Bryan Stone

If there is one mistake that nearly all developers are culprit of, it is this.

They make promises to clients, and then they don't deliver on them.

They tell a client "I will have that to you tomorrow."
Then tomorrow rolls around, and they break the promise. They don't deliver. This broken promise upsets the client and it hurts the relationship.

The key is not to work faster.
The key is to under promise, and then over deliver.

If you think you can get something to the client by tomorrow, tell them 3 days from now. Give yourself a buffer.
If you get it done tomorrow, then the client will be ecstatic. But if life comes up, and it takes longer than expected (as it often does), then you have two more days to deliver.
Yes, it may mean the client waits a bit longer, but you are making a promise and keeping it.
Taking your time is better than breaking a promise.

Don't make promises you can't keep.
Under promise, over deliver.
Never the other way around.

Life scientists currently spend more than 180 billion dollars every year to generate precious research results. Yet they don’t spend anywhere near as much effort on making the results of that research reproducible, searchable, and machine-readable. This results in needless waste and duplication; to paraphrase the famous saying, “Half the money we spend on research is repeated; the trouble is we don’t know which half.”

The classic solution has been the physical laboratory notebook. However, in an era of geographically distributed conglomerates, massive biomedical datasets, and increasingly computerized workflows, we will not attain reproducible research through good note-taking alone. We need modern tools.

That’s where Sajith Wickramasekara and Ashutosh Singhal of Benchling come in. They’ve built a suite of apps, centered around a digital laboratory notebook, that help life scientists design, run, record, and search the results of their very expensive experiments. Built by their team of fellow MIT engineers, Benchling’s technology has already been adopted by thousands of scientists across both industry and academia, and has a serious chance at becoming to biomedicine what GitHub has become to software engineering.

To understand the problem they are solving, it’s useful to review the state of data in the life sciences. Current systems separate each type of data scientists use into its own silo, making recreating the full context and results of an experiment impossible. The tools are poorly designed and don’t take advantage of the web, making sharing data difficult and wasting expensive researcher time on searching for old work or redoing known results. Imagine a software engineering team working without version control and you’ll have a sense of the status quo for most life science labs.

Benchling changes all that with a multipart offering for scientists that is, as of today, free for general use. The Benchling suite begins with single-purpose tools for cloning, gels, colony picking, primer design, and more. All of these different apps are connected to the scientist’s electronic lab notebook in the cloud. For the first time, the place where scientists do work is connected to where the work is recorded. Every action in Benchling is tracked, versioned, and can be retraced in the future. Instead of a paper notebook, scientists record observations and notes inline with the actual work they are doing, and can search across all of their lab’s current and historical information.

The result has been a crowd pleaser in the life sciences. Scientists love it because it’s well designed and unifies many disparate tools in one interface. Managers love it because they get visibility into what their scientists are doing. And executives love the sophisticated archival functionality as it helps organizations capture and preserve institutional knowledge such that when people leave the company, knowledge doesn’t leave with them.

With thousands of customers (including both academic labs and pharma companies) already on the Benchling platform, we believe their future is bright. That’s why I’m proud to announce that Andreessen Horowitz is leading a $5 million round of funding in Benchling to scale their operations. Our bet is simple: if a lab is spending a few million per year on generating precious life science data, they’ll now probably want to try Benchling out for free to make sure they don’t unnecessarily spend a few million more.

by @dbl

Have you ever had to set up, run, and scale an email server? While it has been a long time since I have done this on my own, I do know that it is a lot of work! Users expect to be able to access their email from the application, device, or browser of their choice. They want to be able to send and receive large files (multi-megabyte video attachments and presentations often find their way in to my inbox). Email administrators and CSO’s are looking for robust security measures.

Paradoxically, email is both mission-critical and pedestrian. Everyone needs it to work, but hardly anyone truly understands what it takes to make this happen!

Introducing WorkMail
Today I would like to introduce Amazon WorkMail. This managed email and calendaring solution runs in the Cloud. It offers a unique set of security controls and works with your existing desktop and mobile clients (there’s also a browser-based interface). If your organization already has a directory of its own, WorkMail can make use of it via the recently introduced AWS Directory Service. If not, WorkMail will use Directory Service to create a directory for you as part of the setup process.

WorkMail was designed to work with your existing PC and Mac-based Outlook clients including the prepackaged Click-to-Run versions. It also works with mobile clients that speak the Exchange ActiveSync protocol.

