Or, feel free to download it directly.

We’ll be back in a few weeks, hopefully with a title and fancy podcast feed for those who car.

I’ve been liking Leila’s weekly round-up thing. I always feel like I don’t remember what I did, but never had enough time to do enough.

•  A nice Out of Office email ends with this: “If I do reply to your email it is because I took the time to hide from my family and peck out some gibberish on my Blackberry that probably could’ve waited until next week anyway.”
• From a briefing request: “I’m writing you to request an analyst briefing from you as an expert on enterprise software.” Such phrasing makes me suspicious.
• Cormac has been sick this past week and weekend, staying up all night. I have no idea how we kept sane when he was an infant and woke up every 2-3 hours. You feel like you can’t function. But, there’s a certain clarity it gives you: you no longer put up with bullshit and slack from people and the world. You want to optimize on one path.
• “I’d appreciate anything, and be happy with nothing.” – that should be my coat-of-arms motto.
• The IBM folks are getting that accent over the “e” on my badges a lot of late – nice!
• I went through the Long Beach airport this week, flying on JetBlue. It was tiny. At one point, you even walk outside to go through the gates. Being outside at the airport is lovely as you’re always sealed in. Also, you had to use stairs to get in and out of the airplane. I was sad that I didn’t have my sun-glasses, missing the opportunity to look at mid-century Hollywood. Also: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/5601490001/
• I was at Microsoft’s MIX 2011 where there was much talk of a return to web development, HTML5 and all that. Microsoft is positioning itself as “the stable” choice, having learned the lesson of IE6: like all software, “browser versions never go away,” so you should work hard to make it right.
• RedMonk helped with an unconference at IBM’s conference that same week, Impact (around the WebSphere brand: SOA, Java, middleware). I had a wonderful time, talking with several people and groups about cloud stuff. Some of of my cloud security post comes from discussions there, and I wrote-up an off the cuff explanation of 3 tips for applying agile in challenging environments. Also, I recorded a podcast about using search as middleware, a concept I find fascinating because it’s an application of doing easy, human-friendly stuff in middleware rather than computer-friendly stuff.
• People in Las Vegas dress terribly. There’s all the Ed Hardy and that style’s mangled decedents – you know, off-center skull with wings stuff. And then the desire for both sexes to look like porn stars, hustlers, and hookers. It’s hard to imagine feeling comfortable in any of those, but people seem to dig those styles. And if they’re having fun, great for them.
• We were in Houston for this week, at my mother-in-law’s. She’s right up against a golf course. One morning, when I was letting the dog out for her morning constitutional, I overhead a loud yell: “GOD DAMNIT!” said a golfer, missing a put or something.
• A school was also in view. Around 7:30 each morning, a long line of buses first pulled up and dropped off kids. Then a long line of cars, from two different directions on the road lined up to let off kids one-by-one. It seemed absurd, but as I recall, my mother dropped me off at school each morning (a few years, I biked to school and took the bus). The bus was always crappy, being with your parents, listening to NPR on the way the class is much better.

In this episode, Charles and I go over several key agenda items for the new president. Namely:

• Is Charles a morning person?
• The cult of morning people
• Silva’s Dance performance with People Dancing Movement Guild
• All about Evernote. The public Coté Stash
• The so called “wet sauna,”or fake sauna
• Dealing with Snow: Getting around, long-underwear (sheep’s wool), driving
• What Charles has been working on – Library Sciences thing called “Summon” Serials Solution
• The Jon Udell regional web-ization efforts
• Browser-cross platform hatin’
• A little bit on Lotusphere 2009
• The Agile Executive
• Texas Social Media Awards – go leave a comment on Coté’s nomination!
• Charles’ JavaScript talk at the Detroit Java User’s Group
• JavaScript on the server-side, that article

As mentioned, Charles will be presenting at the Detroit Java User’s group: February 18, 2009 6:30PM to 8:30PM at ePrize headquarters in Pleasant Ridge.

Also: why don’t you just subscribe to the podcast feed to have all episodes automagically downloaded?!

For quite sometime, my good friend Charles Lowell and I have been doing a podcast. Our topics are usually unplanned, ad hoc, and fully Agile. No matter what, we make sure to live up to our motto: “better than half the stuff out there.”

