Todd the Techgnostic

Software Developer Management

2010-10-06T12:34:00.005-05:00

It should probably be remarkably similar to any other kind of people management, but many say otherwise. An interesting conversation on a programmers board.

I've been posting some answers on this new board as it seems to engage me in ways that Stackoverflow didn't. I think it's because it's about programmers per se and not about hard-core development items.

Software Development Insanity

2009-09-04T11:00:00.001-05:00

Speaking of software development, let me detour into a grumpy old developer diatribe.

First, go read this.

Done? OK. For me, the choice quote:

I may be getting old, but I don’t think I am out of touch. My sanity of being a software development professional seems to be tested daily by our industries predilection for Silver Bullets. The latest it seems is Scrumban. My wife can’t stop laughing when I say it to her.

Building software is an expensive business and there are always people trying to sell the latest and greatest improvements. The purported improvement is sometimes a product (a new IDE or language) and sometimes a process (XP, Agile, etc.). There is always a certain segment of the developer community that scrambles after anything that is new and shiny and with the advent of the web the frenzy of fandom can create more buzz than is deserved.

In an attempt to be "with it" the new improvement is tossed around as proof of how up-to-date one is. Previous approaches are dismissed and people who use them are dinosaurs.

Regardless, as the blog author points out (like I sort of did in my last post) software development at its root is fairly basic. In this case "Requirements, Design, Code and Test."

A book that influenced me strongly was The Pragmatic Programmer and its approach of "tracer bullet" development. The idea of roughing out a whole system with stubs where real code would eventually go was appealing. You could quickly get a rough idea of how the whole thing would hang together and could immediately see what pieces would be more effort than others. Not surprisingly the authors of that book became influential in the whole Agile movement.

The marketing and buzz that sprang up around Agile now means that the term is tossed around without much care as to what it means in practice, as long as you sign up for the seminar or pay to be certified as an Agile coach. All that management hopes for is that they can start to get more software faster than they did before. Unfortunately for them all of this glosses over many other items of importance like the huge differences between the abilities of individual developers.

I think that there is room for discussion on craft vs. engineering in software development. People who write code for a living, day in and day out, are close to the workings of the technology and have an intuitive grasp of what they are doing. Attempting to impose engineering rigor on the process gives the illusion of control with boxes and lines and probably some kind of metrics. At the end of the day the develop has to know what is supposed to be built and have a clear idea how they are going to do it. The rubber hits the road when the developer hits the keyboard.

I am not sure if there will be some kind of a backlash an a "back to basics" push anytime soon but I for one start to tire of the relentless onslaught of new approaches that do not offer significant benefit over known and proven approaches. There is an awful lot of code out there that would be considered obsolete by the current cutting-edge developers that nevertheless is important and valuable to businesses.

Being techgnostic means keeping all of this in mind before embarking down the path of new software development. What you already have might basically do what you need (Pareto principle) or what you need might be a one-off fix that does not warrant a full blown process. Step back, take a deep breath and ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish and produce just enough to make it work, getting something out sooner rather than later.

Software Development Overview

2009-08-28T11:00:00.000-05:00

All software, outside of the most trivial examples, handles data (some form of digital representation). With that data, software basically does four things:

Capture
Process
Store
Output

In each case what the data is and how it is handled differs, but really that is the crux of software development. Leave out the hardware on which the software runs. These four items are it. That said, each one of them can be drilled down into very deeply, with each layer yielding more approaches, ideas, philosophies, etc.

Methodologies on how to create each of these pieces and make them work together compose volumes. Whole companies exist to serve small parts of each of the approaches.

That said, it is still just as simple as these four things.

Data has be be captured from the environment outside of the computer program, brought in from a keyboard being typed on by a human, from a file on a disk being read, from a camera storing an image or one of many other approaches. There are a multitude of ways for capture to occur. There are fierce debates about the best way to do so.

Processing and storage can be done in either order, but I am putting processing before storage because normally something happens to the data before it is stored for future use. All the clever algorithms for sorting or determining values that take up so much time on the discussion boards fall into this bin. Again, debates are fierce about approaches to processing.

Storage can be done in various ways, being slightly less contentious. Physically the data winds up in the memory of the computer, either volatile (in RAM) or non-volatile (a storage medium like a disc or flash memory). The way the data is stored, the format of it, can yield some debate but not nearly as much as where it should go and the method for retrieving it.

Output is communicating the processed and/or stored data to another system, be it a human or another computer. For humans this can be something like a monitor, speakers or a printer. Something for one of our senses to experience. For another computer (or the same computer, running a different program) it can be bits transmitted over a network or stored onto a disc (somewhat overlapping with the storage aspect).

As I said earlier, each of these items can be expanded on to very great extents but it is instructive to be able to come back to them whenever you start to get lost in the chaos of information that surrounds all human enterprise and by extension the computer software that supports it. Most often each of the pieces can be separated from each other and you can make decisions based on what works best for you for each one instead of having to put all of your eggs into one basket for all four items.

Philosophy surrounding the development of software to do these four things run the gamut from just sitting down and starting to write code to huge processes that involve many people who think for a very long time about what they want to accomplish and how they want to do it and how they will measure their efforts, etc. There are fervent proponents of each approach who tout the benefits of their favorite and will stick by it dogmatically without ever thinking that there might be another way to do things.

The techgnostic approach is to look at the problem you are trying to solve and then line it up with the four items that software development requires. Very often you can crank something out quickly that gets the immediate need addressed but will come back to haunt you later. You can also spend a huge amount of time trying to get everything perfect the first time. Try to shoot for something between the two, subject to constraints like safety.

If you are building software to control a medical device or drop a bomb you need to think long and hard about it and the solution will tend towards the more restrictive process. If it is a program to dump some data periodically for someone so they can run a trending analysis it requires very little oversight.

If you look around yourself, at the software that you use (like the browser you are reading this on) you can quickly discern where the four pieces are that make it work. Did the entity that produced the software make all the pieces depend tightly on each other, or are they interchangeable? There are probably other options for what you are trying to do that approach the problem domain from a different perspective. Do not get locked into only one way.

I will return to this subject over time because a lot of philosophy about how to get things done is buried in it. Cowboy programming versus gold plating. Architecture versus expedience. The topics are legion. To complicate things further there are significant issues associated with the process that transcend these four items to do with the management of people and the economics of the entire process.

Digital music players

2009-08-21T11:00:00.001-05:00

I overheard a conversation the other day that baffled me. The bafflement comes from my own egocentric reality where I assume everybody has a certain level of knowledge. As I no doubt have missed the point on this sort of thing before I thought I should write a little bit on it.

The confusion was two people talking about portable music players. One person was showing off their new player, a Microsoft Zune. The other person said "Ugh. You should have bought an iPod instead. They're much cooler", to which the reply was "I wanted something that works with Windows - I don't have a Mac."

Apparently the Apple marketing machine has not achieved full penetration.

This was followed on by "I think that you CAN use it with Windows, but you have to use iTunes for it to work", which elicited "I don't want to have to buy all my music through their store, and never be able to play the music anywhere else."

Again, maybe a couple of short commercials from Apple to update the masses would help.

I won't go into intense detail, but basically any digital music player will play MP3 files, the general current standard for digital audio. This includes the iPod. Apple prefers the AAC format which up until recently was encumbered with digital rights management (DRM) that did in fact lock the song to your account. Now, however, most of the music in the iTunes store is DRM-free. That said, you can get music from elsewhere into your iPod. The most important one which seemed to escape the people having the conversation is that you can rip the audio from your regular CD and put it onto your iPod.

Also, you can purchase or acquire MP3 files from any other source and put them into your iTunes library.

Disclosure: I myself have an iPod, which was about the fourth digital music player that I bought. I liked the other players just as much when they were playing music (I am not an audiophile and found the quality to be more or less equal) but where the iPod was clearly superior was the user interface and the client software. I use my iPod for also listening to podcasts (essentially recorded radio shows) and being able to easily organize all my audio content was worth it for me to move to an iPod. Your mileage may vary.

