On Saturday my post on how not to ask questions at a conference was the number one post on the site for a solid six hours, between four and ten PM. Here are some raw stats from the last day.

• Since the post was submitted, I've gotten 31,787 pageviews to my site; 14,478 in the nine hours between post submission and midnight, and another 15k on Sunday. One post can bring in amazing amounts of traffic, and justify all of the effort you've put into creating quality blog content.

• In just the last two days I've gotten 50% as much traffic as I did in the whole previous year.

• Of those pageviews, 30,807 were for the article itself. 414 people visited my homepage (1 in 72 people) and 253 people visited my about page (1 in every 130).

• 8,142 visits (roughly 27%) came from mobile devices. I am really glad I added a mobile/responsive view for smaller screens earlier this year, as this makes the content much more consumable on a small screen.

• 69% of mobile visits (18% of the total) came from an iOS device.

• Roughly 10,000 clicks came from Hacker News and 8,700 came from the Programming subreddit, where my post is still on the frontpage a day and a half later. If your post is doing well on HN, it probably makes sense to submit it to Proggit as well, as there's a large contingent of people that use Proggit exclusively.

• 1,479 people have clicked on the aggregate Bit.ly link and 97 people have Tweeted the post (roughly 1 in 300).

• I added 18 Twitter followers (about 1 in every 1800 visitors), bumping my total to 418. I added one new Bitbucket follower and zero new newsletter subscribers.

• 23 people left comments on the post (about 1 in every 1300). 156 people left comments on Hacker News, off about 10k clicks, and ~160 people left comments on Reddit, off of 9k clicks.

I've posted my "conversion rate" in all cases because I don't feel like it's amazingly high. This is probably the nature of this sort of traffic though; there to read an article and learn something and then move on to the next thing. I suppose if I can reach the frontpage a few times in short succession, people may start to recognize my name and there would be a snowball effect, in terms of the number of people signing up to follow me or posting comments.

I don't have the tools in place at the moment to be able to test my "conversion rates" and see whether they can be improved. All in all though, the low rates at which people are clicking through to other material on my site suggests that I should put any information you'd like readers to know about yourself on the post view page, or in the footer of the post itself.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Via Tyler Cowen, an author from the Wall Street Journal interviewed the head of admissions at the Harvard Business School. The whole article is good, but this particular line stood out:

The best recommendations have a lot of verbs. They say, "She did this," versus adjectives that simply describe you.

I remember in 5th grade that we had to write Show Not Tell stories. The idea was to get out of the habit of writing "Kyle is in 3rd grade and he is really kind" - style stories and instead writing "When Joey's mom couldn't pick him up, Kyle walked him all the way home, even though it was two miles in the wrong direction."

I don't know why later teachers dropped the Show Not Tell agenda from the curriculum, but apparently people still write in this style. Maybe recommenders are lazy and it's easier to write "Shannon is a hard worker" than it is to come up with a concrete example. Maybe the recommender doesn't know the student very well, which is discussed in the article, and a problem.

The other possibility is that the person being recommended hasn't done anything interesting. It's easy to tell, because if you have done things, people tend to mention them when they're introducing you to someone, like "This is Jeff. Jeff wrote the entire billing system." You can also tell because the bullet points on your resume will have really bland verbs in them that don't really say anything, like "Developed marketing skills" or "Monitored social analytics tools for Company X".

One day you are going to have to wake up and decide to be Someone that Does Things. The World of Doing can be scary at first because there are lots of things that need to be done and no one is there to tell you how to do them.

So: what verbs to people use to describe you? Which of the versions below would you rather someone used to describe you?

• "He's really good at finding tips and tricks to save time."

• "He built a replacement for the school's calendar system and got 550 people to sign up."

• "She is a really fierce competitor."
• "She won the regional finals for her team by making free throws and getting a key steal in the final minutes."

• "She's a hard worker."
• "She rewrote the website to make it 100% faster, which boosted signups by 50%."

• "His code is always reliable."
• "While he was in charge, the API was down for a total of three minutes in two years."

Related: See Be Specific at Less Wrong.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

I went to Pycon last month (my first conference ever!) The conference was totally awesome and I met a lot of cool people. But I was also pretty appalled at the question asking at the end of each talk. Here's some stuff you should keep in mind before you ask a question at a conference.

