Left the Circus Circus and headed to the geek circus at Mandalay Bay.  Got in, got some breakfast, met a few more people and headed to the keynote.

Upon arriving the crew I was hanging with at the event; Erik Mork, Beth Murray, and Brian Henderson and I were entertained with several other thousand geeks by the wicked yo-yoing.

The first video demo of something was of Bing Maps and various aspects of Microsoft Research integrated together.  Namely the pictures, put in place, on real 3d element maps of various environments.

Silverlight

Scott Guthrie, as one would guess, kicked off the keynote.  His first point was that user experience has become a priority at Microsoft.  This can be seen by any observant soul with the release and push of Expression, Silverlight, and the other tools.  This is even more apparent when one takes note of Microsoft bringing in people that can actually do good design and putting them at the forefront.

The next thing Scott brought up was a few key points about Silverlight.  Currently Silverlight is a little over 2 years old and has achieved a pretty solid 60% penetration.  Silverlight has all sorts of capabilities that have been developed and are now provided as open source including;  ad injection, smoothing, playback editing, and more.  Another thing he showed, which really struck me as awesome being in the analytics space, was the Olympics and a quick glimpse of the ad statistics, viewer experience, video playback performance, audience trends, and overall viewer participation.  All of it rendered in Silverlight in beautiful detail.

The key piece of Scott’s various points were all punctuated with the fact that all of this code is available as open source.  Not only is Microsoft really delving into this design element of things, they’re getting involved in the right ways.

One of the last points I’ll bring up about Silverlight 4 is the ability to have HD video on a monitor, and an entirely different activity being done on the other monitor, effectively making Silverlight the only RIA framework that supports multi-monitor support.  Overall, Silverlight is continuing to impress ? providing superior capabilities tit-for-tat with the competition.

Windows 7 Phone

The Windows 7 Phone has 3 primary buttons (yes, more than the iPhone, don’t let your mind explode!!).  Start, Search, and Back control all of the needed functionality of the phone.  At the same time, of course, there is the multi-touch, touch, and other interactive abilities of the interface.  The intent, once start is pressed is to have all the information that a phone owner wants displayed immediately.  Avoiding the scrolling through pages of apps or rolling a ball to get through multitudes of other non-interactive phone interfaces.  The Windows 7 Phone simply has the data right in front of you, basically a phone dashboard.  From there it is easy to dive into the interactive areas of the phone.

Each area of the interface of the phone is broken into hubs.  These hubs include applications, data, and other things based on a relative basis.  This basis being determined by the user.  These applications interact on many other levels, and form a kind of relationship between each other adding more and more meta-data to the phone user, their interactions between the applications, and of course the social element of their interactions on the phone.  This makes this phone a practical must have for a marketer involved in social media.  The level of wired together interaction is massive, and of course, if you’ve seen Office Outlook 2010 you know that the power that is pulled into the phone by being tied to Outlook is massive.

Joe Belfiore also showed several UI & specifically UX elements of the phone interface that allows paging to be instinctual by simple clipped items, flipping page to page, and other excellent user experience advances for phone devices.  Belfiore’s also showed how his people hub had a massive list of people, with pictures, all from various different social networks and other associated relations.  The rendering, speed, and viewing of these people’s, their pictures, their social network information, and other characteristics was smooth and in some situations unbelievably rendered.  This demo showed some of the great power of the beta phone, which isn’t even as powerful as the planned end device.

Joe finished up by jumping into the music, videos, and other media with the Zune Component of the Windows 7 Mobile Phone.  This was all good stuff, but I’ll get to what really sold me on the media element in a moment.

When Joe was done, Scott Guthrie stepped back up to walk through building a Windows 7 Mobile Phone.  This is were I have to give serious props.  He built this application, in Visual Studio 2010, in front of 2000+ people.  That was cool, but what really was amazing that he build the application in about 2 minutes.  The IDE, side by side design that is standard in Visual Studio is light years ahead of x-Code or any of the iPhone IDEs.  The Windows 7 Mobile System, if it can get market penetration, poses a technologically superior development and phone platform over anything on the market right now.  The biggest problem with the phone, is it just isn’t available yet.  I personally can’t wait for a chance to build some apps for the new Windows Phone.