So be sure to be clear on what it is you want from a digital audio player, given your preferred operating system and method of acquiring music. You can then make a clear decision based on your own needs instead of being herded into one camp or another. Marketing seeks to push you into a decision based on irrational feelings. See past them and decide based on your actual needs.

Pareto Principle in Technology

2009-08-14T11:00:00.000-05:00

I first heard of the Pareto Principle when I was at university studying economics. It was used in reference to wealth distribution (which was what Pareto was studying) where it had been observed that 20% of the people controlled 80% of the wealth. Over time more studies showed the same sort of distribution.

With respect to technology it is a handy rule of thumb that while not exact gives you something to go from when thinking about issues. A good recent example are analytical reports such as from AdMob of the applications on the Apple online software store (where Apple boasts of the tens of thousands of applications) wherein it was found that a small number of the applications account for most of the traffic and most of the profit. Various limitations (such as a set top 10 list) feed into some of this behavior but largely it boils down to most of the applications having very little value, leading to few people recommending or using them.

In software development the Pareto Principle also rears its head. In iterative approaches like Agile you work on a feature list from a priority list, with the highest value items first, in small batches. Rather than trying to deliver all 100 pieces of functionality that you would like to see you deliver them in batches of five or so and because the first ones being delivered have the highest value you might get 20% of them done (20 features) and have most of the benefits that you want, rather than taking a lot more time and maybe missing the mark with a lot of the work. Delivering sooner rather than later, even if it is a small amount of functionality, also plays into this approach.

Studies by large companies like Microsoft find results like fixing the top 20% of the bugs (by frequency of complaint) results in 80% percent of the errors and crashes going away.

Many examples can be found all around us of the Pareto Principle at work. As far as technology goes it is a good idea to keep it in the front of your mind when you are deciding how you should approach your projects. What is the smallest amount of features / product that you can deliver that provide the biggest bang? Grab this low hanging fruit and get something out rather than trying to design the ultimate application that does everything. You may find that after a few iterations that what you have is good enough and you can then move onto another project and find more success rather than continuing to try and reach a shifting and unattainable goal.

Disappearing Data

2009-08-07T11:00:00.000-05:00

A software development blog that I read had an entry on alternative data storage. It referred to a tongue in cheek project called PaperBack. The idea is that your data is printed out to paper so that it will not degrade like magnetic or optical storage. There are serious people thinking on this subject. All in all I cannot tell if PaperBack is a joke or serious. Regardless, it highlights something that I often think about.

I look at all the data that I and my family have acquired over time and wonder about it. Documents, audio files, image files, videos and others. I have managed over time to collapse them down to a single large collection, which I have on multiple different hard drives. The collection represents all the floppy and zip disks I'd hauled around for 20+ years plus CD and DVD archives. Luckily external hard drives have plunged in price.

I should have started all this sooner than I did and count myself lucky that catastrophe did not strike. I have personally encountered tape that could not be used for anything or there was no software to read it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of data inaccessible. Myself, I have CD's from the late 80's that are no longer readable. I also have a graveyard of dead hard drives.

It makes me think about how fleeting all this is. The fact that hard drives even work is something of a miracle with all the things that have to work JUST so between the hardware and software, at many levels. Every couple of years I have a fit of getting things together and saved. After I spend all the time doing it and making sure I've got it all I worry about the drives that I am backed up to failing. Or that a tornado will come in and annihilate it all regardless, making my efforts futile.

Then I get very philosophical and wonder what is so important with what I have. One time when I thought I had lost about six months worth of photos I felt physically ill and dreaded telling my wife. Luckily I found the files on another backup and all was saved. Regardless, if a tornado came along and annihilated the house and both backups we would be glad just to be alive.

I guess sometimes you have to balance off covering yourself against absolutely everything and what really matters.

Regardless, if you have not already done it, go out and buy an external hard drive and back up all your data. It is only a matter of time before your main hard drive fails. It is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy.

Google Voice

2009-07-31T11:00:00.003-05:00

I lucked out and snagged one of the invitations for Google Voice. Everything you've read about it being cool is true. It is simple to enter however many phone numbers you want it to ring through to and the voice mail features are awesome. They are continuing to expand it and will be adding more features and integration going forward. For myself it is also ideal because it allows me to make long distance calls to Canada for a small fraction of what I normally pay, and I can have it ring through to whatever phone I am currently at. I'm normally not overly gushy about things but this one warrants it.

The service runs in the cloud and you access it with a web browser, wherever you are. There is some integration with GMail right now but it is limited. There is also a client side application for smartphones available that makes your use of the service transparent. This means that you can get a phone number that never changes (the Google Voice one) and hook it into whatever phone you want on the other end so you are no longer bound to a carrier to keep your number.

Apple's decision to block the application that allows tighter integration with the service is short-sighted and is causing bad press for them. Once Google closes the gap on a few more things like sending and receiving faxes it is going to be a de facto requirement for any small enterprise.

If you haven't yet got an account to to http://www.google.com/voice and request one. You will not be sorry.

The only caveat on this is going to be "how will they make money?" Right now it is free (except for international long distance, which is still very reasonable) but I predict it will move in the same direction as the Google Apps suite, with a limited free edition and a full feature paid version. Stay tuned as they continue to evolve it and competitors try to come up with something better (are you on it yet Microhoo?)

Software Code Re-use

2009-07-24T11:00:00.001-05:00

One of the holy grails for software development is to build something that will be used again by somebody else, saving the development time it would take to write it over again. Instead of re-inventing the wheel you get the efficiency of just grabbing a wheel off the shelf and using it. Inside of a small project with a small number of developers (perhaps even just one) this is usually easy to achieve. Once the project grows or there is a different project with similar needs it gets more complicated.

Software is still much of a craft than it is an engineering effort. Developers identify very strongly with their work and often believe that even though there is an existing block of code that basically does what they need that they can do it better. A combination of "not invented here" and a need for a slight change often results in yet another implementation of code to do something with text values, for example.

Sometimes this occurs directly in the face of existing code, out of developer hubris, but often it comes from ignorance of the platform that is being worked on. Chances are very good that a modern framework like Java, PHP or .NET already has defined in their frameworks code that does most of the things that you need. In a worst case you can often use something that is "almost there" and just add the couple of things you need without having to rewrite it all.

Regardless, software re-use is an ongoing are of interest for many organizations, both as producers and consumers.

So far, the best use of "re-use" of code has been with services rather than libraries (above the very basic libraries built into languages). The re-use has been best with things like web servers, database servers, etc. and not necessarily specific blocks of code that make up parts of the services. This is because a service creates a clear boundary. It defines for you up front what it will accept and what it will return or otherwise cause to happen. It is of no importance to the user how the work is accomplished, it is accomplished.

The UNIX ideal of "small and sharp" tools also cleaves to this ideal, whereby small command line utilities that do only one thing but do it very well can be chained together to create useful applications.

In a wider sense this is called a "stack", where different services and glued together to provide an overall environment / platform. For example, the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) is credited with a large amount of the innovation that occured on the internet because all four components were FOSS and were in use by large groups of developers.

Additionally, if you lived in any one of the components you did not have to worry about any of the others.

A web developer in PHP does not need to know how to program the C code that makes Linux work, nor the low level routines of Apache of MySQL. They can concentrate on building web applications using PHP and just depend upon the other items to work together. The same kind of re-use of code through services is found in many other cases also.

The techgnostic approach to re-use is to stop before you write a large pile of code and determine if what you need already exists. Writing and maintaining code is very expensive. If you can leverage something that already exists and has been used by other and has been tested to be good you can deliver a lot more value much more quickly than rolling your own.

(Not) Getting Things Done

2009-07-17T11:00:00.001-05:00

One of the core values of Getting Things Done (GTD) is to capture everything. You use "buckets" such as a pad of paper, a voice recorder, etc. to capture any and all things you need to get done. Ideally you should get by with as FEW buckets as you can, and you have to empty them periodically, ideally daily. Then all the items should be processed, put into appropriate slots for further action.

Some people start into GTD with guns blazing and eventually bail out, abandoning the system entirely as too much trouble and too rigid. Some others (like myself) continue to capture everything, but don't make the time to do the processing and wind up with information scattered hither and yon.