• Ask questions that you believe would be relevant to at least a third of the people in the room. Otherwise, avoid the temptation to show off your specialized knowledge to the room and just ask the speaker afterwards. Most of them are approachable on Twitter, email, or just in the hallways.

• Ask only one question. If you have more than one question, pick the best and ask the other one in private later. Or ask your first question and then go to the back of the line. Other people have questions to ask as well and may not get to ask one.

• Avoid buzzword bingo. It feels like lots of people walk up to the microphone just so the room can hear them mention some buzzword that indicates they know something about the topic. If I am running a Scrum team should I use Soak testing? How does Node.js influence the development of the PyPy project? If you wouldn't ask the question without a room full of people present, then don't ask.

• Ask a question, don't make a comment. Talk time is for the speaker to be the expert, not you. Write up your comment as a blog post and post it for everyone to read later.

• Be brief. After a talk, time is precious and many people may have questions for the speaker, so don't ramble about how nice it is to finally see the speaker in person, or how enlightening the talk is, even if those things are true. It's a matter of courtesy to everyone else in the room.

There is an easy solution to bad questions that no one has bothered to implement yet. Have people submit questions anonymously and have the speaker or a moderator choose which ones to answer, or have the room vote using a tool like Google Moderator. This will solve the problem of the question asker-bragger asking a trivial question.

The other solution is to charge money to ask a question, which could go to whatever cause you want. If enough people in the room have the same question they can contribute to the fee to ask the question and have it asked.

Update: There's some good discussion on Hacker News. "If the question you're asking makes you look smart, there's a good chance you're being a douchebag."

Also my friend Alan Shreve wants to know if it's appropriate to push back if the speaker dodges your question.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Inspired by a great post on why college students choose consulting I decided to re-post my series of posts on consulting, written in 2008 when I was considering a career in consulting. I was also looking to write a more focused series of blog posts so a blog on consulting was a good fit. Not knowing anything about consulting at the time, I also thought it would help me get a consulting job. Ultimately I decided not to do consulting and doing the blog was part of the reason why.

I looked at why people hire consultants, whether consultants actually have value, why it's a good decision for you personally. Here's the full list of posts:

• Why consulting?

  Information transfers slowly; despite what economists say, firms aren't efficient and lots of times they can do things better. Consultants have expertise about how to improve management and become more efficient, and when this knowledge is shared/diffused to companies, everyone is better off.

• The evidence for evidence-based management

  The authors use evidence, and numerous case studies, to explain that financial incentive plans often don't work, developing a comprehensive long-term strategy isn't that important, most mergers only work under certain specific circumstances, and company culture can be more important than hiring the best workers. In each of these cases, studies have shown that the conventional wisdom is often wrong, and companies, schools or hospitals that implement evidence-based programs do better than those who don't.

• A disastrous tale from a young BCG consultant

  I got the feeling that our clients were simply trying to mimic successful businesses, and that as consultants, our earnings came from having the luck of being included in an elaborate cargo-cult ritual.

• What skills should you learn for a career in consulting?

  A lot of your job as a consultant is selling your services and acting knowledgeable. Many people are stuck in Dilbert-like situations and will look at you as a knight in shining armor. For this you’re going to need to be friendly, personable, and high status; you’re going to need to sell yourself as an Answer Guy.

• Is it true that to do the best work, you need to hire the best people?

  As Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer point out, it’s a myth that the best companies are best because they have the best people. Usually the best companies have great systems that bring out the best in people.

• Save the planet by hiring better managers

  A one standard-deviation increase in management correlates with a 38 percent increase in sales per employee...smaller firms with better management out-grow other small firms with bad management...better management is associated with improved health care outcomes, employee satisfaction, and energy efficiency...Managers are not well informed about how good their own management practices are and which areas need improvement.

  Another experiment by the same group took a random group of textile firms in India and provided them with free management consulting. Not only did performance grow in the firms provided the consulting, but they also said the reason that they didn't implement the changes sooner was because they were not aware of good management practices.

• Why firms don't experiment

  I've often tried to help companies do experiments, and usually I fail spectacularly. I remember one company that was having trouble getting its bonuses right. I suggested they do some experiments, or at least a survey. The HR staff said no, it was a miserable time in the company. Everyone was unhappy, and management didn't want to add to the trouble by messing with people’s bonuses merely for the sake of learning.

• What's the downside to hiring a consulting firm?

