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Small Businesses and the Health Insurance Market
As a small business owner, I take very seriously the benefits we offer to our team. Every year, we work with our insurance broker to find the best health insurance plans we can offer at a price point that is workable. Like most companies, we offer full medical, dental and vision, and as a rule, we always pay the premiums for the employee and their family because we just feel that's the right thing to do.
Across all of the insurance networks, the plans more or less look the same - as you progress through the tiers from Bronze to Silver to Gold, the deductibles improve and the maximum out of pocket shrinks. We have been doing this for just shy of 15 years now, and every year, the plans get worse and more expensive. Every. Single. Year. And yet, as we analyze the various plans, we continually find that even our upgraded "Gold" plan is barely more than a safety net for catastrophic or major health events.
We have changed insurance networks 3 or 4 times through the years, trying to offer the best options to the team, but honestly they all seem nearly identical. The thing that's disturbing is that because we are less than 50 employees, we don't have options to simply "buy a better plan" as some might argue. Across all of the markets, we have only one more tier (Platinum) that we could upgrade our plan to, and even that isn't what I would consider a good plan; it's simply more expensive.
These ever rising prices are increasingly becoming a huge driver of base costs for us and other small businesses. Silverpine's employees have a fairly low median age, and nothing about our working environment is even remotely dangerous – we should be an ideal candidate for an insurance company. And yet nobody is competing for our business. Nobody is innovating to provide better products and coverage for us. This is a completely broken industry. Everything about it flies in the face of healthy free market dynamics.
I don't have a definitive, corrective solution to offer – I'm not an economist. But it does seem to me that health insurance is closer to a utility (like electricity or sewer service) and as I mentioned, the tenets of capitalism don't seem to apply to it. Outside of a stock price, it barely functions as an industry and quite frankly, the entire situation is bad for American businesses, especially small businesses, like ours. Something needs to change because health insurance is not only broken for the insured, it's also broken for most of the companies that cover the lion's share of the cost of that insurance. It's time for a change.
ACS Europe 2024
This summer, I had the pleasure of being invited to speak on a panel at ACS Europe, which is a global conference for the access control industry. The conference was held at Google's facility in Zürich, Switzerland. The entire event was invigorating and exciting as competitors and partners alike all met and discussed the industry and where we see it headed. I was thrilled to represent Silverpine and bring my own sliver of perspective to the conversation. Below is a short clip of part of my time on the panel.
Tools for a Distributed Software Agency - 2023
It's time for my annual reflection on the tools that we use to power Silverpine. I've been posting these for the past few years and it's always an interesting activity to see how things change over time. You can see old posts here:
Overall, we have continued to consolidate our tools, which is good from a financial perspective. One notable tool that fell from the list this year is Squarespace which we previously used to host the Silverpine website; we rewrote our website as a native front end hosted on AWS which allowed us to drop it from our monthly costs.
While tool consolidation feels good, I do worry that it can potentially lead to a lack of innovation. For the past few years, a lot of change has occurred in the design space (Sketch, Figma, InDesign, etc) and it felt like there were a lot of improvements being made amidst healthy competition. But this past year, that has slowed way down. Even amongst teleconferencing software it feels like things have mostly collapsed to a primary three options. I sincerely hope that 2024 will bring with it some overdue disruption into the tools ecosystem. I am definitely ready to try something new!
Communication
Slack - If we could pick only one tool from this list, it would be Slack. For any distributed team, Slack is absolutely essential. One thing that I did notice that changed this year is that our team took advantage of Slack's "Huddle" feature far more than in years past. We pay for Zoom as well, but it's much easier for team members to quickly jump into an adhoc call and do some screen sharing if they don't have to leave Slack. Definitely a much used feature.
Zoom - There are three main options for teleconferencing (Google Meets, Zoom and Microsoft Teams) and while none of them are perfect, Zoom still seems to work better across various hardware configurations than the others.
Google Workspace - Google Workspace replaced Dropbox for our team last year and for the most part it hasn't impacted us much. It's a fairly economical option for email and shared storage and while the shared storage functions aren't as robust as Dropbox, it works well enough.
