The Evolution of today’s enterprise applications

Enterprises are changing the way they deliver their services, build their enterprise IT architectures and select and deploy their computing systems. These changes are needed, not just to stay current with technology, but also to enable businesses to innovate and grow and surpass their competitors.

In the old days, corporate IT departments built networks and data centers that supported computing monocultures of servers, desktops and routers, all of which was owned, specified, and maintained by the company. Those days are over, and now how you deploy your technologies is critical, what one writer calls “the post-cloud future.” Now we have companies who deliver their IT infrastructure completely from the cloud and don’t own much of anything. IT has moved to being more of a renter than a real estate baron. The raised-floor data center has given way to just a pipe connecting a corporation to the Internet. At the same time, the typical endpoint computing device has gone from a desktop or laptop computer to a tablet or smartphone, often purchased by the end user, who expects his or her IT department to support this choice. The actual device itself has become almost irrelevant, whatever its operating system and form factor.

At the same time, the typical enterprise application has evolved from something that was tested and assembled by an IT department to something that can readily be downloaded and installed at will. This frees IT departments from having to invest time in their “nanny state” approach in tracking which users are running what applications on which endpoints. Instead, they can use these staffers to improve their apps and benefit their business directly. The days when users had to wait on their IT departments to finish a requirements analysis study or go through a lengthy approvals process are firmly in the past. Today, users want their apps here and now. Forget about months: minutes count!

There are big implications for today’s IT departments. To make this new era of on-demand IT work, businesses have to change the way they deliver IT services. They need to make use of some if not all of the following elements:

  • Applications now have Web-front ends, and can be accessed anywhere with a smartphone and a browser. This also means acknowledging that the workday is now 24×7, and users will work with whatever device and whenever and wherever they feel the most productive.
  • Applications have intuitive interfaces: no manuals or training should be necessary. Users don’t want to wait on their IT department for their apps to be activated, on-boarded, installed, or supported.
  • Network latency matters a lot. Users need the fastest possible response times and are going to be running their apps across the globe. IT has to design their Internet access accordingly.
  • Security is built into each app, rather than by defining and protecting a network perimeter.
  • IT staffs will have to evolve away from installing servers and towards managing integrations, provisioning services and negotiating vendor relationships. They will have to examine business processes from a wider lens and understand how their collection of apps will play in this new arena.

 

Welcome to the world of API-first vendors

The latest development to happen with the cloud is what is called API-first or API-based SaaS companies. What this means in layman’s terms is a service that set up to just connect something with something else using well-documented interfaces. It is hard enough to understand what a cloud-based vendor is selling, but generally there is some physical comparison: a disk drive (Dropbox), an email server (Gmail), a word processor (Office 365) or whatnot. But an API-first vendor is almost like selling a package of air. To give you a better idea, here are some examples of these API-first companies:

  • Contentful, which offers an API-based content management system
  • Chartmogul, which has an API for web-based charts
  • Stripe.com’s Atlas has an API-based Internet payments system
  • 18F, a division of the US Government’s General Services Administration, has developed a series of digital services and APIs so that others can access various federally-based data sources
  • Tray.io, who is building various connectors to different web services using a drag-and-drop drawing canvas
  • Bitwage, which offers banking APIs so companies can pay their employees in Bitcoin. (They have been a “traditional” SaaS vendor, adding this API layer to their existing offerings.)

This last example brings up an important point. The truest API-first companies are those that started out with putting together a great API, without regard for an eventual or legacy product or SaaS offering.

These API-first companies are another degree removed from any physical reality, but it is a cool idea nonetheless. Patricio Robles at the Programmable Web was the first that I found to write about this a few years ago here.  But they have begun to become more common, and add to what you could call meta-API vendors, such as Mashery and Apigee, both of whom offer API management functions and analytics for API-first companies and developers. And there are API marketplaces that have sprung up over the years, including ones from Microsoft Azure, Infochimps and others. These latter places will sell access to particular data feeds that you can incorporate into your own apps.

API-first companies all share several common elements:

  • They have no user interface. The idea is for their customers to build their own UI and differentiate based on this value-add.
  • You interact with their product or service via something web-based.
  • The best API-first companies take the effort to show developers how to become productive within minutes of first use. More on that in a moment.
  • Their inherent value is based on their API set. Once you understand this, it is easier to see what they are offering.
  • On the other hand, there is less to visually demonstrate about the product, so it can be difficult to explain to potential customers. And the sales cycle is longer, since a company has to convince both the resident nerd and management staff about the worthiness of the product.
  • Pricing is typically usage-based, such as the number of requests to their APIs.

