Gilroy Was Here

Tomorrow is my last day at United Health Group. I thought it would be appropriate for me to write a little diddy on the things I enjoyed about working there.

10. I learned a great deal about the health insurance industry.
9. The pay was pretty good.
8. This was my first introduction to TeamTrack and other Serena Inc. tools.
7. I got a great deal of experience in evaluating different development tools.
6. I learned a fair amount about Anthill Pro, IBM Websphere, and Mercury ITG.
5. I learned a great deal more about Ant.
4. This was my first real introduction to working with Java2 Enterprise Edition.
3. I learned the ins and outs of Subversion.
2. The company was progressive in allowing it’s employees to telecommute.
1. I met allot of great people that I want to stay in contact with.

Keep an eye out tomorrow for my follow up post titled “Top Ten Things I Hated About Working at United Health Group”. I’ll probably wait until I’ve turned in my building key for that one ;)

If you’ve read this blog for awhile you know that I periodically struggle to reorganize it. I just never seem to be able to find a method of structuring it that I like. I have tried combinations of all of the following:

1. Keeping this a personal blog and creating separate blogs with separate addresses for other topics.
2. Keeping frankgilroy.com a single domain with sub-domains or separate directories for blogs on other topics.
3. Using a single blog at frankgilroy.com and attempting to organize by categories or tags for lots of different topics.

None of these seems to feel comfortable to me. I’ve decided on yet another new approach coinciding with my transition into a job where I feel I’ll be blogging more professionally.

As of today I’ve removed all of the extraneous “categories” from the blog. There are now only two categories: personal and professional. I’ve converted all previous categories to “tags” that will span both categories. In other words:

1. From this point forward there will be only two categroies: personal and professional. If you’d prefer to ignore one (hopefully not both) of these categories you can do so easily by using one of the following urls:

http://frankgilroy.com/category/personal/
http://frankgilroy.com/category/professional/

2. I will continue to tag content on a variety of subjects. Examples of tags are “google”, “running”, “nascar”, “photography”, etc. Some of these tags will span both the personal and professional categories, others will be specific to my personal or professional lives.

Eventually I’ll try and make it so that you can subscribe to one category or the other. In the mean time, let me know what you think about the new approach.

Wow, can you beleive it? I completely freaking missed June. June is gone. I didn’t even post anything on the blog in June. It was a very busy month. I’ve been quite productive in just about every aspect of life lately other than blogging. I guess something has to suffer eh?

Anyway, I have been working pretty hard on truly embracing my inner geek. You might say I’ve had a bit of an epiphany in the past month or so. For me to be happy with what I’m doing, I need to be doing technical things. I still have quite the knack for leadership roles but I find that when I spend the bulk of my time in these roles I start to get really itchy.

The other thing I’ve learned is that there really is a different and I think better way to “build a mousetrap” when it comes to software development. I’ve been doing quite a bit of research into companies that follow an Agile or Lean software development model. I’ve always had a feeling that these ways of developing software are better but I’ve never really been able to experience them first hand with people that are doing it right.

That is all about to change. I have been looking for an Agile software company for a few years. Most of the ones I’ve found up until this point were small startups that either couldn’t afford to pay me what I’m making or that needed somebody with more depth in writing code.

I had just about given up. I started to think that the only way I was going to be able to spend more time writing code was to start my own company. That is an effort I’m still working on and still has great promise but I think I’ve found a way to attack the problem from two fronts.

I have finally found a company where I can gain a great deal of exposure to Agile Software Development and where I can add value with my experience in Build Engineering and Configuration Management.

I have joined a software company that was recently acquired by Accenture and has been doing Agile development for 3+ years. I’ll be part of a Continuous Integration team where my responsibility will be to enhance and maintain the environment and tools developers use to develop.

I’ll be part of a Scrum team that maintains the source control, build management, and automated testing a code analysis tools. I think there will be a fair amount of coding and integration work to do and I’m really looking forward to it.

I truly beleive that an Agile environment will be much more conducive to actually learning more about writing software as opposed to learning more about writing documents about writing software. Wish me luck! If things turn out the way I hope you’ll start to see a much happier, healthier and geekier blogger in the weeks and months to come.

Below is the text of an ad I placed on Craigslist in Philadelphia today. Please feel free to provide feedback on the ad itself or what I’m trying to do. If you know of anyone who might be interested, please considering passing this ad along to them. Thanks!

Please read this ad carefully. This is not a typical ad soliciting applicants for employment.

My name is Frank Gilroy. On May 18, 2008, I decided to create a software company. I have been working in the field of software development, in various roles, for around 12 years and on that day I decided that there has to be a better way.

I want to create a software company that people actually want to work at. I want to create software products that people actually want to use. Would you like to join me?

Here’s the catch. I have no money, will have to continue working my full-time job, and have no other partners or co-founders. I do not want to take on investors because they will want to tell us how to run our company. I have also learned that while I’m very passionate about and good at coming up with ideas for applications, and providing the minimal amount of leadership and management necessary to run a development project, writing the code is not my strength.

So, in a nutshell, I’m looking for a very strong software developer to join me in this effort. I’m not sure how we’ll label this working relationship. We could choose to call ourselves partners, co-founders or even employer/employee. That is a decision we will make together.

