PLAN FOR IMPROVISATION

Photo credit: raphaelchekroun One my most popular posts of all time is one I put up in 2009 about Principled Leadership . I still get traffic from this post and once got a very aggressive job solicitation based on the principals outlined in the post. Recently I came across a quote that nearly sums up the whole list in one sentence: Smart leaders understand it’s not just enough to pursue, but pursuit must be intentional, focused, consistent, aggressive, and unyielding. *I'm afraid I don't know exactly where this came from so, if you are the owner, please let me know so I can link back to you.

I often wonder why some organizations only consider candidates who have computer science or computer engineering degrees. In the real world I have seen many great developers who have come from diverse backgrounds. However, I had an event recently that made me really happy I have a degree in computer engineering. It made me understand why the favoritism exists for computer science credentialed developers. I had an issue with an email template in Ruby on Rails that without a good mental model of compilers and, specifically, compiler optimization would likely have taken a long time to identify and fix. Here is what happened: in a database somewhere... UPDATE app_configs SET affiliate_template = 'Welcome to UrbanBound #[FirstName], ' def send_email_to_todays_movers   Mover.each do |m|      @boiler_plate_email = AppConfig.find_by_config_name('affiliate_template').value     [business logic goes here]        prep_mover ...

I came across this article via LinkedIn. It reminds me of the Maker Schedule, Manager Schedule discussion except its from a maker perspective. Given that I have been doing a significant amount of development in Ruby on Rails for UrbanBound  for the past 3 months, I'm following a maker's schedule again. Being my own boss makes things simpler , however I think its important for makers to understand how to be productive and articulate to their management how they can be best managed. If this seems a bit counter intuitive to you. I can tell you that good managers do know how to manage. However, given all of the pressures around managing a business, its easy to fall into the trap of thinking about management objectives over the needs of the people who getting the work done. A healthy reminder: 7 Things Highly Productive People Do

At UrbanBound we are  necessarily obsessed with who our users are - and who they aren't. An application designed for baby boomers utilizes very different design principals than one designed for a younger audience. If we try to design for everybody (the lowest common denominator) we just aren't going to be compelling enough to anybody. We keep a visual reminder posted of who we are, and who we deliberately aren't, build for. This way we don't waste time and limited resources on people who aren't likely to work with us.

 Watch my site get slow. Watch me download the logs to make sure nothing happened. Thanks for wasting my time script kiddies.

Overall I love my Toyota Prius. Under the hood, it is an engineering marvel. Prius' have been around for 10 years and still sell like hotcakes.  I honestly don't understand why Ford hasn't made a competing product by now. I have come to realize that I pay attention to design more than the average person. I hate it when simple design mistakes ruin an overall well designed product. The interior of my Prius has some obvious problems that could have easily been fixed had they asked the right questions. Separation of Concerns Is there any reason they needed to put the door lock/unlock button between the buttons that operate the windows?   The buttons feel different - therefore its not likely that I'm going to press the wrong button. However, nearly every time I want to use one one of the buttons I have to take my eyes off the road and look at the buttons to choose the correct one or I have to feel each one to get the correct one. This simply violates the principa...

Anybody who has worked with me knows that I'm a fan of analytics. If you are selling soap or software development services, I strongly believe you should be capturing metrics on how people use and interact with your product. As such, I have Google Analytics on my blog. I have learned quite a few things about my content over the past few years. #1 Short blog posts are the most popular. #2 However, the longer multi-part ones engage users more #3 Good content draws people in. Of the people who stay on my blog for more than 10 minutes - which is a long time in the web -, half come in through the top 5 posts. The top 5 posts are: Boarding Pass - You're doing it wrong How to Interview and Hire a Good Project Manager Effective vs Efficient Teams Principled Leadership Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule ...not in the top 5, but one of my favorite posts... Systematic Amateurism Patterns of traffic Usage: 10% of traffic comes to the site and reads the blog...