Back in the day (say five years ago), when you built some whizzy consumer tech company, you built the whizzy thing first and worried about the APIs later when you had gobs of data that other folks wanted to get access to. Witness Foursquare, which was a darling for a brief moment of time, but now they want to leverage all their data via their API to track commuting routes or popular nightspots or other things in their vast database. But what is happening more and more, as Robles says, is “APIs are designed, implemented and documented before the application that will consume them even exists.”

I first came across one of these with Twilio, which plans to go public this year. That is an incredible statement in and of itself, since imagine explaining what an API-first strategy to your average VC: it could easily be a plot point on “Silicon Valley” (the TV show). Twilio now runs major infrastructure for Coca Cola, Uber and EMC, among others. Their idea is to put an API in front of the switched phone network, so your programs could have access to making calls.

About that part about being productive out of the gate. This is a key aspect of this class of products. As I said, the idea is that you want your APIs to connect something to something else. The more integrations of various services you supply, the easier it will be for developers to build these bridges between their program and an existing SaaS product. This is what Contentful did: they have a variety of integrations with existing content management products, such as WordPress and Joomla, so you can import your existing blog posts and images and make use of them within minutes of signing up for their platform. This means an API-first company has to invest time in a solid knowledge base, lots of programming samples, and installation guides to make sure their potential developer customers can figure out how to use their APIs.

Chartmogul had a post here about how few apps will be built completely from scratch in the future. Companies will be able to launch faster, add new functionality easier, evaluate their costs more predictably, and scale more reliability.

Want to join in? There is now an entire website, naturally, to help you get started. Welcome to this brave new world!

Box turns the API world inside-out

You might not have seen the news last week from Box, the online storage service. There are two items. First is about Box’s new developer edition, announced at its annual conference. What is significant is that this is the first time, to my knowledge, that a software developer has made it easier to embed its app inside other apps. Let’s see what they did and why it is important.

Many software vendors have spent time developing application programming interfaces or APIs that make it easier for third parties to have access to their apps or data that they collect. These days it is hard to find a vendor that doesn’t offer an API, and Box has done a terrific job with its own APIs to be sure. They have created a developer community of tens of thousands of people who write programs using them.

These programs make it easy to fax a document from within Box via an Internet faxing service, add digital signatures inside a document, make small changes to a document, and so forth. The idea is to manipulate a document that is inside the Box cloud storage system, so that their cloud can become more valuable than the dozens or hundreds of other cloud-based storage providers that are available. Without access to its APIs, a third party has to first move the document out of Box, make these changes, and then move it back to its repository. That takes time and uses computer resources.

But the developer edition turns this notion on its head, or should I say goes inside the Box. What they are trying to do now is allow apps to use a set of Box features, but doing so inside your own app. Instead of accessing APIs so you can manipulate particular documents, you can make use of Box’s security routines, or storage routines, or other basic functionality, so that you don’t need to invent this functionality from scratch for your own particular app. What are some of the features that are offered? According to the announcement, these include: “full text search, content encryption, advanced permissions, secure collaboration, and compliance.” That is a lot of stuff that an independent software developer doesn’t have mess with, which means that new apps could be written more quickly.

On top of the developer edition, Box also announced its own Javascript libraries that anyone can use to get started on coding some of these features, called T3. They had posted a few snippets of code on this website showing you how you can construct a Todo list. While JS frameworks are numerous, this one might be interesting, particularly in light of the developer announcement.

Certainly, online storage is undergoing its own evolutionary moment. Google is now charging a penny a GB per month for near-line storage, promising to retrieve your files in seconds. Of course, they and other cloud providers are (so far) just a repository, and that is the line in the cloud that Box is trying to draw with these announcements.

If it all works out, we’ll see Box become the center of a new universe of apps that can take collaboration to the next level, because the folks at Box have already built a collaboration environment that they use for their own customers. It is gutsy, because a Box-like competitor could make use of these features and out-Box Box (which is one reason that Box will control who has access to its tools for now).