Archives and Feeds:

• Archives: recent episodes, with older ones mixed into the podcast category of this blog.
• Audio and Video: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DrunkAndRetiredcomPodcast
• Audio Only: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DrunkAndRetiredAudio
• Old episodes (1-120): http://drunkandretired.com/podcast/drunkandretired-podcast.xml

30 Second Sample: see if you like our humor and witty banter.

And if you like what you hear, you’re surely enjoy both my weblog and Charles’s weblog.

Thanks!

Yuh!

Get yourself a Yuh! shirt. We
didn’t mark them up, so they’re just at cost, and no nasty URL to
make you look dorky.

Or, how about an A-Team Build shirt?

If the Flash file above does not work, try the movie download instead.

At long last we achieve gravitas with episode 100. To celebrate, Coté returns to the back porch where the podcast just over two years ago, while Charles joins in finally having a drink during recording.

We talk about what open source in a SaaS world, single-entity vs. multi-entity open source production, and then the horrors of learning object orientations by way of the perltoot page.

Tags: booze, gpl, oo, opensource, perl, saas.

Then again, I’d be willing to be that there are teams of jack-booted thugs with hex screw-drivers and Cisco certifications ready to keep the network up. I mean, how terrible would that be if it went down?

While we wait for The Switchover, I still have this scrappy old thing. In the world of SaaS, High Availability means having two blogs.

Other Meanings for “High Availability”

I used to work at a company. Let’s call it WXYZ, Inc. One of the class clowns there made this joke one day:

High Availability? Baby, if you wanna get high…WXYZ is available!

Remarks like this were often followed by, “Waitress! Another Dewar’s!”

The Wealth of Networks

I started reading The Wealth of Networks last night. It’s nice, dense yet concise, academic talk about how content-producers controlling the means of production and distribution changes things. Information Marxism? Sure, sign me up as long as I can have a swanky Paris flat to go with it.

I’ve read a scant 20-30 pages, and there’s already a great conclusion: the physical distribution constraints of the “industrial information age” (pre-net) were the requirements driver of all that nasty, hegemony friendly IP law we created and now have.

Now, of course:

The removal of the physical constraints on effective information production has made human creativity and the economics of information itself the core structuring facts in the new networked information economy.

At least, that’s my understanding of those pages.

PC Means “Personal Computer”

As I read it, I keep thinking about the other 4-5 billion people who aren’t on the network. I had the pleasure of hanging out with Mr. Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah last week while he was in town. We had some Ruby’s BBQ and then some coffee (well, he had tea) at Spider House.

Somehow we got to talking about the $10040 laptop. He had two interesting things to say (side-note: a longer post on the hangin’ out is much over-due):

• The notion of a 1:1 mapping between a computer and user may not be universal.
• Hey, how ’bout them cellphones?

Which was interesting, because we talked with Nokia this morning. Now there’s a mega-platform for you: cellphones. The strange thing about The Wealth of Networks thinking (my 20-30 pages understanding of it) is that the people who run and own the networks seem a few successful startups away from being PanAm and TWA to the analogous Southwests. I mean: telcos! Come on!

In America, we always wave off madness in the telco world — Korea is light years ahead of us, I hear, and they have some sort of crazy cool network in Europe — as regulation and FUD. Really, it’s probably just 50-100 well paid people who’re waiting to retire until they screw with the golden goose.

Generations

And there we have one of my new pet-theories. (Inquire within for more pet-theories.) Technological change is generational. You have to wait for one generation to hand over the reins before real change can happen. Excited about Agile Software Development? Keep your eye on the retire date of all those managers and “decision makers.” Want better cellphone networks in America? Wait for “insiders” to retire.

If good software takes 10 years, seachanges in software take 30-40. As the man said, “get used to it.”

Of course, firing people works too, but it feels so nasty. And really, wouldn’t you just be sticking it to yourself in that case?

Luby’s Upgraded to STRONG BUY <eom>

The problem for us youngin’s is that retirement is soon to retire itself as a concept. Aside from all the fretting about not being able to live out The Golden Years in an RV or finally getting to writing That Novel, the generations in the tech world need to make a pact. A sort of realpolitik:

OK, we’re all going to keep our minds flexible and updated, right? I mean, if you’re going to stay in the work force forever, you’ll voraciously take on new ideas throughout your term, not just in the first 10 years. Maybe in exchange we’ll slow down a bit and focus on creating technology that allows you to work just 40 hours a week instead of 60. And we won’t say “no” next time you suggest Luby’s…. Okey-okey, and we’ll be less — just a little — snarky if you’re letting us play in your lawn.