Myself, I have a digital voice recorder, a Palm PDA, my GMail account using a GTD Firefox extension, the GMail task list widget, a collection of Google documents and a couple of scattered OneNote files. I also recently loaded up EverNote to give it a swirl but have thus far put very little into it. Needless to say it is overwhelming when I look at all of them and try to wrap my head around it.

Like an addict of some kind, though, I continue to go through the motions even though I have no idea why I'm doing them. I guess I think I'll suddenly get a bunch of time to plough through and get my collective stuff in order.

I don't normally consider myself an overly hopeful individual but I must be. The MOST important items continue to bubble to the top but what I really need to do is clear the decks and do another reset. Hand-in-hand with that is a need to ruthlessly purge a lot of things that have been hanging around my lists for years now that I am just going to have to accept are not going to happen in my lifetime.

The geeky aspect of all this is that I'm saving up and waiting to get myself an iPod Touch to try and replace a bunch of these items. There are some people who follow GTD who have eschewed the technological approach and go with Hipster PDAs (collections of 3x5 cards with a binder clip).

I wonder what the techgnostic approach to all this should be? Generally it would mean an application of just enough technology to be effective without gold-plating for the purposes of geeky fulfillment or to fit into whatever current rhetoric my technological church of choice dictates. Maybe my technology needs are simpler than I think they are, and my fevered thoughts of creating or finding an XML format to allow for a vendor and platform neutral means to store all my GTD information are insanity?

Hmmm. Now that I start looking around apparently EverNote supports XML import / export. Here's someone else who's obviously put a lot of thought into this also. Plus there are many software packages for this.

The techgnostic thing to do, I think, would be to pick something that is just enough to help me integrate what I have and make it less painful to keep up. Another project to add my my list.

Doh!

Smart Phones

2009-07-10T11:00:00.000-05:00

Ah - a couple weeks of downtime always refreshes.

Lots happened in the last couple of weeks(ish). One was the new iPhone came out. A friend of mine is agonizing over getting one, versus a Blackberry or something else. He believes that government and corporations are all sewn up for Blackberry.

For government - agreed (for now).

Corporate - it's shifting, and shifting rapidly.

With the iPhone OS 3.0 release there is now tighter integration with Exchange servers (really the thing that made corporate folks ga-ga for Blackberry in the first place) plus security items like the ability to remotely wipe a handset.

In many companies that I directly know of the upgrade cycle (starting at the top) is resulting in iPhones instead of Blackberries (execs first, of course). Governments will take longer to make such a change, if they do, and again it will start at the top, with the peons getting the goodies last (naturally).

Me, personally, I do not talk on the phone very much, and if I do it is from a land line. I use a pre-pay phone for the occasional voice call and use a PDA for other functions. When my current PDA (a Palm) dies I'll get an iPod touch (seeing as Palm got out of the PDA business).

If you're going to pay the monthly bill anyways go with the iPhone. Blackberry will probably be what you're provided with by your company.

That said, the market keeps shifting, with the Palm Pre now released and decent UI having been grafted onto Android by HTC.

As always, make a decision based on your own needs and not what the market blares at you.

Free software equivalents

2009-06-12T11:00:00.000-05:00

One of the blogs that I follow, The Simple Dollar, recently had a post about software best-sellers and their "free" equivalents. I read through the list and found some programs that I use on a regular basis.

In some cases the word "free" can mean one of two things, or both. There is "free" as in speech and "free" as in beer.

The first free would be more descriptive if you used the French word Liberté (as in Liberté, égalité, fraternité - Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood) or liberty, meaning the freedom to do as you will with the software. This is generally viewed to mean see how it works and adapt it to your own purposes. Another term for this is "open source", meaning that the code that is used to build the software is "open" and there for all to see.

The second free is the more common sense of the word, as in "without charge". You can use the software and not have to pay anyone for the right to do so. This is the part that most people are interested in. Unless you are a computer programmer the ability to see the code that built the program is not important to you.

Interestingly you can have software that is free as in no charge, but you cannot see the code (i.e., proprietary free programs) such as Internet Explorer (although whether that is truly free in that it only runs on MS Windows is another debate). You can also have code that a company maintains intellectual property rights over and charges for, but you can also see the source code, should you be so inclined (not as common). The free software that most often gets the headlines is free in both senses, often referred to as FOSS or F/OSS software (Free Open Source Software).

As usual there are two sides to every story. There are some people who say, essentially, that free software is only free if your time is not worth anything. If you have free software that you have to build and support by yourself maybe paying a few dollars for a pieced of software is not all that bad an idea. That said a lot of popular FOSS software like Firefox is available already built and is very easy to use.

Like most things to do with technology and software in particular there is not a clear cut black and white answer to any question to do with free software.

Of the software packages listed I have used the following:

OpenOffice - Early versions of this very extremely slow, but it has gotten much better. Their stated target was to be equivalent to MS Office 97 (not a bad target, in my opinion, as that was somewhat the zenith for that package before it shot off into bloatware)
ZoneAlarm - Nice firewall program, but they push hard to move you to the paid version
AVG Free - Good anti-virus software, but again they push you to use the paid version, going so far as to present "warnings" about needing to upgrade to the paid version that are not true.
Audacity - Good audio program with lots of community support. For most people this will fill their audio needs.
Google Maps - Cool mapping application
Ubuntu Linux - This is my desktop OS at home, in addition to a laptop running Windows XP Pro, plus my wife's Mac. I spend most of my time in Ubuntu, switching over to the Windows machine for very specific things that I do not have under Ubuntu (mainly other MS products like Office or Visual Studio)

In addition to QuickBooks Simple Start Free Edition 2009 there is another FOSS program called GnuCash that does well for book-keeping.

The thing to keep in mind when you look for software is that generally there are lots of people who want to do what you're doing or trying to do. Lots of people have to do the same thing you're trying to do and some of them know how to program. Over time software gets written to satisfy these needs. Some of it is commercialized and some people make simple knock-offs of it. Depending upon you comfort with computers you can get by with all kinds of free software. If you're not as comfortable with software you can purchase software that has commercial support and is perhaps more popular, increasing the number of people who can help you with it.

The techgnostic thing to do is to get a trial of the commercial software as well as copies of a couple different free alternatives. Give them all a try and go with the one that best balances off the satisfaction of your needs with the demands it makes on your resources, be they time or money. In the end you will probably wind up with a mix like me, and save a lot of money by not having to buy programs that have a thousand features when you only need two every now and again.

Do you have any favorite FOSS programs? How about proprietary programs that there are no alternatives for that you depend on?

PDA Migration

2009-06-05T11:00:00.000-05:00

Long ago my life started to get complicated enough that I started having to keep track of things on paper because my brain wasn't going to hold enough information anymore. I started with a simple paper organizer and then moved on to more involved ones as time went on like the Franklin.

In the early 1990's I purchased a Sharp Zaurus. Being a computer-guy it seemed appropriate for me to keep my data in an electronic format. I had to pay extra to get a serial cable interface so I could back up my data. It ran on AAA batteries and was super cool (to me, at least).

My the mid-late 90's, though still working, the Zaurus was getting passe so I moved onto a Palm Pilot. Again this was super cool. The device was designed for synchronization so it was very handy to move data to and fro, plus there was a programming kit so I could dabble with software for it.

This was followed by another Palm, then by a Sony Palm incarnation called the Clie (very nice). For a brief time I had a Palm VII, one of the first wireless PDAs. The data plan was way too expensive (data was charged by BYTE transferred). The latest (and probably last) Palm I got was the Zire, the low cost color version of the venerable Palm PDA. This mainly was my calendar, contact list and password storage device.

For a while, I had a laptop and largely used it for my information management needs. Then it died and I could not justify buying another one in light of my other responsibilities.

My work in the past has provided me with Blackberry or Windows Mobile devices. In all cases I have used them but never trust much to them, largely because they were provided by my employer and I keep my personal and professional items separate.

