Why 20% time is awesome and how to make it work.
One of the things I was most excited about when joining reevoo was the fact that thursday afternoons were “work on what you like time”. I spent the first 6 months using this time to bring my Ruby/Rails skills up to scratch, reading books or running code samples and gradually transitioned refactoring bits of the codebase that didn’t make sense or spiking on small features that I thought may be of use to our customers. Most of these features probably don’t exist any longer, some canned before they even hit the big time, and probably for the best. That’s not what matters though and I want to try and explain why.
Flexibility
Our thursday afternoons have since evolved somewhat, they are now thursday full days (ala Google 20% time). They are not an exact science though, they don’t have to happen on thursday and they don’t have to be a day. I think this flexibilty is an important part to ensuring that 20% time actually works for the company. If I don’t have an idea for something to work on this week, I’ll most likely carry on with a standard work week. When I do come up with what I think is a worthwhile project I might work on it for two days in a row. This flexibility means that spike can become a live feature.
Communcation
Isolating yourself and hacking away for day might not be the best way to approach 20% time. Speak with others in the company about your idea, there’s a good chance they might well have some valuable input. I’ve had cases recently where others in the company have created their own mock-ups for changes and tweaks and presenting them to me as ideas for 20%. This is great and shows a wider understanding of what 20% is about.
Resource
I’ve recently come to a milestone with one of my 20% time projects, it’s reached a logical conclusion and it’s due to be deployed to the live reevoo.com within hours of writing this. I’d estimate that I’ve spent 2 or 3 full days on it over the course of 2 months. I can’t take all the credit though! I’ve had usability input from our head of UX, photoshop mockups from our designer, SEO tips from our SEO consultants and some excellent UX tweaks from @GeorgeBrock (our resident javascript guru). All this has led to a much nicer end product than if I had gone at it alone.
Don’t be afraid
This is two-fold. Firstly don’t be afraid to show off your work to others. If you feel that the project is getting too big for 20% time, show it to your boss and try and get it scheduled in as a real project. If it’s something small and worthy don’t be afraid to push to make it live.
Also don’t be afraid to can your work, it’s a fact of like that sometimes things don’t pan out the way you envisioned. Chuck it away, you’ll learn something from the process.
Showcase
Recently the development team (well, @GeorgeBrock) gave a presentation to the rest of the company about what the development team had been working on during 20% time. It was a great presentation and it was awesome to see the excitement from the rest of the company for what we have been working on. Showcasing is important to engage others and helps to prove the worth of 20% time.
The Essence of Utah
This is one of my favorite photos from our American Road Trip. I think Ben managed to capture the very essence of the trip; that is of being in amazing places and climbing on incredible rock. This shot was taken at Big Bend, Moab in Utah.
Could spam email help me win big at the Casino?
I was clearing out spam from my inbox, and one email caught my eye:
yo mate, ok I`ll give you my trick…
you know in roulette you can bet on blacks or reds. If you bet $1 on black and it goes black you win $1 but
if it goes red you lose your $1.
So I found a way you can win everytime:
bet $1 on black if it goes black you win $1
now again bet $1 on black, if it goes red bet $3 on black, if it goes red again bet $8 on black,
if red again bet $20 on black, red again bet $52 on black (always multiple you previous lost bet around 2.5)
if now is black you win $52 so you have $104 and you bet:
$1 + $3 + $8 + $20 + $52 = $84 So you just won $20 :)
now when you won you start with $1 on blacks again etc etc. its always bound to go black
eventually (it`s 50/50) so that way you eventually always win. But there`s a catch. If you
start winning too much (like $1000 a day) casino will finally notice something and can ban
you. I was banned once on royal casino. So don`t be too greedy and don`t win more then $200
a day and you can do it for years. I think bigger casinos know that trick so I play for real
money on smaller ones, right now I play on elite world casino: <link removed> for more
then 3 months, I win $50-$200 a day and my account still works. <snip>
Obviously to good to be true right? My presumption was that the exponential growth of the bets you would need to place would soon exceed the maximum bet of the table (and the balance of your bank account).
