Perspective

My mom fell down and broke her hip. I flew over to spend some time with her at the hospital. Suddenly everything looks different. It's amazing how one's perspective changes when confronted with serious health matters.

Call your parents or your loved ones and tell them that you love them. Even if you are really close and there are absolutely no problems in your relationships, still, call them and tell them one more time. Make their day! And yours too.

Life is good.

I am on vacation, writing from a lakeshore in Pennsylvania. This week is all about family, water, nature and kayaking. Will be back blogging about resumendation.com in a few days.

For now, if you are reading this, go and create an anonymous profile. You think you do not need one? I would LOVE to hear why you think that.

Yes! One dow, many more to go.

I am happy beyond being able to explain. Something amazing happened today. Yes. The first person created an anonymous profile on resumendation.com - it happened today at 3:45PM.

Thank you anonymous individual. I do not know who you are, but I love your profile. You clearly got the essence of what I am trying to do. You mentioned what you are doing and created a custom section to describe your hobbies. You can't do this in a regular resume, no way.

I never expected to be so excited about a single new account, but I am. I do not know if resumendation.com will be a success, but I now know that at least one person understands what the site is all about.

You put yourself out there, all out, with no fear and no concerns - your true self is available to anyone who might want you or your services. Now I wonder if you are feeling better after opening up like that?

Thank you anonymous individual.

Is software ever done?

When is software done? When is a website done? Is it even possible for a software product to be done? I believe it is. Too many products keep adding features until they turn into unbearable mass. I used to like Microsoft Word - it is too complicated now. I don't mind complicated, but I would give up many features for a more reliable product and less bugs. Skype used to be wonderful. It keeps constantly getting worse, for some years now.

Why can't more software developers focus on what their product is supposed to do, do it well, and let it be. Don't worry about more features. We don't want features, we want software to be a tool that works. My refrigerator does not keep adding features. I got it 7 or 8 years ago and I am happy with the service it provides.

I think we, as software developers, should learn from mobile apps. Mobile apps are small, inexpensive, fast loading, usually do one thing well, and that's it. Want additional features, get  another app that offers the additional features you want and use it along with the original app and the original features. Love it.

So, with all af this in mind, I decided to completely rewrite our homepage. I want to make it short and clear, with very little words. Once I am done, I will leave it be for a very long time, I hope. Take a look at what I came up with. I am actually fairly happy. The message is short and straight forward. Check it out... let me know what you think.

I wanted to convey the following:

1. You can show who you truly are, as long as you are anonymous. 
2. Most of us are more valuable than what we believe to be. There is no need to pretend and lie. The truth is actually very good.
3. Being accepted to work or into a college is so much sweeter when you are accepted for who you really are. No games, no BS. Try it once and you will never want to look back.

Drop me a note, let me know if I managed to convey the message on resumendation.com

Creating is easier than explaining

Now that resumendation.com is getting some (little) traffic, I decided to mention it to my ice hockey friends that I play ice hockey with a couple times each week.

This was not a premeditated decision and not a planned event, it simply happened. The subject of job searching came up in the locking room after the game and I went for it. I told my friends about resumendation.com and then I realized something important. Creating the web service was easier than explaining it to other people. I had a good opportunity to explain it, a friendly audience, but I was not able to capture their attention. My story was not cool, not clear, not organized, there was no flow to it and I lost the audience after a minute or so. I clearly do not have my story telling act together.

Coming up with ideas - yes, I can do that. Not all my ideas are good, but I definitely have plenty of them.

Turning ideas into products (software or hardware) - yes, I can and do that. Not always very well at first, sometimes it may take me a while until the result is good enough, but I can create. Making something out of nothing is what I enjoy doing.

Expressing my ideas in words - that is real hard. It is easier for me to crate an algorithm, or write thousands of lines of code than describe what I do in simple words. Coming up with a clear, short and simple to understand description of what I think or do is always difficult for me. Words are not my favorite communications method. I find words too limiting. But how do you communicate without words? I don't know :-(

Some people have the talent of using the right words at the right time at the right intonation, I am not one of those people. Something I clearly need to learn. I am going to write a description of resumendation.com, make sure it is clear and short, and then learn it by heart.

This will be my homework for the upcoming weekend.

Too many distractions

I still have a problem with resumendation.com homepage. It has too many distractions. Need to make it simpler and focussed on our main objectives - getting people to create anonymous profiles.

I think that the problem is the "Find" box on the bottom of the home page. The "Find" box is supposed to enable head hunters and potential employers to search for a person they need, right from the resumendation.com homepage. I wanted to make it real easy for them.

