#'we expect to be down for a few more hours while the database servers finish syncing'

[luvxiem]

when will my husband (ao3) return from war (maintenance)

[joylee56]

Have You Tried Turning It On and Off?

For Ifishouldvanish; Happy RCIJ!

for the prompt ‘Hey, you’re the jerk...’

Rating: Explicit; Also Lacey has a potty mouth.

“I’m pretty sure nurse maid isn’t part of my job description.”  Lacey said.  

“You’re the project manager.  Babysitting is pretty much what project managers do.”

(Part 1 of 3)

The data center was dark.

“Crap!”  Lacey flipped the light switch again.  Nothing.  Not a blinking light to be seen.    

Using her phone for light she crawled along the floor to locate the surge protector/uninterruptible power supply.  Which clearly had not lived up to it’s name.

Except everything had been unplugged from the uninterruptible power supply and there were now extension cords run from the mains.  “Fuck!”

This despite the half dozen signs she had posted specifically telling people not to do that.  Their equipment was flaky enough as it was.  It could not take power fluctuations.

They’d caught the edge of a hurricane starting Friday.  It had been storming like a bastard the whole weekend.  God only knew when the circuit breaker had gone out.  Except it was a certainty that it was after some idiot had disconnected the surge protector.  She pulled all the plugs. Making a complete sweep of the room to make sure she had gotten them all.

Then she headed for the main switch box.

“Circuit breaker out again?”  LeFou, their database administrator, commented.  “I already had to fix that once this weekend.  You really need to do something about that.  Gaston has enough on his plate without having to worry about unreliable hardware.”

“What did you do?” Lacey demanded.

“When I came in on Saturday morning the storm had tripped the circuit breaker.  So I turned it back on.”  LeFou looked very pleased with himself.  “When that didn’t get the system back up and running I figured out that the surge protector you had everything plugged wasn’t working.  So I found some extension cords, all with built in surge protectors as you can see, and plugged everything in to the wall sockets.  Once that was done the whole system booted up like a charm.”

Words failed her. As she headed back to the data center, LeFou called after her.  “You really make too big a deal out of your job, Lacey.  It’s mostly just common sense.”

Which was clearly in short supply around Megacorp if nobody had thought to stop that idiot from putting their entire rickety old system at risk.  But it was not like bitching about him to the head of IT would do any good.  LeFou was an old buddy of Gaston’s, which was how he had gotten his job.

It was also how she had gotten her job.  She had already been living with Gaston when he offered her the position as project manager, so it was not like the sex had been a quid pro quo, despite what the gossip said.  And she had worked damn hard since she got hired to learn how to do the job properly.  Hell, she was doing most of Gaston’s work these days.

But this was way beyond her ability to fix.  And Gaston’s fancy computer science degree that had been long on theory and short on the practical.  Not to mention she strongly suspected that his gentleman Cs had been earned more on the football field than in the classroom.  He would be even less use.  At least she had some self taught hardware knowledge.

Gaston was also halfway to Burlington to attend some regional company meeting.  She texted him, with a brief summary and telling him she would be calling in outside help.  

A Google search on her phone showed there was only one computer repair company within an hour’s drive that said they worked on servers.

Crossing her fingers, Lacey called them.

“Golden Hat, our work is as good as gold.”

Praying their tech guys were better than their marketing people, she quickly explained the problem.  “Can you get someone here to fix it now?”

“As it happens Mr. Gold is available.  What system are you running?”

“Windows Server 2003”

“You’ve got to be kid…, that is, let me check with Mr. Gold.”

He forgot to actually put her call on hold so she heard him call out,  “Rum, you think you remember how to work on WS 2003?”

Another voice came from farther away,  “I remember.  Why would ye want me to?”

The guy she had been talking to came back.  “He’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

She spent the time waiting for him sending out an email explaining what had happened. She also printed out actual paper notices which she posted in the coffee room as well as the data center.  

At least the guy who showed up was the right vintage to work on the equipment.  A tiny little guy, probably only a few inches taller than her in her heels, he had graying brown hair past his collar, but an old fashioned air which was not completely due to the dress slacks, tailored white shirt and dark tie, with a name tag on his blazer reading ‘Mr. Gold, Golden Hat Computing’.

Clearly he was an old school computer nerd.  But the laptop he carried was state of the art and his backpack of tools looked reassuringly full.  

Noticing he used a cane she asked,  “The data center is downstairs.  Is that going to be a problem.”

“Shouldn’t be.” He told her brusquely.  “Now what happened?  Storm knock out your system?”

“That’s the least of it.”  She sighed.

By the time she laid out the chain of events they were in the data center and he was taking a good look around.  “How often do you overwrite your back up tapes?”

“We got two that alternate every other night at midnight.”

He winced.  “You’re not even set up to use a RAID?”

Which was Lacey’s turn to wince.  “The company backs up it’s data to the Home Office every twenty four hours and so with the tape back up on site my boss didn’t think we needed to spend the money to upgrade.”

“That’s not the only reason to use a RAID.”  He shook his head.  “Let me run some diagnostics and see how much of this is salvageable.  These aren’t hot swapable so pulling the drives is going to be slow.”

“So I need to tell everyone they’re not going to be able to access their data this morning?”  This was not going to be a fun morning.”

“If you get lucky it will take a couple of days to get things up and running.  Uhm, don’t expect to get lucky.  This stuff is old enough I’m no hopeful.”  Looking around he added.  “I could build you a new system in less time than that if you’re not dead set on Windows.”

“It has to talk to the Home Office.”

He shrugged and started opening up the first server.

She left him to it.

Despite her email and signs half of the office came up to her and demanded why the system was down and what was she doing to fix it.  

Mr. Gold appeared shortly before lunch.  He had a clip board out and was making a lot of notes on it.

That was fast.  “You fixed it?”  

“Uhm, no.  You’ve got several disk drives that are dead, but all of them are reading as threshold exceeded and are on the verge of failure.  I’m amazed the whole system didn’t die on you years ago.  I’ll need to order new drives and you might as well replace them all.

“After we get you new drives, we’ll need to run a complete set of diagnostics on both the hardware and the data.  I’m not optimistic about your backups, so you probably should see if your headquarters can get you the data you need.”

He finished writing something and tore the top sheet off the form he had been writing on. He glanced up briefly to meet her eyes as he handed it to her then looked away.  “That’s my proposal and cost estimate.  I’ll need it signed, uhm by someone authorized to approve that large an expenditure.

“And, uhm...” His voice got softer,  “We’ll need half down before I do the work.”

“Half?” Squeezing half of this cost estimate out of corporate was going to take a lot longer than they could afford to have the data center down.  She smiled her sexiest smile at the guy.  “Can’t you get started right away?  It’s not like Megacorp isn’t good for it. And I’d be ever so appreciative.”

She figured she would not have to go further in her ‘appreciation’ than having drinks with this guy.  After almost a year at Megacorp she could read a nerd at twenty meters and this was one of the shy ones.  He probably would not even try for a good night kiss.  

“No.”  He glanced up briefly to meet her eyes and then back down to fidget with his pen.  “Megacorp takes 90 days to pay their invoices.  And that’s if they don’t try to dispute the bill.  We’re a small company.  We can’t carry accounts receivables that long.  Half down.”

A shy one with a back bone it seemed.  And he knew just how cheeseparing corporate Accounts Payable was.  She sighed and pulled up the spreadsheet where she recorded the petty cash account.  “How much can I get done for 1497 bucks?”

“I can get you new hard drives installed and a proper uninterruptible power source hooked up.”  He shook his head.  “What you’ve got down there is a piece a… that is, it’s completely inadequate for what you’re running.  By rights you need a stand by generator as a back up.”