I decided to code up a simulation to get an idea whether it really is possible to win big using this method. Firstly I knocked up a quick and dirty Roulette spin simulator http://gist.github.com/169004 it’s a bit more verbose that it needs to be, but what the hell.
Test 1
My first test wasn’t so successful, I had made the assumption that there was no maximum bet and that if you had a win, the next bet would still be 2.5 times the previous bet. I also set an initial bank of £2000 and the algorithm won’t let you bet above your bank balance. I ran 1000 iterations of this betting pattern and the results are as follows:
Number of Wins(e.g. make a profit): 338
Number of Losses(e.g. lose money): 662
Average win: -£8
In summary, your odds of winning are 33% and long-term you don’t stand to make any profit.
The code for this pattern is here: http://gist.github.com/169045
Test 2
As per the previous test but this time introducing a betting limit of £500
Results:
Number of Wins(e.g. make a profit): 484
Number of Losses(e.g. lose money): 516
Average win: -£24
As you can see, this brings your odds back to around 50%, but the long-term wins are still effectively zero.
The code for this pattern is here: http://gist.github.com/169048
Test 3
So how about if every time we win, we reset our bet to £1? Would this yield different results. I kept the bank at £2000 and the betting limit at £500 (although instead of quitting when hitting the betting limit we reset our bet to £1). Also as we’ll often be making small bets with this method, I added a limit of 100 bets per iteration.
The results were quite interesting:
Number of Wins(e.g. make a profit): 887
Number of Losses(e.g. lose money): 113
Average win: -£21
So you now have an 88% chance of winning! That’s great, right? Well no. The average win is quite telling in this scenario. Although you have a really good chance of winning, you stand to win only a small amount and you will often have to make large bets. Below is a sample of winning amounts (remember these are after 100 spins of the wheel):
£163, £90, £145, £248, £160, £140, £186, £95
Compare these to the below sample of losing amounts:
£1865, £1980, £1922, £1961 - you get the idea!
The code for this pattern is here: http://gist.github.com/169059
In summary the losses that you are going to make will pretty much wipe out any profits and therein lies the problem. With the method you are forced into making big bets and you are going to reach point where you either reach the limit of the table or your bank balance.
So when the spammer says he makes $50-$200 dollars a day, he could well be - most days. However every week or so, he’s going to lose $2000. I for one, have no sympathy.
Hacking the morning.
I usually wake up around 6am, it’s easy in the summer months but it’s hard in the winter, so in January I bought a Philips Wake-up Light. For those of you that haven’t come across these types of light, they are designed to wake you up gradually by simulating the dawn sunrise using a powerful bulb. They are fairly expensive, retailing for around £100 ($140), though there are other models around for less.
So does it work? in a word: Definitely. I’m often awoken way before the light reaches it’s full intensity (which happens over a period of 15 minutes). It’s also feels like a natural wake-up making a normal clock radio seem like a bucket-of-cold-water-over-face in comparison. However after a particularly late night, the light doesn’t quite get my eyes to flicker open, the wake-up light has a backup plan though. Birdsong. Once the light reaches it’s full intensity, a birdsong soundtrack gradually fades in until it’s like being asleep in an aviary. If that doesn’t wake you, you’re probably dead.
It’s been a great purchase. There are however a few minor cons. Firstly the light unit requires a 100w incandescent bulb, they no longer sell incandescent bulbs in the UK so I had to buy a batch on eBay. Secondly it’s not really suitable for couples on different schedules.
You Know my Name by The Dialect Crew
Truncation
It’s hard to sensibly truncate HTML text, it messes with the tags. There aren’t any good solutions out there either.
Hmmm.
I was an Athiest until I discovered Alvism in 2008.
El Capitan, taken with my Holga.