Now I am thinking, why distract the users with a search box until there are enough anonymous profiles to search for?

The solution: I eliminated the search box and made the page a bit less cluttered. Less distractions, good. Until we have enough profiles worth searching for, searching will be done from the menu on the top of the page. I will return the search/find box to the home page when we have more anonymous profiles.

I am happy for now. Home page looks focussed, much better than a couple of days ago.

A change is coming

Resumendation.com is live for a couple of days and I am already anxious. I know, I know... things take time... But still, I think the home page is not right. You see, resumendation.com is intended for three groups of people:

1. Professors, who will use resumendation.com to write recommendations for their students.
2. Students, who will use resumendation.com to ask their professors for recommendations.
3. Every person that dreams about a better life, wants to be discovered, yet must remain anonymous.

Professors, I hope, will use resumendation because it solves a real problem some of them are having. I designed the system to hopefully address their needs and make them want to use it. 

Students will use whatever their professors will tell them to use. That is life... I did design the system to be easy to use and beneficial for the students. Students will benefit from a well organized repository for all of their recommendations that can follow them through their entire career. Students also will benefit from their comprehensive yet anonymous personal profile that can be found on every search engine.

Every human being I can think of could use a better opportunity. This is not only about jobs. This is about  an opportunity to be who you really are.

So here is my problem with the home page: I do not believe it clearly describes all of the above. I do not know how to write a short enough description, and I cannot expect the public to read one that is as long as the above. 

My solution, for now: I added a reference to "Human being" in addition to "Student" and "Professor" on the bottom of the page and linked it to the anonymous profile manager.

Google, do no evil? Maybe.

Yesterday I wrote about the eight separate $1 charges that google charged my credit card by mistake. I believe it will all work out just fine, mistakes happen to all of us. And I must admit that google was easy to reach on the phone, their people were polite and knowledgeable, and I think that eventually I will not be charged anything and their free $75 AdWords coupon will actually be free.

But this incident, especially the nice and professional treatment google gave me, got me thinking about google's corporate motto that is supposed to be something like "Do no evil." I wasn't sure exactly what it was, so I decided to read about it. I searched on google's corporate site for "Do no evil". Hmmm... not there. Went to wikipedia... Yes!

According to Wikipedia:

"Don't be evil" is the informal corporate motto (or slogan) of Google,^[1] originally suggested by Google employees Paul Buchheit^[2] and Amit Patel^[3] at a meeting. Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out," adding that the slogan was "also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent." While the official corporate philosophy of Google^[4] does not contain the words "Don't be evil", they were included in the prospectus (aka "S-1") of Google's 2004 IPO (a letter from Google's founders, latter called the "'Don't Be Evil' manifesto"): "Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."^[5] The sixth point of the 10-point corporate philosophy of Google says "You can make money without doing evil."^[4]

That is very nice, but why is it no longer in any of Google's official documents? Why was it taken out? Some things just cannot be undone. Most (all?) corporations I know do not have a "Don't be evil" statement, and that is perfectly OK. Corporations do not have to be nice, just legal and ethical and perhaps fair. Asking a corporation to do no evil is a bit much in my book. After all, a corporation is more of a building than a human. And doing no evil is a human quality. 


So why was it taken out? Did Google decide that they are OK with being evil? This is where not having ever said "Don't be evil" is a world away from having stated it and then taking it away. Once you take the high road and put yourself on a pedestal, you are committing to higher standards. Stepping down is a failure, at least in my book. Sorry Google, I hope I am wrong, I still like you, just not as much as before.

Life is good? Maybe...

Resumendation.com is ready to go live. Not that it is completed, I am aware of some improvements waiting to be done, and some changes are needed to better handle scalability, and I am fairy confident that early users will have plenty of requests and suggestions, but it is good enough to go live.

Resumendation.com is finally live. Yeah!!! Now what?

It's time to hit google Adwords. As many of you know, google will gladly give any new account $75 worth of free advertising. It is a great deal, especially since this is not co-advertising but a real gift. I am free to use it to purchase $75 worth of google AdWords, no strings attached. Great? Maybe...

So I am signing up for a new google AdWords account, entering my credit card information, entering my newly received coupon for free $75 of AdWords, hit the magic "Continue" button - an error message appears right next to the coupon code "Sorry, this is an invalid code!!!". No big deal, I must have mistyped. This time I am copy-pasting it right from the email - same problem, invalid code. Ha! That's strange, but I will deal with it. Luckily, the same email that included the $75 coupon code also includes a telephone number - it's time to call. I am calling google... the answering machine starts telling me their office hours... that's not a good sign. A quick look at the clock, it's five minutes before 9AM. The solution is obvious - I will wait a few minutes, have my morning coffee, and call after 9.