“So, I keep telling them.”  In detail.  She had a whole proposal written up about what they needed to upgrade and how a new system would pay for itself in costs savings.  She had gone over Gaston’s head and forwarded it to corporate.  Where she strongly suspected it was sitting unread in somebody’s inbox.

Gaston never did make it back to the office from Burlington.  Leaving her to take the flak from everyone else about the system being down.  She was nursing the bottom half of a bottle of wine when he made it home.

From what had apparently been a golf game with the Regional VP in charge of tech. She came close to heaving the bottle of wine at him when he asked what was for dinner.

“Whatever you can find in the fridge.  And while you’re fixing it we need to talk about how we’re going to get the data center running again.”

At least he had apparently read her texts so was up to date on the issues.  He read through Golden Hat’s proposal and cost estimate while he ate his sandwich.  He was frowning by the time he finished them.  

“We don’t have the money for this, Lacey.”  Gaston shook his head.  “Corporate is breathing down our necks.  They’re going to be combining divisions to cut costs.  We need to show a higher profit or we’ll end up merged with Vermont.  And they’ll only need one IT department.”

“We don’t have a choice, Gaston.  The thing’s not going to fix itself.”  She nibbled the sandwich he had the grace to make for her while he was making his own.

“Maybe you could, you know, flirt with him a little?”  

“You’re so desperate you’re willing to pimp me out?”  Clearly the time had come to re-evaluate her relationship with Gaston.  She let him sputter about how it was not like that for a minute before she told him.  “I tried.  He’s a hard headed Scotsman.  Not the ‘Capt, the engines canna take it’ kind,   although since he fixes computers I guess he’s that kind too.  But a full on Trainspotting gives no fucks kind.”

Mr. Gold came back the next day to replace the drives and set up a new uninterruptible power supply.  When he was done Gaston cornered him and in his best buddy to buddy manner tried to talk him into completing the job.  “… it’s the bureaucracy, you see.  It’s not that you won’t get paid.”

Out of petty cash over the next two years if Gaston was not going to send the bill on to corporate Lacey figured.

But Mr. Gold was having none of it.  “As I told your… Assistant?”

“Project manager.” Lacey corrected him.

“Uhm, right.” He sounded dubious.  “You could upgrade to a Linux system at a lot less than it will take you to fix this one.  And you’d have something that was actually being supported with updates.”  

At that point Gaston gave up on friendly and tried for intimidation.  “Look if you don’t fix this you’ll never work for Megacorp again and I’ll let everybody in the industry now how lousy your service was.  It’ll ruin you.

Mr. Gold was staring at his shoes and the fingers of his right hand were rubbing together in a circular motion.  His voice was quiet, but firm.  “Not working for a company that’s no going to pay me and makes impossible demands will be no great loss.”

He glance up at Gaston looming over him and backed up a step before continuing.  “And I’ve been in the business since before you could read.  Besides being the only service and repair company this side of Bangor.  I’m thinkin’ you’re over-estimating your influence a bit.”

Probably a by a lot, Lacey had to agree.

Gaston fell back on what was plan C.  “At least reinstall the back up for us.  That won’t take you long and we can pay you for it today.”

With what?  Lacey wondered.  They had already used all the petty cash.

“You can’t just reload your backups.”  Mr. Gold told him.  “You need to review the data to see how much has been corrupted.  There’s a strong likelihood that your backups got overwritten after the first crash and if so they’re almost certainly corrupted.  Reconstructing your data is about half of my bid.”

“But you don’t know for certain the tapes are corrupted?”  Gaston insisted.

“I’m sure enough of it that I’m not willing to reload that backup onto a clean system without a thorough review.”  Mr. Gold told him.

“If you won’t do it we’ll get someone else.”  Gaston threatened.

“You’ll have to because I’ll no do it.”  Gold started to pack up his gear.  “I’d recommend going with the Nerd Herd at the Buy More over in Bangor. They’re competent and I’m pretty sure at least one of them is old enough to drink and so may have worked on WS 2003 at least once.”    

They did not get the Nerd Herder who was old enough to drink.  But despite Gaston pulling the same intimidation on him as he had on Gold, even he was not willing to reload the backup data.  Although he was not as certain as Gold had seemed that the data was corrupted.  Instead he fell back on squeaking out,  “It’s Buy More policy to check the back up data first,” before running for his little car.  

Lacey spent several hours trying to convince Gaston to bring back Gold.  “The guy clearly knows how our system works, Gaston.  I mean he probably was working on servers back when it was introduced.”

Gaston was still maintaining they could not afford to do that when she finally left in a huff.

Gaston did not come home that night.  Which was probably just as well because Lacey was completely out of patience with the guy.  She did bring him a smoothie by way of a peace offering the next morning.

“The system’s down again.”  LeFou greeted Lacey with before she got her jacket off.

“Damn it!  He said he’d fixed the drives.”  Lacey turned toward the data center.

“It’s not the drives.”  LeFou told her.  “Something happened to the Home Office’s system.  The entire company’s down.”

Lacey had a sinking feeling.  Instead of going to the data center, she headed into Gaston’s office.  He was on the phone with someone, who by the tone of Gaston’s voice was way further up the food chain than he was.

She waited for him to get off the phone and asked,  “What did you do?”

“Don’t you start, Lace.  I just had corporate IT crawling up my butt.”

“You reloaded the backups without having them checked, didn’t you?”  They were in serious shit.

“The guy from the Nerd Herd said they were okay.”

“The guy from the Nerd Herd was maybe all of twenty and you brow beat him into saying they might be okay.” Lacey pointed out.

“Yeah, well, don’t say that to anybody else and we might come out of this with our jobs.”

“Gaston, there is no way in Hell that kid did not go back and tell his boss what you wanted him to do.  And you can be damn sure the boss wrote up a report to cover their asses.  They’re sure to tell corporate as soon as our crash hits the news.”  She checked her phone.  “Which happened about two hours ago.”  

The hit squad they sent from corporate to investigate the ‘incident’ came armed not only with the Nerd Herd’s version of events, but with Golden Hat’s ever so meticulous proposal and cost estimate which she, like a good little corporate shill, had forwarded for approval.  So it did not take them long to figure out where the screw up had been.

It really hit the fan when the hit squad dug up her old proposal pointing out the inadequacies in the system along with how to fix it.  She had worked her butt off preparing that thing and now they were going to screw her with it.

Gaston got axed in the first wave.  They did not outright say it was for incompetence, but anyone with half a brain could read between the lines and figure it out.

They announced the merger of the Maine office with the Vermont one a week later. Everything was going to move to Burlington.  Keeping her job would mean being hours away from Dad which would make taking care of him a problem.  Not moving meant she would be out of work.  Again.

It turned out they did not give her a choice.  “Why am I being fired?”  Lacey demanded of the HR people.

The woman sighed. “You’re not being fired, Ms. French.  We are merging the Maine office with the one in Vermont.  With this merger there will be a downsizing of the IT departments.  Positions within the department will be determined by seniority and qualifications and I’m afraid you are the lowest ranked in both areas.”

“But I’m the one who discovered the cause of the problem and put together the proposal for how to fix it.  Before it happened.”  

“Which has been duly noted in your personnel file.”  The HR woman continued.  “You are welcome, in fact encouraged, to apply for other positions within the company.  But Megacorp has guidelines for these matters and frankly you should never have been hired for the position you held.”

So Lacey took her severance check, a crappy one month’s salary, and checked the company Positions Available page.

The only ones she actually had the qualification for all sounded suspiciously like file clerks and gofers.  She filled out the applications anyway.  She needed the money.  