It could backfire: developers are a funny bunch, and many of them like reusing someone else’s code but maybe not to the level that Box requires. It certainly is a different model, and one that will take some getting used to. But the proof is in the pudding, and we’ll see in the coming months if anyone’s code turns out to be noteworthy.

The cashless customer is now king

I wanted to bring in my winter coat to the cleaners (maybe optimistically a week or so too soon) and in cleaning out the various pockets I came across some cash and a receipt dated last December. I thought about how long it has been since I have actually used cash.

What a difference from my dad’s world. My dad dealt with millions of dollars every day as a comptroller and always carried a wad of cash worthy of a mafia don. I still have his money clip somewhere. I put the few bills on my desk as a reminder and then thought about how the world has changed. Paying in cash is certainly becoming less common.

Most of my customers still pay me with paper or electronic checks, a few go through Paypal and every once in a while I get asked to accept credit cards. Now there are so many options for accepting Internet payments and two good ones that you might not know about. One is Simplify.com, which is part of MasterCard and has done a lot of work in developing their payment gateway. The other is Stripe.com. Both charge a bit less than 3% per transaction but have no other recurring fees. That is a lot less compared to just a few years ago, when you had to pay monthly processing and other annoying fees to have a merchant account. Stripe even accepts non-dollar currencies, including Bitcoins, and converts them into dollars for you.

aaa2Both Stripe and Simplify offer a variety of APIs, tools, code samples, and connectors to various payment-related apps. I like the way Simplify arranges its code samples, as you can see in this screenshot.

Stripe has more third-party plug-ins than Simplify, including more than a dozen just for WordPress. Both offer documentation on webhooks, which are URLs that can interact with short pieces of code for particular event notifications, although I think Stripe has better documentation. Both also support OAuth for consolidated signons to other SaaS apps without having to store your credentials. Finally, both can operate in either a testing or sandbox mode so you can try various things out, and then go live with actually processing real transactions.

We have come a long way with online payments to be sure. Both services allow you to build in payment processing to your website in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago. I think my dad would be just as amazed as I am.

ITWorld: What is the value of a data dashboard?

When it comes to convincing your boss of the value of a data dashboard, nothing works better than when you can save some dollars as a result of a trend that you visualized. This is what one of the data-driven marketing staff did for the Texas Rangers baseball team; their dashboard saved about $45,000 in annual costs.

 

The Rangers are big fans of data dashboards, and they should be: dashboards can spot trends, communicate a particular position to management, or call out trouble spots while you can still doing something about it. I heard from Sarah Stone, who is the marketing and advertising manager for the team and also a Big Data junkie.

 

Stone gave a talk at the annual Tableau Software user conference held earlier this month near their Seattle headquarters; I also met with her separately to get more information about her situation. She told me that she was new to the team’s front office (as they call the folks who don’t actually get into uniforms) and was looking to support one of her colleagues who were involved in a discussion with one of their long-time contractors. Their contract was up for renewal and thanks to Stone’s help they were able to produce a visualization that was used to shave off $45k from the contract. This was a great example of how data science could be used to benefit other marketing and sales efforts.

 

Tableau Software is big into dashboards and I came across many of them during their conference. One issue is that they can easily overpower management, who may be used to squinting at a series of spreadsheet figures. “The first time you show your boss a visualization can almost be a magical moment, it can really reveal things in your data that weren’t very obvious before,” said a data analyst at a Defense Department contractor I met at the conference. At another session, Vaidy Krishnan, an analyst from General Electric’s Measurement and Control group said, “Dashboards are just a starting point for a discussion. You can’t get everything right out of the gate but using them helps you ask critical questions.”

 

Stone is the person who has to decide on television and other media advertising buys for the baseball team and has to spend wisely: she needs to know which games are selling slowly, or what kind of ticket buyers are likely to come to which games. To do this, she uses Tableau Software’s tools and connects to several public and private data sources to produce her visualizations.

 

For example, she wanted to see whether the Dallas market was saturated with professional sports teams and used census data to compare the raw number of seats for each metropolitan market. Not surprisingly, St. Louis (as shown below) showed lots of rabid sports fans (something that I can attest to, after living there for several years) while Dallas still had room to grow.

 

Another analysis looked at how they could save money on their corporate cell phone bills. She was able to find several staffers who were frequently on scouting trips out of the country, and try to adjust their plan to handle more international minute usage. “We also saw a spike in the bills during August but then figured out that was when the whole team was in Toronto for a series of games, so it made sense.”

