School - I026: XI - Bring one positive and one negative example of usability in web.

Bring one positive and one negative example of usability in web.

This lesson focused on people and computer communication, ergonomics and usability.

Jakob Nielsen mapped down definition of usability and it is defined by 5 components:
Learnability
Efficiency
Memorability
Errors
Satisfaction

I am anayzing the same component with two different newspaper webpages regarding to the Satisfaction component.

The BAD Example

Postimees Web - http://www.postimees.ee/

First if I open the webpage I get notifications about cookies. I guess it is standard nowadays. This is one time click on "I Understood" button. I instantly get 11 cookies in my browser, all are either to domain www.postimees.ee or .postimees.ee. First seven are not directly linked to host only, none of them are secure or they will not die when session is over. All cookies expire in a long time in the future, only one is set to expire today. Others are at least one year, until ten years. This makes me very sceptical and causios what they try to track from my browser activity and my movements. They should at least introduce session based cookies.

Webpage is sending constant ping requests to Amazon WebServices and chatbeat analyics service with different parameters which are somehow hashed. Ping is encrypted to 1x1 image. 43B. It is sent every 1.2 minutes. Seems like Chartbeat is using Amazon Elastic Search to store the metrics and then generates audience graphs over those parameters.

They also want to access https://secure.pmo.ee/api/me/ but it always keeps error if you are not logged in - 401(unauthorized).

If we move forward to the webpage itself it is full of ads. On the main page there are now 3 different ads:
 * On the background
 * On the footer
 * On the left side

Footer in the bottom is really annoying and constantly upgrading scroller div style.

I was assuming that when I login then those adds and trackers will be removed, but they still remain. I am expecting that when I pay some money to them then I will get ad free environment, but I only get some paid articles where I am not very sure about quality of the article.

Conclusion, only way how to use Postimees.ee satisfactory is to use adBlock and uBlock.

The Good (not perfect) Example

The Sun Web - https://www.thesun.co.uk/
Same story here, standard cookie policy check. 15 cookies in this webpage, where 5 are session only cookies, 4 are related to host only and rest are available for other sites as well. 3 cookies expire by session and rest of them are mostly with maximum age for 2 years.
Tracking parameters are being sent to www.parsely.com, in every 1 minute and 2 sekunds again 43KB as Postimees.ee. It is similar to Chartbeat, most likely same kind of functionality but different providers.

One resource is not found https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/simgad/6337765394029551775.

On the website layout, it is bit better, it only has one add on the top of the page, which is being tracked back to my location most likely by IP. This website has focused more on images than getting news name to catch the attention, but I already like it better than Postimees.ee due amount of "spam" it is displaying to me.

After I created an account and logged in, my user experience didn't change. Looked for a place to pay, but couldn't find one, so I guess that they are actually living from the ad's and it is not so abusing as Postimees.ee has, I even could live with that.



Do you know any online newspaper which is focused on news? I would be willing to subscribe if I get an ad free environment.

School - I026: X - Take one project and analyze it's software and business model

This topic is actually very abstract one and it had me thinking which company's/projects business and development model would I take.

I've always interested in Elon Musk  as well as Richard Branson but this time, instead of Virgin I decided to take Tesla.

They are focused in different areas of electricity, like electric cards, lithium-ion battery storage's, residential solar panels. Leonardo DiCaprio talked with Elon Musk in Tesla's Gigafactory and there was a phrase that you need 100 Gigafactories to power the entire world with sustainable energy. So Actually I was interested in their business and software development model.

If I go to their homepage and look for job ads, then we see 22 teams and if we google for some keywords in their careers sub-page like:

• Agile - 10 results
• Scrum - 2 results 
• Lean - 23 results 
• Waterfall - 0 results
• Critical path - 5 results
• Kanban - 2 results

Chaos, Spiral, V-model, Prince2 and I didn't go through all the list assuming that already those didn't give any match here and I got matches to some of them above.

They have today (21.04.2017) 2480 job adds and if we divide it to department wise we get following result:

Department	Count
Communications	4
Design	14
Energy Products	51
Engineering	322
Facilities	28
Finance	92
Gigafactory	73
HR	68
IT	76
Legal	13
Manufacturing	200
Marketing	45
Production	14
Quality	17
Retail Development	13
Sales	719
Service	638
Supply Chain	82
Workplace	11
Grand Total	2480

Now If we compare the Google results with the jobs which they have available, map them to department and remove the false positive results:

