Archive for the ‘General’ Category

I’m a big fan of quotes so as I read books, I keep track of the lines and paragraphs I like in a tinye moleskin book. The other day I was reading through some of the things I’ve stored in it over the past year and found the notes I took from the book “Good To Great” very interesting. FYI: Several of them below are paraphrased and not direct quotes.

Celebrity leaders from outside the company didn’t lead to greatness. Leaders promoted from within did (10 of 11 of the CEO’s of good to great companies were promoted from within).

Great companies did not focus on what to do, but rather what not to do and what to stop doing.

Greatness is not a function of circumstances. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice. You must maintain an unwaivering faith that you can, and will prevail in the end.

The right people are your most important asset.

3 Simple Truths: 1) If you focus on who rather than what, you can more easily adapt to a changing world. 2) If you get the right people on the bus, the need to motivate and manage goes away. 3) Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

Those who build great companies know that the ultimate throttle on growth is the ability to get and keep the right people.

When in doubt, don’t hire–keep looking. When you know you need to make a people change, act. How can you tell if someone should get off the bus? Answer these questions. Would you hire them again? If they took another job would you be sad or relieved.

Put the best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.

Members of good to great teams tended to become and remain friends for life.

Charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow seeds of problems when people filter the brutal facts.

One of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events. Leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts are confronted. How do you create a climate where the truth can be heard? 1) Lead with questions, not answers. 2) Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion. 3) Conduct autopsies without blame. Openly discuss failures. 4) Build “red flag” mechanisms. Turn information into information that cannot be ignored.

The Three Circles of Greatness. 1) What can you be the best in the world at? 2) What drives your economic engine? 3) What are you deeply passionate about?

A hedgehog concept is not a plan or strategy on how to be the best, it is an understanding of what you can be the best at.

So on July 23rd, 2005 at 12:42am (my typical inspiration time), I posted my thoughts on Following and Forging. It is now almost two and a half years later and if you have talked to me at any length during that period or stumbled upon railstips.org, you’ll know which path I chose. I’ll give you a hint if you don’t want to read the old article, I chose to follow. I wouldn’t say that I’m a follower, but the little voice in side me, that pushes me to be more efficient, reminded me that rarely are you more efficient doing everything by yourself.

In the last paragraph of that post I said, “I mainly write this post for myself. I think it will be interesting to look back on in a year when I know what path I have chosen.” Funny thing is, it was interesting to look back on. Not sure what made me cruise into my archives for that post but it came to mind tonight, so I thought I would reflect on it for a sec.

I use to hate decision-making. I remember when I was younger, I would wait until the last possible second to make a decision, and even then, I would often look to my mom for help. Over the past few years I’ve had to make so many that I’ve learned decisions are temporary. Worst case scenario, you make the wrong one and if you are lucky, you figure it out and course correct. Anyway…just thought the old post was kind of funny.

So I had this really long post written to support my title. The only problem was that I feared my overall point was lost in dripping sarcasm and multiple paragraphs, so I erased it and I’m going to now summarize in hopes that it sinks in with you, the reader.

Do not measure work experience in 2008 - 1996 = 12 years of experience, which is better than 2008 - 2004 = 4 years of experience. Experience is a good term. No one should be judged on age. They should be judged on what they have been through and accomplished. Experience encompasses those things and age does not. Unfortunately, the human resource definition of experience is “number of years”. Heck, they even use phrases like “years of experience,” which instantly materializes experience to only a number of years including no other factors.

True experience is really fricken hard to measure, especially in an industry as young as the web. Others try to measure it with certifications and tests. I can’t say I agree as those methods approve of those who can remember black and white answers. I don’t think I can say this next line without sounding like I think I am a philosopher but here it goes. True experience is found in grey areas. If experience was black and white, wrong or right, then one could safely assume that more years equals more time to memorize those absolutes and thus, ultimately, equals more true experience.

So how do you measure the grey areas of someone’s experience? I don’t have any correct answer. I have a few ideas which I’ll mention but who knows if they are good. One thought, is to measure each year of experience separately. A year of experience as a junior developer is nothing compared to that of a senior developer. I know first hand as I’ve been both. You gain a lot more experience as a leader than a follower. As someone who sets the standards rather than someone who follows them. As someone who is burdened with greater accountability when things go wrong than someone with less. What I’m trying to say is more responsibility equals more experience.

In addition to the experience that you gain at work everyday, you can grow immensely in your free time at home. When judging someone’s experience, you have to include extracurricular activities. Experience is not solely gained at work. If I only gained experience at work, I would be a quarter of the developer that I am today. Some of the biggest breakthroughs I have had in learning have come sitting on the couch next to my wife (thanks for listening to the boring breakthroughs Steph). I have dedicated countless free hours, with which I could do anything, to furthering my knowledge in my field of choice. When determining someone’s experience, you have to somehow figure in the years gained outside of work.

What do those two suggestions above have in common? Well, if you want to find someone with more experience or you want to compare two or more people’s experience, you have to do some work. Experience cannot be accurately determined from a two hour interview. To find someone with experience, you will have to make some effort.

Believe me that was shorter than the monster I had written and deleted. What are your thoughts? Am I crazy? Do you have other ideas of how experience can be rated?

Updates

A few others have followed my lead (ha, yeah right) and posted on the topic.

• Years of Irrelevance by DHH
• Cheaper Talent Hypothesis by Martin Fowler

Everyone that is not a geek who sees me brandish my iPhone while checking text messages and such, is first mystified by the device and then they instantly hop on the “it’s just too expensive for a PHONE” train. I try to explain on the spot why it is worth it but that usually ends in failure as most on the spot thinking does.

