The end of agile (VI)

(To listen to this post’s soundtrack, click this link)

“How the hell did I get to this point? What am I doing here in this stairwell in a client’s building, arguing with this guy on the phone, taking his insults? It’s time I told him to go to hell!”

Wake Up!

I’ll give you a dose but it’ll never come close to the
Rage built up inside of me
— Rage Against the Machine

In April 2003 I was out of work, and broke, because I had gone several months without a paycheck. I was in anguish, my body and my mind weren’t responding. Exhausted and worn out.

Leaving the CCS, the Santiago Chamber of Commerce, had been a complete failure. I was “keeping the pot on the stove”, as we say in Chile, with odd jobs landed through contacts. The story of how I got there still makes me angry, because I was deceived, swindled like many citizens, like the Chilean state itself.

After leaving the Chamber, I went to work at a startup, created by someone I met through CEO. He ran a successful web design agency and had several important contracts, most of them with the government. His offices were in a beautiful old mansion in Providencia, where some of the lunches with entrepreneurs that I told you about in part 5 were sometimes held.

When I started working there the startup hadn’t been incorporated yet. So I worked with the agency’s team, replacing the head of technology, who had left. That’s where I met Rafa, who was the company’s developer. The rest were account managers and a couple of graphic designers. While the due diligence was being done to receive the seed capital that would give rise to the startup, I took the chance to get to know their technology, and I helped out on some projects of the parent company.

Cult of Personality

Look in my eyes, what do you see?
The cult of personality
— Living Colours

I remember that one of the partners had a modeling agency at the same address. It wasn’t unusual to see beautiful girls on the second floor running around in their underwear to change outfits during photo shoots, putting together their books. Several models passed through there who were starting to get famous right then, for appearing on the fledgling programs called reality shows, and other celebrity gossip shows that invaded the television of the time.

I should have suspected something right then. The atmosphere was very strange. Rafa and I worked at the back of the house. One day a German kid, about 22 years old, showed up asking for a job. He could design, program in Python, and knew a strange platform called Zope[. I took a look at it, and it was a very interesting web content server. We hired him, because the agency’s technical area had to be left well staffed before Rafa and I moved over.

I have to say that at least during that time they kept their commitment to pay me what we’d agreed. But I was worried, because that wasn’t what I had signed up for. I was supposed to be developing software for a platform of interactive mobile games.

Bulls on parade

The microphone explodes, shattering the molds
[— Rage Against the Machine]{style=“letter-spacing: 0.01rem;”}

When Tom Morello was asked on Twitter which city has the best fans, the musician answered, Rock: Santiago, Baseball: Chicago.

For Rage Against the Machine, one of their best concerts was the one that became known as the Battle of Santiago, in 2010. Their style, which mixes funk and rap with metal, with political lyrics, makes them one of the greatest exponents of rap metal and funk metal.

The use of Wake Up in the soundtrack of The Matrix made a big impression on me. I think it burned that movie’s message into my mind. It’s the right closing note. Too bad they never made a second or third part of The Matrix

.

They say RATM’s music was used by the CIA to torture prisoners at Guantanamo

. The idea was to wreck their nerves by playing this aggressive music at full volume. It’s a terrible irony and proof that the system can absorb anything, even what goes against it, and use it to its own advantage.

For me funk metal is tied to violent energy, to that pent-up rage I kept accumulating through 2002 and 2003, which blew up into severe stomach pains and depression.

Evidence

Anything you say, we know you’re guilty
— Faith no more

Suddenly some executives walked into this comedy, with experience in retail and television. They would be the startup’s commercial and executive arm.

These days, in early 2019, the founders of several successful startups, like Cornershop and NotCo, are sharing their view of how a startup should be built, through a class at the Universidad de Chile[, whose content is being made public.

If you watch the first video of this course you’ll get one of these founders’ take on how to build a successful startup. It’s advice drawn from his own experience, which at least worked for him and his partners. Well, the people at the startup I was in did exactly the opposite.

First they put together a pompous board: there was a former minister, a former television director, retail managers and of course a representative of the venture capitalist.

Technology was seen as secondary. They paid us well and gave us money to buy equipment, but there were just two of us. I was barely asked about an IT or development plan. As far as they were concerned the platform was already done, and it was just a matter of connecting it to the carriers’ networks.

It’s about time I told you what the hell the business was about.