It's 9:10AM, I am calling google, this time a very courteous voice starts asking me 20 questions, so she can transfer me to the right person to assist me. I am patient... two minutes later I am talking to a very nice gentlemen. He offers to help me with anything related to AdWords. Any questions I may have, any problems I may experience - he is here for me. He wants to help me with keywords and ad copy... Great, I am describing my problem to him - the code is not valid. The guy is very nice, sounds like a professional, and suggests I copy and paste the code instead of typing. I am thinking "stop wasting my time", but I follow his instructions - same problem. Next advice, try typing the code manually - I follow his instructions, type the code manually, same problem.

A few more futile attempts, then I start thinking... What kind of programmer at the mighty google would be writing this page? Probably not one of their mighty super-programmers. So what kind of error/bug/mistake a not-so-super-programmer would make to cause my code not to work? I am thinking that he would probably handle all the normal things but might not properly handle exceptions, user errors or data validation. I am thinking that the error message might be misleading, perhaps it is not related to the code? Something is probably wrong, but not what the error message is telling me. The error must be somewhere else... I ignore the error message and go over the rest of the information on the page and BINGO - my credit card expiration date is wrong. I fix that and everything works fine. Life is good? Maybe...

A couple hours later my credit card company calls. Mr. Rubinstein? Did you use your credit card to pay google.com today? Yes... Was the amount $1? Well, I didn't think it was supposed to cost me anything, but I can live with a $1 charge for $75 worth of advertising. Not what I expected, after all free should be free, as in $0 not as in $1, but still a good deal. I approve the charge and move on with my life? Maybe...

Ten minutes later my credit card calls again. Mr. Rubinstein? Yes... Can you approve a $1 charge from google.com? Hm... I just did, 10 minutes ago... (Wait, here comes the surprise) "No, Mr. Rubinstein, this is another one. Another $1. In fact, you have eight $1 charges from google.com"

Eight separate charges for $1 each? That is not right. At this stage I feel like something wrong is happening. I am asking to cancel all those charges, but my credit company cannot cancel a charge until it appears on my monthly statement. I ask them to record a note and decide to call google.

The call to google was way too long and too complicated for an eight dollar mistake. Apparently, they too cannot cancel a charge until it appears on my statement. They asked me, very nicely I must admit, to give them a call once my account is charged and they would take care of it. Life is good? Maybe...

Trust is not easy

How do I convince people to trust resumendation.com?

I need to convince individuals that we can be trusted with their identity, and that we will respect their anonymity. I need to convince professors who write confidential recommendations that we can be trusted to keep the recommendations confidential. And finally, I need to convince academic institutions to trust our confidential recommendations.

That is a whole lot of trust that needs to be generated.

The first one, trusting resumendation.com to respect your anonymity is relatively easy. We decided to rely on the basic principle of "You can't compromise what you don't have." We are not asking to trust our programmers, or administrators. We are not even asking to trust our data security procedures or our infrastructure. We simply do not know who the anonymous individuals are, therefore we cannot compromise their anonymity.

So the logical argument is solid, but will it be enough? I do not believe trust is created via logic. Trust is deeply personal and it happens in our guts. Creating trust was one of the reasons why I decided to write this blog. I hope that me being completely truthful and transparent will add to our website's trustworthiness. I guess that we will need to be patient and see how it goes.

Convincing professors that our confidential recommendations are indeed confidential is a whole different issue. We have the recommendation, so we can no longer rely on "You can't compromise what you don't have." Here we need to rely on identity management and solid security practices. I have many years of experience with data security, encryption and authentication. I created encryption algorithms and key generators. My technical track record is fairly impressive when it comes to data security. So, my decision to not even try to create a secure system was surprising to my colleagues. Let me try to explain. Security is tricky. How do you create a lock that cannot be picked? And when you create one, how can you be sure? Do you trust a lock that was never successfully picked in ten years? It really depends on who was trying to pick it. If your "secure" lock was never seriously attacked then it may not really be secure even after fifty years of successful use.

As a programmer, I love creating stuff from scratch. Most of my programmer friends are like that too. It is so much fun to make things your way, just as you like it, exactly the way you believe it should be done. However, when it comes to data security, making things your way is usually not a good idea. I have met programmers who believe in security through obscurity. The jury is in on that one - it does not work. When it comes to data security - stick to peer reviewed algorithms and well tested implementations.

