We got a new RAV4 last Friday

Our lease on our previous car, a 2007 Toyota RAV4, ended a couple of weeks ago. We did a bunch of research and decided to get a new one ;) So it's a 2010 Toyota RAV4, which is 99% the same car.

Note: picture from NewCars.com, and it's just a stock photo, not our actual car.

Same engine, transmission, color, powertrain, etc. There are a few small improvements and upgrades: backup camera, Bluetooth, heated mirrors, smart keyless entry, push-button start, etc. Nothing earth-shattering, but collectively fun.

We didn't set out to get the same car. In fact, although we were very happy with the previous RAV4, we wanted to try something different. But neither our requirements nor the market offerings had changed much during this 3-year lease.

We still want a 4-wheel-drive vehicle to help with Boston's winter snow. We need room for 4 people and their ski / snowboarding gear, for those winter ski trips. That rules out most sedans.

We wanted the dealership nearby, near our house, so it's convenient for service when needed. Ideally, we also wanted the dealership located on some public transportation axis, for the same reason.

We really like bold, fun colors, like our previous Barcelona metallic red. We like the native iPod hookup. And we didn't want to spend much more than we had spent previously.

These requirements rule out a whole bunch of otherwise good cars, both SUVs and smaller. But they are what they are ;)

We had a very good experience at Herb Chambers Toyota, on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Specifically, our sales guy, Michael Lydon, was nice. He was patient, friendly, not pushy, and easy to work with. And the business director / finance manager who handled all the paperwork and such, Nathan Piasta, was also great.

Both of them provided excellent professional service. I highly recommend them as well as the dealership in general.

Toyota should also be commended for taking back our previous car without asking any questions or charging for anything. None of the nickel-and-diming that often goes on at the end of leases, with wear and tear. Very nicely done. And you even get a lease loyalty bonus worth several hundred dollars on your next lease.

Thanks to the good interest rates at the moment, and to Alli's negotiation training at Harvard, we were able to negotiate a great deal.

We used TrueCar.com extensively for research, and we practiced negotiating at another area dealership. We also used my previous company, CarGurus, for reading car reviews and opinions via their blog. Thanks, guys ;)

WebInno 24 (Boston Web Innovators Group)

Last week I attended the Boston Web Innovators Group meeting, #24 in the series.

I went to the first few of these, when they were small and contained mostly people who build stuff. Engineers and hands-on entrepreneurs.

There is definitely a need, a demand, a market for that kind of meeting. So it was successful from the very beginning. Congratulations and thank you to David Beisel of Venrock for organizing this thing and addressing the huge demand.

But over time, the meeting has grown bigger. Really, really big, in fact. Hundreds of people attend it, and it's in a big ball room / conference venue in a hotel these days.

Unfortunately for me, it's hurt the meeting. There are now a ton of other people that I'm not really interested in chatting with all that much, like IP lawyers and consultants. There are still a lot of great folks there, but they're harder to find. The signal-to-noise ratio has dropped.

David et al are doing a lot to try and fight this: dinner and buzz groups and mini-sessions around the main events, etc. These might prove effective, and I'm trying them out.

But overall, the event is not quite as useful to me as it used to be, unfortunately. I wore an "I'm hiring..." name tag / badge last week, and I got a lot of people to come up and ask if I'm hiring anything other than engineers. We are, and I can connect people, but still...

Worth noting: one of the presentations, thredUp, was cool. Both the idea and the way it was presented.

Maybe I'm being selfish ;) This meeting is good for the ecosystem, and we need more like it. I appreciate it. I just like the more focused groups better.

Kennedy School winter formal 2009

Also last weekend, after our dinner at Om, we went to the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) winter formal, 2009 edition.

This party was a lot of fun. Great people, great location (Harvard Faculty Club), great music.

I don't always enjoy dressing up, and I don't like tuxes, but this was fine.

The Harvard Faculty Club is a cool place to host these events, because it has several rooms, not one enormous ballroom. So each room can have its own personality and feel. There are quieter areas and louder areas, sit-down areas, and multiple bars. That worked out really well.

Hanging out with Alli's MPA classmates is always a blast. They are wonderfully diverse and thoughtful. Add a little bit of dancing, a little bit of drinking (mostly Diet Coke for me that night, after Om...), and you have a good recipe.

The photos are posted on Facebook, not Flickr, so you might not be able to see them unless you're Facebook friends with us.

Restaurant review: Om (again)

Om is a modern Indian fusion restaurant in Harvard Square. The emphasis is on modern, both in look and feel (very loungey) and in food / menu choices.

I went to Om for dinner with Alli when it first opened, back in 2006. I posted the review here.

