In the last few years of my professional career, I have had the opportunity to work in various programming languages, operating system environments and team dynamics.  I have also recently been given the task of deciding what type of products I want to be designing and developing.  What I’m about to write were thoughts specifically triggered as a result of a conversation I had today with my brother, who is a very intelligent creative design type.

He has been talking up the idea of creating various Wordpress themes and plugins as well as various iPhone applications, mostly as a way to get his (or our) names out there as knowledgeable people in the respective fields of programming.  This would ideally lead to a consulting agency for project-based work for larger clients wanting more specialized development tasks performed.  It sounds like a very good plan, to be honest, if you’re into that kind of work experience.  Sometimes I think I am, but then most times I feel a bit more grounded than that…

It takes a talent for multitasking to be in the consulting agency environment.  I’ve tried it out a few times, and I can honestly say that I find the various unrelated projects from differing customers to be distracting to one another, and to the flow of my creativity.  Now, this experience has been in the IT consulting field, which may be entirely different from the programming consulting field, but I suspect the effect is simply less intense and that the short term nature of consulting arrangements tends to distract from the longer-term nature of designing robust software applications.

Much more interesting to me, personally, is to take a project from its concept, architect it well, and help it grow into a fully mature and stable product that somebody finds useful.  The pressure is a little less intense as you can feel free to make mistakes with design, as you will have (more) ownership, responsibility and the inherent ability to fix those mistakes given the longer timeline of feedback from users.

To all my future readers, regardless of the programming slant to this post, what are your thoughts on consulting versus long-term projects?

I was catching up on my blog reading tonight and found a really interesting blog post over at Writer Dad.  The very first article I saw caught my attention as I’ve identified myself with the ability referred to in a comment on that article by Randi: “Education isn’t about knowing all the answers. It’s about knowing where to FIND the answers when you have a question.”  Randi then referred to the Socratic method of teaching, which I’m putting on my list of things to read up on.

I guess I learn something new every day.  Time to start asking more questions

Given that I had the opportunity to travel this Thanksgiving week to my friend’s place in Los Angeles, I had a lot of time to think (and a lot of time to regret the decision to drive with my 3 little boys on a holiday weekend, but that’s another post in another blog ).  Anyway, as a result I have the following short list of things I am thankful for in things tech related.

• Engineering geniuses that understand that they don’t know everything and can find bits of truth anywhere
• Engineering humility that allows cooperation with designer genius
• Palm, for leading the way in smart phones with their PDA series so long ago
• Apple’s iPhone, for forcing the mobile phone industry to go ’sexy’
• the Internet and it’s creators, for enabling world-wide connection, information sharing and collaboration
• Google, for enabling the search of and usage so much useful and relevant information
• Google watchdogs for reminding us that so much power can also be easily abused
• Facebook, for allowing me to connect with so many of my old friends
• Twitter, for introducing microblogging and the “Continuous Partial Attention” concept
• Microsoft marketing, for making computers look easy to end users and their developer tools group for enabling such sophisticated development
• Many other companies for creating technology that actually makes computing easy

In all seriousness, there are plenty of other things I am thankful for related to tech.  I am more thankful to my family and friends for putting up with my incessant use of “Greek” language that tends to put them to sleep

Ok, so WordPress finally and completely won me over today.  They have a wealth of plugins, themes, and a huge community supporting their ecosystem.  Whether you’re running your own web-blog, a photo-blog or even a podcast, there are plugins to support that.  Since it’s free, it’s even a great resource for small and large enterprises alike.  I’m hosting my own instance of WordPress-MU simply to make it easier to maintain the 2 or 3 core blogs of different topics I am interested in, and the soon to be 2 or 3 more “test” blogs I’ll be creating as I attempt various less-common blog types such as photo-blogging and knowledge-blogging (a probably mistaken name for the concept of blogging at least one bit of information that you learned about on any given day).

I knew I’d do it too…  This is actually an edit since I posted the entry and then remembered the big feature that I just learned of that made me think to write this post.  There are instructions on importing your blog from wherever you hosted it last, and the instructions are quite clear.  I have found that this is very compatible with the overall experience of the latest versions that I have seen of WP.  Things are laid out simply, clearly and the user experience seems to make a lot of sense.

You know what really gets me going lately?  Sensationalistic
journalists looking to muddy the waters of Open Source.  Take, for
instance, this article titled “Will Patent Battles End Free Linux.”  What a joke.