 

Her work on tracking ticket sales is an example of how a typical Big Data analysis session goes. Often, you don’t know what questions to ask or how to go about collecting the data that you’ll need for your analysis. At the conference, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, gave one of the keynotes where said the “really difficult thing was formulating questions that we are currently too stupid to ask now, let alone understand the answers to.” He gave as an example if someone from the 1700s were to try to figure out when the next asteroid would hit the Earth. No one from that era would have even asked such a question.

 

Stone admits that she often will run several queries and create several different data dashboards before she figures out what she is trying to accomplish. This is very typical behavior in the Big Data world. She is in the process of putting together an interactive seating chart of their stadium, showing characteristics of which seats were purchased by season ticket holders, what concession sales happened on particular games, and whether promotions or team performance helps to fill seats.

 

Not surprisingly, all those bobble-head doll giveaways do drive ticket sales. “And a post-season win translates into three seasons of subsequent increased sales,” she told me. Some of the data is downloaded from StubHub, the secondary ticketing retailer that Major League Baseball helped start. She is also working with the local Southern Methodist University business school students as interns to help integrate regression models based on R.

 

“Our sales department knows what they are doing when it comes to selling tickets, but when it comes to looking more globally at this process and how it coincidences with other variables such as team performance or the weather, they need help.”  For example, her analysis can predict attendance so the team can better staff the stadium for more crowded games.

 

Before she started, the marketing department had to make frequent requests for reports from the box office, and these reports didn’t reflect real time sales either. “Producing real-time, holistic visualizations is the holy grail. We’ve always been able to obtain real time data, but it hasn’t been all that accessible and only a few people could gather that information,” she told me. “Our seat inventory is very perishable, and if I can design a discount program or arrange for an ad media buy for the next day’s game, it can have a big impact. Having a stale report doesn’t really help if you are trying to move thousands of tickets. We need to know how sales are trending because once the game is over, we can’t sell those tickets anymore.”

Ironically, when she started with the Rangers last year, Stone knew virtually nothing about baseball—she jokes that she didn’t even know the difference between an out and a hit then. (Now her game knowledge has improved to the point where she accurately scores each game she watches.) She came to the Rangers from another competitive landscape: professional politics, where she used data analytics to help focus media buys and to track what the other candidates were doing. “Really, politics and baseball are very similar,” she told me. “Both marketing groups have no control over the quality of the product you are promoting and you still have to get people to either come out to vote or to go to the game. Data is still data.”

Everyone is in the software business

Everyone is in the software business You may not know it, but you are in the software business, no matter what your actual business may appear to be. It doesn’t matter what you produce, whether you are a “bricks and mortar” retailer or a “guys in trucks” distributor, software is where you are going to end up.

virgin-america-logo-1Why is everyone in the software business? Simply because software is become the lifeblood of so many decisions on what a business makes, how it is sold, and how customers are kept happy. All the interesting business operations are happening inside your company’s software. Software is where you can find out if your customers are going elsewhere, if your profits are coming from some new markets, and if your employees are helping or hurting your overall reputation.

As an example, the airline Virgin America has billions of dollars invested in planes and the people that fly them, but their brand lives and thrives based on their mobile and web experience. That experience is all because of the airline’s booking software, and understanding what is happening with that software will make the difference between success and failure for the airline.

Take as another example a national food service distributor. Their business is getting food into trucks, and then getting those trucks to restaurants and other institutional caterers and retail kitchens. The company has had an ecommerce business for the past decade, and a pretty significant one at that. But lately their customers have been shifting their emphasis from calling their sales representatives with the weekly orders and wanting to do more online. The distributor needed to scale up their online business, and also be more data-driven. Rather than letting their truck drivers or regional offices make decisions about distribution, they wanted a single view of their business, and use the changes in their orders and other data to fine-tune their deliveries. This food distributor is now firmly into the software business.

What is driving everyone to software? Several things.

  • The cloud. The days where you had to build your own servers and data centers are over. Post Holdings is probably the largest cloud-only company, and their revenues are in the billions.
  • Everyone wants an online storefront. Just like the food distributor, even the most basic industries are finding out there is value is selling their stuff online.
  • Big Data is getting more familiar. You can now find Hadoop clusters in many traditional Fortune 500 companies. The IT staffers at the giant retailer Sears eventually spun off a side business in helping others get started with Big Data.
  •  Customer experience is king. One way that businesses can differentiate themselves is by paying attention to their customers. This isn’t anything new: Nordstrom’s department stores have been doing this for decades. What is new is a range of software tools to help figure this stuff out.