Now, my Zire is starting to fail. The digitizer is hit or miss and the screen is starting to go. Once a week or so I have to do a hard reset to make it go. Palm now no longer makes PDAs so I find myself at a crossroads. I want a small electronic device for handling my personal information, but the market only seems to be producing phones to do this, and I don't want a monthly bill.

I believe that now I want an iPod Touch. I had three other MP3 players before I got my iPod Nano a couple of years ago and I have to say hands down that the iPod is the superior experience. As a computer guy I was able to figure out my other devices but the iPod was just that much better. The iPod Touch is much larger and seems better suited to handling my needs for information management. There are a couple of sticking points.

One is price. At over two hundred dollars (as of this writing) it is not something that I can trivially purchase. It starts to get me into the neighborhood of buying a netbook instead. Admittedly the netbook would not have the portability of the iPod Touch, but it would have other strengths (like a keyboard) to make up for it.

Another is software. I have Palm OS software that I've used for years that will no longer be usable. I have to take that into account also.

For now I will limp the Zire along and see what Apple comes up with on Monday at the WWDC and go from there.

It's been interesting watching the rise and fall of each of the form factors and companies. From Sharp (still around but out of the PDA business) to Palm (with a history of mis-steps and frittering away their huge lead) to Apple (whose Newton venture paved the way for more functional PDAs). It will be interesting to see where things progress to. There are rumors that Apple will expand the iPod Touch into a small tablet and effectively re-launch the Newton. I'll be paying close attention.

What do I do with my data?

2009-05-29T11:00:00.002-05:00

At this point in time there are two broad categories of approaches you can use to manage your data:

Relational
Non-relational

Since one is defined in terms of the other I'll start with relational.

Like the name suggests, relational data are items that can be related to one another through the use of a key value. For example, your government issued an identifier number to you that is used to identify you. This number is then linked to your name, where you were, born, etc. It is a key to reaching that information.

If you think of a table of information, with rows running horizontally across the page and columns intersecting the rows vertically, running down the page, the key value identifies the row. So, for information about person you might have something like this:

Key	FirstName	LastName
100	John	Smith
101	Fred	Brown
...	...	...
174	Zachary	Miller

Each key identifies a row, and each row has columns of information. Then, in another table where you store, say, order information, you do not have to enter John Smith's personal information every time you create an order for him. The data exists in one place. Then, if you find out that he spells his name "Jon" and not "John" you can change it in once place.

There are other advantages to the model, but this is the crux of it. Information only has to be entered once, and then related to other information.

A relational database management system (RDBMS) is software that allows you manipulate this type of information easily.

Non-relational is a grab bag of different approaches that do not include necessarily the idea of a key value (or at least not in a separate tables sort of way). Generally a non-relational data store will store all of the information for any one thing all together, all at once. For example, an order would be stored all on one line, with the customer information repeated over and over for each order they are linked to. You wind up storing the information more than once for certain items and you have a lot of work to do if you want to update that information or use it to link to information that is held elsewhere.

Storing information in a spreadsheet often winds up being non-relational but in more modern systems there are ways to make the data relate to other data. The lack of management tools, however, will generally drive you towards a management system.

If the data you are storing is VERY simple and small in size you can save time and money by just storing it into a text file that you update by hand. For anything beyond that you should consider more sophisticated software to help you with the process of storing and updating the information.

Weighing the pros and cons of the various different packages is a very involved process. Think through what your needs will be and then invest the time in some research. Make sure you base your decision on your needs and not on what some marketing tells you your needs are.

Make a techgnostic choice for your database needs and you will achieve your goals effectively and efficiently.

What kind of a database do I need?

2009-05-22T11:00:00.001-05:00

So, we covered the need for one. Chances are you need one. But which one? First we have to think a bit.

There are some questions to consider the answers to:

What kind of data am I storing? Is it just text and numbers, or do I have to store files or picture? Do I have to store documents?
How much data am I storing? Do I have a few dozen customers and a couple of suppliers, or do I have hundreds of both? Do I have historical information I need to put in, and how much of it do I have?
How many people need to get at it? Is this just for me, or do other people need to get at it also?
What other requirements do I have? Speed, costs, etc. Does the system have to lightning quick or can you wait a second or two? Do you have a budget to spend on this, both for software and somebody to handle it?

There are several broad categories of alternatives.

If the amount of data is small, simple and textual you could get by with a text file. An XML file can easily hold a fair amount of structured data and does not require very powerful software.
If the amount of data is larger and maybe a bit harder to manage you might need a spreadsheet like Open Office Calc, Google Doc or Microsoft Excel.
If your data needs are larger you start to get into actual "database" software, of which there are many different options from free to very expensive. The choices stretch out a great distance, but include smaller ones like Microsoft Access or FileMaker or ones that will scale out as needed like MySQL, PostreSQL or Microsoft SQL Server (various editions).

In each case the number of people need to access the data will drive what you wind up with. Think about your needs before buying what people are selling and come back to determine what kind you need. Answering these questions will help you be techgnostic in your choice.

Do I need a database?

2009-05-15T11:00:00.002-05:00

"Oh, obviously you need a database."

What?

What is a database, you ask? All you know is that it lives on the computer somewhere and keeps track of things. Why can't you just keep your paper and files? Or are you already using a computer? "Look, see - I have it all in a spreadsheet!".

The person who told you of your need for a database rolls his/her eyes and groans and says "THAT is not a database!"

Confusion reigns.

So, what is it?

Strictly speaking, ANY collection of data is a database. Your paper and files? That's a database. A bunch of index cards in a box? Database. That spreadsheet of yours. Also a database. Any one of many different software products with the word "database" in their name? Yeah, database. Really, a database is an organized body of related information. Period. The exact mechanics of it are where people get hung up.

Honestly, the person who recommended a database to you most likely meant that you would benefit from a "database management system" (DBMS) such as has been around for many years, specifically designed to manage your information. Even though your stack of paper is technically a database how long does it take you to find a very specific piece of data out of it, say, an invoice from a particular vendor? When the pile is small it is trivial. As the pile grows it becomes non-trivial.

You've moved from a small pile / number of cards / number of spreadsheets. What happens when someone else needs to get at the same information? Any more than a couple of people cannot effectively search through your pile. And when the information must be updated what do you do? Mark up the original? Attach sticky notes? Put the file on a shared drive and hope for the best? And if you want to know some kind of aggregate information like "how much money do I owe all people with outstanding invoices?" you now have a much larger task on your hands. That is where a DBMS really comes into its own.

A DBMS has been designed, from the beginning, to efficiently store your information, with methods to capture, store, analyze and create outputs based on the information stored within. They are at the core of much of the efficiency that is attributed to computer technology.

For anybody who is doing anything in their lives that requires capturing information, storing it for future use, sifting and analyzing it and creating output such as reports or simply answers to questions about the data the need for a computerized database is clear.

However, just like the question of "do I need a computer" (most often "yes") is followed by "what kind of computer do I need?" there are some questions you have to ask yourself before you start down the path of using a DBMS. As the blog title implies we will cover this in a techgnostic fashion in the next post.

For a sneak peek, the questions will be along the lines of:

What kind of data am I storing?
How much data am I storing?
How many people need to get at it?
What other requirements do I have?

That will be followed by another post wherein some of the more popular alternatives are considered, as well as some less popular choices. Come to think of it, this might become a series of posts. Stay tuned.

The rise of the Netbook

2009-05-08T10:45:00.000-05:00

Making computers smaller was a goal from the very earliest incarnations of the technology. Down from the size of a room to the size of a few fridges. Down from that to a largish box that could sit on the top of a desk. Soon someone asked "How about one I can take with me?" Portable (in the sense that they COULD be moved, not necessarily EASY to move) computers themselves iterated through various forms. Of course someone said "What if it ran on batteries?" and computers became truly portable, freed from the tether of the electrical grid (or a generator). The same evolution has continued over the years with portables becoming smaller and more powerful with each cycle.

Until very recently these smaller and more powerful machines commanded premium prices. You could expect to pay much more than you'd pay for a desktop computer with similar power. The intent was that the portable computer should have the same power (or close to it) as a desktop. This meant all kinds of trade-offs had to be made and components had to be engineered to be even smaller. All this engineering did not come cheap and having a laptop computer was a badge of honor and the province of the technological (or just wealthy) elite.