Last weekend, on Saturday, we met our friends Joe and Julie for dinner there. At first we were going to just get drinks, since the drinks at Om are amazing (and they're known for that). But then we were hungry, so we got dinner too.

I had an excellent seared tuna, and everyone else had good steak. But the drinks are the exciting part. The French Superfly, which has a great name, was awesome. Highly recommended.

Service was OK, not excellent. Our appetizer momos were never delivered.

Om is a little expensive, food-wise, and I'm not sure the value is there. But for drinks or appetizers, or to meet friends, it's a good place.

Why don't you blog more about work?

This is one of the questions I get most often from commenters on this blog.

I'm a little surprised to get it, since I never blogged that much about work.

These days, I write my work-related blog posts on the HubSpot dev blog, at dev.hubspot.com. They are not many nor frequent. Some blog posts could belong here too, as the work vs. professional development split is not always obvious.

A good example is our recent blog, with the videos of Eric Ries's Lean Startup talk at MIT last month. It's something I think a bunch of people might be interested in, but it was HubSpot-sponsored, too.

I have the HubSpot dev blog set up to Tweet on my behalf when a new post is published. That way my Twitter and Facebook followers get the post headline and link automatically. (Follow me at @YoavShapira on Twitter if you want.)

But anyways, that's the answer. I still blog a little bit about work, but when I do, it's not here. Subscribe to the HubSpot dev blog and follow us there. There are much better bloggers than me who write there.

Another cool newspaper article about my dad

My dad is a cool guy. I've posted articles about him in the past. He's saving lives every day.

This article covers a recent story, who had this cancer tumor around his heart. Only a few people in the world can operate on it, so my dad found one of them, Dr. Reardon from Houston, and they did the surgery together.

Read more on the Jewish Herald Voice.

How Mike Capuano personally helped me

This is not a political blog. I hardly, if ever, write about political topics.

But today we have a special election in Massachusetts for the US Senate. One of the candidates is Mike Capuano, a local politician, who has directly and personally helped me.

I wanted to share this story. I'm not super-familiar with all the other candidates, and I trust my readers to have their own opinions and judgment.

In 2005, Alli and I got married. At the time, during the Bush administration and closer to 9/11, it was challenging for our international guests to get visas to come to our wedding. Specifically, my cousin Shira, who grew up together with me often in the same house, could not get a visa.

It was unclear why. She had a job she was going back to, and a husband she was going back to, etc. She tried all the routine appeals and such, but to no avail.

Shortly before the wedding, we were running out of ideas. Alli suggesting contacting one of our local congressmen, Mike Capuano. We did contact him, and he simply took care of it. I never spoke to him in person, but his office was responsive, friendly, effective, and efficient.

I'm not sure I've ever had such a pleasant government transaction or interaction. My cousin got her visa legally, attended our wedding, went back to Israel, and all was good.

Neither Mike nor his office ever asked for anything, including support. I haven't given him any money, and I haven't really shared this story until now. I probably should have blogged about it sooner.

But anyways, he helped me out. Just like you'd hope a government official in his position would. And that's rare in my experience, which is why I wanted to share it.

Find your polling place here, and vote today if you can.

Restaurant review: O Ya (revisited)

Last night Alli and I joined a few friends to celebrate a birthday, by going out to O Ya. This is a fun, modern, great Japanese restaurant near South Station in Boston.

Before writing this blog post, I looked back at my review from the first time I went to O Ya, a little more than a year ago: original O Ya review.

To my pleasant surprise, I would say just about the same things now that I said back then. The food is incredibly good: awesome, impressive, delicious, any good adjective you want. Some of the dishes were the same as last year, others new, others I don't remember.

It's still definitely worth checking out if you're a foodie and/or you have a special occasion, or, ideally both ;) Because it's still just as expensive.

The only differences from last time was that I learned not to order dessert at all. Instead, we order another round of our favorite couple of main dishes from the tasting menu. The chutoro and the potato chip, to be specific.

Even better, this time we've got awesome pictures, courtesy of Karen ;) Check them out on flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/45276448@N03/sets/72157622940437168/.

Happy birthday, Jared!

Thanksgiving 2009 on Captiva Island (Florida)

Every Thanksgiving Alli and I travel down to the gulf coast of Florida, where her parents and brothers live. We celebrate Thanksgiving with them over a long weekend, and it's always a lot of fun.

This year, instead of staying with them in Sarasota, we all rented a big villa on Captiva Island. This is an island / resort combination, about 1.5 hours south of Sarasota (near Fort Myers), still on the gulf coast of Florida.

