Driven

Yesterday I spent 3 hours of my day interviewing three potential candidates (all for different positions) within our company. I'm not sure if it was partly due to my cold or not, but it was one of the most tiring days I have experienced in awhile. Granted I was at the office for 12 hours and skipped dinner, but the last time I remember feeling that drained after a day of work was 13 months ago when we were doing some major overhauls to our system infrastructure and I was up for 30 hours straight. I really enjoyed each interview, but the "drained" feeling definitely reminded me of the early days back in 1999 and 2000. Back then we would all pull 15-18 hour days for months on end and not think twice about it, our small team had an amazing drive. All of us were driven by something inside to make a great company and we all worked really hard. As I interview candidate after candidate I try to spot that "drive", these interviews would go so much faster if I could spot the "driven" quality quicker. Unfortunately not many people have it, fortunately I am surrounded by people who do have "it", and I will continue to push myself to not settle for anything less.

Blogs Make You Smarter

I've been amazed over the last year how much I learn on a daily basis because of blogs and RSS. Information is poured into my RSS reader and it's so easy to browse the topics and read the interesting items. As another example, a co-worker today told me that they clicked over to David Catalano's blog from my blog and posted a comment; David saw the comment and emailed the co-worker and asked if they would like to borrow the book. Now the co-worker is going to read the book. Not only did they learn something from the blog, but now they are going to read a great book!

Ten years ago I was similarly amazed by how much smarter the Internet was making people. Every morning you could quickly browse your favorite news sites quickly and easily. People could email you information instantly, newsgroups always had great information based on topic, and I haven't even mentioned Google yet. I believe blogs and RSS have taken the power of the Internet to the next level and most "normal" people still have no clue what blogging and RSS is all about; so it will only get more useful as the masses understand and adapt the technology.

We were discussing today creative ways to find more potential developers for our team. Being in SWVA we have to be creative to find great people, and the idea of searching blogs for candidates came up for discussion. I think it would be a great idea for Monster to buy a blogging company. If all resumes came with a link to their blog it would provide so much more value than a bland old resume. If I get a stack of 50 resumes they all start looking alike around resume 17, but the one or two that have links to their blog always stand out in my memory.

Time Tracking

One of my big goals for 2005 was better tracking of where my team spent their valuable hours. We just implemented our third method for time tracking this year, but this time I think we've found the winner. It's a simple online program, but it easy to enter the time and it provides great reports. Maybe next month I'll find something better and make my team switch again (good thing they love me). The report I just ran on my time was the total hours that I have worked so far in March, it totaled up to 212 so far, or just about 55 hours a week.

Now to most of my friends this sounds like a lot, but to me it's not that bad. I enjoy working late into the night at home, and many aspects of my job even require me to do some things late at night. Weekend hours are great for research because I don't get distracted by the hustle and bustle of a normal weekday. It's great to have the flexibility to work from home and makes working a lot of hours possible. This flexibility is something we extend to all of our developers, every member of my team can work from home and most do, all for different reasons.

Hello World

OK, probably not the most original first blog title, but I think it's appropriate. After all, I'm a programmer at heart. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Kevin Minnick and I am VP Product Development at Webmail.us. I enjoy researching new technologies, managing my team, trying to figure out dates for my CEO, and chipping in with programming whenever needed. In fact, I love everything about my job. I thought this first blog entry should be about why I am starting a blog. There are many reasons, but the primary reason is that I feel this is the most exciting time of my career and I should document my experiences so that someday I can find the time to reflect upon them.

We released Webmail 3.1 last week and we had a little celebration today and a long time friend from Exemplum (now their CEO) asked if I had started a blog yet. He made me realize that I should start now because of where we are in our careers. I've been wanting to do this for awhile, so here it goes, hopefully I will find the time to keep it updated! I doubt it will be as interesting as my CEO's blog, but he has a lot more free time on his hands. ;)

HELLO, WORLD!