Month: December 2010

Improving the Time Suck of Social Media

Social media, albeit being a great boon in many regards, has also become a massive time suck for almost everyone involved!  Sure, news is up to date, down the the minute, almost real-time with every single little bit of craziness there to read about right now!  The t0-read, to-do, to-make, to-code lists all keep getting longer and longer and longer…

…and then…

Crickets.

That’s right, you might as well be listening to crickets.  Social media is killing many productive people’s productiveness.  I’ve decided I’m going to take a break, of some sort, just not sure what kind.  Maybe I’ll schedule myself some “social media time” or something.  Similar to “TV Time” for kids.  If only parents were better about that, maybe social media wouldn’t be the ADD person’s massive time blow that it is.  Well, as I write this I’ve determined the following.

Twitter

I’m going to time box the activity and use specific tools that enable me to effectively use the social media services.  Twitter, that needs to be done on a PC with Seesmic or something that allows me to truly and quickly interact.  None of this half-assed mobile super phone poking about on the Blackberry, or twiddling about with Twitter on the iPad.  Those other tools just don’t allow the speed and ease of viewing links and other such things that using a full on PC with power allows.  I want to get in, see what’s up, filter the crap I don’t want to read out of the way, tweet, and get the hell out of there.  I want bus time, walking time, and other activities back for other uses.  I want to just read a book, or just take a walk again.  No twittering while riding or walking anymore.  Done.  Gone.  Zilch.

My time box at this time is going to be limited to 15 minutes a day.  In the morning and in the evening sometime.  In that time I have the following things I need to straighten out;

  • Get synced up on who I am and am not following, and review my list of recent followers to see who I should be following.
  • Find a better way to track tweets.  Lists are useful, but there needs to be something more.  Maybe Paper.li or something of that sort.

Both of these tasks need knocked out with the time boxing I’ve allocated.

Facebook

This I’ve already relegated to minimal use.  I might use it about 15 minutes to 2 hrs a week.  I’m actually amazed at this fact.  Simply, I have a Facebook Profile because one kind of needs to have one being in the technology industry.  Also it provides a great avenue for keeping in touch with people that I might otherwise not be in touch with.  It’s good to know people I grew up with are doing well, providing a little morale boost here and there.  🙂  Plus, one never knows when a blast from the past might turn out to be a great friend, asset, or network contact here in the present!

Time boxing for Facebook is going to be limited to 5-10 minutes per day.

Blogging Here @ CompositeCode.com or elsewhere…

This is something that I find truly useful.  Not the time suck like these other web apps.  So really I’m not going to time box myself or set some arbitrary limit.  I am going to continue striving to have at minimum a blog entry per week.  One that is partially useful, even if it is just to review what I’ve done for the week, conferences or meetups I’ve attended, or something of that sort.  Hopefully I’ll be able to maintain some actual useful code how-to, cloud computing write ups, and other legit, honest to goodness, readable entries as well.  🙂

So no time box for blogging, this is something I truly love to do.  Write, write, and more writing.

With that I’m off to find some time tracking software to help myself stay in the time boxes I’ve set.  Cheers, and happy holidays!

Black Hat Agile Cloud Retrospective Quality Improvements

Big enough title?  Meh, that isn’t really related.  🙂  Please read on.

The latest little blurb back and forth in the ALT.NET Community on the ALT.NET Seattle Google Groups thread is about retrospectives and how to increase quality. I won’t post any direct messages but wanted to blog a bit about that.

My fellow coworker Eric Ridgeway mentioned, which I whole heartedly agree, one doesn’t wait until the end to make quality improvements.  One focuses on quality at all times.  This makes me wonder sometimes were the disconnect is for quality improvements.  Even when asked sometimes, I’ll state something that is so simple as “always focus on quality” but then have follow up questions such as, “so when should we focus on quality?”

How did that not translate?  I get lost when I get a statement made back as a question.  I just stated the solution, the solution is to always focus on quality.  When you write a test and watch it fail for lack of implementation and then implement it look to see if it is elegant.  Look for the quality of logic and code usage.  If it looks odd try to refactor it.  If something is just being changed, check the quality.  If you’re white boarding, ask yourself if you should be trying out some implementation instead of just white boarding.  If you’re implementing but it doesn’t seem clear, ask yourself if maybe a white boarding session will work.  If you find your daily process is hampering clear minded efforts to develop good software solutions, ask why the process is low quality and what would make it higher quality.  If your team has low code coverage, or heaven forbid no code coverage, don’t wait, start doing something immediately.  Stop non-quality development and start high quality development.

It really is that simple.  There is no way that should not translate.  Always focus on quality.

While reading this blurb on the ALT.NET Google Groups I got an alert for Rob Hirschfeld’s latest blog entry about Agile & Cloud Computing. In his latest blog post titled “Black Hat Feedback Essential For Cloud Success” he dives right into the process improvement and retrospective conversation. Rob points out a few reasons teams skip on improvement:

  1. All that talking and listening and improving takes time and attention.
  2. Post Mortem or “lessons learned” meetings that never make any difference because they happen after the work is done.  (well, duh).
  3. No one has a methodology that makes the meetings productive.
  4. Lists with more than 3 items on them have too many items to be productive for improvement activities because of reader’s limited attention spans.