To put the icing on the cake, she tripped over Gaston’s packed suitcases when she got home that night.  “What’s this?”

“Dad got me an interview at Blizzard.”

“Were you planning on telling me about that or just have me come home and find you’d left?”  Lacey demanded.  

“Now don’t be like that, Lace.”  Gaston tried to placate her.  “It wasn’t like either of us thought this was a long term thing.  We had our fun, but I need to go where I can find work.  Tell you what, once I get settled I’ll see if they have a job opening for you.”

“I can’t move to California, Gaston.”  Lacey pointed out.  “Dad can’t leave Maine and I have look out for him.  I wasn’t sure I could move as far away as Burlington.”

Gaston shrugged. “Well, then I guess I’ll be going.  Hey, I don’t suppose you could drive me to the airport?”

She did not.

“It’s not like I’m gonna miss his sorry ass.  The sex was nothing to write home about.  But he covered the rent.”  Lacey complained to Ruby the next day at the diner.  “I couldn’t pay the rent on that place even with my old job and you know Megacorp is going to contest my unemployment.”

“That sucks.” Ruby agreed.  “We can give you three or four shifts a week here and any you can pick up from the other waitresses.  That’ll get you by while you look for another job.”

“Thanks.”  Lacey tried to be grateful.  But she had so hoped to have put waiting table behind her.  

And it wasn’t like there were a whole lot of tech companies in coastal Maine.  She was probably going to have to move south to find work.  Which meant the headache of looking after her Dad from out of town.  

She had been working at Granny’s for about a week when late in the lunch shift two men came in.  One of them was about medium height, fairly good looking in a broody poet sort of way and dressed like he was in a period drama complete with a weird top hat thing.

The other was Mr. Gold.  

They sat down at one of Ruby’s tables, but Lacey marched over to them anyway.  “Hey, You’re the jerk who got me fired!”

Gold reared back and blinked at her.  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, that’s good.  I was at Megacorp and you came to fix our data center, remember?  Only you wouldn’t do it.”

“Well, I remember her.”  The other man put in.  “You talked about her and the ghastly server system they had for about an hour when you got back.”

“I remember the job.”  Gold told him testily.  “I no remember anything about anyone bein’ fired.”

“When you wouldn’t do it...”

He interrupted. “You weren’t goin’ to pay me.  Of course I wouldn’t do it.”

She ignored him. “My idiot boss reinstalled the corrupted backups and managed to take down the entire company’s system.”

The guy in the top hat whistled.  “Now that takes talent.”

“So corporate closed the office here and I got fired.”  She finished.  “And there aren’t any other tech companies hiring in the entire state. I’ve looked everywhere.”

“None of which is my fault.”  Gold denied.

“What do you do?” Top hat asked.

“What?”  Lacey asked.

“What did you do at this job Rum so inconsiderately got you fired from?”  Hat guy was smirking a bit.

“I dinna’...” Gold sputtered.

“Well, not directly, but it does seem like you were in the chain of causation. You’re the one who’s always lecturing on how actions have consequences.”  

Hat guy turned back to Lacey.  Grinning broadly now.  “So we should help the lovely lady...”

Gold snorted at the description.  Lacey glared at him.  Hat guy continued.  “...Find another position.”

“I’m a project manager.”  When Gold raised an eyebrow at that, she declared.  “I’m certified and everything.”

Granted the certification came from an on-line course and she had fibbed a little about having a college degree.  

“Perfect.”  Hat guy clapped.  “As it happened we need a good manager.”

“We do?”  Gold asked.  

“You’re the one who’s also always complaining about all the time you spend on paperwork.”  Hat guy’s smile had changed to a smirk.  He clearly was pulling something on his… partner, Lacey guessed.  “You were bitching only yesterday about having to waste half the day on the Google advertising.”

He turned to Lacey, “How are you with Google ad words, Ms…?”

“French.  Lacey French.”  Gold smirked slightly at that.  She glared at him some more.  “Sure I can do website maintenance.”

They had covered it in the on-line course when she got her certification.  It had looked easy enough.  

“How about bookkeeping?”  Hat guy leaned forward conspiratorially.  “Rum spends a couple of days a month just on bookkeeping.”

Here she was on certain ground.  “I’ve done the books and taxes for my Dad’s florist shop from the time I was twelve.  What program are you using?”

“Just a spreadsheet.”  Mr. Gold, who was apparently named Rum, muttered.

“No wonder it takes a couple of days.”    

“It’s an excellent spreadsheet.  I wrote it myself.”  He was indignant.

“So it sounds like she’d be perfect.”  Hat guy clapped his hands.  “Come on, Rum. It’ll be fun to have someone else around to play with.”

She did not like the sound of that and looked at Hat guy suspiciously.

“Jeff designs games.”  Gold quickly explained.  He sighed, “I suppose we could use someone to help with testing.

“You’ll meed to be flexible.  We’re a small family business.��  Gold told her. “And it would be temporary.”

“To start anyway.” Jeff put in.  

“And we probably can’t match what you were making at Megacorp.”  Gold frowned at his partner.  “Say eighteen an hour?”

That was actually more than she was making at Megacorp.  “I can live with that.”

“Come by tomorrow at 9:00.”  Gold handed her a card.  “Now can we get some lunch?”  

  The address on the card looked like somebody’s house.  Somebody rich.  It was a three story pink Victorian which was really nicely kept up.

Gold answered the door and showed her around.  “You’ll be answering the phone along with the paperwork.  I’ve prepared a script for you.  There’s a database of customers.  The ones who have service contracts with us get first priority.

“Your station will be there.”  He pointed to a standard cubicle set up in what had once been the parlor of the old house.  There were a couple of others which looked like they were primarily used for storage.  Behind them an old oak table was stacked with paper.  

“This is Jeff’s office.”  He led her through into what she guessed had been the dining room.  Solid mahogany desk and credenza held computer gear, stacks of papers and a strange collection of toys and gimcracks. Another matching desk held a lot of organizers.  Which did not look very organized.  “For God’s sake don’t touch anything in here unless Jeff has put it on this desk.  Incoming materials go here as well.

“The toilet is off the main hallway.  Kitchen is through there.”  He waved at a set of sliding doors.  “You can get to it from the hallway as well.  Help yourself, but make a note if we’re running out of anything.

“I’ll be downstairs if you have any questions.”  He paused.  “Uhm, Jeff can be a bit… whimsical.  If he asks you to do anything that seems… odd, you might want to check with me.”

“We talking strip to my knickers odd or pick shit up from his dealer odd?”  When Gold blinked at her she added.  “I can handle him either way.  I just want to know what to expect.”

“More like do a census of the fairies at the bottom of the garden odd.”  Gold’s mouth quirked.  “Jeff has a head injury from a car accident.  He’s functional, well most of the time, but sometimes he has a little trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy.”

“Is that when you hurt your leg?”  Great.  She was working for a nut job and a gimp. First thing she was going to do was check their bank account and make sure her paychecks were not going to bounce.

“No.”  His lips thinned.  “Not the same accident.  Mine was courtesy of the Taliban.”

“You’re a vet?” He was only a couple of inches taller than she was.

“Aye.”  His voice became sardonic.  “The army’s physical standards aren’t nearly as high for their techs.  Especially not ones who speak Urdu.”

“Where’d you learn Urdu?”

“Glasgow.  Lot of our neighbors were from Pakistan.  And the Mother of a mate of mine didn’t speak any English.”  He led her back to the cubicles.

“That’s should get you started.”  He looked her up and down.  “Uhm, about your clothes...”