The weather was beautiful, if a little windy at times. But this wind brought some nice waves and opportunities for surfing, which some of us took advantage of.

The island is quiet, with not much to do. A few little shops, a few little bars. The Mucky Duck was fun ;)

We flew out on Thursday morning, Thanksgiving morning, as we always do. I love flying in this time window, as opposed to Thanksgiving eve. There is hardly anyone at the airport or on the plane. It's quiet and fun, the way I wish all flights could be.

Flying back on Sunday, the plane was full, but still not bad. We took off and landed on time, got our bags quickly, and were home in short order.

Another fun Thanksgiving ;) Looking forward to next year.

Bar review: Drink

I've actually been to Drink a couple of times already, and I usually don't even write about bars. Most of them don't stand out, and I'm not a big drinker anyways.

But Drink has gotten such buzz around town, and a lot of people at work really like it. So I thought I'd write up a couple of quick notes.

The atmosphere is awesome -- classic, energetic, but not too loud. You can converse, the people watching is good, the bartender watching is reasonable, and the place is welcoming. Really nice.

Most of the drinks I've had here, however, were too strong for my taste. The Sazerac, the Fort Point Channel, and a couple of others, all the same.

The exceptional thing I love about Drink, however, is their home-made ginger soda. It is absolutely incredible, the best I've ever had. I wish I could buy it in bottles, or gallons, and maybe resell it. Try it by itself, first, in a simple glass. Then ask for some drinks that feature it. My favorite is the Dark and Stormy made with this soda, even though I'm not a huge rum fan.

So Drink, like Sportello which is right above it (and owned by the same person), falls in my book as "cool, but I'm not sure it merits a special trip out there."

Restaurant review: Sportello

Sportello is an Italian word for "counter" and this little restaurant indeed consists mostly of a long, W-shaped counter. There's an open kitchen behind it and a couple of tables off to the side.

Alli and I went there for dinner with Iva and Demetri a couple of weeks ago, but I haven't had time to write up my review until now.

It's a small, cozy, modern, white place. The food is creative Italian, as you might expect. The wine list and menu are short and simple, but there are some good findings. Unfortunately, none of the food was particularly remarkable. Same for the wine.

It was all good, but nothing amazing. I enjoyed the atmosphere and the companions at dinner, but I would have enjoyed dinner with them anywhere else just as much.

It's a nice addition to the neighborhood at a fairly reasonable price point.

The one really nice thing is because this is set up like a lunch counter anyhow, it's very easy and convenient to find a single spot when eating alone. You're not taking up a whole table and extra space.

Overall, Sportello was nice, and if I were in the area, I'd go there for lunch now and again. But I'm not sure it's worth a special trip. The other places in Barbara Lynch's empire, like B+G Oysters and The Butcher Shop, I liked a lot more. And of course #9 Park, which is not in the same ballpark as these restaurants.

More on Coders at work: concurrency bugs

If you're looking for my first / basic review of Coders at Work, it's here. Highly recommended.

In the book, Peter Seibel asks each programmer what's the worst bug they've had to deal with. Many of the answers are concurrency bugs. Issues related to multi-threaded applications running many things at once.

This makes complete sense. It's been my experience as well. Those concurrency bugs are really annoying.

At HubSpot, we have one guy, Drew, who is just awesome at ironing these out on the Java side of things. He not only knows the underlying libraries and their pitfalls really well, but he has a knack for thinking about concurrency issues. It's a really valuable talent.

Thankfully, we don't have to delve into low-level C code and gdb to debug a lot of our issues. The programmers in this book often had to do that. And that, by itself, is a good reason for giving thanks.

More on Coders at Work: reading code

I just posted my basic review of Coders at Work. It's a great book, go read it.




This post has a few more observations and thoughts.

First, reading code. A number of the programmers in the book talked about how often and how much they read code. I realized, while reading the book, that although I do the same thing (and have done it for 15 years now), I don't ask others to do it. I don't talk about it, but I just take it for granted, and that's wrong.

Reading code has been extremely helpful for me professionally. Working on various open source projects, and having to take over / fix other people's code as a consultant (on tight deadlines usually), is awesome. I love it. It is almost always frustrating at first, as it's hard to understand, and no code is ever perfect.

But reading code often and a lot teaches you about programming. You see other styles, other approaches, other patterns. It's often more effective than reading books about programming theory or design patterns. At least it's been more effective for me. Afterwards, when I read those books (because I do that often too), they make much more sense. I have a working example in mind from past code reading.

This is an over-looked advantage of us using so much open-source software: we can read it! Not just when we have a bug and not just when the documentation is bad, but when we want to learn how it works. Really important lesson there, and one a lot of younger developers don't seem to do as much. Maybe I'm wrong on that last part?