One of the quotes he pulls from Lean Agile advocates Mary Poppendieck and Eric Ries addresses this, “The secret to improving your performance is to regularly work to improve your performance.”  This goes back to what Eric, many others, and I keep saying, “always work on quality, don’t wait until the end”.  If you wait until the end, it’s already too late.

Recent Readings

I’ve been catching up on blogs lately & reading a few books, the technical type, as one might imagine. To collect my thoughts I decided to have a sit down and write up a little bit on each of the entries & books I’ve found notable. Here’s the recap.

When I read this, I almost lost my temper before I even got to reading the blog entry.  But I did and it turned out a good read.  Phil & team are trying out some new approaches for the NuGet Project to see if they can increase quality & efficiencies of the product and project.  You’ll have to give it a read to see how much he really hates Lean.  😉

Bobby is doing these visits in the spirit of Corey Haines Journeyman Tours.  I’ve got a ton of respect for anyone that can coordinate time & effort to do this.  The amount of learning, open mindedness, and other characteristics are high on my list of awesome.  Cheers to your visit to Getty Bobby, it was good reading about your experience.  I must say, one of my favorite bits is the picture you got of the technical debt kanban.  Absolutely great idea!

Anyway that is all I’ve got for now.  Will probably do another wrap up sometime later in the week.  Until then, cheers!

My Narrative on Unbiased Cloud Computing

Over the past few weeks I’ve been posed with the “your biased claim” from some people.  I decided that I would put together a write up on what my motivations are for cloud computing, how I’m involved, and what my intent is for future involvement.

First off, I need to point out that I’m a software developer (which is probably obvious).  I build applications, mostly on the .NET Platform but also with other stacks such as Ruby on Rails, PHP (rarely), and of course the respective tools around those stacks.  I’ve also spent a lot of time working on enterprise architectures with massive scale (think 150k employees).  I have dug through REST at its core, implemented SOA and other such things.  Lately I’ve had the fortune of developing against Amazon Web Services (AWS) and also Windows Azure, again primarily using the .NET Framework (ala C# and such).

My interest in cloud computing really got started while I was working at Webtrends.  The company has a geographically dispersed, somewhat virtualized, network of hundreds of computers.  The way the company was moving made multi-tenancy easier and brought costs down for the company in a big way.  Something that cloud computing does from the beginning.  This whetted my appetite for large horizontally distributed and scaled systems.  Recently I moved from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington to get even more involved in the heart of cloud technologies.

However, a major problem arose.

In addition to cloud technologies I’m also very pro-agile ideals.  I believe in the individual developer, working with others in pairs or however.  Learning better ways to build great applications and software solutions.  I try to live and breath the solid and great ideals behind the Agile Manifesto and Software Craftsmanship Manifesto.

I like to stay as unbiased as I can in regards to my technology stacks, and initially I was working out at Microsoft (As a Consultant).  I was forced into the antithesis of the Agile & Software Craftsmanship Manifestos.  It was depressing and I realized I couldn’t keep a good clear view of the various cloud technologies while hunkered down in the belly of the beast.  Two things weighed on my mind;  my intent to stay unbiased was clouded by working closely with the Azure team writing white paper materials and researching and the second was that so much of the work is done in a very anti-agile & anti-craftsman way.  It wasn’t serving me morally, ethically, or technologically.

I had to get out of that.  So I did.

I joined Russell Financial.  I am now doing Scrum Agile with a team of exceptionally talented individuals including @codereflection, @notmyself, @ang3lfir3, @terryhughes, and several others.  We use a lot of open source, unbiased software, that happens to primarily be on the .NET stack.  The ideas are shared open and with bias in regards to a whole host of things from Heroku and Salesforce, current enterprise ideas about Cloud technologies, and other things.  I now have a solid work environment that doesn’t provide me with a skewed view of the cloud technologies.

From here I can see the clouds and research, develop, and identify which cloud provides the best opportunities for each specific need that a company is working on.  Sometimes I might sound biased this way or that way, but every judgement I make toward one cloud service or another is based on specific criteria.

In other words, if I’m providing consulting to you for your efforts to utilize the cloud, I’m going to provide you honest, company specific advice on what your strategy for deployment, development, and return on investment should be.  So if you think I’m being biased, check your premise, my research, development, and general efforts around cloud technology are to find the best of breed options for whatever task, need, or want a company may come up with for cloud services.

Now, back to my regularly scheduled technical bits.

Opera Just Keeps Leading

I’ll admit Chrome has really cleaned up browsers and Chrome & Opera have easily led the revolution in making browsing FAST again.  With Javascript execution smoking the competition (Opera smoking the competition for years now) and rendering that is pretty damn perfect.  IE has of course been a thorn pushing developers to build things that aren’t standards comliant, but with IE 9 actually meeting standards then that just means Chrome & Opera can focus on moving the industry forward with new creative solutions to browsing & using the Internet.  Throw in Firefox as they move forward and we’ll see advancements that haven’t happened since the heyday of the late 90s & early 21st Century.

I’m looking forward to seeing what advancements these browser companies put forward, and even the IE users can look forward to IE implementing the changes now that Microsoft isn’t busy distracting the web world with all that IE6 destructive nonsense.  I’m glad to see IE9 join the web world & start chasing the leading browsers.  Good job all!