“What’s wrong with my clothes?”  She demanded.  She looked good today. Her best pair of nude heels showed off her legs like nobody’s business.  Granted the little blue pleated skirt was short, but so was she.  Anything longer looked dowdy and she was damned if she was going to dress like some librarian just cause her boss was a prude. She had enough of that from her Dad growing up.

Gold sighed.  “Never mind.  It’ll probably be good for him to have to practice minding his manners and not staring.”

With that baffling statement he turned toward the stairs.  She called out to stop him. “You want to see my Green Card now?”  She pulled it out of her purse.

Gold blinked at her. “Not particularly.  Why would I?”

“So you can fill out the form showing I’m not illegal?”  She held out the documents.

“Undocumented.” Gold corrected her.  “There’s a form?”

“Yeah.”  She said.  “You never hire anybody before?”

“Not really.” He admitted.  “Leroy does the occasional odd job for us, but we just pay him as a contractor.

“But since you clearly know more about it than I do that can be your first task.” He waved in the general direction of the computer.  “Find it.  Fill it out.  I’ll be downstairs in the workshop trying to catch up on the work I should have been doing while doing your orientation.  You can bring the form down for me to sign when you finish it.”

He headed toward a door under the stairs.  She called after him.  “I suppose you expect me to bring you a cuppa while I’m about it?”

“Thank you, yes. Lemon, one sugar.”  He called back over his shoulder.

Lemon her ass.  She tossed her purse under the table.  She would show him she was no tea lady.

Her good friend Google had no trouble finding the forms she needed.  The only problem she had in getting them filled out was figuring out how to turn on the stupid printer which appeared to be nearly as old as she was.  

Because she was going to be the best damn manager in the whole damn state and show that nerd what for, she actually made a pot of tea while she was waiting for the print job to finish.  And fixed him a cup just as he asked, using a nice china tea cup and saucer from the hutch.  

“I have your tea and the forms ready for you to sign, Mr. Gold.”  She called our sweetly as she descended the stairs.

She set the tea down on a clear spot at the U shaped desk he was working at and handed him the papers as she described them.  “W-4 for the IRS, I-9 for immigration, whatever this thing for the Maine Income Tax people is called, and a standard non-disclosure agreement.”

Gold blinked at the stack.  And started to read the non-disclosure agreement.  “That’s very… efficient of you.”

“You really should have had me sign that before you gave me your log in codes.” She kept her voice sweet.  “Why I could be up there stealing all your secrets.”

“I dinna figured you’d be around long enough to learn any.”  Gold muttered as he read.

He absentmindedly picked up the cup of tea and took a sip.  Then he looked at her suspiciously.  “This is perfect.  You didn’t spit in it did you?”

“I’m too good an Aussie to mess with a cuppa.”  She smirked.  “Otherwise you’d of gotten salt instead of sugar.”

“Uhm, in that case, thank you.”  

She looked around the basement as he read through the forms.  At first glance it looked chaotic, but looking closer it sort out into sections.  New parts sorted into bins.  Old machines in various states of disembowelment set out on tables around the edge of the room, which looked like it took up about half of the house’s footprint.  She spotted a door that probably led to the rest of the basement.

Half the U shaped desk was actually a workbench along the wall under one of the windows.  Tools neatly hung from the rack on the wall under the window.  What looked like several projects with pieces and wires each confined to it’s own section.  Computer keyboards and monitors took up the other side of the U with papers covering the joining section. A couple of comfortable chairs sat facing him from the other side.

It was actually a nicely set up workroom.  Orderly without being anal about it.  It must be connected to the HVAC system because it was a comfortable temperature and did not have any of the musty smell you usually got in the basements of old houses.  

One thing did stand out.  “Is that a spinning wheel?”

Gold looked up from the paperwork.  “Aye.  I use it when I’m waiting around for things to cool or code to compile.” 

“I’ve never run across a programmer who spun.  Juggle, play guitar or other odd stuff, but not spinning.”

“Me Aunts ran a yarn shop.  They taught me when I was a lad.”  

He glanced at the copy of her green card she had attached to the I-9 and smirked.  “Your name really is Lacey French?”

“Yes, it’s my real name.  No, I did not pick it because I was getting a job as a stripper.”  She huffed.  “And I’m not sure you’re in a position to comment, Ragnor.”

She had found his name on the company tax forms.

“Touche.” He agreed.  “It was the sixties.  I blame the drugs.”

“There were some of those going around in the 80s too.”  She took back the forms.  “What do you want done next?”

“That stacks of stuff on the table needs to be filed.”  Gold told her.  “And remind Jeff when he comes in that we’ve got a conference call with the artist for his game at two.  Then remind him again every hour until then.”

She finished the filing before Jeff showed up at 11:30.  Wearing the top hat, a different frock coat and a yellow ascot with burgundy polka  dots.  And Gold had the nerve to comment on her clothes.  

Before she got the chance Gold came upstairs to remind him about the conference call.  And to ask,  “Did you take your meds this morning?”

“Yes, mother.  And I ate my breakfast and brushed my teeth.”  

Jeff was less demanding than Gold.  He did give her a bunch more filing to do.

When lunch time rolled around Jeff made a couple of sandwiches and took them downstairs.  “I’m going to go over the specs for the graphics we’re going to be talking about this afternoon.  The artists always want to use way too much memory. Help yourself to whatever is in the fridge.”

There turned out to be a really nice cheese and fruit plate in the fridge. Lacey had it for lunch.

Gold and Jeff had been on the conference call for over an hour when Lacey noticed a couple of kids running up the front walk.  At the last minute they veered around the edge of the house toward the back. Lacey headed down the hall and almost made it to the kitchen before she heard the back door open and a little girl’s voice call out. “Daddy, we’re home.”

She found the girl, (grade school age?  Lacey was not good with kids’ ages) and an older boy hanging up jackets and stowing backpacks on a shelf clearly set up for just that,  

They both looked up as she came into the room.  “Uhm, hey.”  Said the boy, who despite dark curly air had to be Gold’s son.  The genetics were obvious.

“Are you the new project manager?”  He asked.  “Dad said you were going to start today.”

Nice that somebody got briefed.  “Yeah, I’m Lacey.  And you are?”

“He’s Neal and I’m Grace.”  The girl put in.  “What’s a project manager?”

“I’m suppose to help your Dads,”  That left it nicely vague as to whether Gold and Jeff were together or not.  “Get their work done on time and not forget stuff.”

“That will be good.”  Grace said solemnly.  “Because Daddy forgets things and Uncle Rum is sometimes too busy to remind him.”

At least that clarified the genetics.

Neal made a bee-line for the refrigerator.  “Looks like Dad forgot our snack.”

Oh, Hell.  She had eaten his kid’s after school snack.  She had never managed to get herself fired on her first day before.

Quickly she joined the boy at the refrigerator.  “How about I make you a proper Tea?  You like scones?”

The scones were coming out out the oven when Gold and Jeff emerged from the conference call.  Grace ran to hug Jeff.  “Daddy, Lacey taught me how to make real scones.  Just like the Queen eats.”

“Excellent, dormouse.  We’ll be all set when she comes to call.”  Jeff told her.

Neal was just finishing setting the table with the nice china from the hutch that Lacey had used earlier for Gold’s tea.  He had insisted that, “Aunt Flora would rise out of the grave if we served a ‘proper’ tea with the every day mugs.”

“So you’ve all become acquainted then?”  Gold took the seat at the head of the table.

“We have.”  Lacey set the tea pot in front of him.  “Such a pleasant surprise when they arrived home.”

“I did say it was a family business.”  Gold smirked.

A test passed apparently.  “If you’ll be mother, I’ll serve the scones.”

