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Referencing in advice to client. Good book.
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Give it five minutes – (37signals)
“Ideas are fragile. They often start powerless. They’re barely there, so easy to ignore or skip or miss.
There are two things in this world that take no skill: 1. Spending other people’s money and 2. Dismissing an idea.
Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.
So next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes.”
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Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite! | Video on TED.com
Doodler vindication!
“Studies show that sketching and doodling improve our comprehension — and our creative thinking. So why do we still feel embarrassed when we’re caught doodling in a meeting? Sunni Brown says: Doodlers, unite! She makes the case for unlocking your brain via pad and pen.”
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Conway’s law – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Conway’s law is an adage named after computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1968:
…organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
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How Sara Blakely of Spanx Turned $5,000 into $1 billion – Forbes.com
Good self-made woman entrepreneur story:
“Sara Blakely is the youngest self-made woman to join this year’s billionaires’ club–turning $5,000 in savings into a new retail category”
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Self-tracking for health, fun and profit? – Input Output
My latest on Active Information:
“About a decade ago, I was working with my favorite co-conspirator on a universal task viewer service, which was an adjunct to our event-driven architecture. In order for something to appear in the task viewer, it had to be “trackable” (include the proper interface).
Over the course of our design sessions, and throughout the next few months, we kept identifying business and system actions that should be trackable. It became apparent to us that nearly every business and system action could be trackable, following an interface pattern similar to making document objects printable.
I hadn’t thought of “trackable” — and the running “hey that’s trackable” joke — in years. However, reading Counting Every Moment on self-tracking in the recent Economist Technology Quarterly bounced trackable up my memory stack.” -
Jump to Kanban in Lean manufacturing distilled section
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Kanban is the New Scrum « The Hacker Chick Blog
“The thing I’ve grown to dislike about Scrum are it’s time-boxed sprints.
Working with startups, Scrum sprints are almost always way too long. When your sprints are too long then releases are infrequent (deferring revenue) and the team is forced to wait too long before being able to adapt to changing customer needs. This is wasteful because it means you’re continuing to move forward with outdated information.
On the other hand, if sprints are too short, big features need to be arbitrarily chunked into smaller tasks, which aren’t useful to the customer on their own & can obfuscate what the team is trying to achieve”
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10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy | Brain Pickings
“People who think well, write well.”
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Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs – NYTimes.com
“It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.”
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High Scalability – High Scalability – Grace Hopper to Programmers: Mind Your Nanoseconds!
“Computing pioneer Grace Hopper, inventor of the compiler, searched for a concrete way to create an intuitive understanding of just how fast is a nanosecond, a billionth of a second, which was the speed of their new computer circuits.”
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CFOs boost tech spending as they cut elsewhere, seeking competitive edge – WSJ.com
“This is the best time to get outsize returns if you know what you are doing,” says Dr. Brynjolfsson. “It is also the best time to lose your shirt if you don’t know what you are doing.”
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Innovation and the Bell Labs Miracle – NYTimes.com
“Why study Bell Labs? It offers a number of lessons about how our country’s technology companies — and our country’s longstanding innovative edge — actually came about. Yet Bell Labs also presents a more encompassing and ambitious approach to innovation than what prevails today. Its staff worked on the incremental improvements necessary for a complex national communications network while simultaneously thinking far ahead, toward the most revolutionary inventions imaginable.”
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Amazon queues up new workflow service — Cloud Computing News
This is very interesting. Amazon brings cross-border orchestration to cloud(s) and enterprises; and presumably between business partners. Use for scale, flexibility and potentially integration.
“Amazon Web Services says its new Simple Workflow Service (SWS) will run applications that are distributed between customer sites and Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, further blurring the line between the customer’s data center and their chosen cloud.”
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What’s Your Mental Model Of Innovation? – Forbes
“Achieving continuous innovation, Hamel stresses, “lies outside the performance envelope of today’s bureaucracy-infused management practices.” It will require major changes in mind and heart. It will need, Hamel writes, new values, new processes for innovation, a greater adaptability, the infusion of passion in the workplace and a new belief system or ideology.”
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Big Data’s Impact in the World – NYTimes.com
An excellent piece in the NYT on all things big data.
“GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking…”
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The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: February 2012 – tecosystems
“For years now, it has been self-evident to us at RedMonk that programming language usage and adoption has been fragmenting at an accelerating rate [coverage]. As traditional barriers to technology procurement have eroded [coverage], developers have been empowered to leverage the runtimes they chose rather than those that were chosen for them. This has led to a sea change in the programming language landscape, with traditional language choices increasingly competing for attention with newer, more dynamic competitors.
The natural consequence of this tectonic shift has been uncertainty. Vendors for whom supporting Java and Microsoft based stacks was once sufficient are being forced to evaluate the array of alternatives in an effort to maximize their addressable audience. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) stacks like Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are perhaps the best example of this; the differentiation for each at launch was in part their support for multiple independent runtimes from JavaScript to Ruby.
While the question is obvious – which languages should I support? – the answer, and mechanisms for determining an answer, have been considerably less so….”
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It’s Time to Kill the Elephant | cloudeventprocessing.com
Colin on the need to break free of batch based MapReduce: “All of these recent shifts from companies like Google, Yahoo, and others no longer see a competitive advantage in batch based MapReduce. The future has arrived, let’s look at some evidence…”
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Suffering-oriented programming – thoughts from the red planet – thoughts from the red planet
Excellent post / advice:
“I follow a style of development that greatly reduces the risk of big projects like Storm. I call this style “suffering-oriented programming.” Suffering-oriented programming can be summarized like so: don’t build technology unless you feel the pain of not having it. It applies to the big, architectural decisions as well as the smaller everyday programming decisions. Suffering-oriented programming greatly reduces risk by ensuring that you’re always working on something important, and it ensures that you are well-versed in a problem space before attempting a large investment.
I have a mantra for suffering-oriented programming: “First make it possible. Then make it beautiful. Then make it fast.”"
From CIO To Chief Digital Officer – Chuck’s Blog “In the new digital information economy, who leads the transformation from the previous business model to the new one?” PiCloud | Cloud Computing. Simplified. Looks interesting: “Re-inventing the Cloud: Leverage the power of the cloud with only 3 lines of [Python] code. Leave the load balancing, auto scaling, and server management to us.” IBM’s Watson is changing careers – Big Tech – Fortune Tech Watson must’ve blown through his winnings. He’s getting a job: “IBM plans to sell Watson as a cloud-based service companies can tap to find answers in disparate data sets. For example, a financial services firm could use it to sift through news reports and market research to find likely acquisition targets. Or a healthcare company could utilize Watson to process medical articles, prior cases and even a patient’s own medical history and identify the most likely diagnosis and best course of treatment.” Fungi Discovered In The Amazon Will Eat Your Plastic | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation “The mission was to allow “students to experience the scientific inquiry process in a comprehensive and creative way.” The group searched for plants, and then cultured the microorganisms within the plant tissue. As it turns out, they brought back a fungus new to science with a voracious appetite for a global waste problem: polyurethane.”