I will have more to say about this topic, right now I am working on a white paper for a client that will dive into this deeper. Check back here in the fall when I can post a link to it.

New Relic: 10 Things Non-Developers Love To Say To Developers

Do you sometimes have difficulty talking to your non-technical clients, coworkers, and bosses? Do they continually say things to you that just don’t make any sense? Do they ask for the completely impossible as if they’re ordering a cup of coffee? Do they demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of what they’re talking about?

If you answered, yes, to any of these questions, don’t worry—you’re not alone. I have a lot more to say about this. You can read my post in New Relic’s blog here.

Quickbase blog: Time to end spreadsheet abuse

What software do you use for formatting a resume, running a presentation, a rudimentary word processor, drawing pictures of their network infrastructure connections, a simple database or drawing a map? By now you have probably guessed: a spreadsheet. (The presentation used a separate worksheet for each slide.)

Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented the lowly electronic spreadsheet with VisiCalc for the Apple II in 1979. It is amazing that it has come to have such a long and fruitful life – and dare we say so abused too. I remember my first time with VisiCalc back then. I thought I had died and gone to digital heaven: it was my go-to mathematical modeling tool, calculator, and general analysis workbench. Looks like many of you have had similar circumstances.

Part of the allure of the spreadsheet is that it can be so useful, even in situations where we have a lot more appropriate software and collaboration tools (such as Quickbase). A good example comes from the early days of Trek bicycles. Their product team would hold status meetings two to three times per week, during which the team assembled in a conference room and via phone would update project spreadsheets one line item at a time. That has got to be one of the most painful ways to collaborate. I guess this was before the Internet was in wide use.

I always knew that spreadsheets were the go-to database program for those who were confounded by SQL or Access or even Filemaker to put in rows of information and organize them. I guess it is a testimonial to the power of the spreadsheet that so many databases were built using them over the years. Here is one that might tickle your, ahem, fancy. A talent agency that books exotic dancers uses a spreadsheet to schedule the dancers and track customer complaints. Customers who are blacklisted (the mind boggles at what the reasons could be to get you on this list) and who require “special skills” of each dancer are also catalogued in separate columns of the spreadsheet. Nice to know.

But databases aren’t their only use or abuse. Just as I was fascinated by those early spreadsheets, many of you have come to use them in more interesting ways. A few years ago I asked my readers on ReadWrite.com to tell me their favorite spreadsheet abuse stories. One reader wrote that he used a spreadsheet’s “formulas to write web page HTML, where I had a lot of data that needed to go in a repeating template.” Again, that seems excessive to me. Another one wrote in: “One retail store HQ I worked for used it to print price tags for furniture since you could create a consistent layout. The buyers also used it as a word processor since they didn’t know how to use Word.”

That seemed to be a common thread. I remember one colleague back in the early days using it as his only word processor, and putting in an entire line of text in each cell. It made for formatting challenges when it came time to edit this “document,” to be sure.

But spreadsheet abuse doesn’t have to happen, particularly if you use an online tool such as Quickbase or one of its competitors. This adds the collaboration component and extends its usefulness beyond mere rows and columns into something more powerful and sharable. Indeed, many people have built some great pieces of software with online spreadsheets, such as:

  • Customized CRM/sales management apps
  • Operations, inventory or logistics tracking tools
  • Customer service and support
  • Marketing and project managers 

For example, one collegiate football team uses their spreadsheet as an application for recruiting high school football players. Scouts use tables to track data for prospects such as height, weight, stats and SAT scores. The information is shared among the front office team management and continually updated as they roam around the country looking for talent. That isn’t spreadsheet abuse, but just darned clever. So think the next time you are about to build the world’s greatest spreadsheet of your own, and maybe start your app with an online version first.

ITWorld: An introduction to A/B testing

A/B testing is like many things that can be vexing about the Web: a simple concept can turn into a complex programming project. But while the idea is simple — producing two (or more) different webpages for your site and instrument them to see which one drives more traffic or more sales – getting it to work can be fraught with politics and the actual implementation details.