“How do you like your tea?”  He asked starting to pour.

It was actually a nice afternoon break.  Grace informed them in detail about the latest chapter of Charlotte’s Web her teacher had read to the class.

Neal’s responses to Gold’s questions about his day were more monosyllabic. Lacey upped her estimate of his age by a couple of years.  From the amount of food he was putting away he had to be a teenager despite his small size.

When he finished his fourth scone he got more talkative.  “Can the team come over Friday?  We need more practice.”

“I’ve got a repair call in Ellsworth.” Then glancing her way, he smirked.  “But if Jeff and Lacey can supervise you I don’t see why not.”

Neal, glanced Jeff’s way then turned to her.  “Would that be okay, Lacey?  If we’re going to get anywhere in the competition we really need more practice and Dr. Jekyll, our coach, won’t work later than 4:00.”

And from what she had seen of Jeff so far, nobody was going to trust their kid to his supervision alone.  She had to wonder how he was looking after Grace.  Great.  Tea lady and babysitter.  This was clearly another test on Gold’s part.  To see how far he could push her.  “What kind of competition is it?”

“The STEMletics.  It’s like the Mathletics but covers science, technology and engineering as well.  Teams compete against each other like in the old College Bowl.  We really need to get faster at coming up with answers to have a shot at winning.”  

Clearly Gold had majored to sire a baby nerd.  She had no idea what the College Bowl was but it did not sound like it would be all that hard to ride herd on a few teenagers.  After all she knew what sort of mischief they were likely to get up to from experience.  “Sure I’ll bring refreshments.”

After tea was done, Jeff took Grace off to his office to do her homework and Neal disappear to where ever boys his age disappeared to.  Gold told her.  “Leave the dishes. I’ll do them tonight when I do the washing up from dinner.”

At least she was not expected to be the maid as well.

[barelycompiles]

Constructive Ways of Managing Quite Long Development Iteration Times

So you're a brogrammer now. You sling some Python, or Coffeescript, or bash, or whathaveyou. Now you're contributing so some mighty project, and it is taking quiet a while (in developer time) to build. Maybe the compiler is slow. Or the CI server runs a bunch of extra checks. Or you're generating virtual machines that take ages to install. Whatever your project, it can feel agonizing to change a few characters, start a build, and have to wait a long time for the build to finish before you actually know if your code is working. If you're lucky, the build runs sucessfully and you now have a working system to share with others. If you're unlucky, the build dies half an hour from now, and you'll be tweaking some more characters, triggering another build, and by then you'll have lost quite a lot of productivity. In an industry of instant gratification, latency measured below human perceptive levels, actually making your own software can be a very different experience to using premade software. Expect more pain and bugs than usual. When you clock out of a hard day's coding, you may have only moved the progress bar a few ticks, while the rest of the open source community seems to whizz by at light speed. It feels like being stuck in a local Turing tar pit, where even the most incremental code changes take forever to test. What a bother! Might as well ditch software entirely and go back to Triceratops trolleys or however things were done before computers.

The good news is that, as bad as a post-fifteen-minute build may be for software development, it's neither atypical nor fatal to the success of a project. You think you have it tough? Hardware development cycles can take months, so practice patience young programmer. If you're stressing about fixing that null pointer exception before the hackathon deadline in time for a pizza break, consider how the foreman feels managing a condo. He doesn't even get the benefit of instantly wiping his workspace when something builds wrong. A foreman (or forewoman) has to spend even more time and money to tear down any mistakes during construction. You got it lucky doing your jerb from a coffee shop.

As I said, it's not uncommon to suffer egregious build times that take far longer than a few milliseconds, stretching instead into the quarter hour, half hour, or multiple hour mark. This happens for a lot of reasons, basically ineptitude in build design, which we won't cover in this post. There are plenty of steps an engie can take to optimize build times, and if you're the punk suffering from those build times, I'm sure you know better than me what specifically is soaking up your productivity. If you can fix that, you should. A good technical leader will recognize when project structure is limiting productivity, and will reward anyone who can reduce these blockages. The technicals don't matter so much as the political power to effect that change. That's all I'll say about that.

Instead, this post is about what you can do to get the most out of a sucky code-build-test-repeat loop, where you've exhausted the technical and political possibilities for improving the loop time. Aside from rewriting the project from scratch (probably in Go), what can be done to stay productive in this hellish environment?

Recognize your daemons.

Take stock of the applications, services, processes, and so on that are sharing resources with the building project. If you're playing around in Photoshop the same time you're running a graphical benchmark, that probably adds some extra delay on top of the baseline delay. Disable networking programs, menulets, anything that is stealing precious resources from the build.

If you're building locally, consider moving the build process to a dedicated remote server. If you're building remotely and the server is always stalling, replicate the build locally. Even odds that the build system is awkward and designed for local operation XOR remote operation, i.e. not for both. If you can unify the build system so that it can run more similarly and successfully in both environments, that will exponentially improve production reliability in addition to improving build times. Use Docker. Anyway.

Debug logically.

Richard Feynman is said to have fixed a radio just by thinking about it. Some shit like that. The point is, you spend time thinking about a problem before you go and solve it. Especially when the act of solving it takes way more time than thinking about it. Become the compiler. Practice those stupid Java puzzlers. Once you hit Build, it will be very many nanoseconds in the future before you can fix the code and build again, so make every build count. Specifically:

Lint your shit. Your text editor can warn you of build-failing code before you actually build.

Unit test your shit. When you add functionality, write a dinky little test that should fail if the function is at all inaccurate. Learn the syntax for calling specific tests rather than the whole test suite.

Automate that shit. If you're setting up a database every code-test iteration, find some kind of process so that the computer does the work for you. Doesn't have to be a perfect POSIX compliant shell script. It doesn't have to be portable across different user accounts. It doesn't even have to be command line driven, just as long as YOU can get it to run and do the things you need in a basically reproducible fashion. If it fails half the time, run it twice the times.

Master the code base.

Software is shit. There is a very good chance that the build error you see bears the most strained and tenuous relationship to the actual source of the error. I hope you never have to debug microservices. Jesus.

In any case, study not just the error messages, but the code base as well, including the history. Does git-bisect show a particularly bad sequence of commits? Does churn show an unusually in-flux file? Does git-blame show a logic bomb your asleep ass slipped into development months ago? Which classes are poorly documented? Which classes' documentation are LIES? Baz Luhrmann would have sung "Add... Print statements." if he wrote this shit.

Boldly experiment.

In science, some experiments are so sensitive that they take decades to complete. You can't push a rover to mars faster than the laws of physics permit. So when the project calls inherently for long turnaround times, the thing to do is to pack that bitch with as many experiments as possible. Collect soil samples, record atomospheric measurements, take photos, gather dozens of metrics. It's a big investment, so diversify the treasures.

Do not be afraid to try out ideas on the code. Fork it. Branch out. Tie it up in an FPM bundle. Delete the parts that you don't like. Fix multiple bugs at once, because it's better to find out that 4 changes don't work in 1 hour than to find out that 4 changes don't work in 4 hours. Change the code to fix the top error message, and the next dozen, before you hit Build.

Fuck commit hygiene. What a waste of time! Do your dirt in a feature branch and rebase for cleanliness once the build works. Swap out dependencies, even just different versions of dependiencies. Pin that shit. Lock it down. Distrust semver. Control your space, now you have all the time in the world.

They say discipline boosts creativity. Not fascistic hierarchical discipline, just the idea that supplying your own structure to your work can actually lead you naturally and unexpectedly to new ideas. Try programming without classes and objects. Try installing operating systems without a mouse. What kind of algorithms would still work for that problem without losing idemopotence? How freeing is a system with full POSIX compliance? How freeing is a system with no POSIX guarantees? Change the system to work for you, or else change yourself to work in the system.