[At one CEO meeting we had Carlos Baradello as a guest. Today this gentleman is a founder and manager of an important venture capital fund in Sausalito, California. But in those years he was in charge of an important area at Motorola. He visited Chile because that company wanted to set up an R&D center in our country. It was at that lunch that several of us realized the future was what back then was called “the mobile web”.

In Europe, as a result of the reality show craze and the SMS boom, there were already experiments with interactive television. Big Brother, for example, was a reality show where the audience could vote by sending messages from their cell phones.

In 2002, these guys from the agency built a prototype for a trivia game to be used during the soccer World Cup. That’s how they got the idea of setting up a mobile games startup using SMS. But the engineer who had developed the platform together with Rafa had walked out on them. So they approached me at a lunch and offered me the job of CTO of this new startup.

I accepted, after my failed negotiation at the CCS. And so suddenly, in late 2002, I was setting up equipment on a spacious floor of a building in Vitacura. It was a very elegant office. We bought high-end laptops. We had a fancy coffee machine, an efficient and friendly assistant, comfortable leather chairs, and dozens of cell phones to test with.

The only bad thing, the only evidence that this was headed down the wrong road, though I didn’t know it, was that the investor was called Inverlink Holding.

Don Ricardo’s vase

Can you feel it, see it, hear it today?
If you can’t, then it doesn’t matter anyway
You will never understand it ‘cause it happens too fast
– Faith no more

We set up shop in September 2002, more or less. I signed a new contract, this time with the startup, with the title of technology manager.

But in November the paychecks came late, and the same in December and January. In February we got nothing at all. Meanwhile, in that period we didn’t land a single meaningful deal. Despite being connected to every cell phone carrier, and the pompous board meetings full of dignitaries, and our executives’ résumés, we weren’t managing to sell much.

It seemed the partners cared more about getting to the next investment rounds than about selling anything. I’ll say it again: everything you shouldn’t do was being done at this company.

In February 2003 it came out that the secretary of Carlos Massad, head of the Central Bank, had been sending emails with inside information to Enzo Bertinelli, with whom she was having an affair. That set off an investigation that uncovered one of the biggest frauds against the public treasury in our history. Inverlink had committed several crimes, and among other things it was illegally obtaining funds from Corfo, the state development agency, with which it financed, among other things, tech startups like the one I was in. Guess who was one of the directors of our startup. Yes, Enzo Bertinelli himself.

It was at that time, when the scandal broke at CORFO, which touched his son-in-law, that President Lagos delivered his famous vase theory:

“Not one peso of the Chilean State has been lost here. If you have a vase in your house and a thief breaks in and steals it, when they find the vase they are going to give it back to you”

The problem is that the vase was broken. And I was among the pieces.

I didn’t even get the chance to quit. One day we showed up for work and found the door shut, sealed, with chains and padlocks. The secretary, Rafa and I looked at each other. There was nobody else. We went for a coffee, said our goodbyes, wished each other luck and went home. Just like so many other employees of the Inverlink companies, which ranged from small tech startups, through insurance and investment firms, to a major hospital. More than three thousand of us were left without a job because of the stolen vase, and we were never compensated.

Reboot

Can’t stop, addicted to the shindig — Red Hot Chili Peppers

Remember the young German we had hired? One Friday he came to visit us at our Vitacura offices. He had stayed on in charge of maintaining the agency’s sites. We talked a lot. He was a pleasant, intelligent kid. He had come to Chile for love, and he told us he was planning to go back and resume his studies in Germany in a few months. We said goodbye that Friday. On Monday I was told he was in the hospital in a coma. On Tuesday he died of a stroke. He had a tumor that had never been diagnosed. The news hit me hard. It was devastating, I remember. It made me very sad.

Since I had no job, I survived by taking part in a few freelance projects at friends’ companies.

In April of that year Jorge, who had served as the startup’s general manager, came to me to say there was a company interested in developing mobile technology for logistics. I got along well with him, because in the end he was the only one who faced us during the crisis, and he tried to help us. Besides, I respected him for his great intelligence and honesty.

This time the funding came from a major Chilean shipping company. That’s how a company was set up that they called Inphone. A curious and prophetic name. It was a small startup that would use SMS messages to coordinate routes, track fleets, and do anything else we could come up with using SMS and the data technologies over GSM and GPRS, as long as it made sense for the world of shipping logistics.

