Obie Fernandez

The Self-Destruct File

One of my most important possessions was stolen last night when the Hashrocket office was burglarized: my 17" MacBook Pro, which has had a permanent home on my desk since I got a MacBook Air about a year ago. The thieves also got some of our iMac workstations and a couple of 30" monitors. Today has not been a happy afternoon for me.

The incident (and the subsequent trouble I'm going through pulling SSH keys and changing passwords on everything) has me thinking that perhaps there should be a sort of "self-destruct" file on the desktop. It would have to be named in a honeypot fashion that would seem irresistible to thieves and anyone nosing around your system without your permission. So maybe it would be named "account_numbers.txt" or something like that. When they double clicked it, a series of events would happen. First the computer should turn on the camera and snap a photograph and send it along with IP address and any other information that could be gleaned from the local network. (If the computer was offline, maybe it would wait until it got connectivity?)

Finally, if not disabled within a few seconds in some way that the thief would not be aware of, the computer would delete everything sensitive as well as disabling itself for future use - "bricking itself."

I can't be the first to have had these kinds of thoughts. It sucks big time to get your stuff stolen.

The sad part of this whole affair is that we've normally been very happy-go-lucky and easygoing about guests and even strangers visiting the office. Not to mention all the photos and videos online of us in our offices showing tons of nice equipment. The list of potential suspects is huge and we know we were targeted in particular. This world seems perfectly designed to kill idealism and make you cynical as you grow older.

Hashrocket Named One of Top Employers in North Florida

I'll update this post with a link to the JBJ site article once it's available publicly in about 30 days.

Some additional information not included in the article:

• We actually have about 25 employees based in Jacksonville. If you count everyone involved on a day-to-day basis including contractors at all locations the number is over 40.
• We offer full match on 401k contributions up to IRS limits, with no vesting period
• We reimburse monthly gym membership dues
• We pick up the tab for our weekly happy hour on Wednesdays
• High-end Apple workstations for everyone

Most importantly, but difficult to state concisely: We have fun on a daily basis because we work on cool projects with awesome clients. Most of our clients are startups and 100% success-focused. They encourage us to work the way we know will bring them the most success, which is why we're able to push the envelope on continuous process improvement. Progressive testing/spec'ing practices, pair programming, agile design, all these are possible because I actively avoid trying to work with clients that have legacy issues, corporate politics, non-cooperative stakeholders, saboteurs, etc.

We should have a real job listings page on our site soon. For the moment, if you're a great web designer or developer and feel like you would fit in at Hashrocket, contact jobs@hashrocket.com - We're hiring!

Excellence Is In the Details: GMail EOM

It always gives me such great pleasure when I notice excellent attention to detail in software that I use on a daily basis. In this case, it's a detail that I've noticed before, but never have heard anyone talk about.

Every once in awhile I send someone an email with just a subject line. If you enter a subject in GMail and hit send, you'll get a warning dialog asking if you really want to send without a body.

However, if you follow the convention of suffixing your body-less subject line with the string [eom] and hit send, then GMail doesn't bother prompting you with the warning dialog, because someone on that team knew that EOM stands for "end of message".

Excellence is in the details. They don't always have to be visible or even talked about. In fact, when you discover those great little details in practice it can really be a really delightful and loyalty-building experience.