Of course, we should probably be lining up to thank the generation ahead of us for working to pay the bills instead of bankrupting society. So, let me be the first: Thanks! …but now can we get on with some badly needed changes in core thinking?

Disclaimer: I actually like Luby’s. One word: okra. Bonus words: tarter sauce, deviled eggs.

Tags: agile, cellphones, generational, innovation, ip, lubys, networks, retirement, thewealthofnetworks, work.

Our man Klobe had a link to BarCampAustin. It’s Saturday, March 11th, 2006.

I’ve never been to a foo/bar/baz camp, so I figure with one in my town, I outta check this one out full-bore.

I proposed the session “Agile in the Real World: Wild Success, Terrible Failure, and Endless Yelling,” which I know many of you, dear readers, would love to give input on and participate in.

Hopefully several of you will work with me on that idea and show up at the camp as well.

Tags: austin, conferences.

Waterfall is plan driven — fixed requirements, estimated time and resources.

Agile is value driven — fixed time and resources, prioritized features.

“Would you rather have 100% of your features 80% complete or 80% of your features 100% complete?”

YAGNI says, it never makes sense for a developer to implement things that aren’t asked for. It is always an explicit waste of the company’s money. It does not save money over doing the same thing later: the cost is the same, just spent later, which is a good thing. Making the marketing guys grin will not put money in the company’s pocket.

Much of Chapman’s In Search of Stupidity is an extended proof of why you’d want to use YAGNI to keep developers (and fame-crazed execs) from running wild with features. Any developer who’s suffered through hours long design meetings and protracted “debates” about how baroque to make a system become fast adherents to YAGNI as well. See KISS and Good Enough Software.

On the other hand, we have flickr. And del.icio.us.* And, oh yeah, Mr. $434.26, the GOOG.

“Some of the most intense users”

Cauvin linked to a set of interesting notes on Google’s product and project management taken in Jan. 2003 by Evelyn Rodriguez. On the topic at hand were these tidbits:

• Employees (called Googlers) are best source for ideas at Google — also some of
  the most intense users of Google with well-formed opinions.
• We get a lot of our ideas from our users (including customer support queue)
• Next iteration [of Google News]: Didn’t make it to user studies because Googlers hated it.

While these notes are from 2003, that was obviously a critical time for Mr. $434.26, so the software development approach they were taking at the time is obviously of interest.

And what’s interesting is how involved the “Googlers” (man, I’d kill myself if I had to go by that moniker) themselves are in playing the role of customer. In the world of Agile, that’d be a big poop-on-that no-no: in most Agile implementations, the product owner is the mouth-piece of the God of Features, The Customer.

At the other end of the spectrum are developers who are writing and using the software: those “intense users” at Google.

Eating Your Own Dog Food

In software, we call this “eating your own dog food.” While I obviously have infinite respect for everything else good product managers do, the eating your own dog food principle is the most important one to follow, and yet the one least used.

If you’re working on some big, complex piece of enterprise software, for example, ask yourself, “would I want to install this and configure it?” Chances are, the answer is no: in an enterprise software shop, one of the hardest things to do is to find a running copy of your software (dev instances don’t count). No one wants to go through the hassle of installing that beast, which usually involves several hours, cryptic error codes, and dedicating a whole machine.

The CEO Test

Never mind the ever insulting “my mother/aunt/some clueless old lady” test; a product manager I know has a real answer for this problem: “The CEO should be required to install every piece of software their company makes.” In other words, the CEO would have such a terrible time installing most pieces of software that they’d use their bully-pulpit to make install easy.

Install is just the first part of your software (and as the first impression a customer gets, ask yourself, “how much time do we spend assuring that the install makes the best impression?”). The next step, of course, would be to require the CEO to use the application weekly, if not daily, with the same hopefully result.

The flip-side is that as a buyer of software, one of your first questions should be, “tell me how your company uses this software. Give me details.” If a company — esp. a large company that has all the same IT concerns as any other company — doesn’t use it’s own software, they’re sales people better be ready to dance up a storm to explain why.