Last weekend I was on the other side of the country in a town/area I had never been. I took no map, printed nothing from Google and didn’t plan anything. I had to fly there and back with connections in between but I didn’t print my e-receipt. I didn’t scribe into my moleskin the flight numbers or departure and arrival times. “No way,” you say. “That’s impossible.” I’ve got news for you Walter Cronkite, it’s not.

I had my flight plans emailed to me along with all the numbers I needed so when I approached the counter to checkin, I just turned on my iPhone, opened my email and punched in the number. The tickets spewed from the machine and I was off to security.

I arrived in Orange County, where a rental car was waiting for me. “Ha,” you say. “But you didn’t have directions so you got lost on the way to your hotel, right?” Well, of course I got lost. But not for long, as I just opened up Google Maps on my iPhone and typed in the address of my hotel. “Which you wrote down in your moleskin, I knew it!” Nope, I just got it from my email again. Are you catching my drift tokyo style yet?

I arrived at the hotel, checked in, once again using my email on my iPhone for the confirmation number and headed up to my room. As you can imagine, at this point I was itching to call my wife. I wanted her to know I was safe for the night and to hear her voice before I settled in to bed. I used (yes, you are correct) my iPhone and with one tap (ok, it was two), I was waiting for her to pick up on the other end. Oh, and my phone was sitting over on my desk as I was using my new Jawbone bluetooth headset which, obviously, just works.

Now you might think “that is a lot of iPhone usage for one day”. No way he is going to spring anything else on me, the reader of this magnificent article. I mean, he is just heading to bed now, right? Wrong. I need to wake up in the morning, don’t I? I softly tapped into the clock area, set an alarm for 9AM and picked Dropkick Murphy’s “Heading Up To Boston” as the ringer to wake me from my slumber. Then, I went to bed.

The next morning, I woke up to Dropkick and got ready. Yes, I even brushed my teeth with my iPhone. The one downside is that it only has mint toothpaste. Ok, that was a lie but I did unplug it from the charger, jump back under the covers, check my email and read the tweets that I missed during my night of beauty sleep.

I used the iPhone’s text messaging to update twitter and let the world know that I was alive and ready for the day. I punched in the address I needed to be at, again using Google Maps on my iPhone and the email, and headed out. Vroooom, vrooom. That was my car starting. I promise I won’t do that again.

I think by now you get the point but I really like to hammer it home. “What about life in an airport with an iPhone?” Well, I can’t answer that. Watch “The Terminal” or something. I can tell you that waiting for connecting flights, walking from terminal to terminal and sitting on the runway is far less stressful with iPhone in tow. Both to and from my destination, everyone in the airport seemed frantic or furious. I believe it’s because they didn’t have Dwight Yoakam’s “Honkey Tonk Man” ringing in their ears.

This is where the story gets interesting. It does, I promise. I got stuck in Chi-town because it was too foggy in South Bend to land. I was left with three options: rent a car and drive home, attempt to sleep in the airport or get a hotel for the night. I quickly grabbed a sheet from one of the United workers and within a few minutes I had called every rental car company at O’Hare. Unfortunately, they were all out of cars (or they didn’t like me) so I decided to take the flight home the next day. I called Steph and she talked me into staying in a hotel, so I called the number given to me and a few minutes later I was in the hotel.

The next morning, I received a text message from my buddy Oak, who saw my tweet the night prior that I was stuck in Chicago, saying that my buddy Matt was also in Chicago. I text Matt and a phone call later, he was on his way to pick me up and take me back home. But why, if I had a flight lined up would I take a car ride home? Because I checked the weather and knew that no flight was headed into South Bend for quite some time as it was still extremely foggy. Oh, and of course I did that from my iPhone.

So there. That is my iPhone story. Names were changed to protect the innocent. Oh, guess not. Well, at any rate, you can see how handy my PHONE was last weekend. So next time you see some egotistical web developer rockin’ out on his iPhone, don’t tell him it’s too expensive. Tell him that he is wise for purchasing such a helpful life device.

P.S. This is also a post about how much I love Twitter.

P.P.S. This is probably the longest article with no pictures that I have ever written.

So I have never been one to blog from the desktop. Heck, I’ve never been one to blog from anything but the administration area that comes with the blog software I use. I came across a link to MarsEdit tonight and decided to give it a try. I threw in the settings for this blog, which runs on wordpress and rails tips, which runs on mephisto. The wordpress one, just worked. Simply put in the url and I was good to go. It took a wee bit of research to get mephisto rolling but nothing a few minutes of googling couldn’t solve.

At any rate, I don’t really have anything important to say, I just wanted to try out the software and see what I thought. For the sake of adding some value in this post, I’ll link to a few things I have found interesting the past while.

• ToDoist.com - Simple and fast task management. There are a few things I would improve but these guys nailed the bulk of it on the head.
• Google Chart API - Looks interesting. Haven’t played with it yet, but rest assured that I will.
• Mac OSX Leopard - Several have said that this was not worthy of a major release. I tend to think they haven’t really given Leopard an in depth look. I’m a week in and each day I find a new thing that I really like. I’ll probably collect a list and post an article here before too long. Oh, I’m also digging my iphone.
• Ack - Ack is a tool for programmers similar to grep but designed to search through big source code trees. It is quick and does nice search term highlighting all from the terminal.
• Explosm Comics - These are appalling and hilarious.
• Jake and Amir - Appalling and hilarious as well. My favorite is “The Burp.“

Anyway, that is all for now.

Update: MarsEdit is impressive. Everything worked, even editing to do this update.