Category: Uncategorized

“Oh yeah, pointers.”

Pictured above: The Whole Foods in my neighborhood. Nice, isn’t it?

In what the press release calls “all-cash transaction valued at approximately $13.7 billion,” Amazon has acquired Whole Foods.

Whole Foods — its full name is Whole Foods Market, but more people call it “Whole Paycheck” because of their reputation for the premium prices they charge for items that you won’t easily find at your run-of-the-mill grocery store — will still operate under its own name, with its current CEO John Mackey, and out of their Austin, Texas headquarters.

What does Amazon get out of the deal? After conquering the market for online dry goods, they’ve set their eyes on the only kind of shopping that we do more often: groceries. They’ve been experimenting with grocery delivery service for years with AmazonFresh, which serves a few locations: the Seattle area, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Sacramento, London, Boston, Dallas, and Chicago. Acquiring Whole Foods instantly gives them a well-known, well-liked brand and over 400 “showrooms” located on prime real estate that are frequented by customers with more than the average amount of disposable income. In the longer run, Whole Foods locations can serve as fulfillment centers, and distribution or pick-up points for online grocery orders.

What does Whole Foods get out of the deal? According to this Recode article, being acquired alleviates a number of business headaches, such as the “activist investors” that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey calls “greedy bastards”, as well as “slow growth, shrinking profits and increasing competition from traditional grocers, meal-kit services like Blue Apron,” and — oddly enough — “e-commerce plays like Amazon.”

My favorite Tweet about the acquisition so far:

I, too, spend $13.7 billion at Whole Foods.

— Slade Sohmer (@Slade) June 16, 2017

Hey, Tampa Bay area developers! Want to meet up with your local developer community, learn cross-platform mobile development with Xamarin and cloud development with Azure, and maybe hear a rock and roll accordion number or two? Then you’ll want to come to the Tampa edition of Xamarin Dev Days this Saturday at the Tampa Bay Microsoft office in Rocky Point and get some free hands-on learning!

I’ll be there

I’ll be doing the first presentation of the day, Introduction to Xamarin, where I’ll walk you through its features, risk just a little live coding in building a cross-platform image search app, and give you a taste of Xamarin’s plugins, which let you go beyond write-once business logic and into write-once platform-specific features. You’ll be impressed by what you can do with Xamarin in your toolbelt.

When, where, how to register, and what you’ll need

It all happens on Saturday, June 17, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Microsoft Tampa Bay office at Rocky Point (5426 Bay Center Drive, 7th floor).

Go here to register. It’s free!

Here’s the full agenda:

 

Food will be served, and there will be wifi. What you should bring is a laptop — Windows or Mac — that’s set up to do Xamarin development work. If you don’t already have Xamarin tools installed, head here to download Visual Studio Community (which is free) for either Windows or Mac.

If you’ve never built an app with Xamarin before, you might want to check out these quickstart tutorials:

• Hello, Android
• Hello, iOS

I’ll see you there!

 

 

If you go to a meeting room at a Microsoft office these days, you’ll quite likely see a sticker that talks about fixed mindset meetings and growth mindset meetings:

Click the image to see it at full size.

Here’s a closer look at that sticker:

Click the image to see it at full size.

Kudos to Microsoft for encouraging the growth mindset!

Also worth checking out: The difference between failing and being a failure.

I’m still looking for work, so I thought I’d show off my coding skills and improve on Robbie Leonardi’s high-concept interactive platform game-style resume by making a resume that was also an actual game. It’s still a work in progress, but I thought I’d show you a preview.

I used the Phaser game framework that I learned about this weekend and put together a quick, single-screen sample in a hour. The real version will show my entire résumé and be more extensive. If you’re viewing this page on a desktop or laptop computer (right now, it responds only to the arrow keys on a keyboard) you can try out the preview:

 

Use the ⬅️  and ➡️  keys to move and the ⬆️  key to jump.
This game currently works with desktop/laptop computers only;
mobile-friendly version coming soon!

More conventional ways to find out about me

I’m looking for my next great job! If you’re looking for someone with desktop, web, mobile, and IoT development skills who can also communicate to technical and non-technical audiences, or a marketer or evangelist who also has a technology background and can code, you should talk to me.

• See my magnum opus job application
• Visit my LinkedIn profile
• See my Stack Overflow Developer Story
• Download my detailed resume [PDF]
• Contact me at joey@globalnerdy.com

Exit Emil Michael (and not a moment too soon)

An updated image from my February post titled The Uber story that everyone’s talking about right now, and some helpful background info.

Emil Michael, the worst executive at Uber — and remember, Uber is essentially an Olympics for worst executives — is finally out of the company.

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, the Uber dinner party controversy of 2014 might. That’s when he floated an idea to counter their negative image in the media by spending “a million dollars” to hire opposition researchers and journalists to look into “your personal lives, your families” and as Buzzfeed puts it: “give the media a taste of its own medicine.” When someone at the dinner pointed out to him that such a move would be a problem for Uber, Michael replied: “Nobody would know it was us.”

Buzzfeed, who had an editor present at the dinner, wrote:

Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.” She wrote that she was deleting her Uber app after BuzzFeed News reported that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service. “I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.

At the dinner, Michael expressed outrage at Lacy’s column and said that women are far more likely to get assaulted by taxi drivers than Uber drivers. He said that he thought Lacy should be held “personally responsible” for any woman who followed her lead in deleting Uber and was then sexually assaulted.