  There’s a selection bias at play...it’s likely that consultants provide firms with value in excess of the costs of hiring them. Smart firms realize this, and want to hire consultants. But because they’re smart firms, they’re probably ahead of the curve and consultants can only provide them with limited amounts of profitable advice. The firms that need consultants the most are unlikely to hire them.

• Why do firms hire consultants?

  Consulting firms can reliably signal authority and intelligence; bosses may hire consultants to confirm that they’re correct. To cite one recent example, the US Postal Service hired two consulting firms so that they could go to Congress and implement a restructuring plan.

• There's hope for consulting

  I have seen some serious analytical firepower (maybe not always with quite the rigor of an academic paper but for sure at several orders of magnitude the pace those are developed at) being thrown at what originally seemed like simple problems – generally things turn out to be neither simple nor elegant in the end. The art of the trade is to come up with a coherent story in light of that.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

Sometimes my friends ask this. I tell them "I can, but I probably won't."

The tech industry is an enlightened industry. Generally, employees are treated like adults and allowed to organize their days in a way that's productive for them. I usually wake up without an alarm, around 8:30 or 9, and I watch Liverpool games at the office if they're playing during the week. So if you ask me if I have to work tomorrow, the answer is No, I can take off work whenever I want. Another company that does this is Netflix, who lets its employees take as much vacation time as they want.

There's a flip side to this, of course, the reason that I usually show up for work instead of lounging around home in my PJ's watching Friday Night Lights. If I took enough days off work, eventually I'd develop a reputation as someone who didn't ship code. And maybe if someone else in the company wanted work done right, they'd turn to someone else instead. That's not a reputation that I want attached to my name.

It's not all stick, however. I also like showing up for work, making Twilio better and building an experience our users will be delighted with. And part of the reason I like it so much is because our company makes it a lot of fun.

So yes I watch soccer at work and have a beer at the end of the day and go on vacation a lot. But I also put in a lot of work; one day last week I showed up at ten, went home at seven and kept working until one. So I can take off work tomorrow if I want, but I probably won't.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

I've fought with Facebook for a long time. But I've quit for good now. Here are some reasons why I'm happy I don't have one:

• I don't have to worry about embarrassing photos later becoming public. I also don't have to worry about accidentally setting the wrong privacy settings or sharing things with the world that I probably shouldn't.

• I don't have to worry about Facebook selling my browser history. A short detour for the non-technical audience:

  • When you type in your username and password on a site, the site stores a small file on your computer, known as a cookie. 99% of sites on the Internet do this.
  • Then each time you load a new page on a site, your computer sends the cookie to the website as proof that you are you. This way you don't have to enter in your username and password every time you load a new page.

  Now here's what happens when you are logged in to Facebook, and you visit a page with a Like button:

  • Your computer requests the "Like" button content from Facebook. This means that your computer is sending your Facebook cookie to the Facebook servers.

  • Facebook reads your data from the cookie, and makes an entry in its database with your name, the time and the page you visited. It pulls up a list of your friends that have "Liked" the same page.

  • Over time, they can use this information to establish a comprehensive history of your browsing habits.

  Before, I used to only open Facebook in a single-site browser called Fluid, so it wouldn't be able to tie my browsing history to my account (I do the same for Google as well). As it turns out this isn't good enough; they log your IP address when you request a Like button and use it to build a profile of your activity. It's for this reason that facebook.com and www.facebook.com are blocked in my /etc/hosts file.

• I have ten extra minutes every day.

• I won't ever remark out loud about someone's funny status or comment. When you don't have an online social network, these comments sound inane.

• I can avoid zeroes more effectively. I noticed that my Facebook social graph bore little resemblance to my real life social graph; even though I was Facebook friends with my real life friends, we barely interacted on the site. Instead I got a steady stream of updates from people I cared little about. Furthermore, most of the people who added me as a friend were people that I didn't want to hang out with.

  I tried to mitigate this by imposing a strict 150-friend limit. But people would get pissed off that I wouldn't accept their friend request. Because I wasn't interacting with my friends very much on Facebook to begin with, my social life hasn't suffered in its absence.

• I don't get jealous any more. The number one reason guys have a Facebook is to look at pictures of girls. But every time I looked at pictures of girls I met I would get reminded of how much time I wasn't spending with them. I'd assume the worst in every scenario and talk myself out of pursuing people that were interested in me. In this case being oblivious is actually a benefit.