Eventually a kind of tipping point was found, not unlike with cell phones. In the same way that the huge cell phones of the 1980's become smaller and smaller into the 1990's so that design decisions started to rotate around making the keys LARGE enough for human fingers to operate as the phones had become so small laptops started to change also. Two kinds of consumers were looking for portable machines, with two sets of criteria: as SMALL as possible (most often frequent travelers and/or gadget freaks) versus as POWERFUL as possible (the so called "desktop replacement" crowd). Each of these consumer types was provided with what they wanted, but in all cases you continued to pay dearly for the machines.

As time and Moore's Law marched on an intersection occurred. This was the intersection between relatively powerful laptops and the ubiquity of wireless internet. Again something that was once the province of the technical elite became very common, with wireless access available virtually anywhere for a very small fee, if at all. Instead of existing as an alternative to a desktop computer the laptop became basically a terminal to connect into the content of the internet. The need for the terminal hardware (i.e., the laptop) to be powerful was lessened. Beyond a certain amount of power was a waste. A simple machine could be used to read e-mail, surf the web, watch videos, etc. The hardware of a new type of laptop was ready. The other part necessary was the software.

Open source software, which languished for some years in obscurity from the public, leapt to the forefront of these new machines, dubbed "netbooks" as they are basically used to access networks and not much else. Rather than having to pay the "Microsoft tax" for every machine netbook manufacturers started to load open source operating systems like Linux onto their machines, erasing the extra payment. This dropped the price a little bit more, along with the smaller screen, small hard drive and lack of optical drive to produce a netbook for a few hundred dollars instead of almost a thousand dollars.

The effect on the market was slow to build but once it did it ran away, catching the large manufacturers unawares. Coinciding with some economic hard times netbooks flew off the shelves and accounted for most of the growth in the sales of portable computers. Now all the major manufacturers have their own netbooks out and Microsoft is scrambling to try and find a way to ensure that they are a presence in the market, albeit at a lower per unit cost as in the past.

For many people a netbook is all the computer that they need. They can use a web based provider of e-mail, store their pictures on a photo sharing site, use online applications for word processing and generally do what they need to do without very much regard to the computer that they do it on. If their inexpensive netbook bites the dust the only thing you might need to do is rediscover your bookmarks (although even those can be cached away by one of many online utilities).

There will always be a market for the more powerful and expensive laptops for people who need the power of local processing for tasks like video processing or engineering that burns up a lot of CPU cycles, in the same way that there will still be people who will spend thousands of dollars on desktop machines to do very specific tasks. In both cases, though, there are now inexpensive alternatives, often using open source software, that give people just what they need for a small amount of money.

Keeping in mind what you're trying to get done before you choose your technology is a techgnostic thing to do. Think it through the next time you advise somebody on what kind of computer to buy or examine your own needs the next time you put your money down.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

2009-05-01T11:00:00.002-05:00

Being green is seen as increasingly important for companies. Sometimes it's a stretch to find something to trumpet about but you can always find something like using recycled paper in your printers or such. If the new measure actually saves the company some money (not often), all the better.

One place that companies could definitely get more bang for their green buck is with computer hardware. The hardware itself caused a lot of pollution during its manufacture and when it winds up in a landfill it leaches a lot of nasty chemicals. If you can avoid having to buy new computer hardware you can feel better for being green as well as save some money.

Most often the things that will fail on a computer are the parts that move: the hard drive, any fans in the case and the power supply fan. Otherwise, in the absence of a power surge, the rest of the solid state electronics will keep going for years (at least five). It used to be that software always outpaced hardware and you always had to buy new hardware to keep up. Hardware is now ahead of software in most cases (unless you're talking about niche needs like high-demand video games or such). With some more RAM (inexpensive) and maybe some new parts that you interact with (monitor, keyboard and mouse) you will feel like you have a new computer.

If your needs are not directly tied to software available on Macintosh or Windows you can load one of the freely available Linux distributions and get your computing tasks done very handily, while also saving some money and making your computer more secure. If you are not comfortable with such a move you could just back up your data and do a clean re-install of your operating system and again feel the joy of a new space. If you are 100% uncomfortable with either of these suggestions you can go and buy yourself a new computer but keep in mind that the prices are much lower than they used to be and you don't need a lot of power for most things you're going to do.

As always, you need to think about what it is you're trying to do when you are considering a hardware purchase. Do you want what you're getting just because you're "due" for some new hardware, or do you have a specific need for it? Are you tied to a particular software platform? If not, when you get new hardware is an ideal time to take look at alternatives. The computer market is in flux right now and there are lots of new approaches being tried.

Obviously everyone's situation is different, but what I am advocating is not necessarily just going on to the next revision of what you've always done, instead taking a look at alternatives, including keeping your existing hardware and just refurbishing it a bit. You'll save some money and help the earth by being green.

The hard stuff is easy, the soft stuff is hard.

2009-04-24T11:00:00.002-05:00

Technology, of whatever type, is a tool and that is all. Outside of enjoying a tool purely for its own sake (tool-o-phile?) there is no value to a tool except what you do with it. You don't buy a drill, you buy holes. A shovel might represent a crystallization of effort with a forged head and carefully turned handle, but it is just a shovel. Until someone picks it up and digs a hole with it there is nothing to see, move along.

"High" technology needs to be viewed the same way. It can become VERY complex and challenging to understand, but ultimately it is just a tool. A database without data in it is an empty shell. Even when full of data it means nothing until you DO something with it. Transform the pieces of data into information that you can use to make decisions. Again, the technology by itself is nothing. It takes people to use it to get value from it.

Technology is for most people the "hard" stuff. People skills like communication and collaboration are considered "soft" skills. Depending upon your personality type you might gravitate towards one or the other. In the end, though, the effectiveness of whatever your enterprise is will rest upon the behavior of the people using the technology. In most cases the hard stuff will come with a default setup that works in most cases, and if it doesn't you can find someone who can make it work for your situation. Really, in the grand scheme of things, that was the easy part.

The "soft stuff" is where the real challenge lies. Many technology people consider the soft stuff relatively worthless as it does not improve the speed of their hardware or software. It does not help directly with their up-time. It does not give them more disk space to store data. Very often they will gloss over the people-oriented items or leave them to others.

This is a mistake.

If you don't take into account who is going to be using your system you will fail. The end users of the system are most often not technologists. They are people who want to use a tool to get their job done. They want to get in the car, push the gas pedal and drive somewhere. They don't want to have to know any detail whatsoever about how the engine works, how the linkages between the control systems ensure that the vehicle goes in the correct direction, etc.

Gas, go, done, next.

You can build the most technically elegant system in the world but if you don't take into account the people who are going to use it you are dooming your efforts. This is true for systems that are internal to companies, or external to be sold to others. You can mandate usage internally (you WILL use the new system) but it will never be accepted and unless you have a monopoly you have no hope externally.

If you find yourself looking at a technology decision be sure to take into account the soft stuff. Who is going to use it? What are they going to do with it? What is the LEAST that you can do to make the system work? Systems do not exist for their own sake. They exist to serve people in some way. Keep that foremost in your mind and the decisions about what to do should be clearer.

Once more unto the breach

2009-04-17T17:23:00.000-05:00

I guess a year is an unreasonable gap. Lots has gone on in my life. Many events that kept me from thinking about an online journal. Most significantly was the passing of my father, who influenced me very strongly. Few days pass by that I do not think of him and wish I could talk to him.

2008 was a year of transitions for me on many levels both personally and professionally. Now I think it's time to re-engage a few things I'd shelved during the chaos. One of those things is this blog. I will commit myself to a personal goal of posting to this blog once per week, come Hell or high water. I've already queued up a few weeks worth of topics (not yet written).

Going back and reading over the older posts I realize that my interest are more or less the same as they were, and I will be continuing in the same vein. That means more posts about the various manifestations of information and computer technology, their use in business process management and trying to make all the parts of the process dance together: people, technology and business.

