2016

The last twelve months did not pass fast. It was a long year..

Family-wise changed. Some got affected by Alzheimer, others display old age all too early. My own mom got surgery for two different cancer cases and a foot surgery. My grandma of 80 y.o. broke a leg which is a problem in her age. In worse cases family members passed away. Too much, too often, too quick. I've tried to be present, to support the treatment expenses and somehow, just somehow help. Sadder events were the death of my wife's father. Happened over night just before Christmas, just too quick and unexpected. Also sad was the earlier death of our house pet dog, which was part of the family for a whooping 17 years. Was sad to see our old dog put to final sleep. He was in constant pain, couldn't even walk any more. Will miss our daily walks on the park that happened three times a day regardless of snow or summer. We'd just get out on the street for fresh air so he could do his own business. Many times enjoyed the sun outside the office thanks to him, still grateful for these good moments. A great moment in 2015 was the birth of my second son. A strong and healthy boy. Nostalgia when remembering the happy moment when my first child got born back in 2008. In the meanwhile since that year almost everything changed, especially maturity-wise. In 2009 I've made the world familiar to me fall apart and yet to this day feel sad about my own decisions that eventually broke the first marriage. I can't change the past, but I can learn, work and aim to become a better father for my children. This is what I mean about maturity, do that extra mile to balance family and professional activities. It is sometimes crazy but somehow there must be balance. This year had the first proper family vacations since 5 years, which consisted on two weeks at a mountain lake. No phone, no Internet. Had to walk a kilometer on foot to get some WiFi on the phone at night. This summer we were talking with investors and communication was crucial so the idea of vacations seemed crazy. In the end, family was given preference and after summer we didn't went forward with investors in either case. Quality time with family was what really mattered, lesson learned.

Tech-wise we did the impossible, repeatably. If by December 2014 we had an archive with a trillion binary files and struggled hard on how to handle the already gathered data, by the end of 2015 was estimated that we had 3x as much data now stored. Not only the availability of open data grew exponentially, we also kept adding new sources of data before it would vanish. If before we were targeting some 30 types of source code files related to mainstream programming languages, now we target around 400 different types of binary formats. In fact, we don't even target just files. At current day we see relevant data extracted from blogs, forum sites, mailing lists. I mention an estimation of data because only in February we'll likely be able to pause and compute rigorous metrics. There was an informal challenge at DARPA to account the number of source code lines that are publicly available to humanity in current times, we might be able to report back a 10^6 growth compared to an older census. Having many files and handling that much data with very limited resources is one part of the equation that we (fortunately) had already solved back in 2014. The main challenge for 2015 was how to find the needles of relevant information inside a large haystack of public source code within a reasonable time. Even worse, how to enable end-users (customers) to find these needles by themselves inside the haystack through their laptops in offline manner, without a server farm somewhere (privacy).  However, we did managed to get the whole thing working. Fast. The critical test was a customer with over 10 million LOC in different languages, written for the past 15 years. We were in doubt about such a large code base. But running the triplecheck tooling from a normal i7 laptop to crunch the matches required only 4 days, compared to 11 days when compared to other tools with smaller databases. That was a few months ago, in 2016 we are aiming to reduce this value down to a single day of processing (or less). Impossible is only impossible until someone else makes it possible. Don't listen to naysayers, just take as many steps as you need to go up a mountain, no matter how big it might be.


Business-wise was quite a ride. The top worst decisions (mea culpa) in 2015 was pitching our company at a European-wide venture capital event and trusting completely on outsourced sales without preparation for either. The first decision wasn't initially bad. We went there and got 7 investors interested in follow-up meetings. Very honest about where the money would be used, along with expected growth. However, the cliché that engineers are not good at business might be accurate. Investors speak a different language, there was disappointment for both sides. This initiative costed our side thousands of euros in travel and material costs, along with 4 months of stalled development. Worse was believing that the outsourced team could deliver sales (without being asked for a proof or test beforehand). Investors can invest without proof of revenue, but when someone goes to market then they want to wait and see how it performs. In our case, it didn't perform. Many months later we had paid thousands of EUR to the outsourced company and had zero product revenue to account from them. Felt like a complete fool for permitting this to happen and not putting a brake earlier. The only thing saving the company at this point was our business angel. Thanks to his support we kept getting new clients for the consulting activities. Majority of these clients became recurring M&A customers, this is what kept the company floating. Can never thank him enough, a true business angel in the literal sense of the expression. By October, the dust from outsourcing and investing were gone. Now existed certainty that we want to build a business and not a speculative startup. We finally got product sales moving forward by bringing aboard a veteran on this kind of challenge. For a start, no more giving our tools away for free during trial phase. I was skeptic but it worked well because this filtered our attention for companies that would pay upfront a pilot test. This made customers take the trial phase seriously since it had a real cost paid by them. The second thing was to stop using powerpoints during meetings. I prepare slides before customer meetings but this is counter-productive. More often than not, customers couldn't care less about what we do. Surprisingly enough they care about what they do and how to get their own problems solved. :-) Today exists a focus on hearing more than speaking at such meetings. Those two simple changes made quite a difference.


So, that's the recap from last year. Forward we move. :-)