First,
patent issues have been going on for decades between proprietary
companies.  Heck, most lawyers know this already and many have
admitted that the only reason that Open Source projects are getting
targeted is that they play by a more open strategy to begin with. 
Many of the patent holding companies rely also on the sheer volume of
patents in the system, and the ambiguity of most of those patents, to
prevent an adequate search of patented technology so that they can lay
in wait while somebody else implements “their” idea, only then moving
in to say “hey, that’s mine, you have to pay me to use that,” after
much time, energy and (usually) money has already been spent on the
effort.

Anyway, I just wanted to point this out for what it
is.  Patent Battles are a problem with Business and Ethics, not
with proprietary versus open source.  I would venture to say that
at least as many, if not more, proprietary projects trample on the IP
rights of others and simply never get reported due to a lack of
informational access and the cost and risk of exposing potential
offenses.  Way to play your ethics cards people, way to go…

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Over a year ago Stowe Boyd remarks here
about a possible future of social networking, marketing, advertising
and e-commerce in general. While I would LOVE if this came to pass, I’m
sure that the market doesn’t move as fast as I want it to, nor do I
believe that it will necessarily move in the direction I would like.

You see, we are in an era of redefining the way we want to be
consumer-ized, if that’s even a term. We have one of the first examples
in the 30-second skip function of Tivo, and all of the uproar by the
broadcast networks about their television ad-revenues being eaten away
by it. Another is the so-called ‘ad-blocking’ plugins for various
popular web browsers. Google’s AdSense and various other ad-services
have been battling click-through versus actual conversion rates for a
long time and have been trying to be more effective in those targets
and conversions. Many of us consumers, however, naturally rely on our
own communities of information in order to obtain recommendations for
consumer purchases.

Crap, okay, so the first two examples I was going to use about cars and
pizzas in television commercials didn’t hold water as I know most of us
actually MIGHT say I want that pizza or that was just on TV because it
looks appealing. However, for many purchases, such as music players,
home appliances, clothing, furniture, etc… we generally rely on our
communities to recommend products and services that they, themselves
have enjoyed. Honestly, while television commercials might still
influence me and my friends, word-of-mouth recommendations hold much
more water than advertisements that are either obnoxious or are
downright insulting.

I guess I need to make a point. I would LOVE to participate in
marketing objectives where companies actually cared about the
intelligence and opinion of their target audience and treated us in a
way that displayed respect instead of arrogance. The methods Stowe
mentions in this post would be most appealing to me because they do
just that. They are an example of letting products speak for themselves
instead of spinning the truth around a product to get it out the door
and into a “sucker’s” hands. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I
have never liked being treated like a sucker…

So I’ve been quite busy this summer with my job, yard work, family
activities and general hobbies. Lately I’ve been hearing a bunch about
Facebook in the blogosphere and in my real “social” network. I’ve also
had the chance to become semi-addicted to it and actually catch up with
some of my old friends from high school and my slightly more recent
singles scene days. Fortunately, my wife has been on as well, and most
of my old single friends were also hers, so there’s no “conflict of
interest” issues in that regard .

Anyway, between my supreme annoyance with MySpace and the popularity of
comparisons between MySpace and Facebook, and between the general lack
of usefulness of LinkedIn at the time (though it has since improved
significantly with its Answers features…) I decided to give Facebook
a try. I also decided to import this blog into my Facebook account,
although it has been quiet for quite some time, so I haven’t figured
out exactly how much value my Facebook inclusion adds to the blog, or
vice versa. Expect more analysis in this regard soon. Based on this comment on one of Guy Kawasaki’s blog entries, and a comment leading me to this blog entry,
I hadn’t fully understood the connection (and I still probably don’t)
or the implications of personal and blog branding. Now, however, these
posts have been prompted me to make a better connection and try to
streamline the scopes of my blog and my general interaction with the
Internet and my social circles around me.

So, my posts should start to take on a more directed and
subject-oriented matter. I’ll leave my personal rantings for either a
separate blog or at least a topic dedicated to that purpose . If any
of my (probably small number) followers (read interested parties, not
’sheeple’) have topics they’d like my thoughts on, or research on, feel
free to email me or comment on various of my articles.

I swear I have new material to post. I’ll be doing so soon, I just need
to collect my thoughts again. I’ve had various activities such as
birthday parties, vacations, work projects, etc. all demanding my time
and just haven’t had the ability to finish off any of my thoughts that
I usually get around to posting once or twice a week. I still have
them, so watch out

This morning as I was driving to my data center for some emergency maintenance, I was listening to NPR’s “Morning Edition.”
An interesting topic came online that I feel the need to speak about.
There was a guest, author David Shulman, on the show that had written a
book entitled “From Hire to Liar: The Role of Deception in the Workplace”
examining lying in the workplace. The host and the guest author then go
on to discuss various instances where lying might be justified.

