rep do in Carlsbad, a few months ago. Basically, I repeated the same three steps of turning the ignition on without starting the car (referred to, in the Honda vernacular, as  the  "'ON' (ΙΙ) position"), pressing a button on the remote, and then turning off the ignition. Once I repeated this three times, with no more than five seconds between each step, my power door locks cycled and my remote was paired (programmed) to my Accord. All's well and now working as expected.

Give a man a fish...

Kickstarting The Undercover

Moderating a panel of 3rdSpace crowdfunding entrepreneurs.

About five years ago, I joined the 3rdSpace coworking community in University Heights. Around that time, we noticed that some of our fellow members were attempting and failing to raise funds for their Kickstarter projects. So, a couple of us started the monthly San Diego Kickstarter Meetup which spawned a weekly Inventors Club for entrepreneurs actively engaged in Kickstarter projects. At our peak, we had six simultaneous crowdfunding campaigns live on Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

The Undress – The Undercover

The most notable Kickstarter campaign, that taught our group some valuable lessons, was The Undress which is a dress that allows women to change clothes in public, without getting naked. They raised $615,663 in 2014 for their first campaign and then they came back the following year, with an even better version, and raised an additional $248,704.

As a guy, I felt like I was missing out. I wanted a men's version of The Undress – something better than wearing a towel around my waist. Lo and behold, the makers of The Undress launched a Kickstarter campaign, last fall, for The Undercover which is more than a glorified towel for men. The secret to their products is the pockets which allows the wearer to reach inside the garment so they're not scooping under the bottom of a traditional towel and inadvertently exposing themselves to the world. Also, both The Undress and The Undercover are both secured to the wearer so they won't fall off (a common problem that surfers know all too well). The added bonus of The Undercover is that it also doubles (triples?) as a backpack and shorts; and, in a pinch, women can use it to change clothes, too.

What gets me most excited about The Undercover is that mine arrived yesterday and it works exactly as expected. Only an entrepreneur can appreciate how much complex thought goes into producing such a simple product.

Here is The Undercover in action...


The Undercover from Joe Moreno on Vimeo.

Disclaimer: I paid full price for my two Undercovers and I was neither solicited for this post, nor received any compensation.

When to Bring Software Development In-house

A friend taking an HR course contacted me, this evening, to ask me for my input into her homework assignment. The scenario was that you, the student, work in the HR department at a 75 person company that delivers meals to people. The first version of the mobile app, used for scheduling deliveries, has been outsourced and the CEO believes it's taking too much time and money to be developed. The CEO is considering hiring software and QA engineers to bring development in-house and wants your input.

This a good scenario for the real world and I was happy to share my thoughts. My first question was asking if the company considers itself a technology company. Corporations like Apple and Amazon are clearly high tech companies, so it's a no brainer for them to develop their own software. On the other end of the spectrum would be companies who use custom IT systems, but are not tech companies. For example, Wyndham, where I worked about five years ago, outsourced development of their e-commerce websites and backend reservation systems. Asking a company to determine how they self-identify is a good first step.

Another thing to consider is how often will the software be updated. Modern, high tech companies release new versions of their software weekly or monthly. Facebook is a perfect example of a 21st century company that treats development as an ongoing process, instead of an event, by releasing new software three times each day.

These considerations are simply a starting point for the discussion. If the decision is made to bring development in-house then there are questions about conducting interviews, how to dress, and hearing about candidates real-world experiences.

DNS Hijacking?

I have a DNS hijacking theory.

Route 53 is Amazon's elegant DNS web service. DNS is the part of the Internet that converts domain names, like apple.com, into IP addresses such as 17.172.224.47. This is how humans contact computers on the Internet. While DNS is robust, resilient, and redundant, it is the Internet's single point of failure.

So, here's my theory. Websites, like adweek.com, use Route 53:

dig adweek.com ns

returns:

adweek.com. 172800 IN NS ns-304.awsdns-38.com.

adweek.com. 172800 IN NS ns-532.awsdns-02.net.

adweek.com. 172800 IN NS ns-1322.awsdns-37.org.

adweek.com. 172800 IN NS ns-1571.awsdns-04.co.uk.

