Happy Presidents Day everybody.

Jason Cole slices off a steaming slab of ribeye from my favorite startup false idol – the obsession with scale.

The moment that you create a solution, whether it’s a piece of software or a business process, you start to feel pressure to optimize it…this urge to prematurely scale is almost entirely fear-based, a fear that’s ironically fed by a startup’s intense desire to succeed…In our quest to reduce risk, we add the two things our growing company doesn’t need: weight and inertia…Every moment is precious to a startup. The time and money that you spend overbuilding could be invested in growing your customer base and refining your products…The young company that constantly asks, “but will it scale?” rarely gets the chance to find out.

Who Cares if it Scales?

The solution? Commit to learning instead.

A learning organization doesn’t worry about scale because it knows that it will get there when it needs to… it recognizes that agility and adaptability defeat complexity every time. Standardization and locked-down processes — “This is how we do it here” — are the enemies of learning and optimization, so hold them at bay forever if possible. Make learning and experimentation your standard process instead.

Eric Ries said as much in 2011:

Failure is a prerequisite to learning… If you are building the wrong thing, optimizing the product or its marketing will not yield significant results.”

The Lean Startup, p154

But even before that, Ted Dziubia gave the tl;dr version of it back in 2008: “Scalability is not your problem, getting people to give a shit is.”

Solve the problems you actually have today, because in a startup you’re not promised tomorrow.

Like all high-functioning dev teams with a modicum of self-awareness, we thrive on gallows humor and existential dread. No wonder we’ve adopted the this is fine dog for our mascot.

I was searching for the original image source when, to my immense surprise and delight:

A This Is Fine dumpster fire vinyl figure that I can buy?! Shut up and take my money. I did and they did. 2 days later…

I’m flattered Cap’n Quacks thinks I could pull that off, but I’m a home automation luddite and I plan to die that way. There’s probably a million smart LED light options that would have worked, but after 5 minutes of looking my eyes glazeth over, so I went old school instead. Here is the laziest pull-request activated signal light that I could come up with.

Hardware:

• 100% Soft This is Fine Dumpster Fire Vinyl Figure – I bought mine from Amazon.
• A smart electrical outlet that supports IFTT (If This Then That) automation. I bought the Etekcity ESW10-USA, also from Amazon.
• A lamp cord with an E12 candelabra socket from the friendly neighborhood big-box hardware store. I found it by the ceiling fan repair parts.
• The lowest wattage LED bulb you can find. DO NOT use an incandescent bulb, no matter how low the wattage, it will melt the vinyl. I found that out the hard way.
  

Next, drill, cut, or gnaw a lightbulb-sized hole into the back of the vinyl figure. It should be just wide enough that the bulb slides in with a little resistance and doesn’t fall out.

Screw the bulb into the socket/cord, plug it in, and make sure everything works (the first socket/cord combo I bought didn’t). Now it’s time to set up the smart socket.

Socket to me

Install the VeSync app on your mobile device, create an account, plug in and turn on the smart socket, follow the instructions to activate the device, update firmware, and name it. Test turning the socket on and off through the app. Here’s how mine looked after setup:

Automate

The printed instructions that come with the sockets include a QR code link to the full users manual, but mine just led to a dead page. Fishing around on the Etekcity support site I found the manual for a similar model. It was close enough. Search for “IFTTT” (If This Then That) in the manual to get right to the good stuff. Naturally, you will need to create an IFTTT account. I followed the guide to install the IFTTT app on my mobile device and pair the outlet, but after that I much preferred using IFTTT website on the desktop to finish setting up the automation.

IFTTT has a selection of pre-made GitHub integrations, none of which do the thing I wanted, so I created this one from scratch. Be advised at some point in this process you will be prompted for your GitHub credentials. I forget which step. While logged in to IFTTT, click the create button at the top from any page:

At this point you may get an error about accessing the repository. I got several. After a while I got an email from GitHub.

Follow the link and configure it to allow repository access. Mine looked like this when I was done:

Got back to IFTTT to finish creating the applet.

The beacons are lit!

Get your pull request on, and…maybe immediately, maybe eventually, the trigger will fire and light your dumpster fire.

Room for improvement

This was a lot of fun to put together, but there is more I wish it could do. I wish it would turn off by itself, but there is no way to do that on the free tier of IFTTT. I wish I could make it light with different intensity and color for different events, but that would take a more advanced LED setup. Finally, I wish it was more responsive to GitHub events, but it uses polling instead of web hooks or push notifications. Maybe that is supported for the paid tier as well. But for now, I’m very pleased.