And not only that, but also from the point of view that what's important at the end of the day are the results and not sticking to any one religion (e.g., Microsoft vs. Mac vs. Linux). Sometimes a post will be just because it's interesting.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.

Easy To Use

2008-04-14T16:46:00.003-05:00

My parents Windows machine was on its last legs. I suggested that they get a Mac for their next machine "because it's easier", and I believed it. They purchased an iMac and I set it up for them. They were very impressed with the all-in-one design, and some initial "oooo ahhh" moments with the integrated camera, microphone, speakers and slot loading optical drive.

That was about it.

Then it came time for them to do what they were used to doing on the Windows machine. Even though it took fewer clicks and let them do things in a more seamless fashion, the Mac UI was not the same as the Windows UI and they were easily confused.

Being able to make changes and then just close a window instead of having to click "Apply" and then confirm that you did in fact want the changes was not seen as easier. It was seen as unsettling.

Being able to just pop in a CD and have it ripped by iTunes was seen as inferior to inserting a CD and then playing it with Microsoft Media Player.

The list went on.

I got them all set up for e-mail, browsing, pictures, music, etc. and have left them copious notes on how to do each task they want, and their home office looks much neater than it did previously with no more cord insanity, and the monitor is much nicer than their old one, but I am still nervous about them simply amusing me by taking up my suggestion.

My hope is that over time I have helped them with a good decision, but I thought it ironic that I did not take my own advice about being techgnostic about their technology setup. I am buying off my conscience by telling myself that the iMac will over the long run be much easier to use and less prone to viruses and such.

Hopefully I'm right.

Process

2008-04-01T20:52:00.004-05:00

Process is kind of a loose word, where different people mean different things by it. When a process is broken, though, just stating that it is broken is useless. You have to describe WHAT about the process is broken, and why. Usually it is not very difficult to discover, but the piece that is broken is often there in order to make something easier for someone. It was not seen as a breakage, but just a short cut. Sometimes you can get away with one of these in a process, particularly when the process is long-running.

This is deceptive as people think "Well, that one little deviation did not hurt, one more won't hurt either." Soon the original deviation is one of many and the process breaks. Often there is a finger pointing exercise wherein everybody trots out their favorite theory of what went wrong, but the process remains broken. The deviations often have become the practice in the organization and people are invested in it.

Often an outsider is brought in to help "fix" the process.

Being an outsider, this person usually immediately sees where the problem is and tells everyone exactly what it is. Either the person is thanked and process is put back to a working state, or it is decided that the outsider does not "get it" and cannot understand the intricacies of how the organization works. Regardless of which result comes out of it, we can rest assured that the process will drift away from the ideal at some point. So, what can one do about it? Usually you have to have someone dedicated to a concept like "quality" where the process that is followed is periodically reviewed, and someone is held accountable for the worthiness of the process.

Many times this sort of function is seen as pure busywork of the worst kind, and a waste of effort. The time wasted every time the process breaks and profits or customers are lost more than make up for any investment in quality, but people will still make the short term decisions to save a few dollars.

In technology ventures, this whole "process" dance is even more vital as the processes are often automated and can occur thousands or millions of times before it becomes apparent that it is broken. Ironically, because of the fluid nature of software, process is given even shorter shrift than in real physical processes because you can often kludge something together to get to a short term goal. Inevitably you will pay for it later, with interest.

If you are involved in a technology project, regardless of vendor, platform, etc. be sure that you can describe your process for solving your problem in language that anybody could understand, and then be sure that you stick to it. I'm not saying never change the process, as they will evolve to meet changes, but if you cannot explain what you do, or how you accomplish your goals you are doomed to waste a lot of time and effort that could be used to help create more value from your technology investment.

On the road again...

2008-03-27T14:14:00.003-05:00

I'm on the road this week, visiting another office for development meetings. I've been trying to post something on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The trip has been very busy and the only alone time I've had is when sleeping, so that schedule did not work. I have some downtime now, so I'll knock something out fast.

This trip has been an excellent illustration of the importance of communication. You can exchange e-mails all day with someone, or talk to them on the phone now and again, but nothing beats being there in person, face-to-face with someone. That kind of high bandwidth communication removes all kinds of barriers where things can be mis-read or lost in translation.

More things were decided in a few days of meetings than happened in months remotely. Yet, there is often a reluctance to incur the expense of travel. Penny wise, pound foolish.

Good Enough Hardware

2008-03-21T13:08:00.005-05:00

Used to be, a "cheap" desktop computer hovered around a thousand dollars in price, without a monitor. Those days are now far behind us. Cheap desktop systems with bundled LCD monitors are easily found for less than five hundred dollars. Laptops have similarly crashed in price, with a race for the bottom still underway. There is still a high end to the market, with multi-thousand dollar machines, but only people with very specific requirements should buy them.

If you only drive a few nails a year to hang pictures, you can buy a five dollar hammer and you're set. If you take that five dollar hammer onto a job site and drive a few thousand nails with it you will quickly destroy it, rounding the head of it, shredding the handle, etc. In the same way if you are a hard core video game player you would not buy a five hundred dollar computer and expect to be happy.

All that said, most people can get by with the modern "low end" computer, that has more processing power, memory, disk space, etc. than machines they purchased a few years ago. And that computer will be sufficient for a fairly long time. In the 90's software could get ahead of your computer very quickly, and your hardware quickly became obsolete. With so much time between major updates of software now, plus the power available at the low end of the market, breaks this cycle.

The one place that this is somewhat not true is with the Microsoft Vista operating system, if you want to run it with all the bells and whistles. If you want that then the low end machines might not be exactly what you want. If you are only wanting to surf the web and do e-mail you should consider alternative operating systems that run on the same hardware, such as a Linux distribution like Ubuntu.

The Macintosh computers are more expensive, but come loaded with a lot more bells and whistles that narrow the gap between the low end PC and the low end Mac. They offer a good level of stability and if you are looking for easy they are hard to beat.

When you go to purchase your next computer, consider all the factors, including what you are actually SPECIFICALLY going to use the machine for, and do not fall for the sales pitch of the latest, greatest and fastest. A "good enough" computer is going to be sufficient for 95% of people, so don't turn up your nose at a computer because of its low price. You'll be pleasantly surprised by your new machine, regardless.

Make your choice techgnostically, and don't be swayed by hype (I'm looking at YOU, Microsoft).

Object Relational Mapping

2008-03-18T21:49:00.004-05:00

I saw a demonstration last night of object relational mapping (ORM) tools. The idea behind them is that object oriented programming (OOP) and relational databases (RDBMS) model the world in two totally different ways. OOP tries to express everything in terms of behavior and properties, whereas RDBMS focus on efficient data storage, and do not support the kind of behavior that OOP provides. You can program in a RDBMS (with stored procedures, or functions) and you can store data in objects. Both approaches have their pros and cons. At the moment, OOP is the dominant way to write software (Java and .NET languages sit on top of huge libraries of objects) and RDBMS is the dominant way to store data (Oracle, SQL Server, etc.).

Programmers being programmers, clever people have put together some ways to allow the OOP people to have their cake and eat it too. They can program against objects, and then have a whole bunch of backend code handle the dirty details of getting data out of and back into the RDBMS. Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch, so there is an overhead associated with this.

I could see how the approach would allow you to cleanly separate out your business objects (e.g., customers, orders, etc.) from the nitty gritty of the data storage (e.g., the exact SQL statements to retrieve or insert data into a database) and insulate your business logic from future changes in data storage technology. Some frameworks go one step further and define a domain specific language (DSL) to allow you to express your business problem solution in something that resembles normal English (COBOL-esque?).

In a large number of cases, there is significant investment in existing code, written in such a way that you cannot simply switch approaches on a whim. When something like ORM comes along there needs to be a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of whether or not it is worth it to make the switch. The software developers hear this and hear "blah blah blah", knowing that the suits just want to kill their fun. If they are serious enough about their fun they will go to a startup company that is doing greenfield development where they can indulge their latest cutting edge ideas.

Ironically, in three to five years something else will come along, and if they have totally bought into whatever the new thing NOW is (for example, ORM) they will decry any attempt to move away from it, having written tens of thousands of lines of code using it.