It can get so droll hitting Build, looking up an error code, changing one or two lines of code, repeat, repeat, repeat. Take a coffee break. Do something else for an hour, even if it's just coding in a slightly different project. To be pretentious, let your subconsciousness solve the problem for you while you consciously attend to other tasks. That single threaded grind can wear you down, so I personally recommend pipelining your life with more than just the same old same old. One of my coworkers had a multiple monitor setup. The first monitor was for coding. The second monitor was for "bullshit", basically Internet memes. Find your bullshit Zen. You can be productive, even when the system seems to be designed against productivity. Lurk in IRC; solo coding gets depressing after awhile.

If you're suffocating from long build times, breathe. You are not alone. Build times can certainly be improved, but history indicates you'll be far more productive if you treat long build times as axiomatic, just part of the inherent nature of the work. You can pine for a time machine to fast forward the build, or work on unrelated tickets, or program defensively. Standing still is not an option, not for this blog.

[game-refraction]

Game Review: Friday the 13th - The Game (Xbox One)

While asymmetrical multiplayer games aren’t anything new, the premise of trying to escape from one of the iconic campgrounds from the Friday the 13th movies, while Jason attempts to slit your throat or club you to death in a sleeping bag, is one that sounded intriguing. The finished product by IllFonic games; however, feels vastly unfinished as along with its numerous flaws, its launch has been plagued by massive server issues and in-game systems not working as intended.

The horror survival title sees you in the boots of either Jason himself, or one of the many Counselors the game allows you to unlock. As Jason, you will attempt to track down and brutally murder one of the 7 Counselors that are attempting to escape. As said Counselors, you will work together to fix cars, boats, or radio’s needed to escape or to summon help, all while being hunted by the lone player in the role of Jason Voorhees.

When you start the match as a Counselor, you’ll be scattered across the map and will need to regroup with your allies, find items needed to escape, or weapons to combat Jason should the need arise. You can communicate via headset with local players, or should you find a pair of walkie-talkies, then you can communicate over large distances with those that have them as well, but beware, Jason can hear you if he is nearby. You can hide in tents, under beds, in armoire cabinets, all in your attempt to not be seen by the player hunting you. Houses contain a variety of objects that contain maps, car keys, first aid sprays, firecrackers, and more, many of which are crucial items needed to survive or distract Jason.

In order to escape, you’ll need to track down many of the following items: car keys, gasoline canisters, car batteries, boat propellers, and phone fuses. When you have collected enough items to repair one of the escape vehicles, you’ll then initiate a button prompt mini-game, one that is a lot shorter should your Counselor have a high Intelligence stat. While not all maps have a boat to escape on, there is always the ability to repair a car, as well as summon the police so you can make an escape at one of the entrances to the camp. With keeping to including fan favorite moments into the game, you can summon a dead or escaped player back into the game as Tommy Jarvis, the first person to ever defeat Jason in the films. Tommy has boosted stats and is the only player in the game that can actually kill Jason, a feat that takes quite the effort to do.

Each of the 11 Counselors in the game is based on certain tropes of horror movies and only look to resemble certain character types from the films. Selecting a Counselor may depend on certain stats you favor in your desire to outwit Jason. Vanessa has a benefit in her Speed stat, where Eric and Deborah have maxed Intelligence, making them ideal for repairing the escape vehicles. There’s Brandon who has max Strength and Tiffany who shares max Stealth with the rocker chick A.J. As you level up you will unlock more Counselors and will be able to outfit them in new clothing that you unlock as you level. You can also equip a variety of perks that you’ll purchase with in-game points, these are usually stat boosts that have a bonus as well as a handicap to them.

As Jason, you have a few abilities that will help in your efforts to cleanse the camp, as well as several executions that will put down your opponent in a mess of gushing blood. Jason’s core abilities include fast traveling long or short distances, often having him simply appear next to you, making for some very intense chases. Jason also has a vision mode where nearby Counselors will glow a bright red, making it extremely easy to spot them. You can also mute the danger music that you’ll normally output when nearby one of the Counselors, making it easier to get the drop on them. Finally, there is a rage mode that enhances Jason’s abilities and allows him to burst through walls and closed doors with ease. These modes have cooldowns and are not always active, giving the game some sense of balance.

As you level up and gain experience, you can purchase new executions with points earned in-game. These range from stomping someone’s head off, punching it off, or lifting a Counselor up to eye-gouge them. There are also environmental kills like slamming someone’s head with a door, throwing them into the fireplace, or a classic beatdown of someone in a sleeping bag. The kills are brutal, and extremely fun to witness, even if you are one of the Counselors being killed, or seeing him gut one of your teammates right in front of you.

Leveling up as either Jason or a Counselor will allow you to unlock characters with better stats, or different movie versions of Jason himself, with each having a variety of different weapons to wield. Currently, the leveling system is not working as intended with experience points not being added correctly after some matches. You will also unlock badges as well, but I’ve had my badge progress reset several times. There are also cassette tapes to be collected, but no matter how detailed I was in exploring my surroundings, I just couldn’t find them. It is possible that these tapes are part of the planned Single Player content that looks to roll out this summer. For fans of the franchise, they should take note that these tapes plan on talking about the backstory of Jason’s father.

Regardless of server issues or the progression system being bugged, the game comes off as looking unfinished or at least looking the part of something still in early access. The game itself feels clunky, and its movements and animations are sometimes painful to watch, with nearly every facial expression looking like some sort of possessed animatronic puppet attempting to mimic human behavior. I’ve consistently clipped through doors, walls and even glitched while being killed in the water by Jason, only to get right back up and be invisible for the remainder of the match. I’ve seen escaping cars fly into the sky while driving away and Jason himself hovering over traps only for them to snap him up after he’s clearly moved away from them. There have been several times where my ability to interact with doors, cabinets or even picking up items was met with failure, forcing me to either get killed or wait for someone to open a door or summon the police to bypass the glitch. I lost track of how many times I would hear on my headset that this same thing was happening to one of my teammates. There were a few times where Jason would get stuck in the water and was unable to move, allowing us to either take some cheap shots at him or just escape without the fear of what lurked around the corner.

The game also crashed fairly often, and this is the case across all platforms, with each community of gamers expressing the same concerns about the stability of the game. Out of the maybe 40 or so matches I’ve played start to finish, I’ve had double that crash mid-match or crash at the start of matchmaking. Currently, the quick match mode isn’t working and even the developer on Twitter has stated that finding a way into a private match is about the only way to get into a game. Thankfully, Xbox One has a Looking for Group system built into the console and it has made finding a match fairly easy. There have also been Database Errors that prevented me from playing for about 4 hours straight on release day. This error prevents you from even logging in at all, and since it is server based, no method of rebooting the console or your router will fix it. An easy workaround was discovered to work, but it requires you to play via a guest account, preventing your main account from unlocking characters and earning achievements. At the time of this writing, the Database Errors have lessened, but still pop up from time to time.

As is the case with games that lack a narrative story to follow, you are often left to create your own adventures with a group of other players and there was one such match that created a sense of imagination I never expected from this game. As we were running around trying to find bits and pieces for the car, we could hear another player laughing while screaming “oh no! oh no!” and it wasn’t until Jason was nearby that we realized what caused this panicked laughter. The player that was Jason for this round had Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” playing through his headset, and if you’ve ever heard the song, then you know how disturbing it can sound when applied to horror. As Jason approached, all you could hear was this song playing, creating a sense of fear that was stronger than anything a player could do in-game as the iconic Jason. One minute you were calm, collected and trying to find a gas canister for the car and then suddenly the song would inch its way closer to you, filling you with dread and fear.