 

Why bother? Mainly because there is almost nothing else that you can do that can have such a big effect. Just by changing the text size or button color you can generate a 50% increase in click through rates, which is what one of Denmark airports found with their website when they swapped out text that said “Shop Online” to “Buy Tax Free.”

A/B testing isn’t new: magazine publishers have experimented with various cover layouts and images to determine what sells best on newsstands. But it still may be new to your IT department, or your management, and it is high time to get started with the process. Many modern websites still squander their home page real estate, filling up the page with blank spaces or on things users ignore: filler, self-promos and ads. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen recommends to “cut the fluff and spend the pixels on design elements of interest to users — mainly content, but also navigation.”

So we’ve put together some basic tips, and this slideshow showing you what worked in the past for major ecommerce retailers, and some suggestions on potential ways to attack your first testing project.

Your first challenge is all about politics, and who owns which portion of your website that you are trying to improve. “Sometimes a chief marketing officer loses track of what their customers are buying, and having A/B tests reconnects customers with the company,” said Brooks Bell, head of a testing firm that bears her name. (I met her at a trade show earlier in November.) But instead of picking the CMO or another executive, it might be better in the long term to find someone at the bottom of the food chain looking to shine. One of Bell’s earliest projects was such an individual who didn’t have any staff or much budget for testing. As a result of what they found and the bottom-line benefits they produced, “the manager now has a staff of ten and is training other groups within the corporation to do other testing, and was promoted to a director level position that is now very influential and visible within the organization.” So A/B tests can be a way to advance your own career too!

But you also want to be careful that your design is far enough alone where the testing can be useful. User experience expert Danielle Cooley says, “A/B testing is great when you’re trying to determine if a specific detail should be one way or the other, such as should a call to action button be orange or green? But it doesn’t help much early in the design process, or that you still need to have a sensible workflow and solid page design.”

Once you have found your testing champion, your next challenge is purely technical: what kind of testing platform are you going to use and whether you choose someone in-house or a consultant such as Bell, Wingify, Monetate or the dozens of others who ply this trade. You might want to designate a couple of your technical staff and give them a week and the necessary training to get up to speed on the topic, and let them find the right tool for their work. Keep in mind that you don’t just want a coder: you want to build a longer-lasting team to conduct and interpret the tests. “You need lots of talented people to be able to ask the right questions and interpret the insights from the data that you collect, [along with] skilled analysts and marketing people to fully realize your changes,” said Bell. “We typically use a war room where we have all the stakeholders present and brainstorm on the best strategies.”

But if you do look outside, most of the consultants have pretty convincing stories about the amount of dough they have saved their clients over the years or the power of their approaches, so it can be hard to evaluate them.

Finally, you have to keep it going. Testing is a process, not a destination. One part of the challenge with testing is being able to scale your testing effort up as word gets out around the company about your results. Another is that the best IT shops know that they have to frequently make changes to their sites to stay fresh and appeal to new eyeballs. No one is better than this than Intuit, makers of QuickBooks.

Matthew Heusser, Managing Principal for Excelon Development saw when he visited their offices how two interface designs are rolled out for a month and statistics are gathered to decide on which one is ultimately deployed. These tests have helped Intuit weather numerous changes over the years to keep their product fresh. As he writes, “The amazing thing about Intuit is that it has already survived three major market shifts, from DOS to Windows, Windows to the Web, and now the conversion to Social/Mobile products.” That is a lot of history.

Here are some final words of wisdom from Bell: “There is always something that an A/B test misses, even with the best of intentions and careful planning. So if get stuck, think about redoing your tests with a different segmentation of your audience, or with a different focus. There is no single best testing option. Just because you can measure something in a test doesn’t mean you should do it. Think more strategically and long-term, and make sure your executives ultimately support what tests you are doing.”

There are dozens of A/B consultants, tools, and compendiums of tips and tricks.  Here are a few links to check out:

Robin Johnson, writing earlier this year in Optimizely, gives you 71 different ideas on things to test, including website copy, visual elements, and just plain common sense things such as whether you have a positive or negative spin on what you are trying to sell.

Uri Bar-Joseph, writing in SearchEngineWatch, has eight rules for A/B testing, including focusing on one variable, choosing your groups randomly and measuring the results carefully.

–And if you want to have some fun with A/B tests of the past, take a look at these 12 results that were somewhat counter-intuitive from WhichTestWon.com, a commercial A/B testing provider.