This means the first time you visit adweek.com, your web browser/ISP will ask one of the Internet's root servers for adweek.com's registrar (i.e., where is the domain name, adweek.com, registered). The root servers will tell your web browsers that adweek.com is hosted at moniker.com (Moniker is a domain name registrar, similar the well-known GoDaddy). The next step is that your web browser will ask Moniker where adweek.com's DNS servers are located. These are referred to as the DNS name servers, or NS for short. As seen above, the response will point your browser to Route 53 which answers with four different servers for redundancy. The final step is that your web browser will query any one of these four servers for the physical IP address of adweek.com. All of these steps happen in the blink of an eye.

Now here's the hijacking part. What if I go to my own Route 53 account, create an entry for adweek.com, and start adding records? When I did this, Route 53 assigned the following four NS servers to me:

ns-715.awsdns-25.net.
ns-1787.awsdns-31.co.uk.
ns-396.awsdns-49.com.
ns-1263.awsdns-29.org.

There should be no hijacking problem since Route 53 assigned four NS servers to me that are different than adweek.com's NS servers. In other words, I cannot hijack adweek.com's Internet traffic in this case. But what if Route 53 had assigned to me an NS server that was the same as adweek.com's NS server? Then, I'm speculating, I could redirect at least a small portion of adweek.com's traffic to wherever I wanted to.

Perhaps this isn't an issue because Route 53 ensures that it never duplicates NS servers names. That would be an expensive proposition, but certainly doable. From there, if my theory holds true, then what about simpler DNS hosts, such as GoDaddy whose DNS servers seem to be limited to nsXX.domaincontrol.com, where XX appears to be a double digit number? This means that many different domain names are using the same DNS server names. Would that make it possible to hijack some traffic from websites sharing the same DNS server? I'm sure that DNS implementations are robust enough that this isn't an issue, otherwise it would have occurred by now. But, with my understanding of the DNS RFC, I don't know how this hijacking issue has been avoided.

So, how has this DNS hijacking scenario been prevented? I'd love to know.

A Busy Day at the Office

What does a busy day look like?
Ten years ago it was reading and writing e-mails. Today, it's bouncing between Slack, Trello, Basecamp, and Facebook.

More tools seems more complicated, but it actually allows for better filtering of information while establishing well defined boundaries. 

I recently started working as the CTO at It's Borrowed, which is like Airbnb for your stuff. Why not earn money renting out that camping equipment, golf clubs, power tools, or wheel chair that's sitting around in your garage? Looking to borrow a ladder or ice chest? Check the It's Borrowed app.

Since It's Borrowed is a small team of five, I'm also the product manager for our API servers and mobile apps. When I last worked in this capacity at Wyndham we only used e-mail and SharePoint, which was marginal. What made it worse, at Wyndham, was that I had to manually sort and archive e-mails in Outlook, my key communications tool. Otherwise, when my e-mail storage grew to more than about 4 GB, Outlook would stop working reliably. Allow me to digress by pointing out that Outlook's horribly engineered to stuff every single e-mail and attachment into a single file which grows and grows until it eventually collapses in an unpredictable way. Compare that to macOS which organizes your e-mail boxes into an elegant hierarchy of folders; each e-mail (body and attachment), is then stored as a separate file. File systems are much better at managing (CRUD) ten-million 1K sized files than two 5GB sized files.

Workflow Filters

Today's workflow, with Basecamp, Slack, Trello, etc., simplifies my life by managing filters. A ding of an incoming e-mail is an interruption; and a message could be from my manager or my mother, each having a unique sense of urgency and importance.

Here's my workflow when using Slack, Trello, and Basecamp...

Basecamp
When I meet with the business (marketing), we put high level tasks into Basecamp such as "Create an e-commerce shopping cart so people can buy our stuff." Think of the tasks in Basecamp as the business's vision – a high level goal.

Trello
Since I'm the two-way bridge between the business and engineering, I take the vision of the business and break it down into a single engineering task that can fit into a Sprint since we're closely following Agile/Scrum. In Trello, our tech lead has organized boards for each Sprint and the backlog. Each column has a card which is akin to an electronic Post-it note. Inside each Sprint board, we have columns such as Blocked, To Do, In Progress, Review, Done, etc. The blocked column are impediments that I take for action, while the tech lead focuses on the other columns.