I have lots of ideas for the way this company will be self-organized but won’t bore you with those details until we get to know each other better. If you’re interested in getting to know me better and learn more about my vision for a new kind of a software company send me an e-mail at: theonlyone@frankgilroy.com

In the mean time, while you’re trying to decide whether to respond to my ad, or are waiting on a response from me, feel free to take a look at this following recommended reading:

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success-Behind-Unusual-Workplace
http://holacracy.org
http://frankgilroy.com

In compliance with posting guidelines on many popular job boards I will tell you that this position will provide monetary compensation, as soon as we figure out how to make money and distribute it in a fair, self-sustaining and equitable manner.

37Signals - There are lots of ideas I plan on stealing from this company. Most of them documented in their book Getting Real, required reading for potential co-founders by the way. Not the least of which is the idea of a 4 day work week. One of their employees wrote a post describing how they’ve been able to do it and actually increase output.

Google - I really like the idea of 20% time. If you’re not familiar with the idea, Google allows all of its employees to take 20% of their time and basically work on whatever they want. Or at least that’s my interpretation of some of the things I’ve read.

So basically a day a week or so you build a project or product that you hope to bring to market for the company. I don’t know what Google enforces any standards on these projects or not.

My thinking is that if I’m to adopt the idea I mentioned above from 37 signals, that in a way people can choose to either work 20% of their time on a project, or take their fifth day off.

Best Buy - Tim Ferris wrote a blog post today about Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). The basic idea is that employees are allowed to work whenever and wherever they want, as long as the work is getting done.

Ternary Software - Ternary is the pioneering company behind Holacracy. Holacracy is basically a fundamentally different way of making decisions and organizing a group of people. Once my company has 2 or more people, this is the process we’ll use to organize ourselves.

From what I can tell, Ternary has also successfully integrated Agile Software Development methods like Scrum and Extreme Programming into a software practice that has proven very successful. Ternary offers training on their methods.

As I mentioned a few days ago, one of the issues I am faced with in giving birth to a new software company is that I have no co-founders. Why do I need anyone else you ask?

Well, two thoughts come to mind on that. First of all, by definition, to have an “organization” you really need to have at least two people. I can’t really honestly call what I’m doing a company if there aren’t at least two of us.

Second, I don’t have all of the skills and talent necessary to create the company I want to create. I have filled the role of software engineer, but it’s not one of my strengths. I will need a very strong technical co-founder if I’m going to make a go of this.

Lastly, part of the reason I’m doing this is to have an impact on the world around me. I want to prove to the world that there is a better way to run a company and improve the lives of working people while I’m at it.

So here is a list of ways I’m brainstorming on, to come up with a good co-founder or two for my new software company.

1. Social Networks and Twitter - Of course one of the ways I plan to meet potential co-founders will be through the Internet. I will continue to network through sites like LinkedIn and others looking for like minded entrepreneurs. This blog post itself will immediately get posted Twitter as well and I invite any twitter followers who are interested to send me a note.

2. Professional Events - I’ve stepped up my participation with groups like Agile Philly in recent weeks. I will continue to network via local professional groups.

3. Corporate Events - Our local Chamber of Commerce hosts a sort of Business 101 meet-up monthly where you can learn more about how the Chamber can help you and meet entrepreneurs in the area.

4. Traditional Advertising - It’s occurred to me that it might make sense to post an add in some of the local newspapers. I personally get all of my news from the Internet these days, but that doesn’t mean there are some sharp people in the local area that use traditional means.

5. Web Based Advertising - I’ll definitely put an ad up on Craigslist and a few other free/cheap sites.

6. Previous Co-workers/Associates - I’ll plow through my current contacts list, newgroups, prior co-workers etc looking for help. Even if I don’t get any bites there, I may ask some of them to help me vet some of the potential applicants.

7. Current Friends - I can think of at least a couple of friends who might make good co-founders. I don’t want to screw up any friendships of course but this might be the best place to find a good match in terms of like values, etc.

8. Family Members - I can think of at least one family member who knows a great deal about business and has an entrepreneurial streak, this of course could also be ugly, mixing business and family.

9. Attend Classes - I’ve been attending some workshops and seminars lately and made some good contacts but it occurs to me that getting involved with some local colleges might also be a good idea. There is bound to be a higher number of less “risk adverse” people there.

10. Current co-workers - Being in a more IT and less engineering or academic oriented organization now, I can’t currently think of any potential co-workers, but I’m keeping my eyes and ear open.

11. Reality Show - Now for a couple of strange ideas. It has occurred to me that it might be interesting to turn this process itself into a unique marketing idea. I could gain followers for the company itself before even having a product or service to offer by making a public “game” out of finding my co-founders.

12. Approach in like Dating - Again, a little off the wall, but it occurs to me that I could approach this a little like dating. Get setup with some blind “dates” with potential co-founders, try each other on for size utilizing a series of small consulting gigs or open source projects and take it from there.

That’s about all I have for now. I plan to try and start building a pipe-line of potential candidates with the idea of weeding it down to one or two. The remaining folks, if interested would serve on a sort of board of advisers. If anyone out there has any other ideas for finding potential co-founders, let me know.