April 27, 2010
Development, Strategy
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ARRRGGHHH! is probably the best way of putting it.
Why does Microsoft insist on telling me my copy of Office is not genuine? I have an account on MSDN (Microsoft Developers Network) which says I can install Office, so I downloaded it, from Microsoft, got the key, from Microsoft, and installed it. The next day having run Windows Update it says its not genuine! how genuine do you want it to be, you gave me the key yesterday.
I asked a couple of friends if they’d had any problems and one said (a teacher) that their school had recently started showing that too. ‘So what do you do?’ I asked ‘There’s nothing we can do it’s installed by the council we just use it’ she replied… So all the kids in the local Primary School are learning that Windows Genuine Advantage is something to ignore, Brilliant. Do you think the money they are making from corporations at the minute (who would pay anyway) out weighs the effect of teaching the next generation to either ignore the ‘We think you’re a pirate’ message or to just switch to something which doesn’t nag, like Google Docs, Open Office…
I was talking to the network admin at work, he had a shiny new Mac on his desk, I asked if we were all getting them, he replied ‘No, this is mine, after a day of this s#!t I just want a computer that works when I get home’. The only conclusion I can draw from that is that expert Windows users prefer Macs and after the trouble I’ve had (2 days to re-install all this nagware) I’m starting to think the same too.
And now for a developer rant at .net 4 now… I may as well go all out while I’m here!
I went to one of the .net 4 launch events the other day. I went because I wanted to know more about how to use the tools, these are days for developers after all! Half the day was pure sales pitch, look, I’m here, I’ve bought in (to an extent) now show me how to go back an impress.
Then, the content when it did come pointed to the fact that a large chunk of the improvements in VS2010 and .net 4.0 are actually things they should have just done right in the first place (standards compliance, not using bloated names for IDs), or already exist in 2008 as add-ons (MVC). Ah! so that’s why the whole morning was a sales pitch… you haven’t actually got much to show me, but yeah I am excited that after 8 years you finally managed to make your HTML output W3C compliant, 8 YEARS!
As for Silverlight, well 4 looks like it has potential (finally), it’s a shame that I tried to use Silverlight 1 (or 2?) to do something useful…We’re currently narrowing down the plugins used across our sites from 5 to 1 and we’ve chosen Flash.
Perhaps now Silverlight could challenge Flash, but again they’ve shot themselves in the foot, I have a day job to do and I’m going to use the tools I know will get the job done, when I lost 2 weeks work trying to do it in Silverlight you not only lost me but you lost my boss, who 2 years later ‘knows’ that Silverlight isn’t up to the task, and he’s not going to be going to any of the MSDN brainwashing sessions, and if the boss decrees ‘no silverlight, it failed last time’ then you’ve lost the battle.
March 14, 2010
Books, Strategy
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Linchpin, Seth Godin
I was horrified when I read that Seth Godin had written a book about becoming indispensable! Why?
Well, every new job I’ve started I find someone who has made themselves ‘indespensible u’,sually by coding themselves into every system there is; email gets sent to them, only they know the logon, there is no documentation (I hate it too, but none!). They have become such an integral part of the system that nothing can happen without them, everything fails if they don’t logon one morning! I, on the other hand have been trying to make myself dispensable, trying to code myself out of a job, make each system so good I’m not needed*. So to write a book extolling the virtues of becoming indispensable shocked me, especially from Seth Godin! I was so infuriated I went out and bought it, I had to find out why.
How wrong was I!
This book explains why we don’t need those people any more (I’ll call them Lynchpins – because they kill the projects they work on) he refers to them as ‘factory workers’, once you figure out the system (map) anyone can do that job it’s monkeys pressing buttons, and why by coding myself out of a job, by making the systems as good as we possibly can I’m making myself indispensable! As when any other projects come up, it’s me they want to do it, I learn more, I have a more interesting job and everyone gains.
I would say that not all the concepts in the book are new (and he doesn’t claim that they are), I can relate some of these back to Enterprise Tuesday sessions, Predictably Irrational et al and Paul Arden’s books (especially Whatever you think think the opposite). But the way he has assembled these threads, and many others, into a manifesto of how we need to work is amazing. It is an inspiring book, that I nearly put down because I felt by reading it I may actually be procrastinating from what I could be doing! It’s not often that I find business books to be as engrossing as a thriller but I just had to keep reading this.
Putting his words into practice may not be easy for some (me included) but realising that in some cases it’s just the ‘Lizard brain’ trying to keep everything steady, and realising how much better you can make life for yourself and your work colleagues, I think it’s well worth putting the effort in.
*okay so writing a system that will run itself is possibly a bit far fetched but one that doesn’t require constant and unnecessary attention, and one where the attention it does require can be done by anyone.
December 1, 2009
Strategy
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As part of my effort to keep on learning and supplement my reading on the personal MBA, and figure out how I can be more entrepreneurial I have been going to Enterprise Tuesdays, which is a series of lectures and talks every Tuesday evening at the University of Cambridge.
It’s the end of the first term now and I’ve been looking back over notes I’ve made and there seems, to me, to be some similarities in what everyone has said.
- An idea is worthless until you do something about it.
- Stress test your idea with a few people (who will tell you the truth!) is it really a good idea? Is the timing right, is the idea ready, is the market place ready?
- Put everything in to it, you must be passionate about it.
- Be passionate about it, if you’re not then no one else will be.
Obviously there was a lot more to the lectures than that, but to me these seem to be the common themes across the lectures so far.
I’m still having difficulty with the post lecture networking, the place is full of MBAs, CEOs and all sorts of other acronyms and I feel like a fraud for being there, which I think fits in with what Josh calls Imposter Syndrome
September 23, 2009
Books, Strategy
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The Nudge, Thaler and Sustein
Well, that certainly makes you think! The book describes various ways in which we are influenced or possibly should be influenced, but most of all it makes you think about the decisions your making (as well as making me feel bad for the lack of decision making on my part in many of their cases!).
At first I thought the book wasn’t really relevant to me and what I do on a day to day basis, however… as you read in and think about it, you can think of more and more situations where it is relevant (and you won’t stop thinking of situations where you wish someone else had read it before giving you a form). I am a developer for a large e-commerce site and there are many situations where this has caused me to think more about the user and things like what the default settings should be in a given situation, or how we present products and information to the customers.
Well worth a read.
August 23, 2009
Books, Strategy
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What Would Google Do, Jeff Jarvis
A reasonablebook talking about ‘the Google way’. There are good ideas in this book, most of them are discussed elsewhere (on the web and in other books) and they are repeated over and over again.
So, some good if unoriginal ideas repeated over and over. Get it from the library if you like reading, but don’t bother buying it.