Each Sprint begins with the engineers reviewing the backlog along with the CEO and me. The engineers get to pick, from our prioritized list, each task (card) they'll do in the upcoming Sprint. Only the engineer picking the task can assign a weight to a task – a weight, meaning how long it'll take a task to be completed. That part is sometimes a hard pill for management to swallow. But, over time, as engineering delivers on all they promise, management will gain confidence even though they can't interrupt a Sprint with new requirements.

Slack
I think of Slack as Twitter on steroids, across different teams and channels. The key Slack teams are the ones that I have with the engineering department and each individual engineer. Since the engineers fall under the tech lead, I rarely communicate directly with an engineer so as to not interrupt them. This is harder than is sounds when the CEO asks me a pressing question which I could simply have answered by interrupting an engineer. A couple of our channels are automated and tied in to third party services so, at any time, I can see code check-ins or deployments to production in real-time.

The beauty of slack is I can see the history of a channel conversation without having to search through e-mail looking for specific threads.

Discipline is key. As long as the team has the motivation to follow this format then the information will quickly and effectively flow, increasing productivity. It really does work well.

The Right Way to Address Bad Service

Customer service is a pet peeve of mine. There's no way for a business to never have a problem. But, what a company does to address the problem is their moment to shine.

I've written many times about stellar customer service here, here, and here. I've also addressed how to get the customer service you deserve. The blog post is one of the latter.

I don't believe in receiving bad customer service and then posting to Yelp about it unless I've addressed it with the business, first, and given them a chance to fix the problem. Today, that happened to me and the business failed.

Blindsided

I've never given anything but 5 star reviews on Yelp. I believe in sprinkling the world with good karma. If I have a problem with a business, then I'll address it, on the spot, to give the business a chance to fix it. Otherwise, I'll let it go. Speak now, or forever hold your tongue. In other words, don't blindside a business with a bad review. Instead, address the issue on the spot with tact and understanding. Tact is the lubricant of human relationships, so use it liberally.

Today, I rented a truck from a local mom-and-pop U-Haul franchise. This is my third time renting from these owners, and, up until now, I was surprised that their seven Yelp reviews averaged out to 1.5 stars. It turns out there's a reason.

The husband and wife team do a good job when everything goes well. But, when something goes wrong, they come across as lazy. My lazy characterization is a combination of my observation, today, and the Yelp reviews.

Today, when I rented my U-Haul truck, I specifically asked for a few extras such as a hand truck, blankets, and a pad lock. The first two items cost extra... no problem, I've rented U-Haul trucks before and I knew that. The last item... the pad lock... is chained to the truck and the key to lock it is on the ignition keychain. When I tried to use the key to unlock the padlock, it wouldn't budge so the owner tried it and she didn't have any luck either. This pad lock is the only thing that secures the back of the truck. I didn't want to leave it parked on the street, overnight, without securing it. Too many homeless in my neighborhood looking for blankets, etc.

When I saw that the owner couldn't open the pad lock, I asked if she could replace it with a working on. She said no. She said that they didn't have any and she recommended that I buy a lock. I asked if there would be a discount and she said no, the pad lock is free. Then I asked if we could get a different truck and she, again, said no because "I have no other trucks," even though there were clearly other trucks, of the same exact model, on the lot. Even if those were reserved, she could swap out the trucks. I have no doubt that she lied to me simply to avoid refilling out new paperwork. She said that she was sorry and she was on her way.

After getting home and trying a bicycle lock, which didn't work, I saw no other option but to buy a new padlock, which I did. Not a big deal, but still an inconvenience, costing me extra time and money. So, it looks like they'll be getting a 4.0 from me on Yelp (my first). Not a big deal for them, since it'll help their 1.5 star average, but perhaps I'm being insensitive. Maybe this husband and wife are on the verge of bankruptcy. Who knows, but they certainly could have done better; or, perhaps I'm too easy going and I was taken advantage of.

Little Stories to be Told

1st Grade, Silas Wood, Huntington Station, Long Island

42 years later, in the Hamptons.

Top: 1st grade at Silas Wood Elementary School.

Bottom: 42 years later I found myself polishing Brian Gerken’s shoes at a dinner party at Victoria’s home in the Hamptons. Brian literally gave me the shirt off his back as a “thank you.”