Let me first state that, while I believe any form of lying is
wrong and should be avoided at all costs, this is not the basis behind
my arguments here. No, my arguments here will focus around the business
justifications (both for the company and for the individual employee)
in these instances NOT to lie or deceive.

Also to note, however, is that I have NOT read the book. I do
wish to read the book as I believe (from the comments on the Amazon.com
site) that is basically wanders through the lives of many business
peoples lives exactly for the purpose of showing some of the amazing
lies that cripple our current businesses, and likely our very economy.

Problem #1 – What’s wrong with a little white lie, anyway?

Two words: slippery slope
Once you justify a small lie, how do you make sure you don’t go on to
bigger and badder lies? How do you draw the line when it comes to which
lie is ok to tell and which lie is too much? What happens if you’re
wrong in your judgment.

Problem #2 – How can you establish trust when you’re lying?

This
one is the most important. Once you lie, especially when you are caught
as that triggers the impressions in others’ minds, you establish the
precedence that you can, and sometimes will, lie to get what you want
or need. How does anybody know, from that point forward, what you say
is really to get what is needed in any given situation, or is just
fabricated to get what you want, but is not necessarily needed or the
best thing to do?

Problem #3 – What process is broken that is forcing you into a position where you are lying?

Lying
or deception is done for one of two reasons. Either 1) the process is
broken and you need to “work around” it, or 2) you are trying to do
something for which you don’t have the proper authority or privilege.
If it’s number 2, shame on you for trying to cheat the system. If it’s
number 1, see problems #1 and #2 and decide if it’s not a better path
to try and fix the process than it is to just lie about it and let the
process remain broken, causing you to lie further in the future to work
around the broken process.

Problem #4 – What impact does your lie have on business if it is not detected?

What
happens when you actually lie about something. Either you are trying to
work around a broken process, in which case the process generally
remains broken and inefficient, or you are trying to convince somebody
of something that is not really the case. Now, I’m not saying that
everybody needs or even should know every little detail regarding
everything that goes on in any situation. For example, I shouldn’t know
how much Bob in Accounting makes in salary, or how much Sally’s
Christmas bonus was last year, unless I am their manager. However, the
more information I have that I can rely on in making any given
decision, the better able I am going to be to make that decision in the
most proper way.

Problem #5 – What impact does your lie have on business if it IS detected?

The breakdown of trust can cause duplication of effort, territorial
struggles between departments, and undue competition for already
limited corporate resources. Where there is trust, there is teamwork.
Where there is teamwork, there is cooperation. Where there is
cooperation, there is efficiency.

Also, the lie might carry specific and dire consequences such as a mark
on your record, a pass on that promotion you were working so hard for,
or even termination in some cases. Do you really want to risk those
actions just to appease or impress somebody?

So my point is, before you tell a little “white lie” to appease
your manager, or your customer, or whomever you are lying to, think
carefully about why it is you’re lying, and whether it is really the
best thing to do. I know as a consumer, I am very skeptical of people’s
claims these days because of the almost epidemic that is prevalent in
the business community in this regard. This is a sad thing when I can’t
trust the word of my vendors and partners at face value because of the
sheer number of stories and experiences that I have heard and myself
had.

I don’t usually go to Microsoft to get security advice, but an article written back in May of 2004 (linked here) is a very convincing example of why IT professionals need to take security seriously.

Now, this is not to say that external monitoring systems do not exist
to mitigate these problems, because they do exist. However, they are
generally outside the realm of most businesses’ interest and usability.
Personally, I find this rather alarming. Companies like Tripwire
have been doing critical file system fingerprinting for a very long
time now. But that is the only company I can think of that even does
this kind of thing. Sure, there are probably one or two others, but my
point is that that market hasn’t picked up on the type of technology.
That means either that the technology is not sound, or that nobody is
really interested in it enough to create a large market out of it.
Unfortunately, I believe it is the latter.

So, my point is that as IT professionals, we need to be pushing our
vendors for higher security measures. Less critical security bugs. Less
patching required. Etc. Etc. Being in the world of EDI these past few
years, I have grown accustomed to the concept of “charge-backs.” Maybe
it’s time we start pushing the issues back to our vendors. At very
least, we need to make sure each of us are taking a serious look at
every piece of our infrastructure to analyze the security risks
involved in them.