Netflix, I May Start Up an Account Again!

When I get my Windows 7 Phone device, I am absolutely getting a Netflix account again.  The Vertigo crew, as I wrote on Twitter "#MIX10 Props @seesharp on @netflix demo", displayed an application on the phone for Netflix that actually ran HD Video of Rescue Me (with Dennis Leary).  The video played back smooth as it would on a dedicated computer, I was instantly sold.  So this didn’t actually sell me on the phone, because I’m already sold, but it did sell me whole heartedly on the media capabilities of the pending phone.

Anyway, I try not to do this but I may double post today.  Lunch is over and I’m off to another session very near and dear to the heart of my occupation, Analytics Tracking.  Stay tuned and I should have that post up by the end of the day.

Portland Departure – Farewell Stumptown

Off I go on a plane from Portland, Oregon to Las Vegas, Nevada for the MIX 2010 Conference.  Before I even boarded the plane I met Paul Gomes a Senior Software Engineer and Andrew Saylor the Director of Business Development.  Both of these SoftSource Employees were en route to MIX themselves.  Being stoked to already be bumping into some top tier people, I bid them adieu and headed for my seat on the plane.

I boarded, and had before the boarding opted for an upgrade.  I have to advise that if you get a chance on Alaska to upgrade at the last minute, take it.  It is usually only about $50 bucks or so and the additional space makes working on the ole’ laptop actually possible (even on my monstrous 17" laptop).  So take it from me, click that upgrade button and fork over that $50 bucks for anything over an hour flight, the comfort and ability to work is usually worth it!

Las Vegas Arrival – Welcome to Sin City

Got into Las Vegas and swung out of the airport.  I then, with my comrade Beth attempted to get Internet Access for the next 3 hours.  Las Vegas, is not the most friendly Internet Access town.  I will just say it, I am not sure why any Internet related company (ala Microsoft) would hold a conference here.  There are more than a dozen other cities that would be better.

But I digress, I did manage to get Internet Access after checking into the Circus Circus.  Don’t ask why I ended up staying here, if you run into me in person, ask then because there is a whole story to it.

At this point I started checking out each session further on the MIX10 Site.  There are a number I deemed necessary to check out.  However, you’ll have to read my pending entries to see which session I jumped into.

With this juncture in time reached, I got a ton of work to wrap up, some code to write and some sleep to get.  Until tomorrow, adieu.

Keeping a software developer/engineer motivated is a difficult task for managers, directors, all the way up to the VP.  One of the common issues that comes up, that leaves an engineer unhappy with their lot in a company is conflicting tasks.  Engineers often, especially senior engineers, can handle multiple tasks at a particular time.  But nothing ruffles the feather of an engineer, a logical thinker, like an illogical task.

I recently discussed one of these conflicting tasks with someone at a user group meeting.  Names are changed to protect the innocent.

So Toklinian, a solid and well rounded engineer, comes in to a new job.  The primary motives behind his position is to build new software prototypes with the latest software and also to provide HTTP tracking & security on a machine. 

The new software includes all sorts beta goodies & other packages and suites.  Some of the things, rather unstable, but for the most part all bits that clients are asking for.

On the other hand, the HTTP tracking & security requires tons of specific tools.  Each of these takes a few minutes to setup on a machine, and require a key and other various time consuming configuration settings.  In addition to that, the day to day scanning, filtering, and other network related security and tracking all require tons of lists of IPs and domains.  These lists are created in the various tools and packages, again in a very time consuming manner, for use during the course of a day.

The boss determines that Toklinian can do all of these things on one machine, without Virtual Machines.  Toklinian is up to the challange, but makes it known that when the machine needs reloaded, or if the beta software crashes the machine that there could be hours, if not days of downtime that Tolinian would not be able to work on most of his primary tasks as defined by the job.