Photo credit: Our 6th grade teacher, Ms. Cooke, who had Brian, Vicky, and I as her students, snapped the shoe shining photo in the Hamptons.

Coda: There were five people from my first grade class photo in attendance at our dinner party in the Hamptons. It's not that were remained close, over the years, it's simply that timing was on our side as we came together for a 6th grade reunion the evening before our 30th high school reunion.

Good Design is Apparent

The lip (red arrows) wrapping around the sink looks like styling, but it isn't.

Good design is apparent.
Great design is transparent. 
– Joe & Joe (Sparano & Moreno)

Styling is concerned with surface treatment and appearance – the expressive qualities of a product. Design, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with problem solving.
– "Design of the 20th Century" by Charlotte & Peter Fiell

One day, I plugged up the sink on the right with a stopper and stepped away while I left the water running to fill up the basin. I quickly forgot about it until about 20 minutes later. As I hurried back to the kitchen, I could hear the water spilling over before I could see the sink. In my mind's eye, I envisioned how much of a mess of water I'd have to clean up on the floor. Guess what? Not a drop spilled onto the counter or ground. I was floored when I saw that every drop of water had overflowed into the sink basin on the left, thanks to the lip around the sink. For all these years, I simply thought that lip was styling; it turns out it's functional. It's a design element that solves a problem – the exact problem I created by leaving the water running until it overflowed.

Database Architecture

The most popular database is Excel. Knowledge workers use Excel spreadsheets as a simple, non-relational database more often than as an accounting worksheet. That's OK, because it works. The big boys (software engineers) use relational databases, which is like tying together each worksheet in Excel; the tying together of database tables is the relational part. And, about a decade ago, the cool kids started using NoSQL databases which operate more or less like a hash table for blazing fast performance sans the relationships.

In my computer science college classes I was taught that each row in a database requires a primary key. Just like each row on your Excel spreadsheet has a unique number: 1, 2, 3; each row in a relational database needs a way to find that row of data, quickly. In academia – in other words, in theory – I was frequently taught to use something like a person's social security number (SSN) as the primary key for a database table. But, in practice, that doesn't work nicely. In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. One of the key tenets of primary keys is that they must never change unless every single reference to that primary key (relationship) is also updated which is not a trivial task

There are a few issues with using a person's SSN as a primary key. One issue is that it's a long number, much longer than a 1 – 5 digit integer typically used as a primary key, so it takes a database engine longer to compare numbers.

More importantly, what happens if a person's SSN changes? SSNs can change in domestic violence cases, identity theft, when two people are mistakenly issued the same SSN, etc. You may think, since these are such rare cases, that it's not a big deal for a database; but software systems have to be developed to handle every possible case to work effectively. So, to solve this, most databases issue a sequence of integers for each row. In the case where databases are in a cluster, each database might tag a digit on the end representing which database server issued a specific primary key. In other words, instead of 1, 2, 3; database server #4 in a cluster might issue 14, 24, 34, etc. as primary keys.

Database Best Practices

Having done a bit of database work, I've learned some best practices that are worth sharing.

1. Primary keys: Never build intelligence into a primary key – a primary key is simply an artifact of the database and it should represent nothing more than a way to access a row in a database table (i.e., don't use SSN as a primary key).

2. Table Names: Database table names should be singular (Employee, Order, Transaction, etc); they should be named for what each row in the table represents, not the entire collection. The reason is that, typically, there's a one-to-one mapping between a row in a database table and an object used in code. For example, in code, an instance variable referencing an Employee object should represent a single employee from the database while an an instance variable that's plural, such as Employees, should represent a collection of objects such as an array or dictionary.

3. Lookup Tables: A lookup table is usually a simple static database table that's used to populate a list or collection. For example, a list of countries that your company ships to. Perhaps, your company only ships to the U.S. and Canada.; later, when you start shipping to more countries, how do you update the pop-up list of countries on your website or mobile app? With a lookup table, you simply add another row to the table with the new country that you ship to. Typically, a look up table also has a column representing a sort order so it can be displayed in a specific order with, say, the U.S. listed first, instead of Afghanistan, since most of your customers come from America.