Position	Methology based on Google	Department
Staff Program Manager, Service Operations	agile	couldn't match Google result to available job
Senior Mechanical Design Engineer- Interior Systems	agile	couldn't match Google result to available job
.Net Developer	agile	IT
Mechanical Design Engineer - Closures Systems	agile	Engineering
Sr. Engineer- Lighting Systems	agile	Engineering
Software Application Engineer	agile	Engineering
Senior Mechanical Design Engineer - Seating Systems	agile	Engineering
Engineer- Interior Systems	agile	Engineering
Sr. Performance & Scalability Test Engineer	agile	IT
Staff Program Manager, Service Operations	scrum	couldn't match Google result to available job
.Net Developer	scrum	IT
Process Engineer, Gigafactory	lean	Gigafactory
Process Technician - Seat Manufacturing	lean	Manufacturing
Material Project Manager - Manufacturing Introduction Group	lean	Manufacturing
Material Project Manager - Manufacturing Introduction Group	lean	Manufacturing
Material Handler	lean	Service
Engineer- Interior Systems	lean	Engineering
Tool and Die Maker - Assembly/Tryout	lean	Manufacturing
Mechanical Design Engineer - Closures Systems	lean	Engineering
EHS Manager - Factory Departments	lean	Manufacturing
Production Planner	lean	Production
Engineering Applications Product Manager	critical path	IT
Installation Project Manager - Supercharger	critical path	couldn't match Google result to available job
Senior Mechanical Design Engineer - Battery Enclosure	critical path	Engineering
Tesla Supercharger Land Use and Permitting Specialist	critical path	Engineering
Material Project Manager - Manufacturing Introduction Group	kanban	couldn't match Google result to available job
Production Planner	kanban	Production

In summary it comes to that Tesla actually uses a agile at least in Engineering, Gigafatory, IT, Manufacturing, Production and Service departments.

Department	Number
couldn't match Google result to available job
agile	2
critical path	1
kanban	1
scrum	1
couldn't match Google result to available job Total	5
Engineering
agile	5
critical path	2
lean	2
Engineering Total	9
Gigafactory
lean	1
Gigafactory Total	1
IT
agile	2
critical path	1
scrum	1
IT Total	4
Manufacturing
lean	5
Manufacturing Total	5
Production
kanban	1
lean	1
Production Total	2
Service
lean	1
Service Total	1

Although those results are based on Google search it seems that they are using very agile methodology. 

It also is shown that they are using agile approach as their cars pretty much get monthly upgrades of new features, they don't wait when they have product fully ready, but they rather give and improve customers experience every month. Porsche is also making electric car to compete with Tesla, but Porsche first car will come around 2020 and by that time they are way too late to compete in the electric car market with agile development models. 

Tesla didn't make cheap car, they sat down, thought what they can do and how to do fast, they did super car which is able to get updates in your home WiFi and get additional features. You put stuff in, put activation can be over time, not everything must work in the first place. Recently they activated serf driving capabilities. Sensors where there, they just weren't activated.

This is excellent example of agile business model which has high level road-map planned and roll-out takes in place feature by feature. I would call it even high level is planned with traditional method, which is split to iterations and iterations are handled by agile model. Combination of many methodologies which actually makes this very rapid, fast and professional company which delivers.

School - I026: IX - Write a review to Eric S. Raymond "Hacker - HOWTO"

In this session we were asked to write an review to Eric S. Raymond "Hacker - HOWTO" .

"In computing, a hacker is any skilled computer expert that uses their technical knowledge to overcome a problem." by Wikipedia.

Quite often it is confused who is a hacker and who is cracker. This publication makes very clear the difference between those two roles and focuses quite often on the supremacy of the hacker. It reminded me a bit Nietzsche Übermensch which basically describes life after God, new values, transcendence and so on. I believe that who ever has read it has their own ideas and values of it.

Fortunate when I got forward into this publication then it pulled a bit back about hackers supremacy in the world and started to talk about how they are precious and you cannot waste them to solve the same puzzle twice. Who ever wants to solve the same thing twice?

Read the paragraph point of style. It has got 7 points what to do in order to get yourself to perfection so you could call yourself an hacker. Work, play, do science, art, read, make things, train in martial arts, meditate, have an ear for music, play an instrument, appreciate puns, be skilled in all areas of computer related skills, know 5 programming languages, program in them,  be fluent at least in one of them, write open source software, debug somebody else's, publish useful information, make FAQ lists, administrate mailing lists, moderate newsgroups, propagate the culture, learn and use open-source Unix, learn to use World Wide Web, write HTML, English is not native - learn it. SOLVE PROBLEMS.

It made me also think about once great movie which contains a lot of philosophical phrases. We are stretching to 8 billion  on this planet. There is one scene in movie classics which reminded me of this all story, or at least the first part of the dialog matches it. I maybe harsh, but I believe that I am not so far away with this link:

Being in that sense of a hacker, is there any difference than being a monk in a monastery?