I guess it is the fate of all software development to eventually become obsolete and fall by the wayside, but in some niches you can survive for a very long time until that CBA finally tips the scales over, and the maintenance payments to whichever vendor or ability to find programming talent to keep your AS400 / COBOL / PowerBuilder payroll system alive become too difficult.

I suspect I will run a small pilot project using an ORM framework, to see what benefit there is, and to show that we are "keeping up", but for now I think it is going to be one of those things that simply does not pay off enough to warrant a wholesale shift.

So, what do you do again?

2008-03-17T15:37:00.005-05:00

Having spent more of my working life as a non-manager than as a manager, I know how people often look at a manager and say "What does he/she DO all day? They're not producing anything - they're just dead weight" or something similar.

I went to the Manager Tools website and took a look at their podcast categories and culled out some that illustrate a fair amount of what it involves.

HR (and all that that entails)

Evaluations
Staffing / Hiring / Interviews / Recruiters
Retention
Termination / Layoffs

Management

Employee Behavior
One on Ones /Feedback
Networking
Employee Performance
Company Strategy

Tasking

Communication
Delegation
Meetings

Employee development

Books
Career
Coaching
Training

Communication

Email
Presenting

I have not even touched on the budget cycle or any of the other administrative sinkholes that can eat up your day / week / month / year.

Any one of these areas grows with headcount, as the number of communication channels increases. Some of the tasks are emotionally draining, while others take their toll physically.

Yet, I remember when I thought managers did not do anything but drink coffee and loaf around. So when somebody asks me what I do I say "Wander around and wave my arms, hoping it makes a difference." I suppose it diminishes the work somewhat, but the only other option is to try and laundry-list it all and nobody wants to hear about that.

Drowning in information

2008-03-14T07:53:00.004-05:00

Moving into management made me aware of how many things I did not yet understand. Getting people to do what you want them to do without using some form of force is a challenge, and "because I said so" only seems to work with my children (and even then it's hit or miss). One of the venues I've used for information on what to do is seminars.

I go to a seminar that is covering a topic that's of interest and applicable to some problem I am having. The presenter has their slide deck and content down cold, and they go through the process. At the time I think "Wow - this is GREAT information. I am going to use that the next time I need to address this." I leave the course at the end of the day, go back to work the next day and slam into the wall that I'd left behind the day before the seminar.

I go back to my notes from the class and try to recall exactly what was said, and can't quite conjure it up. So I go to the web and search around for similar information and indeed it is all out there, but before the seminar I did not know what to look for. Now I have the information from the seminar, and now from the web also. A lot of the information on the web is structured to make me want to pay for some product or service, so I'm skeptical of some of it.

I need something unbiased, I think. How about a book?

Off I go to Amazon. I search for the subject I am interested in and find a plethora of books, half of which have very high ratings. I cull through the list and find the one that seems most suited to me and order it up. As soon as the order is gone I go back into the storm of daily items.

About a week later I get the book, open it up and am flooded with memories from the seminar, the web search and the remarks on Amazon about the other books I didn't get. I am no closer to having something actionable than I was earlier. And then another crisis pops up, I put the book on the shelf with every intention of reading it cover to cover and making notes, and it sits there for months.

Every time I see the book I feel guilty for not following through.

Sometimes I wonder if can just use common sense? Can't I just take a stab at what seems to be reasonable and then note the result? If the result is good, do it that way again. If it is a failure, try to determine why it failed and do it differently next time.

I think I fall into the trap of wanting total information before I do something, in the belief that it will cause a better decision. There is so much information, though, that it backfires and I don't know where to start.

Perhaps I need to keep in mind the old adage "Good decision making comes from experience - experience comes from making bad decisions".

In the meantime, what do I do with all these books?

Oh, the irony (one of many)

2008-03-12T09:37:00.005-05:00

As a software developer for many years I often wondered what the management people were thinking. My patron saint (St. Dilbert) mocked them mercilessly and I found solace in the humor. I picked up Scott Adams' first book "The Dilbert Principle" and read it from cover to cover and thought it was pure, distilled genius. One thing that stuck out to me then, even more than the other items, was his supposition that the person doing the work of the company - the hands-on person (like me, the software developer) - is central to the company, and the process of creating policies is one step removed from hands-on work.

Damn straight, thought I. If I'm not here to write this code what are they going to do? Write it themselves? Ha!

Fast forward some years. I have been done one-on-ones (O3s) with my direct reports for a while now, once a month for an hour each time. I moved from a once a week O3 format because of how cluttered it made my schedule and because some of my folks did not think it was very useful. After switching to the once a month format, however, I found that a month was a long time to get O3 time with some of my people, in particular my remote people, so I wanted to move back to once a week 30 minute sessions. But, I wanted to get some feedback first.

I called a meeting.

Once everybody who was on-site came into the meeting it hit me suddenly that I was not only having a meeting (which most people do not like) about a policy (one step removed from REAL work), but I was having a meeting about TWEAKING a policy I'd already changed, back to the way it was previously. How far removed from real work was I?

The sheer irony of it was overwhelming.

Apparently, fate has a sense of humor.

So where does "techgnostic" come into it?

2008-03-10T13:28:00.001-05:00

From my title block:

gno·sis (no-sis) n. Intuitive apprehension of truths, an esoteric form of knowledge.

ag·nos·tic (ag-nos-tik) n. One who is doubtful or noncommittal about something. A skeptic.

tech-gno·stic (tek-nos-tik) n. Intuitive apprehension of technology truths, a skeptical take on technology knowledge.

Why append my name with such a title?

I have worked over the years on many flavors of Unix (Sun, HP, SG, BSD and Linux), different incarnations of the Mac OS (from when the whole OS ran off a single floppy in my Mac 512e) and DOS/Windows since the XT. There are zealots in every camp, and strong reasons for their biases. Untold billions of characters have been typed into computers during flame wars about the "best" OS, programming language, editor, database, you-name-it. There is only one thing that can be said for all of this.

All computers suck, equally. I'm not the only person who thinks so.

A bit glib, I admit, but nice and pithy and with enough truth in it to allow it to stand up. Each "platform" of hardware / software / applications was created to solve a particular kind of problem and usually accomplished its mission. When an attempt is made to repurpose it to another task it often fails. From a certain perspective, any other platform equates to "sucks".

So, beyond appearing to be a technological dilettante, so what?

My own technological belief is to use whatever tools, platform, etc. make sense for your own situation. Again this seems like just giving in, but it is not. There are still fundamentals to keep in mind in terms of getting support, safeguarding your data, etc. but they can be enacted on virtually any platform. For all the flak that Microsoft Windows takes it can be locked down quite well. For all the raves that the Mac gets for style there is a closely controlled platform that stifles some kinds of development. For all the intellectual purity of most Linux versions there is still often a steep curve for the computing novice. For all the vaunted stability, etc. of the mainframe there is a prohibitive cost and lack of common support in the workforce.

If you or your company already employ a bunch of Windows admins and everybody is used to Windows there is not much point in having a Mac or Linux jihad because of some perceived superiority. It just does not make sense in that situation. Similarly, if you have a Unix setup and all is well, why upset the system to introduce a single Microsoft application when there are ways to integrate it into your existing setup?

All that said, strong arguments can be made for using standardized PCs, running open source software in "clean sheet" situations where low cost is an overriding concern, such as with the One Laptop Per Child project, or indeed for any other organization who only needs certain kinds of generic functionality, not tied to a particular software package.

The techgnostic part of all this is that in an ideal situation where the platform has not been dictated there are many options to solve your technology problems and we should not shut ourselves off into any one camp. The personalities and business practices of the players should not play a major role in our decisions - what works for us in our situations should be front and center.

That is being techgnostic.

Manager Tools

2008-03-09T13:01:00.005-05:00

When I assumed my management role I had up until then acted as a lead or senior developer, leading small teams of programmers.

In those positions I did not do performance reviews, except to provide feedback to managers when requested. I did not actively participate in recruiting efforts, outside of being asked to speak to candidates. My need to convey status was relatively simple, targeted towards what the group and I were working on. It was relatively manageable to keep an eye on what was being developed, to help out with coding issues and to guide the programming efforts.