Development and Design
Figma - Last year we moved fully to Figma (as did most of the industry) and it's been great. I'm feeling relieved that the Adobe acquisition/merger fell through because Figma is one of those pieces of software that almost feels magical, and I was worried that Adobe would kill that feeling. Everyone from designers to developers to clients (viewing prototypes) extolls how simple and accessible it is. It's just a fantastic tool.
Github - There's not a whole lot to say about Github. After Microsoft purchase it, they've mostly left them alone to flourish. We use it for the obvious code repository features, but we also use Github Actions for our CI (continuous integration) tooling.
Tower - We moved to a team subscription for Tower a few years ago and haven't looked back. Their level of support and continued feature improvement have made it the de facto GUI for source control. Our team works on a myriad of platforms and Tower is well supported on all of them.
Jira - If you use Jira, you know why you use it, and you'll probably agree that it's "fine". That's really all I want to say about it. Nobody loves Jira, myself included.
Operations
Quickbooks - Is there even another option for keeping your books that isn't some sort of Oracle installation? Quickbooks works well for what we need. The CPA and bookkeeper are glad we use it. I guess that means something.
Harvest - We use Harvest for invoicing clients and a small amount of time-tracking. We've been pretty happy with it. The reporting tools make it easy to understand cashflow and to understand when invoices are late.
Gusto - If you need to pay employees or contractors, Gusto is fantastic. One small change from last year is that we upgraded to Gusto Plus and it has made a huge improvement in their customer support. We have employees in multiple states that all have unique tax and reporting requirements so moving to Plus has been invaluable. It's more expensive than the base plan but definitely worth it in terms of reducing headaches.
Adobe Acrobat Pro - We actually have been using Acrobat Pro for years; I simply missed including it in past years. As an agency with numerous clients and prospects, we are frequently dealing with NDAs, MSAs, SOWs and various other legal documents. Acrobat lets us easily deal with whatever form we receive and sign/counter-sign them. This is one of those tools that "just works."
The End
Today, my youngest will attend school for the final day. For fifteen years, we have woken them, dressed them, fed them, and helped them get out the door. After today, we are done.
The bittersweet is overwhelming me.
For Sarah, Rachel and April
Twenty five years ago, I was celebrating my 21st birthday with my college roommates. However, I received a call from my dad that abruptly ended the celebration. My cousin and her three young daughters had been murdered by their father; one of them in the arms of her grandmother who was trying to protect her. He had purchased a gun in Seattle and then drove down to Oregon and shot them in their front yard. The oldest had just come home from her first day of kindergarten.
My dad picked me up from my apartment, and we drove down in silence to my great-grandmother's house. The extended family was gathering to be together and to try and understand what had happened. Twenty five years later and I'm still not sure any of us understand. Can you ever really understand something like that?
Today, an eighteen year old kid murdered twenty-one people in an elementary school, and those memories have flooded back to me. I can remember that night like it was yesterday. As I try to process this horribly tragic event, I am sickened by my emotions. They aren't the emotions that I should be feeling. I'm not feeling anger; I'm feeling resignation. I'm feeling a disappointment in myself because I cannot muster the outrage that the murder of children should evoke.
I don't want this to be normal in the world I live in. But I find that anymore I simply feel helpless. I know that deep within I still have intense feelings of anger, but over and over and over and over again that rage runs headlong into the hopelessness. It just hurts too much.
We should be better. But we aren't.
I'm sorry Sarah, Rachel and April. We keep letting you down.
AirAware!
Ever since the incredibly awful fires/smoke that we encountered in Portland in September of 2020, I've been thinking a lot about the environment on a very local level. I fully admit that I was caught off-guard by my first climate related emergency, and I learned quite a bit about air quality terms like AQI. I also discovered some of the various monitoring networks with publicly available data, and sort of developed an itch to participate in some of them. One aspect in particular that surprised me was how awful the air quality inside my home became. I also realized that while the air quality networks could tell me what the outside AQI was, nobody could tell me what it was inside. So, I eventually purchased an Awair Element to put in my office to help me keep an eye on it. Of course, being a tinkerer, I couldn't help notice that Awair provides an open API for connecting to and monitoring their devices. And so, what would eventually become AirAware was born!
