Why I had to ditch Google Buzz
It started off well enough. I felt very, very excited about it. Finally a social product I was excited about.
Then it started. Out of no where, I had complete strangers following me. I felt violated.
GMail and Google is my personal and private space. Having Dick Muhamaheed follow me felt like an invasion.
Nuff said.
I'll try it out later when it's sorted out.
Chrome usage surpasses Safari. Really?
http://www.crn.com/software/222200092
Net Applications bases its statistics on the browsers used by some 160 million visitors to a network of Web sites that subscribe to the company's services
Not that I don't like Chrome (because I do; it's my main browser), but I'd be curious to know what this 'network of Web sites' is. I have a feeling that it might be a lot of geek sites (Mashable, Digg, Reddit, Endgadget), not really reflecting the general population.
That’s IT. Flex, buhbye. GWT, hello.
I've gone silent on all my social networks in the couple weeks or so because I've been looking for alternatives to Flex. My department are stuck in quicksand right now on the UI front. Each time we make a move, we sink deeper.
The reasons
1. KISS
Yup. Keep it simple people. I know how to do it in the pure Java world, but I didn't have the know how to hold back the code architects on the Flex side of the team. Result: You spend more time coding the framework than writting actual code.
Another thing: On the UI, keep it optimized. Don't create the ginormous value objects when all you need are 2 values. Hold multiple value objects.
Obviously, this is a problem with any technology, but unfortunately, we can't afford to start over (see #3)
2. Flex just doesn't offer anyting compeling for buisness applications
There. I said it. I haven't seen anything that's made me say WOW up to now. We're building buisness applications that need to be fast and where we need to make a lot of small changes, with a lot of remote calls. GWT remoting kicks Flexes butt up to now. We're seeing orders of magnitude better user experience and speed with comparable UI setups.
3. The people
Here in Montreal, we just can't find anyone. We tried to replace our main developper for 2 months and found nothing. Compare that to GWT where you have access to a huge pool of Java developpers.
That being said, we will be keeping Flex in the picture, but for much, much smaller components (charts for example). We'll also be doing smaller Air applications.
The alternative
I spent last week doing a proof of concept of our application using GWT. In no time at all, I had something to show. The difficulties I encoutered were all related to doing UI (which I've never done): layouts, panels, resizing, ...
We've opted to use the GXT widgets and have some UI experts create a skin for it (yes, we all still hate doing design :))
Short story long, we now have control over our development process. We no longer need to pleed with project managers to avoid UI work. In no time at all, we'll have reached status quo with the Flex development which was under way, and after that, the whole dev team will be able to contribute to the project ... and we can back to nice clean iteration.
Self sufficient teams
Once again, Heir Atwood reminds us of the things we shouldn't forget. I've had a natural progression towards the type of management Jeff mentions (the good type that is). As I grow older and hopefully wiser, I learn (and keep on learning) to build teams with people who can be relied on; where I can sit on the sidelines while the engine hums.
I'm fortunate right now to be "leading" a team like that. (quoted because when you have pros, everyone knows what to do, when and how, and they do it well. They don't need to lead all that much).
Speaking for each point he mentions:
Do you pride yourself on being "on top of" the projects or your direct reports? Do you have a solid grasp of the details of every project?
Unfortunately, I still have a way to go here. I don't pride myself on being on top, nor do I even try anymore, but it does bother me inside when I don't know every detail ... I'll get over myself one day :)
Do you believe that you could perform most of the tasks of your direct reports, and potentially do a better job?
Absolutely not! I use the strengths and interests of everyone on the team.
Do you pride yourself on frequent communication with your employees? Does that communication include asking them for detailed status reports and updates?
I wouldn't say I pride myself, but I do think frequent communication is important. I generally don't ask for reports ... unless I've pinpointed a problem case. Status reports are more about helping the problem team member, than keeping me up to date.
Do you believe that being a manager means that you have more knowledge and skills than your employees, and thus are better equipped to make decisions?
No. It just means that I've chosen a career path that includes some for of leadership as well as organizational and people skills. Sometimes I'm better equiped to make decisions, but not because of any supposed superior technical knowledge, but because of the extra insight I might be given by stakeholders.
Do you believe that you care about things (quality, deadlines, etc.) more than your employees?
No. No. No. Nuff said.
Obviously, I don't claim perfection here. I'm still young have a lot to learn. I try my best, and read, read, read and absorb from great writers. A good start for anyone wanting reading material in the area would be this.
Call me master
There you go. I'm now a certified Scrum Master. Admittedly, it was ridiculously easy to get "certified" ... so much so that it should probably not be called a certification (just go to the course for 2 days, and give them your email and voila!).
The course was ok, but far from great. A couple obvious problems:
- 2 days is not enough. Not by a longshot. We were rushing through everything with not much time to delve into deeper questions and issues
- Obviously, in a course like this, a lot of leaders will be present. And that's not meant in a good way. Because of the time constraints, we were continuously rushing to begin exercises without proper information on what we needed to do or how. Therefore, a lot of people inside the same teams wanted to bulldoze and force their ways on others. Yes, I get it: "Agile == team work". But 2 days wasn't enough to develop any type of team work inside the teams especially since a lot of members were annoyed with one another.
I had been using agile concepts for a few years, but never did the real thing because I was missing a few key concepts. Going to the course forced me to look into those things, and talk to people about real world experience with Scrum.
Starting on Monday, I'll be applying a few of the things I learned, but without the whole wizz-bang.
- Obviously, iterations will be part of it. I'd been doing those for a while, but this time they'll be much better structured with a review and demo.
- Continuous integration: I just got a Hudson server up and running and all our tests will need to be runnable inside an automated environment. Again, my teams and I have been doing unit tests for a while, but I've never automated them. (btw: This won't be TDD. The jury is still out for me as far as full blown TDD goes - I'll post my opinions on that later)
- Short user stories: This is key and one of the things that made the most sense to me.
- Daily scrums: Again, I had tried this but it didn't work all that well. Turns out it was my fault for lacking focus and goal during those meetings. With what I learned, they will be a productive and informative 15 minutes.
Following that, with each new iteration I'll try to implement an extra practice or 2.
My biggest problem right now is that my team's physical setup is very 80's style with no room for white boards, small cubicles and not much opportunity for open communication. I've fought the fight with no results at all (showed my managers this and this, but they don't agree. Small cubes are fine apparently ... anyway, that's a fight for another day). And don't think I'm being critical and non constructive. I've offered cheep and pragmatic ways to make my team better ... but it seems like the economic crunch ... well, you know.
Interesting math and the impact of a 7% growth rate
I always mean to school myself to be better with math, and good presentations like this make me want to do that.
I am constantly sidetracked on my learning paths by different things (leadership, patterns, another language, ....).
I'll at the very least try to track down these good presentations and link to them. That 7% growth rate was something else. I knew about the grains of rice story, but the rest of the presentation brought it all together really well.
Delicious 2.0 impressions
I've been a slow adopter of Delicious. But V2, combined with the new habit of publishing thoughts through Wordpress - commonly called blogging - has pushed me to use it much more:
- Useful Javascript snippet which delicious offers to insert a link roll on Wordpress.
- Delicious can post daily summaries through xml-rpc *
- The Firefox add-on is awesome. With the death of Google Sync (which really wasn't great anyway), I've found a great alternative to centralizing my bookmarks.
* I can't get this to work right now, but I'm obviously doing something wrong because it's working for others. [08/15/08 02:30:01 PM -0700] Sorry, you are not allowed to publish posts on this blog." When I figure it out, I'll let you know.
Note: No, I don't work for Yahoo. I just really like the new version.