Our 30-day free trial will give you the time and the resources to evaluate WorkMail in your own environment. As part of the trial, you can serve up to 25 users, with 50 gigabytes of email storage per employee. In order to help you to move your organization to WorkMail, we also provide you with a mailbox migration tool.

WorkMail makes use of a number of AWS services including Amazon WorkDocs (formerly known as Amazon Zocalo), the Directory Service, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and Amazon Simple Email Service (SES).

WorkMail Features
You can set up WorkMail for a new organization in a matter of minutes. As I mentioned earlier, you can use your existing directory or you can have WorkMail set one up for you. You can send and receive email through your existing domain name by adding a TXT record (for verification of ownership) and an MX record (to route the mail to WorkMail to your existing DNS configuration).

As a WorkMail user, you have access to all of the usual email features including calendaring, calendar sharing, tasks, contact lists, distribution lists, resource booking, public folders, and out-of-office (OOF) messages.

The browser-based interface has a full array of features. It works with a wide variety of browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and newer (IE 9 and higher) versions of Internet Explorer. The interface gives you access to email, calendars, contacts, and tasks. You can access shared calendars and public folders, book resources, and manage your OOF.

WorkMail was designed to work in today’s data-rich, email-intensive environments. Each inbox has room for up to 50 gigabytes of messages and attachments. Messages can range in size all the way up to 25 megabytes.

As part of this launch we are renaming Amazon Zocalo to Amazon WorkDocs! WorkMail can be used in conjunction with WorkDocs for simple, controlled distribution of documents that contain sensitive information.

WorkMail Security Controls

Let’s talk about security for a bit. WorkMail includes a number of security features and controls that will allow it to meet the needs of many types of organizations. Here’s an overview of some of the most important features and controls:

• Location Control – The WorkMail administrator can choose to create mailboxes in any supported AWS region. All mail and other data will be stored within the region and will not be transferred to any other region. During the Preview, WorkMail will be supported in the US East (Northern Virginia) and Europe (Ireland) regions, with more to follow over time.
• S/MIME – Data in transit to and from Outlook clients and certain iPhone and iPad apps is encrypted using S/MIME. Data in transit to other clients is encrypted using SSL.
• Stored Data Encryption – Data at rest (messages, contacts, attachments, and metadata) is encrypted using keys supplied and managed by KMS.
• Message Scanning – Incoming and outgoing email messages and attachments are scanned for malware, viruses, and spam.
• Mobile Device Policies & Actions – The WorkMail administrator can selectively require encryption, password protection, and automatic screen locking for mobile devices. The administrator can also remotely wipe a lost or mislaid mobile device if necessary.

Getting Started with WorkMail
Let’s walk through WorkMail while wearing our email administrator hats! I need to create a WorkMail organization. In most cases, I would use a single organization for an entire company.

I start by opening up the AWS Management Console and choosing WorkMail:

I click the Get started button. At this point I can choose between a Quick setup (WorkMail will create a new directory for me)  or a Custom setup (WorkMail will use an existing directory that I configure):

I’ll go for the quick setup today. I need to pick a unique name for my organization:

This will automatically create a directory and then create and initialize my organization. It will also initiate the Amazon SES domain verification process (for jeffbarr.awsapps.com in this case) and create a set of DKIM keys so that I can send DKIM-signed mail. The entire process takes 10 to 20 minutes and requires no additional work on my part. The organization’s status will start out as creating and will transition to active before too long:

After the creation process completes I can begin to add WorkMail users to my organization (if I had used an existing directory in the previous step I could simply select them from a list at this point). I’ll begin by adding myself:

Then  I specify the email address and password. If I have associated one or more domain names with the organization, I can use the name as the basis for the email address:

I can browse all of the organization’s users:

I can also create groups, attach domains, and manage mobile device policies, all from the Console.

The WorkMail Browser-Based Interface
Let’s take a look at the browser-based interface to WorkMail. Here’s my inbox:

And my calendar:

This is just a sampling of the features that are available in the WorkMail.

Pricing and Availability
We are launching a Preview of Amazon WorkMail in the US East (Northern Virginia) and Europe (Ireland) regions today and you can sign up for the Preview if you are interested in joining.

After the 30-day free trial (25 users and 50 gigabytes of storage per user), pricing is on a per-user, pay-as-you-go basis. You will be charged $4 per month for a 50 gigabyte WorkMail mailbox, or $6 per month for a bundle that includes WorkMail and WorkDocs. There is no separate charge for the use of SES to send messages.

— Jeff;