So, after a couple weeks, I had what I felt was a pretty decent reusable framework for iOS to connect to and fetch data from Awair devices. But by then I had an itch. I felt like I had just scratched the surface of what could be done. So after a bit more Googling, I found a number of other devices and networks that allow connecting to their APIs, and I decided to pull them into AirAware as well. In the end, I decided to add support for an initial 5 devices/networks:
- Awair indoor monitoring devices
- AirNow, the EPA's public outdoor AQI monitoring network
- PurpleAir's outdoor monitoring network
- WeatherFlow's family of Tempest weather monitoring devices
- OpenWeather's weather monitoring network
There are potentially other devices and networks that I would love to add support for in the future, but for an initial release, I felt like this was sufficient.
Now, I will stop here and say that I love making frameworks and libraries for other developers. I feel good when I make something and can put it out into the universe to potentially help other people. That being said, will anyone find this useful? Will it help anyone? I have no idea, but that's ok! The point is that AirAware now exists and is available if anyone ever wants to add air monitoring functionality to their app, or if they just want to see a reference implementation for any of the supported devices/networks.
Technical Notes:
- AirAware is available directly via Github (https://github.com/cheesemaker/airaware) as well as through the Swift Package Index (https://swiftpackageindex.com/cheesemaker/airaware) and fully supports Xcode's Swift Package Manager.
- AirAware supports Swift 4.0 and greater
- AirAware requires iOS 13 or macOS 10.15
- AirAware is released under the MIT license
Tools for a Distributed Software Agency - 2021
Last year, I posted an overview of the tools that Silverpine uses, and I thought it might be interesting to revisit our toolset and compare with where we are versus where we were. Many of the tools continue to be the same, but there are a few changes. Read on for the details!
Communication Tools
Without a doubt, Slack is the single most valuable tool for us as a distributed company. One thing that has changed over the past year, however, is that almost all of our clients have now adopted Slack as well. This has been a great improvement as we can now utilize shared channels between workspaces which greatly reduces clutter and overhead. This has allowed us to stay mostly within the Silverpine Slack workspace which makes everything simpler and cleaner in terms of organization and tracking conversations both internal, and external. If you're new to Slack, or have yet to try it out, I have a few posts here and here to help you get going.
Looking back to where we were last year, it's clear that teleconferencing technology and tools have rapidly improved. This is one of the few silver linings of Covid. I've never held video conferencing software in very high regard, but I can definitely say that the tools have gone from incredibly awful to "ok". And to that end, Zoom has definitely moved the quality/easy of use bar further and faster than the competitors. We will see if Zoom can keep the crown in the coming year as Teams and other platforms try to leapfrog it. For now, however, Zoom is the best, easiest to use tool for video conferencing for our business.
Last year, we standardized on Dropbox Pro for file sharing and quite honestly, it's been so seamless to our workflows that I sometimes forget about it. I'm still surprised that Apple or Google haven't acquired Dropbox yet, but I have no complaints. It just works.
We use Gmail for our email, and thereby get all of Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite). I said before that I'm not even sure where I would look to replace the email side of the tools, and that still applies. This past year, however, we have also started using more of the other Workspace tools (Sheets, Docs, etc) but we definitely haven't standardized. Most of the tools are convenient simply because they are ever-present, but if you need to create a document with a significant amount of formatting, you'll want to look elsewhere.
Development Tools
We have looked at a few alternatives to Github (like BitBucket) but at this point, GitHub is pretty much the de facto standard for source control systems. I will admit that I was a little nervous when Microsoft acquired them, but quite frankly, their service has improved to the point that we now use them for both source control and for our automated build system through GitHub Actions. Their cost model is also very helpful to us now that it's seat based rather than project based.