Smartbear blog: What all coders can learn from women in tech

At the 2013 Strangeloop tech conference in St. Louis, several women presenters gave important lessons that we all can use on how to become better coders. The conference had dozens of sessions on advanced programming languages along with tutorials given by some of the leading open source authors from around the world. Notable female speakers at the show included Jenny Finkel, one of the founders of Prismatic; Sarah Dutkiewicz, the owner of Cleveland Tech Consulting LLC; Jen Myers, the founder of the Chicago chapter of GirlDevelopIT.com and Parisa Tabriz, who runs the Chrome browser security team at Google.  There was a lot that all of us could learn from their talks.

Some points these various speakers made during the two-day conference:

Find a mentor that you can collaborate with. Most of the time when you hear advice about finding a mentor, you think the relationship is mostly one way: the mentor imparting wisdom to the mentee. But Dutkiewicz gave lots of great examples of how both parties learn from and inspire each other in more of a symbiotic relationship. She mentions Ada Lovelace, widely considered the first computer programmer, who worked closely with Charles Babbage on his Difference Engine in the 1840s and how both profited from the relationship.

Always be documenting your code. Lovelace also was the first to document her algorithms and this is a common theme throughout history where many female nerds were also helpful here. Dutkiewicz spoke about several women who were involved in the early ENIAC project in the 1940s, the first digital general-purpose computers that filled an entire room. The team had a major role in the project and included Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. They were responsible for documenting the programming used in the machine, including some of the main core programs. “These women began their careers by doing complex mathematical calculations of ballistic trajectories and were heavily involved in early Fortran and COBOL standards efforts,” said Dutkiewicz during her speech.

Role models count. Many women and minorities played important role models to inspire future generations of techies. Myers mentioned in her talk the role played by Nichelle Nichols, the actress who is better known as Lt. Uhura on the original 1960s-era Star Trek TV shows. While Myers reminded her audience “Star Trek isn’t real” (accompanied to many groans), Nichols had the first interracial on-screen kiss. She found out that she had a big fan in Dr. Martin Luther King, as she relates in this video clip where he tells her that Star Trek was the only TV show that he allowed his kids to watch:

You can’t be what you can’t see. One of Myers’ role models is the first American female astronaut Sally Ride, to whom she attributes this quote: “Young girls need to see role models in whatever career they choose, just so they can picture themselves doing those jobs someday.” Besides encouraging other women to choose technical careers, looking for role models is also a good way to widen your horizons and challenging the status quo, whatever it might be. Dutkiewicz mentioned this in her talk and pointed to Admiral Grace Hopper who also wasn’t afraid to challenge the existing predominantly male military at the time. Hopper of course went on to make many contributions to computer science, including building the first compiler and the beginnings of COBOL Hopper served as a goodwill ambassador in her later years, lecturing to many audiences and inspiring many women to enter tech fields.

Keep an open mind about your career. Dutkiewicz mentioned another aspect of challenging the status quo is being open-minded about where your career will take you. Many of us have come to technical fields from some rather odd and non-technical places.  Myers spoke about the science fiction author Ray Bradbury who said, “We need this thing that makes us sit bolt upright when we are nine or ten [years old] and say, ‘I want to go out and devour the world, I want to do these things.'” Myers also mentioned how her programming classes are geared towards teaching her students how to learn about learning new things because the pace of innovation in software is too fast to keep courseware current. “I want to develop a bunch of world class beginners,” she said at her talk.

Don’t be embarrassed about bugs. Tabriz spoke about Google’s efforts, along with many other contributors from around the world, to track down and eliminate browser bugs in Chrome. Everyone’s code has them, and it is time we all accepted that fact. Over the years, Google has increased its bounty paid to documented bugs, including running a series of programming contests called Pwnium. One of the entrants is a teenaged programmer who has won $60,000 in two separate contests and who goes by the handle Pinkie Pie.

Finally, human growth is not a zero sum game: you need grow both intellectually and socially. Myers uses the example of the movie “The Social Network” where the Mark Zuckerberg character is quite a social misfit (she used a somewhat more pejorative word). “He is so smart that it doesn’t matter how he acts towards others, but that doesn’t have to be that way in real life.” She calls the movie the “Citizen Kane of programming movies,” and urges coders to look at all aspects of their lives, both professional and personal. Good words to live by, to be sure.