  The photos people post on Facebook are unrealistic versions of their real lives. As an example, here are my last four Facebook photo albums:

  • Me in South Africa
  • Me in India
  • Me in Scotland
  • Me in China

  Generally you don't see albums titled "The night I was too anxious about social interaction to get off my couch" or "The night Ted got so blasted he peed in someone's laundry, then cheated on his girlfriend". This means that unless you're really careful you are going to wonder why your life is so messed up when everyone else is doing great.

• When you want to share a message with someone you could send them a private message. When you post on their Wall, it's no longer a message for that person - it's a signal to everyone else. To me, this is insincere and I always felt posts to my Wall were a little fake. By canceling my account I'm telling people about the signals I'd rather send and receive - private messages from the sender to the recipient.

That said, there is one feature of Facebook I miss - apparently people like using it to organize events. But that's not enough of a reason to keep my account.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.

There's a pretty short list of things that I like doing: learning new tricks, reading, hanging out with friends, and making beautiful things. On top of that, I've been trying lately to actually follow through on everything I say I am going to do, a sort of five nines for my personal life, that's extraordinarily difficult to stay on top of. I work pretty hard to keep everything else out of the way. Here are a few of the tricks I use to avoid things that I don't want to do.

• Depositing checks: I mail my checks directly to Ally Bank. Total time: about two minutes, plus the cost of a stamp. This is way cheaper than driving to a bank and waiting in line.

• Finding my bank's ATM: I can go to any ATM and Ally Bank will reimburse me for the fees at the end of the month. This is especially handy in Vegas :).

• Waiting on hold with customer service: The ideal solution is to use products that don't require customer service, but for those that do I use LucyPhone. Then I can hang up the call, and they'll dial me when someone's on the line. I use GetHuman to try and get to a human being as fast as possible.

• Finding answers to my random questions: The StackExchange series of sites are wonderful. Most of the time my question already has an answer, but when it doesn't I can usually get one, as long as I take time to ask the question in a coherent way. Failing that, I use Quora, but my results there have been mixed.

• Keeping my devices charged: I keep chargers everywhere - in the car, at work, at home, in my laptop bag. I never have to think about remembering to bring my charger, because I always have one. Same goes with monitor adapters and toiletries.

• Finding new music: I have two really good friends that find good music and mooch off of them. I mostly download remixes from Youtube; they aren't listed in Spotify or iTunes or anywhere. If there was a good easy solution to buy I would consider it. When I'm out I use Shazam to get song names.

• Focusing on the people around me, when I'm on the town: I have a $10 phone I got from Ebay, and another one in my drawer in case it breaks. You may recognize it - a lot of people tell me it was the first cell phone they ever had. I like it because I know how to use it, and it doesn't come loaded with a whole bunch of Verizon junk. I buy minutes from Page Plus; I get 1,000 minutes for $50 and this lasts me about three months.

  I also have an iPod Touch that I use as a smartphone when I'm on a wireless network, which practically speaking is every place that's not a bar or a club.

• Figuring out what I'm going to do on the weekend: My friends are great planners, so I usually go out with them. I'm lucky too that I have different groups of friends from middle school, high school, college and work, so I can choose what I'm going to do on a given night.

• Commuting: My commute is 25 minutes door-to-door, which is about as short as it's going to get on public transit in SF. Driving in the city is extraordinarily stressful, so I don't do it. The public transit is generally great.

• Finding information when I'm out, making restaurant reservations, other assorted tasks: I call Visa Concierge for things that are synchronous, like finding nearby restaurants, movie times or bus routes. I use Timesvr to automate some of the tedious things that have to get done.

• Doing laundry: I don't really have a good solution for this yet, but I'd gladly pay to avoid having to drag clothes to a laundromat. I keep about a month's worth of underwear, undershirts and socks.

• Buying clothes: As a rule of thumb, I don't.

• Window management, and other repetitive computer tasks: I gladly pay for software and hardware that saves me time. Examples: Divvy, Witch, Skitch, TextExpander, 1Password, external monitors, and Peepcode tutorials.

A lot of this stuff is somewhat expensive; I'm lucky I have a job where I can afford to offload a lot of this stuff.

I would pay even more if good solutions existed for other problems in my life. I need to find a new dentist, and someone to get my eyes checked, but don't want to spend time finding someone good. I'd also like someone to manage some finance, healthcare, and server administration things - submit expense reports, transfer money between bank accounts according to certain rules, move all my domains to the same host and domain registrar, but it's hard finding someone I trust to do that at a reasonable price.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.