As far as visuals go, the game isn’t great looking by any means. Jason looks ok, but the Counselors are cartoony and look made of plastic. There is a Counselor that screams at the beginning of each match that causes the whole party to just explode in laughter, even after the 50th time seeing it. While I am sure that the developers intended for the look of the game to appear cheesy, it combined with the clunky and robotic mechanics just doesn’t mesh well at all. Environments are ok, but eventually, apart from a few specific cabins, the three locations all tend to blur together and it can be hard to figure out which campground you are playing in without finding a map or the entrance sign to the grounds.

The voice acting is what you’d expect a game about an 80’s horror franchise to sound like and is so bad it’s rather enjoyable in that “so bad it’s good” sort of way. There isn’t much voice acting present, but you do get a few lines at the start of a match, when you find dead bodies, or when you call the police for assistance. The music, however; is fantastic, and the tense mood of Jason being nearby is made even more enjoyable with the shift to some suspenseful music. You can also turn on radio’s you find in the game that features some actual music, which can also be used to distract Jason.

I’m hoping that the developer adds more to this game, and not just in the way of more skins or new characters. I want more variety in how to escape, like making your way to a helicopter as it drops down a rope ladder or just something beyond the 3 ways to escape currently. Trapping Jason in a cabin and then setting it on fire would make for some fun visuals in a game that is normally very dark. I want the ability to assist other players out of a bear trap, or tend to someone’s injuries. As fun as the game can be, it is a very shallow offering of content for a $40 game. I also want quality of life improvements to core systems, menus and other things that games like Witcher 3 have done to make their game just function better.

Friday the 13th: The Game is an experience where its flaws are nearly the first thing you see, should you even be able to log into a game in the first place. Its instant popularity was something the creators of the game never anticipated and it’s very possible that by the time you are reading this review that most of the technical issues have been addressed. For every time I’ve thrown my controller when a game would suddenly drop, I’ve lifted a Counselor by their neck and snapped it in satisfaction. Server issues aside, the core gameplay elements of Friday the 13th are clunky, yet give way to a satisfying and enjoyable experience with the right group of people.

Stay tuned for an updated opinion on this game once the Single Player content is eventually released.

Friday the 13th: The Game was reviewed on a digital copy purchased on the Xbox One Marketplace. All Screenshots were taken via the Xbox One and uploaded to the Windows 10 App.

Game Review: Friday the 13th – The Game (Xbox One) was originally published on Game-Refraction

[ifreegoogleplaycodesworld]

Free Google Play Gift Card Code Generator

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In the event that you know about our site or on the off chance that you are our one of the old client obviously then you should definitely know how our past framework and database with the expectation of complimentary google play blessing card codes worked. Furthermore, for another client, let me separate it into pieces and let you know the procedure. I'm certain that you all have definitely known the way that, numerous items are subsidiary with offers that demand clients to purchase that rather than the about same item from different brands valued around same, These offers could be anything. any advancement, boosting of a promotion battle or anything you can consider. So there are an interminable measure of items which are associated with play store, You get them you turn them around and there you find in little estimated textual styles, That it accompanies a free google play blessing card code worth $10, $25, or whatever other sum, Depends on the cost really. much the same as this picture underneath.

A special free google play blessing card with the item purchased at Walmart as asserted by one of our clients.

Did you see the pic? Obviously, This is a free google play blessing card. you can see the photo above unscratched google play store redeemable code. so what I'm attempting to clarify you here is that these sort of advancements are still there. Like truly Infinite measures of items with this advancement are available all around the globe. in any case, not everyone is Either sufficiently brilliant to realize that they got a code with their item Or they don't need it and this is not by any means the only thing our framework considers. These all advancement and codes exist with an expiry date of advancement. at the point when there are under 10 days staying for an expiry date. Our framework burrows that. So nobody will utilize these codes in any case. Sounds sufficiently reasonable. we have the contacts with the advancement holders and also the retailers who deal with the advancements. so some of the time we need to purchase from them. it's extremely shoddy as well however it's quite recently that they don't give every code independently. You can subscribe their administration or mass request for advancement, Not just google play recover codes yet different advancements too. We have that too and that is coming soon. we purchase 1500 codes every time. presently as per the strategy, we can not unveil their store name or the value we bargain for. You should ponder now. 'Why these folks give codes to free?', 'Why wouldn't they be able to simply utilize codes and have some good times?', 'these folks are nuts they purchase these google play codes and giveaway for nothing' If you suspect as much. continue perusing ;)

Why do we give free google play reclaim codes and How would we win?

It's not irregular, we realized that we made them come. Coincidentally, it's not play store hack 2017, You can state it is, by implication we are giving ceaselessly free google play acknowledge yet not partner for any play store hack. Returning to your worry So here is something we need to say in regards to your question. Actually no one giveaways something and expects nothing consequently. Be that as it may, reality here is, We need to construct a crowd of people first for our system and site, We are attempting to look for individuals however much as could be expected, That is the reason we are giving these codes away. Possibly we could utilize a few constraints on this administration and dispatch the paid plans in future. be that as it may, impractical right now, So appreciate the length of free administration is accessible to all clients. Presently Let's discussion about winning. We gain through promotions appeared on our site, benefit. In any case, these promotions don't acquire us much cash however it includes the whole gathered for the support for the server, facilitating, administrations and so on. I simply need to say that, while you invested some energy perusing this in this way, some individual may have gotten a free google play reclaim code from our administration and recovered it as well. you should realize that crowd is colossal and the quantities of google play recover codes is constrained. All in all, why not proceed get a code for your google wallet and see the overhauled adjust?

What Can Be finished with this administration?

At present, Our group has discharged the google play reclaim codes generator 2017 release So, let us discuss it as it were. By utilizing this administration, You can have the free google play reclaim codes which you can utilize it in the playstore to purchase anything they offer, Such as Games, Applications, Ebooks, Music and Movies. I trust I didn't miss anything, I intend to state you can truly utilize these google play blessing codes to purchase anything that they have in the authority playstore. for the most part clients run with the amusements in light of the fact that 95% of android recreations are inbuilt with in-application buys, Means you need to buy something inside a diversion, e.g, You introduced another zombie amusement however keeping in mind the end goal to move to next level you need redesigned weapons, Now you need to get it else appreciate old levels. let it be known, we as a whole despise it when it happens. that is the place these google play reclaim codes come convenient. simply create the play store blessing card, Redeem it and Enjoy.

Google play promo code/free google play blessing card

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Prior article with the expectation of complimentary google play credit

Many individuals get confounded over google play promo codes, Google play recover codes, google play blessing card codes, free google play codes, free google play reclaim codes, google play code generator, free google play blessing card codes, google play recovery code, google play redeemable codes, google play voucher, free google play blessing card reclaim code, free google play cash, free google play credit and google play recover code complimentary. They regularly ask us, If these all terms are same or the adjust for google play blessing card is any not the same as google play reclaim codes. however, I need to let you know all, that they are all same, it is recently different terms made by individuals since they request that us how get free google play cash or something like complimentary kode reedem google wallet. Along these lines, they all mean same, they simply going to upgrade your google wallet adjust. I think all you need is google play blessing card codes, That is it. Presently don't inquire as to why do you require google play blessing card codes.