Any other aspect of management was handled by my manager. I had taken organizational behavior courses at university, plus some psychology courses and had a general idea of how you should interact with people if you wanted them to not react adversely to suggestions or direction. To a great extent, though, people were still baffling, but I did not have to really deal with people issues very much. Those issues would be kicked up to the manager.

Previous experience in administration rotated around worrying about office details at a startup, and being seconded into helping make certain projects happen. The paperwork load as a senior / lead developer was not onerous, though at times annoying. Again, the manager had to handle all that, but that was his/her job.

When I started "managing" I suddenly found myself thrust into needing to deal with people issues, continual requests for status (a friend termed me the "answer monkey" - i.e., when someone wanted an answer they would rattle my cage) and administrative overhead to accomplish tasks like recruiting, setting up training, etc. I thought "OK, I've seen this done before. It can't be difficult."

After trying what I thought were the correct approaches I realized that I needed to learn some new techniques. I read some pieces on management (helped a bit), went to some seminars (helped more) and tried out different approaches. Some things worked, and I kept doing them. Others did not, and I stopped doing them.

I seem to be handling most management items acceptably well, hiring people in and my direct reports are getting things done. I still find myself snowed under with minutiae, and struggle to control a lot of the things that demand my time (I will go on in another post about "Getting Things Done"). As an attempt to squeeze more learning into a day without adversely impacting my existing personal and professional obligations I started listening to learning CDs in the car on the way into work. These helped also, squeezing a little more learning in.

However, listening to CDs was a bit too limiting as I also have time to listen when I'm walking or at the gym, so I transferred them to my iPod. That helped somewhat too, but some of the courses on CD are six or more hours long, and I found it hard to squeeze effective learning into the half-hour fragments I tend to have. I had been subscribing to some music podcasts, and recently had added a Spanish language and a legal issues podcast. I cast about for other podcasts to add and came across Manager Tools.

Ah ha!

I started listening to their podcasts from somewhere in the early 2007 time frame and was hooked. Here was a reasonably short podcast (in the 20 to 30 minute range) with specific actionable items that I could use immediately. The presenters provided all kinds of context and information about why to take the action, but the takeaway was the thing that you should do, or other nugget of good information. Rather than trying to make a single, monolithic work that covers every last aspect of management they have taken the approach of presenting bite-sized pieces of useful knowledge.

If you are interested in management at all, you need to go listen to these podcasts.

Web site: http://www.manager-tools.com/
Podcast name: Manager Tools
Podcast URL: http://www.manager-tools.com/podcasts/feed/rss2
The "basics": http://www.manager-tools.com/manager-tools-basics/

I have other resources that I use to try and divine some insight into management and will cover them in other posts.

Some Background

2008-03-08T17:28:00.008-06:00

My technology dalliances began with an Apple II+ at school, and a VIC-20 I purchased with my own hard-won paper-route dollars.

The paper route leads me to a tangent.

In the old days (i.e., the 70's and 80's) a child could sell him/herself into contract slavery, whereby they delivered newspapers six or seven days a week, for what amounted to less than minimum wages. Nowadays these first forays into the world of work have been supplanted by adults that scoop up huge delivery areas and pitch papers from their cars, rather than having youngsters pitch them from their bikes. I worked hard for my money, cutting lawns and delivering papers. I learnt important lessons about work and people that have stuck with me always.

So what? So it meant that I very much valued my little Commodore computer. I hooked it up to the family TV (the one and only) and would get my coding sessions in when others weren't wanting to watch a program. My work was saved to the cassette drive, another important lesson in backing up.

I never saw myself as a computer guy as I was using the computer to get other things, mostly to get to games, or to automate some task. My interest was to be able to live off some form of artisitic pursuit, be it writing, drawing (cartoons) or music. I'd dabbled with writing (so-so at it) and drawing (not so good at it) and music (yeesh - don't go there) right up to graduating from high school. I never had a clear vision of what I wanted to do, though I made good marks. I went into university with a mixed bag of courses, including computer programming, English, creative writing, art studio foundation and math. When I discussed this with my father he sat me down and said simply "Todd, you are not going to live at home forever".

Oh.

So, in the spirit of having to "do something" with what I was learning I did a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics where, again, computers were in there all over the place, but I did not think of myself as a computer guy. I also took all my pre-Commerce courses (organization behavior, various accounting courses, financial math, etc.). I got into geographic information systems (GIS) before I graduated, having a chance during a research project to work with one. When I graduated I had a few choices:

Take my Economics degree and get a government job, crunching numbers forever;
Continue my education and get a Masters degree, get a government job and crunch numbers forever; or
Take a contract working on a GIS for the electrical utility.

I went with the contract.

After the contract ended I realized I needed more technical grounding than I had and pursued a Civil Engineering diploma in GIS, wherein I learnt ferocious amounts about all the things that had been somewhat mysterious up until then, and I learnt C programming. My earlier exposure to Pascal in university saved me from the pointer-madness many of my classmates suffered. I graduated from the program and went to work in the oil and gas industry.

After four years and some contracts that depended upon the price of oil for continued funding I decided to look around for other opportunities less dependent on resource prices. An opportunity knocked and I relocated to Texas for a startup company gig. That experience did not last very long, but I again learnt some very important lessons. After that I tried to make a go of it on my own again but unfortunately chose the wrong market to try and enter. I took a job with Dell to get out of that experiment (again, more lessons learnt) and found out what working for a very large company was like (Dilbert became even more applicable).

I left Dell for the greener pastures of a hedge fund wherein I helped them move their desktop applications to the burgeoning web platform and again got some schooling in human nature and the nature of technology projects. About four and a half years into that I fell victim to some maneuvering and again moved on. A brief foray into retail web apps for Pier 1 was followed by going into the pharmacy processing field. For the last few years that has been my new experience, both in terms of industry and moving from a team lead / senior developer into a management role.

I have approached full-on management (not just team lead / senior) like any other role change I've had. That is, a lot of research, reading and looking for ideas. A lot of my old courses bubbled back up into my consciousness (clawing through the layers of API calls, hacks to get around IE versions and tweaks to make SQL run faster) and have helped. It's been an interesting transition, and part of that experience is why I wanted to start to blog again. I think that managing developers is somewhat different than other direct reports, in particular as it is often harder to measure what's going on, and the conditions for good code to come into existence are very tricky. Maybe getting all the ideas out and working them over will help.

So far, so good.

Here we go again!

2008-03-08T15:54:00.002-06:00

Apropos of nothing, I will once more put my thoughts to virtual paper, if only to give some place for my thoughts so that I can look back. Probably I will direct some people here also if I think something I've written is worth their time.

I started a blog in 2005 and made a couple hundred entries into it before petering out. The posts were a mix of random rambles and meticulous notes following the Hacker's Diet and my attempts to implement Getting Things Done. That blog fizzled for me, or at least my interest in it did, and had enough personal items in it that I decided to abandon it. It was also written with a pseudonym, and I think that encouraged me to be a bit more open with things I'd rather have kept to myself.

This time around I am going to be more "professional" in that I will not regale anyone with tales of my personal doings, and will stick to observations on technology, management, society, philosophy, etc. - bracing subjects, all.

As much as I'd like to be like Rands and have a cool hacker handle I am sadly lacking in that department. OK, I thought, I will use my real name. Alas, my name is far more common than I thought, so I went back to one of my first user account names and recycled it.

Despite not having a cool blog name, I am, however, going to take up some of his practices, including:

The opinions expressed on this website are entirely my own. They do not represent the strategy/plans/thoughts of my employer, my family, my friends, my cat, etc.
In some of my posts, I will refer to specific people as a means of telling the story... making a point. These people do not exist - they are fabrications that are specifically constructed to make a point. There are traits or quirks of former co-workers and friends that I borrow to construct my story persona, but these small slices of personality do not a person make.
Lastly, I go out of my way to never borrow traits, ideas, or personalities from my current set of co-workers and managers. That would be bad form.

There, some ground rules in place. Some ideas are already churning.

So, in case anybody reads this, welcome to the blog!