I decided to stick with Microsoft .NET infrastructure for handling user authentication and session management. This way I know that it was hacked millions of times, all over the world, by some of the best (worst?) hackers and a rather large team is constantly working to improve it. May be it is the best possible solution available and may it it is not. But it is a constantly improving solution and that makes it better than anything I would have created myself. There is just no way that my solution would be tempered with as much as one created by Microsoft, or any other major vendor, and used by millions.

Meta tags for SEO

Search engine optimization is somewhat like black magic or voodoo - many claim to know it, very few actually do. Telling the difference between true knowledge and BS is difficult because of an inherent problem with professional BS-ers - they are who they are in part because they are very good at BS. Search engines do not disclose their algorithms, understandably so, making SEO even more prone to crooks and charlatans. Do yourself a favor and beware of shady quick-and-easy offers. Black hat SEO can and will degrade your website rating by search engines.

Major search engines do a good job interpreting humanly readable text and extracting key phrases, so I decided to optimize the HTML for humans rather than search engines, limiting our SEO to meta tags. Now I need to come up with the "right" titles, descriptions and keywords.

I will start with our home page and deal with other pages later, if at all.

The first big question is "title". It serves two purposes with contradicting requirements. On one hand, the title appears on browser tabs, so you want it to be short. That would make it easy to find the right tab when you have multiple tabs open. On the other hand, it is the most prominent text in search results. That's the text that people see when the page shows up in their search results, so it needs to be descriptive enough to make everyone recognize the website and want to click on the link.

I decided to use the following: Resumendation.com - Let job offers find you. Be visible, anonymously. I am not totally happy with it yet because I do not think it is descriptive enough. Another option is Resumendation.com - You deserve a shot at being hired for who you truly are. I decided to randomly (kinda) switch between those two to see if one is better than the other. Thank you google analytics :-)

Next hurdle is the description meta tag. This one is mainly for search engines, so it is OK for it to be a bit longer. Some say that search engines do not look past first 70 characters... who knows. So here is my first (unsuccessful) attempt: "Where employed individuals express who they really are and what they want to do, while remaining totally anonymous. Employers search anonymous profiles and contact individuals, to describe their organizations and discus job offers". It is about twice the recommend length. Arghhh!

Here is my final description, it is still a few characters over 70 but I am going with it: Enable employers to search your anonymous profile and contact you with job offers.

The last one remaining is "keywords". I will start with a few and keep adding as we go. The important thing is to also include same keywords early in the HTML and then optimize using google analytics. This one is an ongoing process...

Should I use a picture?

I started writing this blog a few days ago and it feels good. I am surprised how easy it is... perhaps it so easy because I am writing about my true thoughts, whatever I am actually dealing with while creating resumendation.com.

So here is my next dilemma: should I use my picture in the link to this blog that I am about to place on our homepage? Should I make it prominent or should it be small and non-obtrusive?

Putting my picture out there on the Internet, for all to see, just does not feel right. It also feels somewhat pompous to advertise my own image. On the other hand, I want all to know that I am sincere and open in my blog, so hiding would also be wrong.

I decided to put a picture that shows more of my heart and soul and less of my face and body. It's an image of my head while doing something I enjoy tremendously - kayaking. My wife and I started kayaking a few years ago and we are both into it. A weekend without kayaking just does not feel right any more. In fact, I really like what this picture represents, so I am making my profile picture on this blog as well.

What makes you, you?

I want resumendation.com to be a place where people can find out who you really are, without finding out who you are. It has three important parts:

1. You describe yourself
2. Others recommend you
3. Your identity is never disclosed

I will explain.

You describe yourself
This part has three sections. The first section is an open form summary where you write a paragraph or two about yourself. This is so others would't need to read through half of your profile just to figure out whether you are a physician or a mechanic.

Then there is the categories section where you describe your education, your experience, and then interview yourself. The education category is straight forward. The experience category is where you will describe everything you know or have experience with. Since this is not a resume, you are not limited to a page or two - write as much as you like. I enabled titled sub-sections to get this large category somewhat organized. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Finally there is the interview category where you are free to ask yourself as many questions as you want and provide the best answers you can think of. Aren't you tired of stupid and irrelevant interviews? This is your chance to ask all the "smart" questions and provide "great" answers.

Others recommend you
This is where you ask others for recommendations. If you get nice ones, include them in your public profile. The not so nice ones, well, that's your call... I probably wouldn't :-)

Your identity is never disclosed
I believe that anonymity is key to true self expression online. Being anonymous makes it easy to express yourself without fear of undesired consequence. There is no need to play games or pretend to be anyone that you are not. Anonymity makes it all easy.