History about our google play recover code free administration

A year ago in January we began our site with 4 colleagues, We had this thought in our brain about giveaways, coupon and blessings based subject. So we accumulated a few information about the market and in view of the exploration we think of the google play recover code benefit. We wanted to give google play reclaim code to allowed to every individual in light of the fact that an android advertise has a considerable measure of application in buys on substantial scale. so we had discharged google play recover code generator a year ago. be that as it may, it had many bugs, we didn't settle them and propelled another administration titled as Google play credit code generator, however then it too had bugs, so We chose later, We will settle them and luckily our group did it. This year we concoct google play reclaim code 2.1 variant, It has a database of google play recover codes worth $25, $10 and $50 too. Presently, It is working fine than any time in recent memory and no bug as such. Numerous clients affirmed that it is the most stable rendition we have assembled in this way. Along these lines, Keep going by our

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Our Story This post comes after Why did we develop a small Shopify App? Since 16/12/2016 Our Shopify App – SEO Product Optimizer (SPO) had launched on Shopify App Store. We were happy that our works had finally released to the public. Thiswas a very exciting moment to see how the market reacted to our concepts. Originally we planned to finish the app within 3 months. We made it within 2 months… However Shopify App Team took around 3 weeks to finish reviewing our app to beta testing. We spent the extra time on testing and pre-marketing. Finally we finished reviewing on 15/12/2016. Phew! We could search it on the Shopify App Store. Now it’s time to do more marketing instead of coding. We have sent our app to a list of related communities we curated on a Google Sheet. With a very limited budget I would like to get around 1,000 beta users before we formally charge for a monthly subscription fee.   Purpose of this series: I have been reading various blogs like the Buffer Blog, Noise vs Signals, BugMuncher Blog (Love this founder, quite fun). I believe in the philosophy of transparency creates trust. It may look stupid to reveal our numbers to the public. This may lead to our competitors following our strategy easily. But I don’t think any existing players will feel nervous of a small player like us. We’re just too small like a peanut. The purpose of this series will be Help other bootstrappers and solo founders like meShare our values with the othersClear my thoughts for the next stepBootstrapping our app to a stable income businessI have been failing for too many fucking times. This writing makes me feel less scared. It’s more about psychology & my personal stuffs.   The marketing tactics we used in the last month: I was doing marketing with the following ways: SPO Product WebsiteWe put our branding and product information on a standalone website. But it could not drive much traffic. Anyway at least we’d got a place where our app could be found out from search engines. Replying relating questions on communities or forumsNot much traffic received as well. We answered relevant questions on Shopify community or Reddit. Unfortunately Shopify community was not very active among store owners. We could find many questions that could be solved by our App. But I didn’t see much traffic coming in.On the contrary, Reddit communities were very active. I subscribed to subreddits like startup, entrepreneur, ecommerce, Shopify and even SideProject. Redditors are very helpful. They gave valuable opinions regarding my launch and marketing strategy. Guest post requests sent to related mediaNot much feedback received. There aren’t many blogs about Shopify. I am not sure if it’s because of my poor PR pitching skill, though I didn’t reach famous media like TNW, TechCrunch. Dan at EcommerceRVW were quite helpful. The site was founded by 2 cofounders named Dan. Awesome. Engineering marketingA small web app called http://ift.tt/2i8UpFn was developed. The simple web app helps users sharing a URL on Facebook with a custom title, description and image in breeze. If users just wanna have a quick share of their website, they no longer need to change their codes about social meta tags.It drove 400 users to this web app. The user spike made the server broke down for a moment. We fixed the server issue immediately after locating it’s a database problem. We installed StatusCake to notify us whenever it happened again (Hopefully Not!). It’s also a good thing because it won’t bother our real users when the app is formally launched in the short future. User action recording with HotjarAs I was not sure whether our onboarding process could help our new customers, I set up Hotjar to see if the new customers could follow our instructions. Out of my expectation, most customers could understand our thoughts. Some of them might spend more than 1 or 2 hours at the 1st time. I had watched carefully for some samples. Indeed there were stupid setups wasting users time. We would include the enhancement & bug fixes in the next update.Hotjar was indeed very useful to understand how users interacted with our software. I no longer need to make any wild guess or asking users via email. Install Google Analytics (GA) into SPO website, blog, Shopify listing page, inside the appThis is a basic move to track conversions from various channels to actual app install. Page views mean nothing if there is no actual install. We value the most important metric as users going from Shopify App listing page to install ratio.   Summary of Tools I used so far:**Metrics measurement** GA: free. tracking traffics from various Hotjar: free. Recording user action in apps **Support** Pure Chat: free. Live chat with SPO website users Helpscout: free. Knowledge Base for FAQ. Instant help menu in App. **Design** Balsamiq: $12 / month. mockup and fast prototyping Canva: free. Social media graphics and blog feature images. Love it! GIMP: free. Light graphics editing. **Infrastructure** Bitbucket: free. Code management Asana: free. Project management Status Cake: free. Notification about web service status SendGrid: free. Transaction email triggered in SPO App Digital Ocean Cloud Server: $5 / month. for SPO blog, website, app. **Others** Godaddy email: free gift when I purchased domain. Though the mail client interface is like shit, it works. WordPress: free. SPO blog Mailchimp: paid per email sent. My list got more than 2,000 subscribers (for my consulting business). Marketing emails to SPO users. Some Discovery about the marketing results:**117 active installs made since launch, 30 uninstalls** **Good things** **Low uninstall rate** Our install rate is very high, nearly 70% since our launch. The remaining 30% uninstall rate is probably due to the installation of liquid code into the Shopify theme. The small task is intimidating for non-techie store owners. However this is limited by a strange software architecture of Shopify. We cannot do much to eliminate this task. We received many inquiries about liquid code installation via email. However the app is free at the moment. So users didn’t have a cost to install or uninstall it. **High session time** Many users will spend long time (say 1 – 2 hours) using our app even the first time. We discovered the interesting facts in Hotjar. These hard working users will go through all products 1 by 1, just like what our instructions told them. I can say that users can follow 80 – 90% of our onboarding process. **Bad things** **Low Retention** Users may not frequently come back after working on products. If we want users coming back after a while, we need to give users a good reason. Otherwise the retention will be kept low. Users will eventually uninstall the app if they didn’t open our app for a long time. **Very Slow Growth Rate** The user growth rate is very slow, just 5 – 7 more installs per day. More marketing works are required. I am not sure if this is because Shopify app user base is small or our marketing effort is not enough. If it’s the former case, we may need to expand our target market to websites other than Shopify stores. Monthly Subscription not likely a good revenue model?One thing I doubt is whether monthly subscription is a good model for SEO. Many users just edit the products once and they are done. My initial plan was to create stable income via monthly subscription. There are around 200K stores. 50% are our target market, i.e. 100K stores. If we can get 1% of stores to pay for our app, there will be 1,000 customers. Each of them we’ll charge for $10 – $15 / month. That’s already a stable business in my region. If I am going to charge by monthly subscription, I need to make users coming back regularly. Not very confident it can be done at the moment.I am afraid turning from free to subscription will be a deal breaker. If it’s not working, I may go to freemium model by selling value added service. A freemium model also requires a large user base in order to convert free users to paid users. The current user base may be too small to for freemium monetization. I need a moment to think about the issue. Obviously we cannot hit product market fit at this moment.What’s next?In the next month, I will try to increase the user base to 500 – 1,000. The current marketing channels are too narrow. We are unlike other SaaS apps with frontend features that can enjoy additional organic growth for more users.We will investigate a viral loop to have positive organic growth. Otherwise we must die after few months according to the current growth rate. Not cool.Mind sharing your marketing strategy?How do you get your app to the market? Did you have a good business as a Shopify app developer? Feel free to drop me a note at bennychan[a]sillycube.comOriginal Story: http://ift.tt/2ie9p4e