The choice of a git tool can be fairly controversial, and we will never mandate a particular app/tool, but we have found that, overall, Tower is a very good, stable, and constantly improving product. They have versions for both Mac and Windows, and their licensing model makes it easy for us to provide seats to any of our engineers that want to use it. I wouldn't say that it's a perfect piece of software, but it's definitely better than using the command line. We're not barbarians!
Of all the tools on this list, MantisHub is the one that I'm the least confident that we will still be using a year from now. MantisHub is a fairly inexpensive, hosted, bug tracking system that's based on the open source Mantis platform. It has replaced Lighthouse which we previously used. We made the decision to replace Lighthouse because it has fallen into abandonware status, and lately hasn't been able to provide the workflow that we need. I wouldn't say that I love MantisHub, but it's not as heavy as Jira and definitely less expensive. We are continually looking to improve our bug tracking system so if you have one that you like, I'd love to hear about it.
Design Tools
Sketch has owned the "non-Photoshop" tool space for years, and it remains the default/standard for our designers. Sketch is a familiar, comfortable, design tool that does what it needs to do. The licensing and cost model work amazingly well for an agency and while I wish that their administrative tools were easier to use when managing seats, it's not something we have to do often. While we were still a Sketch shop this past year, it's possible that the winds of change are blowing. We've been having internal conversations recently about switching to Figma which has quickly emerged as the cool, new kid on the block. I've used Figma a bit and its collaboration tools blow Sketch out of the water (at least at the time of this writing.)
I believe I overlooked our use of Zeplin in my previous tool list. That is a fairly significant oversight on my part! We've been using Zeplin for years now and I don't see that changing any time soon. Zeplin is a very robust tool that engineers and designers can use to easily export image assets out of Sketch (or Figma) and import directly into project workspaces. Zeplin provides that "last mile" in the asset pipeline and supports exporting for web, iOS or Android, each of which have differing format requirements. We love Zeplin!
A critical part of our development process with clients is our prototyping phase. We work extensively with them to help them understand how the UI that we are designing will translate into UX. Particularly when working on mobile platforms, the interface really needs to "feel" right, and InVision is the prototyping tool that we utilize.
Operational/Finance Tools
Like nearly every other small business in the U.S. we use Quickbooks to manage our finances. I don't have a lot of good things to say other than the fact that our CPA prefers us to use Quickbooks.
Silverpine's web content is fairly static, and in general our web traffic is very low. I think it's mostly visited by people who are curious about who we are in the hopes of potentially partnering with us on a project. To that end, we don't really need much in terms of web hosting, so we use Squarespace. One of the best things I can say about Squarespace is that it is easy to get a decent looking web page up, quickly. They have a plethora of templates and basic customization is very easy. If you start wanting to get fancy, though, it gets incredibly clunky, quickly. It's also slightly expensive in comparison to some of its competitors. That being said, we've been using it for years now without too many complaints.
One new addition/change to our set of tools is that this past year we dropped Blinksale and replaced it with Harvest for invoicing clients. A lot of people use Harvest for time tracking, but it also has a good set of invoicing tools and reports. Both Blinksale and Harvest are good tools and are fairly similar in terms of cost, but Blinksale seems to cater its tools more towards freelancers and less towards agencies. Harvest seems to do a better job of catering to both groups, and it's made our invoicing processes much easier this past year.
People like to get paid. That seems to be a nearly universal truth, and for us, Gusto is how that happens. We've been using Gusto for quite a while now and they have done a fantastic job at continuing to roll out new features and products that really complement their core offering, which is payroll. We use Gusto for both employees and contractors, and I haven't heard a single issue about it. Gusto does a really good job at tracking taxes and tax reporting for federal, state and most local requirements and many times they will pro-actively alert us about upcoming changes. On top of that, their customer service is very responsive so when we do have questions about things, they get back to us quickly with real answers. Gusto is fantastic.
Silverpine®
We received notification today that our trademark on “Silverpine” was registered with the USPTO. We first filed for application back in August, so it’s been a long time coming. While it’s certainly not critical to our business operations, it’s nice to have protection around our brand. I’ll have to get used to writing Silverpine® from now on though.