Agile Dog Food?

Charles and I have talked about the lack of dog food eating in Agile quite a lot in the podcast (esp. in the first two episodes: 1 and 2). We’ve never come to a good conclusion, except that there’s something missing.

As the Google notes above indicate, employees are often one of the best sources for features, esp. if they’re users of the system. There’s certainly some shuckin’ and jivin’ that can be done to say that Agile thinking addresses this (we listen to customers, programmers could be customers, ergo we listen to programmers). But, as of yet, figuring out how to harness the innovative abilities of the developers is something that most Agile software development methodologies as practiced don’t do well. Of course, you could knock out the word “Agile” from that sentence, and it’d be even more true.

* My gut tells me that flickr and del.icio.us “allow” their developers to drive features. A couple of quick searches didn’t find anything to confirm it, so for now my proof is simply my instincts. For Google, on the other hand, I have the above “proof.”

I like his re-thinking of the cynical idea that layers of docs are a way for non-technical people to hide-out. Indeed, the docs do provide a sort of “common language” for the technical and non-technical people to talk in.

In fact, Sehlhorst’s post serves well as a “what you should be doing” reply to the problem of Document Mobiles.

Non-Technical People

As I’ve discussed these ideas with people over the last few days, I’ve realized that my definition of “non-technical” is broader than most folks think. For example, I don’t expect a “technical” person to know how to program, or even debug a hairy system problem. Those types of things are what “programmers,” or, at least, “system administrators” do.

What Do Technical People Know?

I do expect “technical” people, for example, to know things like:

• Right clicking on a web page is an extreamly weird and uncommon thing: like a 3 wheeled car.
• Changing the wording on a screen isn’t a big deal.
• When to use a GUI vs. a web app.
• Most aspects of web app usability and design, e.g.: methods of text overflow controlling and scrolling issues, or what “AJAX” means for making web apps more dynamic and realtime.

Of course, there are exceptions, variations, and thin lines to walk for those, and other, things depending on the system and requirements. But, being able to sort out those issues is the core of what makes someone “technical.”

Editors and Writers

To make an analogy: an editor isn’t a “writer” but they’re certainly in the business of helping put together articles, books, and stories. There’s a shit-load of shared knowledge between editors and writers. If you took some dude off the street and had them be an editor, chances are the best you’d get when they read the book would be “this books is long,” or, “I like this book.”

Non-technical people often give similar responses when confronted with demos of software: “could we move that header over a little to the left?”

An Example

I’ve had the pleasure to meet several “technical” people who aren’t programmers. For the issue at hand, Brandon stands out as a good example. He’s a product manager, though he did used to write code…in C++ I think of, all horrors. No wonder he stopped programming ;>.

Despite being a “mouse person” (as opposed to the “keyboard people” who type code), he knows his shit when it comes to software. For example, if you tell him you’re starting an application, he’ll throw a barrage of technical questions at you like:

• Are you bundling a database? Oracle? MySQL? Hypersonic? Can I switch out the database? Can I move the database?
• Is it a web application? Java? Ruby? Does it use JBoss? Just Tomcat? Rails?
• OK, do you have group permissions? Fine grained permissions? Permissions at all? LDAP? Active Directory?
• How about an XML over HTTP based API? On that note, do you implement the <insert your domain here> blah-blah data/process standard(s)?
• You doing water-fall or Agile? How long’s the iteration?
• Of course you’ll want to upgrade to the new Java. But do we really need to? Does it at least run faster?
• Users don’t want 3,000 nodes, events, or 3,000 of anything. Let’s give them 5.
• There is no right click on a web page. Shove that JavaScript up your ass.

(OK, maybe that last, ass part is what I’d say. Brandon has — what do they call it? — couth?)

The above is a good mix of “speeds and feeds and feature tick-lists” and to understanding how technologies are used and can be used, in both old and new ways.

Point being: he can actually add a shit-load of value to the process of writing kick-ass software. And that, of course, is the idea of a “technical” person. They don’t need to write code, but their work should directly inform and feed into the development and (if you’re into making money) monetization of code. Otherwise, there’s probably a degree of waste going on that could be cut out.