A stunningly good book!  I really wish I’d read this book earlier.  If you are responsible for developing any kind of web system that needs to be up 24/7 then you must read this.  The book is full of  useful design patterns and anti-patterns, and I must admit the number of times I thought, ‘yup, trying to fix one of those problems right now’!
My only complaint is that the examples are all Java related, and I develop C# systems, even still the lessons, concepts and patterns are cross platform (some is a bit specific).

If it’s not a course book then it should be! and if it’s not then it should be the first book you read before trying to build a real enterprise level web system.

Another thrilling installment in the Jack Reacher series.   It’s great to be part of another episode in Jack Reachers life.  From witnessing a bizarre suicide on a let night subway to a full on conspiracy, with the men in dark suits out to track dowand silence Jack .  Brilliant.

It’s a bit of a change going from a ‘proper’ phone to a smart phone is a bit of a shock.  I think it’s going to take a bit of getting used to, but it’s already proved it’s usefulness just with the off the shelf  apps: navigation, Internet and gmail.

Time will ultimately tell how useful it really is and we’ll have to see how the battery lasts.

If you need to know:

<rant>
No one in the shop can actually change your address (tried 3 times)
You can’t do it online (tried 3 times)
The website doesn’t remember who you are, so you log in, then go to contact us and have to retype everything again! and in the shop…. come off it that’s like web 0.7 kinda stuff.
Then when (3rd attempt) I finally got someone to talk to who knew what they were doing and managed to change my address and order my new phone…phew… Your phone will be with you in 2-4 day, 7-10 days and then 6 days ago I got ‘tomorrow’ but yeah it’s still not here.

So ring again, and today I got the … sorry for your in convenience, oh no you’re a web customer I’ll put you through to them… even though they went home 2 hours ago!
So still phoneless and none the wiser.
Maybe they think it doesn’t matter as I’m just a pleb… but I can assure you when I do take over running the company infrastructure you can guess whose not getting the mobile phone and broadband contract… ha hah ahahah ahahhahahaha
</rant>

UPDATE:
The phone was dispatched a week ago but with the wrong/incomplete address – even though my billing address is correct, not sure how they do it!
So now I have corrected them…. it is again on it’s way it is unlikely to arrive within 30 days of placing the order!

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.

To honest I was a little disappointed with this book.

Possibly down to my expectation rather than the book itself.  I was hoping to learn some techniques to improve my memory and speed of thinking but that’s not what this is about.  There are 90 odd explanations of ‘phenomena’ from blind spots (both physical and mental) through explanations of why thinking about exercise is better than not doing any at all… Quite a lot of it isn’t new it’s a collection of other peoples work (okay so a lot of books are but when you’ve seen a lot of it already elsewhere it makes it a lot less interesting, although it is quicker to read because you don’t have to fire up  a browser and watch the videos!).

All very interesting but it wasn’t what I was expecting (perhaps my expectations had been anchored too high!).  If you are interested in the brain from a biology and psychology lesson point of view then it is very interesting and explains a lot of detail and gives places to look for even more information so you can deep dive on a subject too.

This really does show you a way to make being creative a part of your life.  Initially I was worried that his might be a little too dance orientated, there are references to it (she’s a choreographer and dancer) but you don’t need to know about dance it’s just a way of explaining the concepts and that all makes sense.  There is no short cut to follow these steps and you will be creative, it’s pointers and help to get you started and then to show at different points what may trip you up an dhow to avoid it.

There are many concepts and explanations of other people and their processes.    I like the idea of creating boxes for projects so that you an collect together all the information and resources in one place, but then look back on those later and remember what was the aim.

I liked her explanation of spine, that’s helped me with a couple of ideas I’ve had going round my head for years but somehow there was something missing from them.

One things I must say is that you should do all the exercises, don’t just read them… do them!

I really enjoyed reading this and  I’ll be eading it again if I feel I need a little shove.  One thing which did come through and is something which seems to be a theme is just do it! Get on with your creative (entrepreneurial) endeavour, and have a ‘team’ of people who you know will give honest feedback on it to keep you on the straight and narrow.

When I bought this I was thinking it would help me design new systems… It won’t.  But… it provides amazing insight into what the role and the actual job of being a software architect is.  Which I actually found a lot more useful.  It was a bit odd to see people I’d worked with in there (especially as I’ve worked on code and systems they’ve designed, I guess those experiences must have taught them a few lessons!)

A very interesting book with many perspectives, but it won’t tell you how to architect software, it will give you many insights into the job of software architect.

If you design anything used by people and you’ve never done any user testing then you must read this! It sets out a simple way to get started on the road to user testing.

I have done some user testing over the years both as facilitator and as observer, so a lot of the book isn’t ‘new’, however there is always more to learn and it’s always good to get other peoples insights and ideas, so it was still extremely useful.

The book is a quick and simple read (Krug’s aim is to make it short enough to read on a flight) , it has the same ease of access as Don’t make me think, and whilst I now want to run off and do more testing, I didn’t feel quite as ‘changed’ at the end of reading it as I did with Don’t make me think.  Perhaps I felt more connection with Don’t make me think as I read the second edition and the ‘new’ chapters in it were the same concepts we’d just published some research papers on so I felt a real connection to it.

(* co-naturality, the same idea can be thought up by different people across the globe at the same time, it doesn’t belong to anyone,  and especially if you are researching the same topic the fact that two sets of researchers came to the same conclusion just adds weight to the idea.)

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.