Unintended Consequences
Disclaimer: This post comes from my old blog back in 2004. I’m reposting it here so that I don’t lose the content. The source was hand-written HTML so the formatting probably appears a bit off.
About seven years ago I wrote some code to do Mu-Law and A-Law compression. About six years ago, I decided to publish an article along with the source code for it. You can find it here. Anyway, the other day I received an email from someone who had taken it and modified it for what he was doing. In doing so, he found a piece of misinformation that has been in my article since I originally published it. Not a big deal, and I intend to rectify the issue. However, as we chatted over email, I asked him what he was using Mu-Law/A-Law compression for. Here is a clip from our email:
> So if you don’t mind me asking, what are you working on that has 13 bit
> unsigned audio input?
Sure. I am designing a system that monitors lots of radio stations to capture and
detect Emergency Alert System activations - those ugly tones and occasional
voice messages you hear on the radio. The system has some rather incredible
shortcomings for a critical system in 2005. When the emergency management
office triggers an alert they have no way of knowing whether or not radio stations
actually broadcast the alert. Sometimes the system fails - too often. So our
system listens to the stations and sends a report back to Emergency HQ. In
most cases an exception report that shows which stations did not properly
send out the alert. So if the dam is breaking or the nuke is going critical they
can try again, use the phone, send a helicopter or something.
Whoa. Code that I originally wrote to compress audio in children’s games is now being used to help monitor Emergency situations. Talk about your unintended consequences!
-Jon
Translating Hardware Exceptions to C++ Exceptions
Disclaimer: This post comes from my old blog back in 2004. I’m reposting it here so that I don’t lose the content. The source was hand-written HTML so the formatting probably appears a bit off.
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No matter how careful of a programmer you are, there will always be times when a hardware
exception will occur in your code. Perhaps it was a third party component that was the
culprit. Perhaps, it was a fellow co-worker that broke something. Or maybe it was
Microsoft itself not playing fair with its documentation and/or implementations.
Whatever the case, it is often very useful to be able to capture a run-time exception
that was generated by the CPU. Sure, you can use a catch(...) to be your fail-safe, but
wouldn't it be great to be able to convert that exception that was generated by the hardware
into a C++ exception? I created this class in order to do that very thing. In fact,
this class was the basis for my super assert that I created, because I found that I could
cause a hardware exception any time I wanted, and by using this C++ hardware exception container,
I could access each thread's stack frame at run-time. This would eventually enable me to
perform a stack trace inside of an assert, but I will explain that more in a different
tutorial.
Anyway, I hope that this is useful to someone. I spent a while digging around in the mire that is Microsoft's documentation before I put this together. Perhaps this will save someone else time in the future. Enjoy. -BossHogg #ifndef HARDWARE_EXCEPTION #define HARDWARE_EXCEPTION 1 |
CPU Detection Code
Disclaimer: This post comes from my old blog back in 2004. I’m reposting it here so that I don’t lose the content. The source was hand-written HTML so the formatting probably appears a bit off.
CPU Detection Code
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I dug this code up from a project that I worked on a long time ago. Unfortunately,
it is woefully out of date, especially with any of the latest P4 processors.
Also unfortunately, I don't have a large suite of machines on which to test this,
however, I have verified a large number of these, but not all.
Also missing from the list are any AMD processors since my old companies didn't
explicitly support AMD. Oh, well. As always, this code is to be used at your own
expense, and I guess with this particular set of code, that means a little more.
Anyway, I hope someone finds this interesting, and if you have any questions,
feel free to ask.
-BossHogg #include "windows.h" bool QueryCPUID(); bool QueryMMX(); bool QueryHyperThreading(); void QueryVendorString(char* string); bool QuerySerialNumber(char* string); void GetCPUInfoString(char* string); unsigned long QueryCacheSize(); unsigned long QueryCPUCount(); unsigned char QueryCPUModel(); unsigned char QueryCPUFamily(); unsigned char QueryCPUStepping(); unsigned char QueryCPUType(); bool Is8086() { } bool Is80286() { } bool Is80386() { } bool QueryCPUID() { } bool QueryMMX() { } bool QueryHyperThreading() { |