Conflict Hell

I was listening away to some ear blistering metal, as I often do, and an ad really jumped out at me.

If you can?t see what is written in the HTC ad to the right, click on the image.  What is displayed is a cross-correlation of several points of analytics data.  Before I jump right in and start explaining each point, think about what is going on with this ad.  This is by no means just some simple ad, there are a number of things going on here.

First data point.  Sprint & HTC, or whoever it is that put this ad together, has retrieved my listening favorites from Pandora.  Just looking at the bands listed shows that to be self evident.  This also seems to be the most obvious piece of data they could have collected about me, since I am logged into Pandora.  This is probably achieved by some web services or other API that Pandora provides advertisers.

The second data point is not immediately noticeable.  I am still at a loss to explain where they retrieved this data point.  What is it?  Concert dates for bands.  Each of the bands listed in the HTC app that is displayed is a coming show.  Matter of fact, it almost seemed like they had shown me my own HTC, except I don't own one.  🙂

Now my location data, I am suspecting probably came from Pandora too, but it is the third point regardless.  All together the ad utilizes geo-positional location, my Pandora music preferences, and pulls local concerts from another source (maybe a Pandora listing too?).  This is a perfect use of preferences to display things that are truly relevant to me.

In addition, they may have just helped to sell me on a new phone for my personal line.  I am up for a replacement and anything that runs Google Droid seems cool, but I?ll admit, with the sneak peaks at Windows 7 Mobile that I've seen and the proposed ability to use Silverlight ? I WILL BE switching from the iPhone when that is released.

Again, conversations give me a zillion things to write about.  The recent conversation that has cropped up again is my various viewpoints of the Agile Manifesto.  Not all the processes that came after the manifesto was written, but just the core manifesto itself.  Just for context, here is the manifesto in all the glory.

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

Several of the key signatories at the time went on to write some of the core books that really gave Agile Software Development traction.  If you check out the Agile Manifesto Site and do a search for any of those people, you will find a treasure trove of software development information.

My 2 Cents

First off, I agree with a few people out there.  Agile is not Scrum for instance.  Do NOT get these things confused when checking out Agile, or pushing forward with Scrum.  As David Starr points out in his blog entry,

"About 35 minutes into this discussion, I realized I hadn't heard a question or comment that wasn't related to Scrum. I asked the room, How many people are on an agile team that is NOT using Scrum?

5 hands. Seriously, out of about 150 people of so. 5 hands."

So know, as this is one of my biggest pet peves these days, that Scrum is not Agile.  Another quote David writes,

"I assure you, dear reader, 2 week time boxes does not an agile team make."

This is the exact problem.  Take a look at the actual manifesto above.  First ideal, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".  There are a couple of meanings in this ideal, just as there are in the other written ideals.  But this one has a lot of contention with a set practice such as Scrum.  There are other formulas, namely XP (eXtreme) and Kanban are two that come to mind often.  But none of these are Agile, but instead a process based on the ideals of Agile.

Some of you may be thinking, "that's the same thing".  Well, no, it is not.  This type of differentiation is vitally important.  Agile is a set of ideals.  Processes are nice, but they can change, they may work for some and not others.  The Agile Manifesto covers the ideals behind what is intended, that intention being to learn and find new ways to build better software.

Ideals, not processes.  Definition versus implementation.  Class versus object.  The ideals are of utmost importance, the processes are secondary, the first ideal is what really lays this out for me "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".  Yes, we need tools but we need the individuals and their interactions more.

For those coming into a development team, I hope you take this to mind.  It is of utmost importance that this differentiation is known and fought for.  The second the process becomes more important than the individuals and interactions, the team will effectively lose the advantages of Agile Ideals.

This is just one of my first thoughts on the topic of Agile.  I will be writing more in the near future about each of the ideals.  I will make a point to outline more of my thoughts, my opinions, and experience with the ideals of Agile and the various processes that are out there.  Maybe, I may stumble upon something new with the help of my readers?  It would be a grand overture to the ideals I hold.