Book review: Coders at Work

A whole bunch of people have been talking about and reviewing Peter Seibel's Coders at Work since it came out several weeks ago. I love this kind of book anyways, but seeing the buzz around it moved it up my reading queue. I particularly enjoyed Jeff's review at Coding Horror, and Bryan's reviews on Journal of a Programmer.

I'll get to my conclusion first, since there are many details: this book is great fun to read. I really enjoyed it. It doesn't necessarily have the best writing, the most clarity, or the most riveting interviews I've ever seen. But it ranks highly on all counts, it's well-organized, consistent, and insightful on almost every page.

If you're a programmer or coder, and especially if you see that as a badge of honor, you should buy and read this book.




There are software developers out there who look down on the craft of programming. They prefer to think in abstract notions, designing "system architectures" or being architects, and they treat the implementation as trivial.

To me, that has always been incomplete at best, and more often just foolish or useless. The devil is often in the details, and the devil matters, as it turns out. Because those who ship (release products) win.

Most (maybe all) of the programmers in this book agree with the above. They share plenty of battle stories, each one getting asked about the worst bug they ever had to deal with. They share plenty of opinions, some of which I agree with, some I don't.

There is a lot of ego in this book as well. Some of the claims border on the ridiculous, even. But if you've ever been in the zone as an athlete, or achieved flow as a programmer, you know that given the right conditions and the right problem, you can be 100x as productive as usual for a short while.

So when I read a claim like Brad Fitzpatrick writing memcached overnight, I actually believe it. And it makes me smile in understanding. To me, that's far more impressive than any system architecture that never left the whiteboard or PowerPoint deck. The deliverables of consultants, in other words, which are mostly worthless by themselves.

I'll probably post a separate blog entry about some detailed bugs, answers, and other thoughts on the book. I wanted to get the basics out of the way first. I love this book.

Israel trip, September 2009

I know, it's been two months since September. I'm far behind in my blogging ;(

In September 2009, following our trip to China, I flew right to Israel. I could have come back to Boston for a few days, but I wanted to go straight to Israel for a couple of reasons, detailed below.

First, I've always wanted to fly around the world. Going from Boston to China (via Toronto) westward, and then needing to go to Israel, gave me a chance. And I'm glad to say, that mission is now accomplished, so I can check it off my "life to-do list." For the record, my complete itinerary was Boston (BOS) -> Toronto (YYZ) -> Shanghai (PVG) -> Xi'an (XIY) -> Beijing (PEK) -> Vienna (VIE) -> Tel-Aviv (TLV) -> Paris (CDG) -> Boston (BOS).

Second, I had not celebrated my birthday with my family in Israel for a few years. It was time, and it was fun ;) My birthday is September 5th, which was right after the end of our trip to China.

Third, I wanted to try working remotely for more than a day or two. Every now and then, I work from home (or a coffee shop) for a day or two, and I find it highly productive. But I wanted to get a better understanding / feeling for what it's like to work remotely for a week or more. I'm glad I tried it, because now I know it's very difficult. It requires a lot of patience, the ability to understand what people mean (not just what they say), and more. Not for me, if I can avoid it.

Of course, the main reason for this trip to Israel was not my birthday, nor my around-the-world trip. It was my little sister's wedding. Noa and Doron got married in September, and Alli and I would not miss that for the world.

The wedding was a blast. A beautiful place, great couple, a chance to see many family and friends, and a big party of course. There are a bunch of pictures on Flickr and Facebook. In fact, one of the reasons I waited with this blog post is to give my sister a chance to post her wedding pictures online.

My birthday was also fun. My family likes to celebrate occasions and give gifts, something I myself enjoy a lot as well. Can't complain there ;)

The third event that happened during this trip was the Jewish new year, or Rosh Hashana. This is one of the two times a year I go to temple (the other being Yom Kippur, the day of atonement). Being in Israel, I got to go with my dad, my grandpa, and my uncle, which was awesome.

There was two other bonuses to being in Israel for more than a few days. One is that I had a chance to re-connect with old childhood friends, and I capitalized on it. I met at least 2-3 people I had not seen in many years, and that was awesome. Everyone is doing well, married, with kids coming soon.

The other bonus was that Alli's parents and brother, Shaun, were with us much of the time. Although Shaun got a little sick the first couple of days, it was great to spend a lot of time with them, and I'm happy they joined this significant family event.

All-in-all, it was a great trip. Even learning that working remotely is not for me, while not fun to learn, is a valuable lesson.

Most of the pictures are on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yoavshapira/sets/72157622295848115/.