Resumendation?

So I was looking for a "good" name for an employment search related web service. It's not a job listings board and not a resume board - it's a place where a person can truly and anonymously describe himself for a chance to be discovered by some employer that really needs a person like that. So how can a person describe himself and convince others that this is all true? We have all seen our share of exaggerated resumes. One can hardly trust a resume these days.

My answer to this is a combination of what you say about yourself (that's the resume part in the name) and what others say about you (that's the recommendation part in the name). Together, resume and recommendation, give me a domain name that was not taken - resumendation.com

To be more accurate, this was my wife's idea and she deserves full credit for it (and for much more).

So, resumendation is a combination of resume and recommendation. But then I began worrying about people lying left and right. How can one trust what people write about themselves and what their friends write about them? After all, one will only write good things about himself and publish only positive recommendations. Right? Not so fast... I think there are some nature forces that will help me out here, plus some recommendation related trickery that I learned from the way most academic institutions solve a similar problem.

First let's talk about the natural forces. I love having the universe on my side. You see, good and bad are not so easy to define. What's good for me might be bad for you and vice versa. So when one person describes himself as great, another person might read the same description and interpret it as full of B.S. Most of who we are is neither good nor bad, it just is what it is.

When it comes to employment, good or bad does not matter. What matters is being exactly what an employer wants. Do you really know what an employer wants? Are you sure? How is it working out for you so far?

Now imagine the difference between being hired for what you think the employer wants versus being hired for who you really are. That alone is worth the effort of being truthful. When was the last time you did not need to worry about how your peers, subordinates and bosses perceive you? How great it is to be with people who accept you for who you really are?

I believe that some people will be less than truthful, in part because many of us are not used to being absolutely open in public and on the Internet. However, over time, they will learn how great it is to be absolutely open - especially since nobody knows who you are. Remember that all profiles on resumendation.com are anonymous? Want to know how anonymous you are? Well, I believe that one cannot compromise what he does not know. And since I do not know who you are, I cannot possibly compromise your identity. Nor can any hackers, who I hope will never be able to hack into my database, because I never asked for identifiable information.

Now let's talk about the way colleges deal with a similar issue when asking a professor or a teacher to recommend a candidate student. Their solution is CONFIDENTIAL recommendations. A student never sees the recommendation that a professor writes, it goes directly to the college.

I created a similar mechanism where recommendations can be regular or confidential. Regular recommendations are visible by the individual and he can decide to include them in a public profile.

Confidential recommendations can never be viewed by the recommended individual. All he can do is ask the recommender to forward a confidential recommendation to a third party. This may not be 100% bullet proof, but it is much better than nothing.

Welcome

Hi there,

So this is it. I am blogging... now what?

I guess I will just start writing whatever is on my mind while trying to create a great web service. I am calling it a service not a website because I believe that technology must serve a purpose beyond just being cool. In fact, I believe that the best website is invisible. I do not really want people to see my website. Don't get me wrong. I do want millions of people visiting my website and enjoying the service, but their mind should not be focussed on my website but rather on what they are getting out of it.

So what is resumendation.com? Welcome to my first challenge :-) Of cause I know what it is, but expressing it clearly in few words is more difficult for me than creating the whole damn thing. I will give it a try and you are most welcome to critique or compliment or suggest better wording... so here we go:

Resumendation.com is a website where employed individuals can express who they really are and what they really want to do, while remaining totally anonymous. Potential employers will be able to search anonymous profiles and contact individuals, in an attempt to convince the individuals to disclose who they are and discuss a job offer.

This is it. Short and sweet.

I believe that we all deserve a chance of being hired for who we really are. Just imagine how great it would be to take all the masks off and just be yourself. Scary, isn't it?

I did not like the fact that a candidate needs to submit a resume to an employer and hope to be picked. Resumendation.com changes that so that the candidates list their profiles (anonymously) and potential employers try to convince the candidates to talk to them. On resumendation.com, the candidate is in control rather than the potential employer. Employers will need to expose their identity in order to convince candidates to agree to communicate. Only if the individual likes the employer he or she will decide to communicate, while remaining anonymous. At some stage, when the candidates are ready, they too can identify themselves. But only of they are ready and willing.

Just imagine how nice it would be to be able to describe who you truly are without the limitations of a conventional resume and without disclosing your true identity. I do not want to condense myself into a single (or double) page resume for some junior HR consultant to go through at the speed of light, looking for reasons to take me off his overstocked desk.