But for some reason, a rather clumsy one in my opinion, they also decided to dabble in mobile marketing at the start. I felt that would make us lose focus, but they argued it was something that could bring in revenue quickly. They offered me a small ownership stake. The good part was that this company, being part of the shipping company’s holding, let us receive the same benefits as its employees and executives. I don’t think I’ve ever had better benefits since.

Somehow the owner of the failed startup found out about all this, and that’s when I got a call from him. Perhaps the most unpleasant phone conversation of my life.

He had worked himself into the idea that I was stealing his technology. He insulted me and I told him where to go. We never saw each other again until several years later, and on that occasion we didn’t even say hello. I suppose he still thinks I stole his technology, a technology he never programmed, of course.

But in any case that’s not what happened, for two very simple reasons. First, I had no access to anything, because my laptop and the servers were trapped behind those chains in that Vitacura office. The other reason is that I never liked their technology, built in Perl with Apache. They didn’t even have an ESME

. If they managed to connect to the mobile carriers it was because I was able to build a gateway that let their application talk to the phone networks.

Ships and fjords

Just one note
Could make me float
Could make me float away
— Red Hot Chili Peppers

At Inphone I built all the technology that was developed, because I was the entire IT department.

[First I put together a digital marketing platform in Java. I also wrote a pretty decent ESME in Java, based on an open source project.]{style=“letter-spacing: 0.01rem;”}\

But the most fun thing I did was working with some Inmarsat GPS units, which were used on the ships that sailed the fjords of southern Chile.

These GPS units had a 64-byte buffer that could be used to transmit messages. I built an application that made it possible to send pre-coded messages (things like: “entering port”, “cargo delivered”, “held up by bad weather”, etc.). We reserved 4 bytes for the pre-coded messages (that gives a potential of more than 4 billion possible messages, which I think was more than enough). The other 60 bytes were used to send a short text.

The ship’s captain had a laptop connected to the Inmarsat GPS through the serial port. In the user interface, a Windows application written in Delphi, he selected the pre-coded message. Then he added some text if necessary and pressed a button to dispatch the message.

In Valparaiso a server periodically polled Inmarsat’s servers and downloaded the messages from the ships, which arrived as files over FTP. They were decoded and placed on a dashboard, also in Delphi. The central operator could send instructions back to the ship, coded the same way, using those 4 bytes.

The coding of messages and instructions was configured by an operator, and if information needed to be added he had to distribute the message table to every ship.

All this was done because in some fjords there was no radio signal and the GPS was the only means of communication.

It was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever been part of, and one of the things that satisfies me most is having built it all from scratch. It required low-level programming, to handle the serial port and the communications protocol with the GPS, something I had already done during my time at Enfasis. It had a bit of mobile messaging, and I also built some dashboards to report the ships’ status and metrics.

Would you believe I put all that together in less than a month?

When you’re focused and working alone, when every decision is yours, the code can flow very fast, and on top of that you can surprise your client by exceeding their expectations. And this matters a lot. Small teams, even a single person, can be very efficient. What matters is that the people are talented, are clear about what they want to do and have the space and time to focus. That is essential to achieving true agile development.

I don’t know how long that solution stayed in use. Not long, I suppose, since satellite communications technology developed very fast. But even so, I think it’s one of the most ingenious solutions I’ve ever programmed.

But despite the benefits of working for the shipping company, I was alone in that job. I’d go days without a single colleague in our little office near the Tobalaba metro station.

There were barely three of us in the company. The manager, a sales lead, and me, doing all the engineering.

I wasn’t satisfied. On the contrary, I felt very depressed. I wanted to emigrate, do new things and work on a team with colleagues who understood me.

That’s when I got the call from my friend Marco, in early 2004, inviting me to venture into the world of biometrics. I’ll tell you about that in part seven.

Notes:

urban legend has it that two more movies followed. I don’t know if I saw them, and if I did I’d rather forget them.

You can read more interesting facts about RATM in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/conarebo/status/1114312594066694146

Even though there is a ruling that says billions of dollars must be returned to the Chilean state, I wonder whether any of that loss has been recovered.

an ESME is a server that lets you connect TCP/IP services to an SMS-based network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Short_Messaging_Entity.

The first part of this series is here: https://www.lnds.net/blog/lnds/2019/03/17/el-fin-de-la-agilidad

Part 7, the continuation of this episode, is here: http://www.prosa.io/blog/lnds/2019/04/14/el-fin-de-la-agilidad