Coding and Beer

Ask anyone who purchases Amazon Prime and they will most likely say they love it.  It makes it quick and easy to purchase things on Amazon because you don’t go through the whole dance of comparing shipping costs of different sites. You know the price you see is what you are paying.

Now, imagine if FedEx and UPS decided to offer their own service instead. This new service could be subscription based just like Prime. You pay one yearly fee. For that, you get a FedEx or UPS account that you could use on ANY merchant website that uses their service.The process should go something like this:

1. Go to merchant website and pick out items.
2. Go through check out process.
3. When it gets to the shipping, you select FedEx or UPS Prime (or whatever branding they call it).
4. You then enter your credentials for your shipping account.
5. Done.

This would:

• Allow FedEx and UPS to get a subscription based fee (stabilizes their income streams a bit more).
• Allow customers to shop in more places besides Amazon.
• Allow sites to compete with Amazon on a more fair footing.
• Give the person more choice and less to worry about.

FedEx and UPS (or even the postal service) could all offer this. I know that Amazon eats it on some accounts, but probably wins with other accounts. Somehow they are making this work for them. If they can do it, so can the shippers. Even if they had tiered plans, I think it would work great. They could even be more strict than Prime by only picking up from vendors on certain days of the week (based on volume sold by vendor) or restricting delivery to certain days a week to customers. I can think of plenty more optimizations quickly.  They can still hold on to the old pay for what you ship model as well since not everyone would subscribe to this service.

Maybe I’m wrong about this.  Maybe there just isn’t a way to do this unless you eat some of the costs of shipping like Amazon does.  My thought is if nobody  in those companies are thinking about it yet, they should be.

I haven’t blogged much lately.  A lot of things have happened in my life in the last year that focused my efforts elsewhere.  I thought I would go ahead and jot down some notes.

Being a supervisor, I rarely get to code much anymore.  Lately I have been getting to do so on a project I wrote a while back.  I needed to add new functionality to it and it needed to have a design overhaul to accommodate the changes.  You know how you always have the “I would totally change that if I were to write it again” thoughts after finishing an application? Well, I get to make those changes to this app.  The new functionality isn’t a priority to finish fast, so I get to work on the app in-between other work.  This allows me to slow down on it and really update it correctly.  I’m removing a bunch of jQuery based javascript I wrote at the time and replacing the client UI interactions with a binding framework.  I chose KnockoutJS for that.  I also removed a bunch of CSS and leveraged BootStrap a lot for layout and base styles.  These two improvements required me to dig in and learn some new things, but the amount of CSS and javascript has significantly dropped on this project so far.  It has a responsive design now which will be great for mobile device use.  I love re-sizing the window and watching the elements flow correctly.  The rework will extend all the way to the database table structure, so I will be plowing through the ASP.NET MVC and SQL database layers as well by the time this project is over.

On a personal level, I started working out again.  It feels really good.  I have dropped about 15 pounds over the last year.  I hope to drop 15 more to get to my ideal weight.  It’s really hard because I love eating good food and drinking great beer.  We are still a cable/sat free household.  Netflix gets used more than I would like, but at least the price of that is small in comparison.

Spring is here, so it is time to start planning the garden and summer projects.  My wife asked me to build a pergola before July.  That should be easy, but I also have other large landscaping projects in mind as well and they also need to be finished before July.  Just got to figure out how to fund it.

My name is Brian Russell and I currently work in the electric utility industry as an Information Systems Supervisor.  I spend my time managing the work of server operations, application installation and maintenance, help desk, and development work.  It’s a pretty cool job as I get to ‘play’ with a wide range of tech such as VMware, SharePoint, SQL Server, ESRI, .NET, Ruby, backup systems, networking, firewalls, log management, desktops, iSCSI storage, etc.

On the personal side of things, I like (trying) to learn the guitar, live music, hockey, trying new beers, poker, golf, snowboarding, and anything else that’s fun.