Don MacLennan: High Tech Yankee

Here’s two products you should use to get a lot of extra security without a lot of hassle.

Lastpass

Lastpass is a browser plugin that stores your online passwords.

It eliminates the need to remember usernames and passwords for your online accounts because it auto-fills the forms whenever you login.  Super convenient.

LastPass generates very complex passwords, which helps avoid having your password guessed by hackers’ programs.  You don’t need to remember them, because LastPass does.

LastPass has a great report that inspects all of your stored passwords.  It quickly shows you duplicate passwords you’ve used in two or more accounts.  And it rates each password for its strength.  Don’t like what it found?  Use LastPass to generate new ones.

LastPass runs on Windows and Mac PC’s as well as all smartphones.

LastPass also has a sister product Xmarks. It’s a bookmark manager and syncs across all of your devices.  This is great when you change devices, such as buying a new smartphone or PC.  One click and all of your bookmarks show up on the new device.

One drawback to LastPass: you must use a master password to access the LastPass repository that contains all the other passwords.  Even though they encrypt everything, you’ll need to choose (and remember) a sufficiently complex password to your LastPass account.  There’s some extra features that can make access to LastPass even more secure, if you’re so inclined.

AnchorFree

AnchorFree establishes a secure, encrypted connection from your laptop to a wifi network.  This is important if you use a public wifi network, and is useful even on a password-protected one.

Like LastPass, AnchorFree gives you a lot of security without a lot of hassle.  Once you install it, it auto-connects over your network connection.  You don’t need to remember to turn it on.

AnchorFree doesn’t noticeably slow down your connection, at least here in the U.S.  They have built out their global network over the years to the point that it should perform well from most countries.

Customers also purchase AnchorFree for two other reasons:

• it provides some anonymity due to IP address obfuscation and encrypted communications;  people living in countries where their internet use is subject to surveillance find this useful
• its IP address obfuscation also enables people living in one country to access online entertainment content in another. For example, streaming Netflix from a country other than the U.S.

One drawback: I had trouble using AnchorFree on my iPhone.  The Mac and PC versions work fine for me.

I spent some time in the last couple months getting my new company’s tooling and systems in place.  Why?

Because when the full engineering team is here soon, we’ll be in heads-down development mode along with our early customers.  No time for other stuff.

The results are pretty staggering:

• Everything we implemented is software-as-a service; it lives in the cloud
• Everything is “industrial strength” in terms of feature/functionality; we’re not going to outgrow these tools and apps anytime soon
• Everything was implemented within minutes or hours.  Enter your credit card number and go.  Tweak the configurations now or later
• Little or no installed software on laptops
• No servers required
• Everything is licensed as a monthly or yearly subscription (often I had a choice of either).  Easy on the cash-flow and easy to budget for growth

All of this was done without an IT employee or consultant.  All of this was done without owning a server.  All this was done without installing (and maintaining!) software.

We get immune to the hype surrounding the Cloud, but this experience reinforced the immense power of this trend.  Think about what this means to small businesses and their ability to “act big” on a budget.  Or, what this means to the IT department of a mid-size or larger corporation.

Massive change is underway and we might be underestimating it.

For the curious, here’s what we deployed so far:

• Salesforce.com
• Webex for conference calls and web meetings
• Accompa for product requirements management
• Rally for Agile product delivery
• Jira for defect tracking
• Github for source code control
• Basecamp for general-purpose project management
• Box for file repository
• QuickbooksOnline for accounting
• ExpenseCloud for expense report management
• Google AdWords for keyword advertising
• Google Analytics
• Algentis for outsourced HR, benefits and payroll administration

As we get closer to market launch , we’ll take the same appraoch for everything else:

• Website content management
• Marekting campaign management
• Various web analytics tools
• e-commerce and/or customer billing
• Various software development tools

Kudos to New Relic for writing about their toolset and inspiring me to write this post.

Having recently co-founded my own company, I get a big role in defining its culture.  And one of the things my partner and I agree on is the need for diversity in our team across cultures, genders and everything else.

Why?  Because it makes for a more inclusive culture.  And because bringing many different points of view to bear on important decisions yields….better decisions.

To that end, I started asking friends of mine the following question: “where can we find communities of women in technology?”.  This was for the purpose of including such groups in our recruiting outreach.

The results thus far have been, to put it mildly, underwhelming.  Mostly in the form non-responses.  And a suggestion to search on meetup.com, which is like starting mostly cold.

What’s going on?

I know there aren’t many women in engineering roles, especially in proportion to the percent of men.  But they do exist.  And they exist in even larger numbers in roles like user experience design, another role we’re looking for.

(We interrupt this post to note that as I’m writing this, in the lobby of a hotel, James Brown is singing “It’s a Man’s World” in the background music.  You can’t get more ironic than that!)

But despite the size of the community, why can’t I tap into this network of professional women the way I have done with so many other communities of interest?

Rather than put forward my hypotheses, I’m interested in yours.  And any connections you could make.  The journey of a thousand miles – gender equality in tech – begins with but a single step.

UPDATE

I’m pleased to report that the first two hires we’ve made are women.  Not because we went looking for them in women-specific networks; it just happened.  But it’s a big step toward preventing our early culture from being defined by a homogeneously (young) male team that mirrors the tech workforce as a whole.