Let’s talk about being an e-commerce company. We have this fun thing called PCI DSS that has a few hundred security and procedural requirements for anyone taking credit cards. Then we have third party integrations like product fulfillment that require us, as the intermediary, to pass around the credit card number to complete [...]

Heard via friends inside that Yahoo! is cutting loose lots of people today as speculated in the news recently. People are being called into conference rooms and dismissed. Apparently the severance package pays out through May so it’s a relatively “soft” landing. Tough times for the Y.

I left a comment on Doug Hughes’ blog and thought it would be worth repeating here because I know that I didn’t hear about PCI DSS early enough. And I figure if I didn’t hear about it, then other heads-down developers may also have been missing this. Let’s get it out of the [...]

Since they launched, I’ve used Mailroom to handle customer support email for my company. Mailroom is awesome because it learns your replies and automatically suggests them to future inquiries. After a couple of major upgrades and some mismanagement on our part, the service had broken down for us and we went back to [...]

I saw this mailbox in front of Moscone center today advertising uspsjedimaster.com. Dressed as R2D2 from Star Wars, there are apparently a lot of these mailboxes around the country. This was the first I had heard about it.
Although I think it’s cute, and if done extremely rarely, could be a successful buzz builder, [...]

Have you seen those fancy CoinStar kiosks that will count your change for you in grocery stores? They seem great (almost fun even!) until you read that they take about 10% of your money. Nice.
If you have a business account at Bank of America, you can turn in your coins there in special [...]

Joel Spolsky is a well-known programmer-author who has written some really great pieces on how to hire and manage programmers. He wrote a piece yesterday about Finding Great Developers that everyone should read. It’s certainly applicable to any type of position, not just programmers or technical staff. Joel puts more thought [...]

Am I the last one to hear about outbound dialing from your web application? There are a couple of service providers who will let you programmatically initiate an outbound telephone call and incorporate pre-recorded audio or text-to-speech. I just tried a demo of CDyne’s Notify! and you can even set the caller ID [...]

Back in the day of BBS’, one of the subcultures was called HPAV, or “Hack/Phreak/Anarchy/Virus”. Kids into “phreaking” would use various techniques to call around the world for free and one of their favorite pasttimes was setting up large-scale teleconferences. These conferences would sometimes last as long as a week. At that [...]