Lexicon
From time to time, I use phrases that have hard-earned meaning to me, but no one else. I’m creating this page to simplify those who might want to know what I’m talking about.
The 5 Guys from DuPont Circle Problem
Once upon a time, I was working in a startup located in the DuPont circle neighborhood of Washington DC. We created a security product that sat on the TCP stack and both encrypted every packet as it went by as well as signing the packet through a method of embedding authentication information (a password hash, biometeric information, etc.). It was pretty slick and a few patents were issued on the concepts. We got a working version up and ready to be shrinkwrapped and shipped when we decided to roadshow the product to a few potential clients. I can’t remember which one it was that did us the very good favor of being honest with us, but at one stop, the manager basically leaned back in his chair and said “Guys, this is a really interesting product. I believe you that it will work exactly like you say it will, but there’s no way I’m betting the security of my company on five guys from DuPont circle that I’ve never heard of before.”
As a result of that meeting, I took a lesson away that I apply to every startup, company, application or project that approaches me. Basically, how are you going to beat the 5 guys from DuPont problem? It doesn’t matter how good your technology is, how spiffy your marketing campaign looks or how much funding you have from however many VCs: how are you going to convince end users to take the chance on your efforts?
HA/HT
HA/HT: High Available, High Throughput. Specifically, I’m talking about systems that have SLA requirements in the neighborhood “no more than 5 minutes unscheduled outages per year” and/or systems that handle over 3000 transactions per minute.
Everyone says that they want their systems to be “always up”; everyone talks about “scalability”. In general, people want those fine qualities, but they generally are not willing to pay the rather large price tag associated with them. It’s almost like the phrase “real time”: Real Time has very specific meaning to people who have actually implemented it; business people say real time and actually mean “when I enter the data in a database, it shows up in a query from another user as quickly as possible,” not “when I enter the data into a database, it is either immediately available for every user on the system within .000003 seconds (as worst-case scenario) or is rendered worthless and/or dangerous (in a safety sense)”.
Damn My Own Logic
I have found that whenever a person is talking about something (be it politics, technology or religion — not that there’s a huge amount of difference between those areas for some people) and you happen to be so impertinent as to point out a potential objection to their way of thinking, if their response happens to be “well, that’s different,” then that’s basically the same as them saying “nuts, I’ve been trapped by my own logic.”
