Blog

The Management Myth This book should be required reading for anyone considering business school. By methodically exposing their extremely shaky foundations, it strongly suggests they are doing far more harm than good.
Rapid Hiring & Firing to Build the Best Teams Apparently the founder of Kayak.com does this, in an attempt to not only prevent poisonous people from destroying teams, but to go in the other direction and create exceptional teams.
First Steps In Flex Screencasts Just over a year ago, James Ward & I published "First Steps in Flex." Our goal was to make Flex easy by creating the shortest examples and chapters we could, to give you just enough to get started. We've just finished making free screencasts of all the chapters in the book.
Software Development Has Stalled I think my subconscious mind has been figuring this out over the past number of years.
Posse Roundup Early-Bird Ends Sunday The Java Posse Roundup Early-Bird pricing expires January 31 -- that's this Sunday.
"Stand Back! I Have An MBA!" We're cranking out MBAs 10x faster than we did 10 years ago. Is there any real value in an MBA, or is it just an irresistible money-mill for universities? I'm reading a book that makes a rather strong case that all management is built on illusions.
Java Posse Roundup Registration Open This year's conference will be March 16-19, with a free "Alternative Languages Hackathon Day" on March 15. It's during ski season in Crested Butte, CO, and also during a spring break so register and get your lodging early!
Wrong Correctness Malcom Gladwell's latest book is a selection from his New Yorker columns. The underlying theme is what I call "wrong correctness," which is fascinating because there are enormous possibilities to be mined, but only if we can learn how to create a new approach to business.
I Believe in Design I finally bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner yesterday. It completely changes my cleaning experience. Design that asks and answers the right questions can completely change other experiences, too.
Two Conferences and a Workshop I drove down to Boulder last weekend to participate in an open-spaces Python conference, speak at an eyes-forward programming conference, and attend a workshop on TurboGears 2. Here's what I learned.
You Can't Do What You Want By Doing Something Else I'm reading Po Bronson's "What Should I Do With My Life?" which is brilliant on many levels. For one thing, it's the anti-self-help book; it's just stories from talking to people, and by no means is everyone successful.
Speaking At Developer Day in Boulder I will be giving the closing keynote at the Developer Day conference in Boulder, CO this coming Saturday, October 10. The goal of this conference is to be cheap and local, so I'm curious to see how it works.
Discover and Promote What Works Our typical approach to problem-solving is to invent something new. If you've been around the block a few times, it gets harder to convince you to jump into yet another untested scheme.
DimDim Works Well I recently held an exploratory meeting with a potential new client where we needed to share a screen over the internet. Neither of us had used DimDim but it did the trick with no snags.
Two Kinds of Management Guidance & inspiration vs. directing & controlling.

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Quotes

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
-- Yeats (Paraphrasing from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound)

Throwing a book of rules at a terrible programmer just creates a terrible programmer with a bruise on their head where the book bounced off.
-- Jeff Atwood

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
-- Benjamin Franklin

If somebody comes up to you and says something like, "How do I make this pony fly to the moon?", the question you need to ask is, "What problem are you trying to solve?" You'll find out that they really need to collect gray rocks. Why they thought they had to fly to the moon, and use a pony to do it, only they know. People do get confused like this.
-- Max Kanat-Alexander

If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.
-- Henry Ford

I don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!
-- Vidiu Platon

I'm beginning to wonder if the sum total pain caused by the box-and-arrow crowd has outweighed the occasional usefulness of UML.
-- Carson Gross

You do not have to spend a lot of time and effort on those who strongly resist change. You only have to help and protect those who want to change, so that they are able to succeed. Put another way, your job is not to plant the entire forest, row by row -- it is to plant clumps of seedlings in hospitable places and to nurture them. As they mature, these trees will spread their seeds, and the forest will eventually cover the fertile land. The rocks, will, of course, remain barren regardless. ... once you have figured out who cannot be converted, you should not waste more time trying to persuade them.
-- David Hutton, The Change Agents' Handbook

... no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure, simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says. The problems inherent in managing these transaction costs are one of the basic constraints shaping institutions of all kinds.
-- Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

A nation ... consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, then that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation ... Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'll dismantle the structures that made America what it is? ... If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law ... He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.
-- William Gibson, Spook Country