Then he returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.

What finally got him removed

Michael’s removal is likely one of a set of recommendations resulting from an investigation into Uber’s workplace environment, which is led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

The as-yet-unannounced recommendations were approved unanimously by Uber’s board members in an emergency meeting on Sunday (yesterday at the time of writing). It’s generally believed that the report from the investigation, which will be released Tuesday (tomorrow at the time of writing) will paint a picture of a “Lord of the Flies” workplace, filled with retaliation-as-business-as-usual, sexism and sexual harassment, and other corporate “rules are for the little people”-style hijinks. Michael fits in all three buckets quite well.

Recode put it very well in their intro to this article:

If you ask most competent executives what they would do if an employee brought them a potentially controversial file that was part of a criminal investigation, the answer is always the same.

Which is: You do not read it or even touch it. You order that it be given to the company’s lawyer immediately. You quiz the employee as to the provenance and consider firing that person if you suspect it was illegally obtained.

So why did it take so long for his bosses at Uber to find out why and how a top executive named Eric Alexander, the now former president of business in the Asia Pacific, managed to acquire the confidential medical records, along with a police file, concerning the case of a woman who was violently raped in India in 2014.

Alexander showed the dossier to fellow executives, including CEO Travis Kalanick and yes, Emil Michael, and Recode reports that “numerous executives at the car-hailing company were either told about the records or shown them.” IEven the writers of Silicon Valley might not have written what actually happened in response: in spite of the fact that none of Uber’s execs have medical training, they still raised questions about the incident based on the illegally- and unethically-acquired medical report.

There’s also his presence at the now-infamous night at the Seoul karaoke/escort bar where “executives reportedly selected women to be their companions for the night by the numbers hanging around their necks.” In case you were wondering, CEO Travis Kalanick was also there.

His departure email

It’s standard damage-control departee boilerplate, and was likely vetted by team of legal and PR flacks:

Team –

Yesterday was my last day with Uber. Starting today, David Richter, our current VP of Strategic Initiatives, will be the new SVP of Business. David is an extremely talented leader and I have high confidence in his ability to help drive the company forward.

I signed on with the company almost four years ago and it has truly been the experience of a lifetime helping Uber become the fastest growing company of all-time — spanning 75 countries with over 14,000 employees.

I am proud of our business team’s part in contributing to the company’s overall success. We have fueled our growth by raising more money than any other tech company in history; we completed one of the most valuable mergers in American/Chinese tech history with the Didi deal; and we have secured ground-breaking partnerships with automobile companies all over the world to support our autonomous vehicle efforts.

But I am most proud of the quality of the team we have built. Beginning with my first day at Uber, I have been committed to building a diverse Business Team that would be widely recognized as the best in the technology world: one that is welcoming to people of all genders, sexual orientations, national origins and educational backgrounds. I am proud that our group has made so much progress toward these goals and is a leader in the company in many of these categories. As an Egyptian immigrant who was taken under the wing of a great business leader like Bill Campbell, I have an abiding belief that we all should pay it forward by ensuring that our workplace represents all types of people.

Uber has a long way to go to achieve all that it can and I am looking forward to seeing what you accomplish in the years ahead.

Sincerely,

Emil

What happens next, and why they may soon be “self-driving”

As a recent article on Medium put it, your company’s culture is who you hire, fire, and promote. Uber’s culture, by and large, is based around emulating its founder and CEO, whose future is now murky. As a tacit approver of all of Uber’s wrong-doings and the symbol of the worst kind of people in Silicon Valley, the only way he can elicit any sympathy right now is the result of bad luck: his mother was killed and his father was injured in a boating accident in late May.

The board has the option to fire him, but they probably won’t. Kalanick probably has too much useful tacit knowledge and understanding of Uber’s game plan to dismiss outright. They’ll probably make him take some time off — with the stated reason being that he needs to mourn his mother and take care of his father — and bring him back into the company in a new, less-public-facing role.

Here’s where Uber management stands at the moment:

• CEO: We’ll find out tomorrow.
• CBO: That was Emil Michael, who resigned today (or more likely, was “voluntold” to do so).
• COO: They’ve been looking for someone who can deal with Kalanick.
• CFO: Gautam Gupta left at the end of May to join a startup.
• President, Technologies: Jeff Jones quit in March.
• SVP of Engineering: Amit Singhal resigned after it was found that he failed to disclose his real reason for elaving Google: allegations of sexual harassment.
• Chief Brand Officer: Apple Music marketing exec Bozoma Saint John joined just last week, which should make for an interesting first 90 days on the job.

That’s a lot of people not at the wheel, or as Hemal Shah put it on Twitter:

Uber no longer has a COO, CBO, CFO, CMO or SVP of Eng and may temporarily not have a CEO.

From autonomous cars…to autonomous company

— Hemal Shah (@hemal) June 12, 2017

Recommended reading

• Global Nerdy: What if we applied the “People don’t quit their jobs, they quit their BOSSES” maxim to Uber’s president’s resignation?
  
• Global Nerdy: The Uber story that everyone’s talking about right now, and some helpful background info
• Susan Fowler: Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber
• Fast Company: This is what cause Uber’s broken company culture

Here’s how you can delete your Uber account, courtesy of David Heinemeier Hansson:

And finally, here’s Cracked’s excellent video, Why Uber is Terrible: