More from ./techtipsy
I have worked with a few software developers who made the switch to this industry in the middle of their careers. A major change like that can be scary and raise a lot of fears and doubts, but I can attest that this can work out well with the right personality traits and a supporting environment. Here’s what I’ve observed. To keep the writing concise, I’ll be using the phrase “senior junior”1 to describe those that have made such a career switch. Overcoming the fear Fear is a natural reaction to any major change in life, especially when there’s risk of taking a financial hit while you have a family to support and a home loan to pay. The best mitigation that I’ve heard is believing that you can make the change, successfully. It sounds like an oversimplification, sure, as all it does is that it removes a mental blocker and throws out the self-doubt. And yet it works unreasonably well. It also helps if you have at least some savings to help mitigate the financial risk. A years’ worth of expenses saved up can go a long way in providing a solid safety net. What makes them succeed A great software developer is not someone that simply slings some code over the wall and spends all of their day working only on the technical stuff, there are quite a few critical skills that one needs to succeed. This is not an exhaustive list, but I’ve personally observed that the following ones are the most critical: ability to work in a team great communication skills conflict resolution ability to make decisions in the context of product development and business goals maintaining an environment of psychological safety Those with more than a decade of experience in another role or industry will most likely have a lot of these skills covered already, and they can bring that skill set into a software development team while working with the team to build their technical skill set. Software development is not special, at the end of they day, you’re still interacting with humans and everything that comes with that, good or bad. After working with juniors that are fresh out of school and “senior juniors” who have more career experience than I do, I have concluded that the ones that end up being great software developers have one thing in common: the passion and drive to learn everything about the role and the work we do. One highlight that I often like to share in discussions is one software developer who used to work in manufacturing. At some point they got interested in learning how they can use software to make work more efficient. They started with an MVP solution involving a big TV and Google Sheets, then they started learning about web development for a solution in a different area of the business, and ended up building a basic inventory system for the warehouse. After 2-3 years of self-learning outside of work hours and deploying to production in the most literal sense, they ended up joining my team. They got up to speed very quickly and ended up being a very valuable contributor in the team. In another example, I have worked with someone who previously held a position as a technical draftsman and 3D designer in a ship building factory (professionals call it a shipyard), but after some twists and turns ended up at a course for those interested in making a career switch, which led to them eventually working in the same company I do. Now they ship builds with confidence while making sure that the critical system we are working on stays stable. That developer also kicks my ass in foosball about 99% of the time. The domain knowledge advantage The combination of industry experience and software development skills is an incredibly powerful one. When a software developer starts work in a project, they learn the business domain piece by piece, eventually reaching a state where they have a slight idea about how the business operates, but never the full picture. Speaking with their end users will help come a long way, but there are always some details that get lost in that process. Someone coming from the industry will have in-depth knowledge about the business, how it operates, where the money comes from, what are the main pain points and where are the opportunities for automation. They will know what problems need solving, and the basic technical know-how on how to try solving them. Like a product owner, but on steroids. Software developers often fall into the trap of creating a startup to scratch that itch they have for building new things, or trying out technologies that have for a very long time been on their to-do list. The technical problems are fun to solve, sure, but the focus should be on the actual problem that needs fixing. If I wanted to start a new startup with someone, I’d look for someone working in an industry that I’m interested in and who understands the software development basics. Or maybe I’m just looking for an excellent product owner. How to help them succeed If you have a “senior junior” software developer on your team, then there really isn’t anything special you’d need to do compared to any other new joiner. Do your best to foster a culture of psychological safety, have regular 1-1s with them, and make sure to pair them up with more experienced team members as often as possible. A little bit of encouragement in challenging environments or periods of self-doubt can also go a long way. Temporary setbacks are temporary, after all. What about “AI”? Don’t worry about all that “AI”2 hype, if it was as successful in replacing all software development jobs as a lof of people like to shout from the rooftops, then it would have already done so. At best, it’s a slight productivity boost3 at the cost of a huge negative impact on the environment. Closing thoughts If you’re someone that has thought about working as a software developer or who is simply excited about all the ways that software can be used to solve actual business problems and build something from nothing, then I definitely recommend giving it a go, assuming that you have the safety net and risk appetite to do so. For reference, my journey towards software development looked like this, plus a few stints of working as a newspaper seller or a grocery store worker. who do you call a “senior senior” developer, a senile developer? ↩︎ spicy autocomplete engines (also known as LLM-s) do not count as actual artificial intelligence. ↩︎ what fascinates me about all the arguments around “AI” (LLM-s) is the feeling of being more productive. But how do you actually measure developer productivity, and do you account for possible reduced velocity later on when you’ve mistaken code generation speed as velocity and introduced hard to catch bugs into the code base that need to be resolved when they inevitably become an issue? ↩︎
Fairphone has bad customer support. It’s not an issue with the individual customer support agents, I know how difficult their job is1, and I’m sure that they’re trying their best, but it’s a more systematic issue in the organization itself. It’s become so bad that Fairphone issued an open letter to the Fairphone community forum acknowledging the issue and steps they’re taking to fix it. Until then, I only have my experience to go by. I’ve contacted Fairphone customer support twice, once with a question about Fairphone 5 security updates not arriving in a timely manner, and another time with a request to refund the Fairphone Fairbuds XL as part of the 14-day policy. In both cases, I received an initial reply over 1 month later. It’s not that catastrophic for a non-critical query, but in situations where you have a technical issue with a product, this can become a huge inconvenience for the customer. I recently gave the Fairbuds XL a try because the reviews for it online were decent and I want to support the Fairphone project, but I found the sound profile very underwhelming and the noise cancelling did not work adequately.2 I decided to use the 14-day return policy that Fairphone advertise, which led to the worst customer care experience I’ve had so far.3 Here’s a complete timeline of the process on how to return a set of headphones to the manufacturer for a refund. 2025-02-10: initial purchase of the headphones 2025-02-14: I receive the headphones and test them out, with disappointing results 2025-02-16: I file a support ticket with Fairphone indicating that I wish to return the headphones according to their 14-day return policy 2025-02-25: I ask again about the refund after not hearing back from Faiprhone 2025-03-07: I receive an automated message that apologized for the delay and asked me to not make any additional tickets on the matter, which I had not been doing 2025-04-01: I start the chargeback process for the payment through my bank due to Fairphone support not replying over a month later 2025-04-29: Fairphone support finally responds with instructions on how to send back the device to receive a refund 2025-05-07: after acquiring packaging material and printing out three separate documents (UPS package card, invoice, Cordon Electronics sales voucher), I hand the headphones over to UPS 2025-05-15: I ask Fairphone about when the refund will be issued 2025-05-19 16:20 EEST: I receive a notice from Cordon Electronics confirming they have received the headphones 2025-05-19 17:50 EEST: I receive a notice from Cordon Electronics letting me know that they have started the process, whatever that means 2025-05-19 20:05 EEST: I receive a notice from Cordon Electronics saying that the repairs are done and they are now shipping the device back to me (!) 2025-05-19 20:14 EEST: I contact Fairphone support about this notice that I received, asking for a clarification 2025-05-19 20:24 EEST: I also send an e-mail to Cordon Electronics clarifying the situation and asking them to not send the device back to me, but instead return it to Fairphone for a refund 2025-05-20 14:42 EEST: Cordon Electronics informs me that they have already shipped the device and cannot reverse the decision 2025-05-21: Fairphone support responds, saying that it is being sent back due to a processing error, and that I should try to “refuse the order” 2025-05-22: I inform Fairphone support about the communication with Cordon Electronics 2025-05-27: Fairphone is aware of the chargeback that I initiated and they believe the refund is issued, however I have not yet received it 2025-05-27: I receive the headphones for the second time. 2025-05-28: I inform Fairphone support about the current status of the headphones and refund (still not received) 2025-05-28: Fairphone support recommends that I ask the bank about the status of the refund, I do so but don’t receive any useful information from them 2025-06-03: Fairphone support asks if I’ve received the refund yet 2025-06-04: I receive the refund through the dispute I raised through the bank. This is almost 4 months after the initial purchase took place. 2025-06-06: Fairphone sends me instructions on how to send back the headphones for the second time. 2025-06-12: I inform Fairphone that I have prepared the package and will post it next week due to limited access to a printer and the shipping company office 2025-06-16: I ship the device back to Fairphone again. There’s an element of human error in the whole experience, but the initial lack of communication amplified my frustrations and also contributed to my annoyances with my Fairphone 5 boiling over. And just like that, I’ve given up on Fairphone as a brand, and will be skeptical about buying any new products from them. I was what one would call a “brand evangelist” to them, sharing my good initial experiences with the phone to my friends, family, colleagues and the world at large, but bad experiences with customer care and the devices themselves have completely turned me off. If you have interacted with Fairphone support after this post is live, then please share your experiences in the Fairphone community forum, or reach out to me directly (with proof). I would love to update this post after getting confirmation that Fairphone has fixed the issues with their customer care and addressed the major shortcomings in their products. I don’t want to crap on Fairphone, I want them to do better. Repairability, sustainability and longevity still matter. I haven’t worked as a customer care agent, but I have worked in retail, so I roughly know what level of communication the agents are treated with, often unfairly. ↩︎ that experience reminded me of how big of a role music plays in my life. I’ve grown accustomed to using good sounding headphones and I immediately noticed all the little details being missing in my favourite music. ↩︎ until this point, the worst experience I had was with Elisa Eesti AS, a major ISP in Estonia. I wanted to use my own router-modem box that was identical to the rented one from the ISP, and that only got resolved 1.5 months later after I expressed intent to switch providers. Competition matters! ↩︎
My evenings of absent-minded local auction site scrolling1 paid off: I now own a Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 Tiny. It’s relatively old, being manufactured in 20162, but it’s tiny and has a lot of useful life left in it. It’s also featured in the TinyMiniMicro series by ServeTheHome. I managed to get it for 60 EUR plus about 4 EUR shipping, and it comes with solid specifications: CPU: Intel i5-6500T RAM: 16GB DDR4 Storage: 256GB SSD Power adapter included The price is good compared to similar auctions, but was it worth it? Yes, yes it was. I have been running a ThinkPad T430 as a server for a while now, since October 2024. It served me well in that role and would’ve served me for even longer if I wanted to, but I had an itch for a project that didn’t involve renovating an apartment.3 Power usage One of my main curiosities was around the power usage. Will this machine beat the laptop in terms of efficiency while idling and running normal home server workloads? Yes, yes it does. While booting into Windows 11 and calming down a bit, the lowest idle power numbers I saw were around 8 W. This concludes the testing on Windows. On Linux (Fedora Server 42), the idle power usage was around 6.5 W to 7 W. After running powertop --auto-tune, I ended up getting that down to 6.1 W - 6.5 W. This is much lower compared to the numbers that ServeTheHome got, which were around 11-13 W (120V circuit). My measurements are made in Europe, Estonia, where we have 240V circuits. You may be able to find machines where the power usage is even lower. Louwrentius mada an idle power comparison on an HP EliteDesk Mini G3 800 where they measured it at 4 W. That might also be due to other factors in play, or differences in measurement tooling. During normal home server operation with 5 SATA SSD-s connected (4 of them with USB-SATA adapters), I have observed power consumption being around 11-15 W, with peaks around 40 W. On a pure CPU load with stress -c 8, I saw power consumption being around 32 W. Formatting the internal SATA SSD added 5 W to that figure. USB storage, are you crazy? Yes. But hear me out. Back in 2021, I wrote about USB storage being a very bad idea, especially on BTRFS. I’ve learned a lot over the years, and BTRFS has received continuous improvements as well. In my ThinkPad T430 home server setup, I had two USB-connected SSD-s running in RAID0 for over half a year, and it was completely fine unless you accidentally bumped into the SSD-s. USB-connected storage is fine under the right circumstances: the cables are not damaged the cables are not at a weird angle or twisted I actually had issues with this point, my very cool and nice cable management resulted in one disk having connectivity issues, which I fixed by relieving stress on the cables and routing them differently the connected PC does not have chronic overheating issues the whole setup is out of the reach of cats, dogs, children and clumsy sysadmin cosplayers the USB-SATA adapters pass through the device ID and S.M.A.R.T information to the host the device ID part especially is key to avoiding issues with various filesystems (especially ZFS) and storage pool setups the ICY BOX IB-223U3a-B is a good option that I have personally been very happy with, and it’s what I’m using in this server build a lot of adapters (mine included) don’t support running SSD TRIM commands to the drives, which might be a concern has not been an issue for over half a year with those ICY BOX adapters, but it’s something to keep in mind you are not using an SBC as the home server even a Raspberry Pi 4 can barely handle one USB-powered SSD not an issue if you use an externally powered drive, or an USB DAS After a full BTRFS scrub and a few days of running, it seems fine. Plus it looks sick as hell with the identical drives stacked on top. All that’s missing are labels specifying which drive is which, but I’m sure that I’ll get to that someday, hopefully before a drive failure happens. In a way, this type of setup best represents what a novice home server enthusiast may end up with: a tiny, power-efficient PC with a bunch of affordable drives connected. Less insane storage ideas for a tiny PC There are alternative options for handling storage on a tiny 1 liter PC, but they have some downsides that I don’t want to be dealing with right now. An USB DAS allows you to handle many drives with ease, but they are also damn expensive. If you pick wrong, you might also end up with one where the USB-SATA chip craps out under high load, which will momentarily drop all the drives, leaving you with a massive headache to deal with. Cheaper USB-SATA docks are more prone to this, but I cannot confirm or deny if more expensive options have the same issue. Running individual drives sidesteps this issue and moves any potential issues to the host USB controller level. There is also a distinct lack of solutions that are designed around 2.5" drives only. Most of them are designed around massive and power-hungry 3.5" drives. I just want to run my 4 existing SATA SSD-s until they crap out completely. An additional box that does stuff generally adds to the overall power consumption of the setup as well, which I am not a big fan of. Lowering the power consumption of the setup was the whole point! I can’t rule out testing USB DAS solutions in the future as they do seem handy for adding storage to tiny PC-s and laptops with ease, but for now I prefer going the individually connected drives route, especially because I don’t feel like replacing my existing drives, they still have about 94% SSD health in them after 3-4 years of use, and new drives are expensive. Or you could go full jank and use that one free NVMe slot in the tiny PC to add more SATA ports or break out to other devices, such as a PCIe HBA, and introduce a lot of clutter to the setup with an additional power supply, cables and drives. Or use 3.5" external hard drives with separate power adapters. It’s what I actually tried out back in 2021, but I had some major annoyances with the noise. Miscellaneous notes Here are some notes on everything else that I’ve noticed about this machine. The PC is quite efficient as demonstrated by the power consumption numbers, and as a result it runs very cool, idling around 30-35 °C in a ~22-24 °C environment. Under a heavy load, the CPU temperatures creep up to 65-70 °C, which is perfectly acceptable. The fan does come on at higher load and it’s definitely audible, but in my case it runs in a ventilated closet, so I don’t worry about that at all. The CPU (Intel i5-6500T) is plenty fast for all sorts of home server workloads with its 4 CPU cores and clock speeds of 2.7-2.8 GHz under load. The UEFI settings offered a few interesting options that I decided to change, the rest are set to default. There is an option to enable an additional C-state for even better power savings. For home server workloads, it was nice to see the setting to allow you to boot the PC without a keyboard being attached, found under “Keyboardless operation” setting. I guess that in some corporate environments disconnected keyboards are such a common helpdesk issue that it necessitates having this option around. Closing thoughts I just like these tiny PC boxes a lot. They are tiny, fast and have a very solid construction, which makes them feel very premium in your hands. They are also perfectly usable, extensible and can be an absolute bargain at the right price. With solid power consumption figures that are only a few watts off of a Raspberry Pi 5, it might make more sense to get a TinyMiniMicro machine for your next home server. I’m definitely very happy with mine. well, at least it beats doom-scrolling social media. ↩︎ yeah, I don’t like being reminded of being old, too. ↩︎ there are a lot of similarities between construction/renovation work and software development, but that’s a story for another time. ↩︎
I don’t like laptops with loud cooling fans in them. Quite a controversial position, I know. But really, they do suck. A laptop can be great to use, have a fantastic keyboard, sharp display, lots of storage and a fast CPU, and all of that can be ruined by one component: the cooling fan. Laptop fans are small, meaning that they have to run faster to have any meaningful cooling effect, which means that they are usually very loud and often have a high-pitched whine to them, making them especially obnoxious. Sometimes it feels like a deliberate attack on one of my senses. Fans introduce a maintenance burden. They keep taking in dust, which tends to accumulate at the heat sink. If you skip maintenance, then you’ll see your performance drop and the laptop will get notably hot, which may contribute to a complete hardware failure. We’ve seen tremendous progress in the world of consumer CPU-s over the last decade. Power consumption is much lower while idle, processors can do a lot more work in the same power envelope, and yet most laptops that I see in use are still actively cooled by an annoying-ass cooling fan.1 And yet we keep buying them. But it doesn’t have to be this way. My colleagues that have switched to Apple Silicon laptops are sometimes surprised to hear the fan on their laptop because it’s a genuinely rare occurrence for them. Most of the time it just sits there doing nothing, and when it does come on, it’s whisper-quiet. And to top it off, some models, such as the Macbook Air series, are completely fanless. Meanwhile, those colleagues that run Lenovo ThinkPads with Ryzen 5000 and 7000 series APU-s (that includes me) have audible fans and at the same time the build times for the big Java monolith that we maintain are significantly slower (~15%) compared to the fan-equipped MacBooks.2 We can fix this, if we really wanted to. As a first step, you can change to a power saving mode on your current laptop. This will likely result in your CPU and GPU running more efficiently, which also helps avoid turning the cooling fan on. You will have to sacrifice some performance as a result of this change, which will not be a worthwhile trade-off for everyone. If you are OK with risking damaging your hardware, you can also play around with setting your own fan curve. The CPU and GPU throttling technology is quite advanced nowadays, so you will likely be fine in this area, but other components in the laptop, such as the battery, may not be very happy with higher temperatures. After doing all that, the next step is to avoid buying a laptop that abuses your sense of hearing. That’s the only signal that we can send to manufacturers that they will actually listen to. Money speaks louder than words. What alternative options do we have? Well, there are the Apple Silicon MacBooks, and, uhh, that one ThinkPad with an ARM CPU, and a bunch of Chromebooks, and a few Windows tablets I guess. I’ll be honest, I have not kept a keen eye on recent developments, but a quick search online for fanless laptops pretty much looks as I described. Laptops that you’d actually want to get work done on are completely missing from that list, unless you like Apple.3 In a corporate environment the choice of laptop might not be fully up to you, but you can do your best to influence the decision-makers. There’s one more alternative: ask your software vendor to not write shoddily thrown together software that performs like shit. Making a doctor appointment should not make my cooling fan go crazy. Not only is slow and inefficient software discriminatory towards those that cannot afford decent computer hardware, it’s also directly contributing to the growing e-waste generation problem by continuously raising the minimum hardware requirements for the software that we rely on every day. Written on a Lenovo ThinkPad X395 that just won’t stop heating up and making annoying fan noises. passive vs active cooling? More like passive vs annoying cooling. ↩︎ I dream of a day where Asahi Linux runs perfectly on an Apple Silicon MacBook. It’s not production ready right now, but the developers have done an amazing job so far! ↩︎ I like the hardware that Apple produces, it’s the operating system that I heavily dislike. ↩︎
I moved recently, and so did my home server. You might have noticed it due to the downtime. This time I have built a dedicated shelf for it, which allows for more flexibility and room for additional expensive ideas. The internet connection is a fiber line, which is fantastic for a place that’s generally considered to be in the countryside. I had to hire a guy at the last place in Tallinn (capital of Estonia) to pull a fiber line from the basement to the apartment, with my own money, so I’m very happy that I don’t have to do it here. And yes, the ThinkPad T430 is still a solid home server. I had an issue with my battery calibration script resulting in the machine being turned off, but I fixed it by disabling it, at the cost of the battery probably dying soon. Seems like a tlp and/or Linux kernel issue that has surfaced recently, as it also happened on a different ThinkPad laptop when I last tried it. I can’t really remove the battery, because the “power on with AC attach” setting only works when the battery is connected and charged. The server/wardrobe/closet room is slightly chillier compared to the rest of the environment, meaning that the temperatures are also slightly lower. I also have an option to do some crazy ventilation experiments in the winter, but that will have to wait for a bit, mainly because it’s spring. I’m genuinely surprised that the Wi-Fi 5 signal is coming through the closet quite adequately, with the whole apartment being covered with at least 50 Mbit/s speeds, and over 300 Mbit/s when near the closet, which is about the maximum speed that I can achieve from the access point in ideal conditions.
More in technology
A long time ago I wrote about secret government telephone numbers, and before that, secret military telephone buttons. I suppose this is becoming a series. To be clear, the "secret" here is a joke, but more charitably I could say that it refers to obscurity rather than any real effort to keep them secret. Actually, today's examples really make this point: they're specifically intended to be well known, but are still pretty obscure in practice. If you've been around for a while, you know how much I love telephone numbers. Here in North America, we have a system called the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) that has rigidly standardized telephone dialing practices since the middle of the 20th century. The US, Canada, and a number of Central American countries benefit from a very orderly system of area codes (more formally numbering plan areas or NPAs) followed by a subscriber number written in the format NXX-XXXX (this is a largely NANP-centric notation for describing phone number patterns, N represents the digits 2-9 and X any digit). All of these NANP numbers reside under the country code 1, allowing at least theoretically seamless international dialing within the NANP community. It's really a pretty elegant system. NANP is the way it is for many reasons, but it mostly reflects technical requirements of the telephone exchanges of the 1940s. This is more thoroughly explained in the link above, but one of the goals of NANP is to ensure that step-by-step (SxS) exchanges can process phone numbers digit by digit as they are dialed. In other words, it needs to be possible to navigate the decision tree of telephone routing using only the digits dialed so far. Readers with a computer science education might have some tidy way to describe this in terms of Chompsky or something, but I do not have a computer science education; I have an Information Technology education. That means I prefer flow charts to automata, and we can visualize a basic SxS exchange as a big tree. When you pick up your phone, you start at the root of the tree, and each digit dialed chooses the edge to follow. Eventually you get to a leaf that is hopefully someone's telephone, but at no point in the process does any node benefit from the context of digits you dial before, after, or how many total digits you dial. This creates all kinds of practical constraints, and is the reason, for example, that we tend to write ten-digit phone numbers with a "1" before them. That requirement was in some ways long-lived (The last SxS exchange on the public telephone network was retired in 1999), and in other ways not so long lived... "common control" telephone exchanges, which did store the entire number in electromechanical memory before making a routing decision, were already in use by the time the NANP scheme was adopted. They just weren't universal, and a common nationwide numbering scheme had to be designed to accommodate the lowest common denominator. This discussion so far is all applicable to the land-line telephone. There is a whole telephone network that is, these days, almost completely separate but interconnected: cellular phones. Early cellular phones (where "early" extends into CDMA and early GSM deployments) were much more closely attached to the "POTS" (Plain Old Telephone System). AT&T and Verizon both operated traditional telephone exchanges, for example 5ESS, that routed calls to and from their customers. These telephone exchanges have become increasingly irrelevant to mobile telephony, and you won't find a T-Mobile ESS or DMS anywhere. All US cellular carriers have adopted the GSM technology stack, and GSM has its own definition of the switching element that can be, and often is, fulfilled by an AWS EC2 instance running RHEL 8. Calls between cell phones today, even between different carriers, are often connected completely over IP and never touch a traditional telephone exchange. The point is that not only is telephone number parsing less constrained on today's telephone network, in the case of cellular phones, it is outright required to be more flexible. GSM also defines the properties of phone numbers, and it is a very loose definition. Keep in mind that GSM is deeply European, and was built from the start to accommodate the wide variety of dialing practices found in Europe. This manifests in ways big and small; one of the notable small ways is that the European emergency number 112 works just as well as 911 on US cell phones because GSM dictates special handling for emergency numbers and dictates that 112 is one of those numbers. In fact, the definition of an "emergency call" on modern GSM networks is requesting a SIP URI of "urn:service:sos". This reveals that dialed number handling on cellular networks is fundamentally different. When you dial a number on your cellular phone, the phone collects the entire number and then applies a series of rules to determine what to do, often leading to a GSM call setup process where the entire number, along with various flags, is sent to the network. This is all software-defined. In the immortal words of our present predicament, "everything's computer." The bottom line is that, within certain regulatory boundaries and requirements set by GSM, cellular carriers can do pretty much whatever they want with phone numbers. Obviously numbers need to be NANP-compliant to be carried by the POTS, but many modern cellular calls aren't carried by the POTS, they are completed entirely within cellular carrier systems through their own interconnection agreements. This freedom allows all kinds of things like "HD voice" (cellular calls connected without the narrow filtering and companding used by the traditional network), and a lot of flexibility in dialing. Most people already know about some weird cellular phone numbers. For example, you can dial *#06# to display your phone's various serial numbers. This is an example of a GSM MMI (man-machine interface) code, phone numbers that are handled entirely within your device but nonetheless defined as dialable numbers by GSM for compatibility with even the most basic flip phones. GSM also defined numbers called USSD for unstructured supplementary service data, which set up connections to the network that can be used in any arbitrary way the network pleases. Older prepaid phone services used to implement balance check and top-up operations using USSD numbers, and they're also often used in ways similar to Vertical Service Codes (VSCs) on the landline network to control carrier features. USSDs also enabled the first forms of mobile data, which involved a "special telephone call" to a USSD in order to download a cut-down form of ESPN in a weird mobile-specific markup language. Now, put yourself in the shoes of an enterprising cellular network. The flexibility of processing phone numbers as you please opens up all kinds of possibilities. Innovative services! Customer convenience! Sell them for money! Oh my god, sell them for money! It seems like this started with customer service. It is an old practice, dating to the Bell operating companies, to have special short phone numbers to reach the telephone company itself. The details varied by company (often based on technical constraints in their switching system), but a common early setup was that dialing 114 got you the repair service operator to report a problem with your phone line. These numbers were usually listed in the front of the phone book, and for the phone company the fact that they were "special" or nonstandard was sort of a feature, since they could ensure that they were always routed within the same switch. The selection of "911" as the US emergency number seems rooted in this practice, as later on several major telcos used the "N11" numbers for their service lines. This became immortalized in the form of 611, which will get you customer service for most phone carriers. So cellular companies did the same, allocating themselves "special" numbers for various service lines. Verizon offers #PMT to make a payment. Naturally, there's also room for upsell services: #ROAD for roadside assistance on Verizon. The odd thing about these phone numbers is that there's really no standard involved, they're just the arbitrary practices of specific cellular companies. The term "mobile dial code" (MDC) is usually used to refer to them, although that term seems to have arisen organically rather than by intent. Remember, these aren't a real thing! The carriers just make them up, all on their own. The only real constraint on MDCs is that they need to not collide with any POTS number, which is most easily achieved by prefixing them with some combination of * and #, and usually not "*#" because it's referenced by the GSM standard for MMI. MDCs are available for purchase, but the terms don't seem to be public and you have to negotiate separately with each carrier. That's because there is no centralization. This is where MDCs stand in clear contrast to the better known SMS Short Code, or SMSSC. Those are the five or six-digit numbers widely used in advertising campaigns. SMSSCs are centrally managed by the SMS Short Code Registry, which is a function of industry association CTIA but contracted to iConectiv. iConectiv is sort of like the SAIC of the communications industry, a huge company that dates back to the Bell System (where it became Bellcore after divestiture) and that no one has heard of but nonetheless is a critically important part of the telephone system. Providers that want to have an SMSSC (typically on behalf of one of their customers) pay a fee, and usually recoup it from the end user. That fee is not cheap, typical end-user rates for an SMSSC run over $10k a year. But at least it's straightforward, and your SMS A2P or marketing company can make it happen for you. MDCs have no such centralization, no standardized registration process. You negotiate with each carrier individually. That means it's pretty difficult to put together "complete coverage" on an MDC by getting the same one assigned by every major carrier. And this is one of those areas where "good enough" is seldom good enough; people get pissed off when something you advertise doesn't work. Putting a phone number that only works for some people on a billboard can quickly turn into an expensive embarrassment, so companies will be wary of using an MDC in marketing if they don't feel really confident that it works for the vast majority of cellphone users. Because of this fragmentation, adoption of MDCs for marketing purposes has been very low. The only going concern I know of is #250, operated by a company called Mobile Direct Response. The premise of #250 is very simple: users call 250 and are greeted by a simple IVR. They say a keyword, and they're either forwarded to the phone number of the business that paid for the keyword or they receive a text message response with more information. #250 is specifically oriented towards radio advertising, where asking people to remember a ten-digit phone number is, well, asking a lot. It's also made the jump to podcast advertising. #250 is priced in a very radio-centric way, by the keyword and the size of the market area in which the advertisement that gives the keyword is played. 250 was founded by Dave Robinett, who used to work on marketing at Sprint, presumably where he became aware that these MDCs were a possibility. He has negotiated for #250 to work across a substantial list of cellular carriers in the US and Canada, providing almost complete coverage. That wasn't easy, Robinett said in an interview that it took five years to get AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint on board. 250 does not appear to be especially widely used. For one, the website is a little junky, with some broken links and other indications that it is not backed by a large communications department. Dave Robinett may be the entire company. They've been operating since at least 2017, and I've only ever heard it in an ad once---a podcast ad that ended with "Call #250 and say I need a dentist." One thing you quickly notice when you look into telephone marketing is that dentists are apparently about 80% of the market. He does mention success with shows like "Rush, Hannity, and Levin," so it's safe to say that my radio habits are a little different from Robinett's. That's not to say that #250 is a failure. In the same interview Robinett says that the company pays his mortgage and, well, that ain't too bad. But it's also nothing like the widespread adoption of SMSSCs. One wonders if the limitation of MDCs to one company that is so focused on radio marketing limits their potential. It might really open things up if some company created a registration service, and prenegotiated terms with carriers so that companies could pick up their own MDCs to use as they please. Well, yeah, someone's trying. Around 2006, a recently-founded mobile marketing company called Zoove announced StarStar dialing. I'm a little unclear on Zoove's history. It seems that they were originally founded as Teleractive in Rhode Island as an SMS short code keyword response service, and after an infusion of VC cash moved to Palo Alto and started looking for something bigger. In 2016, they were acquired by a call center technology company called Mindful. Or maybe Zoove sold the StarStar business to Mindful? Stick a pin in that. I don't love the name StarStar, which has shades of Spacestar Ordering. But it refers to their chosen MDC prefix, two stars. Well, that point is a little odd, according to their marketing material you can also get numbers with a # prefix or * prefix, but all of the examples use **. I would say that, in general, StarStar has it a little less together than #250. Their website is kind of broken, it only loads intermittently and some of the images are missing. At one point it uses the term "CADC" to describe these numbers but I can't find that expanded anywhere. Plus the "About" page refers repeatedly to Virtual Hold Technologies, which renamed to VHT in 2018 and Mindful 2022. It really feels like the vestigial website of a dead company. I know about StarStar because, for a time, trucks from moving franchise All My Sons prominently bore the number MOVE on the side. Indeed, this is still one of the headline examples on the StarStar website, but it doesn't work. I just get a loud click and then the call ends. And it's not that StarStar doesn't work with my mobile carrier, because StarStar's own number MOBILE does connect to their IVR. That IVR promises that a representative will speak with me shortly, plays about five seconds of hold music, and then dumps me on a voicemail system. Despite StarStar numbers apparently basically working, I'm finding that most of the examples they give on their website won't even connect. Perhaps results will vary depending on the mobile network. Well, perhaps not that much is lost. StarStar was founded by Steve Doumar, a serial telephone marketing entrepreneur with a colorful past founding various inbound call center companies. Perhaps his most famous venture is R360, a "lead acquisition" service memorialized by headlines like "Drug treatment referral service took advantage of addictions to make a quick buck" from the Federal Trade Commission. He's one of those guys whose bio involves founding a new company every two years, which he has to spin as entrepreneurial dynamism rather than some combination of fleeing dissatisfied investors and fleeing angered regulators. Today he runs whisp.io, a "customer activation platform" that appears to be a glorified SMS advertising service featuring something ominously called "simplified opt-in." Whisp has a YouTube channel which features the 48-second gem "Fun Fact We Absolutely Love About Steve Doumar". Description: Our very own CEO, Steve Doumar is a kind and generous person who has given back to the community in many ways; this man is absolutely a man with a heart of gold. Do you want to know the fun fact? Yes you do! Here it is: "He is an incredible philanthropist. He loves helping other people. Every time I'm with him he comes up with new ways and new ideas to help other people. Which I think is amazing. And he doesn't brag about it, he doesn't talk about it a lot." Except he's got his CMO making a YouTube video about it? From Steve Doumar's blog: American entrepreneur Ray Kroc expressed the importance of persisting in a busy world where everyone wants a bite of success. This man is no exception. An entrepreneur. A family man. A visionary. These are the many names of a man that has made it possible for opt-ins to be safe, secure, and accurate; Steve Doumar. I love this stuff, you just can't make it up. I'm pretty sure what's going on here is just an SEO effort to outrank the FTC releases and other articles about the R360 case when you search for his name. It's only partially working, "FTC Hits R360 and its Owner With $3.8 Million Civil ..." still comes in at Google result #4 for "Steve Doumar," at least for me. But hey, #4 is better than #1. Well, to be fair to StarStar, I don't think Steve Doumar has been involved for some years, but also to be fair, some of their current situation clearly dates to past behavior that is maybe less than savory. Zoove originally styled itself as "The National StarStar Registry," clearly trying to draw parallels to CTIA/iConectiv's SMSSC registry. Their largest customer was evidently a company called Sumotext, which leased a number of StarStar numbers to offer an SMS and telephone marketing service. In 2016, Sumotext sued StarStar, Zoove, VHT (now Mindful), and a healthy list of other entities all involved in StarStar including the intriguingly named StarSteve LLC. I'm not alone in finding the corporate history a little baffling; in a footnote on one ruling the court expressed confusion about all the different names and opted to call them all Zoove. In any case, Sumotext alleged that Zoove, StarSteve, and VHT all merged as part of a scheme to illegally monopolize the StarStar market by undercutting the companies that had been leasing the numbers and effectively giving VHT (Mindful) an exclusive ability to offer marketing services with StarStar numbers. The case didn't end up going anywhere for Sumotext, the jury found that Sumotext hadn't established a relevant market which is a key part of a Sherman act case. An appeal was made all the way to the Supreme Court, but they didn't take it up. What the case did do was publicize some pretty sketchy sounding details, like the seemingly uncontested accusation that VHT got Sumotext's customer list from the registry database and used it to convert them all into StarSteve customers. And yes, the Steve in StarSteve is Steve Doumar. As best I can tell, the story here is that Steve Doumar founded Zoove (or bought Teleractive and renamed it or something?) to establish the National StarStar Registry, then founded a marketing company called StarSteve that resold StarStar numbers, then merged StarSteve and the National StarStar Registry together and cut off all of the other resellers. Apparently not a Sherman act violation but it sure is a bad look, and I wonder how much it contributed to the lack of adoption of the whole StarStar idea---especially given that Sumotext seems to have been responsible for most of that adoption, including the All My Sons deal for MOVE. I wonder if All My Sons had to take MOVE off of their trucks because of the whole StarSteve maneuver? That seems to be what happened. Look, ten-digit phone numbers are had to remember, that much is true. But as is, the "MDC" industry doesn't seem stable enough for advertising applications where the number needs to continue to work into the future. I think the #250 service is probably here to stay, but confined to the niche of audio advertising. StarStar raised at least $30 million in capital in the 2010s, but seems to have shot itself in the foot. StarStar owner VHT/Mindful, now acquired by Medallia, doesn't even mention StarStar as a product offering. Hey, remember how Steve Doumar is such a great philanthropist? There are a lot of vestiges around of StarStar Inc., a nonprofit that made StarStar numbers available to charitable organizations. Their website, starstar.org, is now a Wix error page. You can find old articles about StarStar Me, also written **me, which sounds lewd but was a $3/mo offering that allowed customers to get a vanity short code (such as ** followed by their name)---the original form of StarStar, dating back to 2012 and the beginning of Zoove. In a press release announcing the StarStar Me, Zoove CEO Joe Gillespie said: With two-thirds of smartphone users having downloaded social networking apps to their phones, there’s a rapidly growing trend in today's on-the-go lifestyle to extend our personal communications and identity into the digital realm via our mobile phones. And somehow this leads to paying $3 for to get StarStarred? I love it! It's so meaningless! And years later it would be StarStar Mobile formerly Zoove by VHT now known as Mindful a Medallia company. Truly an inspiring story of industry, and just one little corner of the vast tapestry of phone numbers.
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