Kopanas

I just have this bug. I love podcasts and I really want to take a crack at producing one. I know I am late to the game but if a couple passionate and opinionated people would like to try it out with me at worse it can be a lot of fun… at best… it can be a lot of fun!

Video? Audio? I presently consume much more audio podcasts then video. I guess it depends on the subject and if video would add any benefit to the people listening/watching the podcast. Plus, I was always told I have a face for radio! :-)

But what can we cover? Stuff I am passionate about: the web, interaction design, the software process, useful branding, how to run a business, startups, the scene in Montreal, my computer, human sexuality… (hey, people told me I had to find a hobby outside of computers so I choose human sexuality!)

Does anyone else have a passion for podcasts here? Anyone ever consider starting a podcast?

I listen to a half dozen podcasts on average per week and if their were more that caught my attention I would probably listen to more!

Since, like the looser I am, I love podcasts and talk radio so much I decided to give Audible a try. Using the following link: http://audible.com/macbreak I was able to sign-up and get one audio book for free. I downloaded “The Cluetrain Manifesto”. Let’s see if I prefer listening to books rather then reading them!

“When it comes to code, I am more anal than a good friend of mine who is gay. (And he likes that joke so to hell with the cry babies)”

I just love geeks!

from the RailsJitsu blog

You need to watch this music video… but more importantly you need to read the words that you will find in Dip.fiction written by Black Eyed Peas front man Will.i.am that explains why he produced this music video! I am inspired. I have hope.

I think about the future of business models a lot. The Internet has had a large impact on business, especially on any business that has historically made money off selling content in the form of information (news & articles), entertainment (music & movies) and products (software).

Kevin Kelly, of Wired fame, has written a really good article on how companies will make money off selling things that are in essence free to copy.

In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values. I call them “generatives.” A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.

→ “Better then Free” by Kevin Kelly

I sure hope so. I remember about 6 months ago looking at subscribing to the magazine but at the time, if I remember correctly, it was going to cost me more then a hundred dollars a year for six issues and I just could not swallow the cost.

To my surprise, I just found out that the January + February 2008 issue of ACM’s Interactions Magazine is available to download for free so I am going to take advantage of the opportunity to check out an issue! I am writing this while I sent the issue to the printer. Ahh… it is finished… commmmmiiinnnngggggggg….

→ Download ACM Interactions January + February 2008 Issue

UPDATE: Maybe you won’t want to print it out… I don’t know if they did this on purpose but when you print out the magazine in black & white it is really hard to read the text. This sucks!

Tanya and Aran have been raving and quoting Dr. Anita Sands, VP of Innovation & Process Design at RBC, ever since they heard her speak at the Canadian Marketing Association’s Digital Marketing Conference that was held a couple months back!

Tanya just sent me a very short clip with Anita expressing what she wanted people to take away from her presentation she gave that day:

“Innovation is about adding new value to clients, it is not about new things necessarily. Go into wherever it is you work and just work with the assumption that there is a better way to do something you are already doing. There is a better way to look at something you already know. Always challenge the status quo. Always drive for constant improvement. That is innovation.”

The way Anita sees innovation I see the right way to grow software. From choosing the next feature to implement (what brings the most value to the clients relative to the cost), to examinug how I can improve the code every time I open up a file by reducing it’s complexity and making the code more expressive in less lines of code to improving how we work so we get more joy of doing what we love.

It has always driven me nuts that people don’t speak more often in terms of adding value to their clients lives and questions the status quo. Way to go Anita, RBC is really lucky to have someone like Dr. Anita Sands working for them.

Linda, Skrud, I think I would like to see Anita at CUSEC 2009, I think SOEN students would learn a lot from her!

→ view a short clip of Dr. Anita Sands

I have always had a dog or cat in my life for as long as I can remember and now I presently have one dog and two cats. I probably care more about Mr. Big, Fedra and Eros more then the large majority of people in my life. To quote my Dad, “they are my kids”.

When the story of Micheal Vick running a dogfighting ring came out with detailed information about what was happening at these dogfighting events only two things came to mind: I hope Micheal Vick gets gang-raped daily in jail and more importantly, what is going to happen to these poor dogs.

I was worried that all the dogs would be put to sleep for safety reasons but a big smile was put on my face this morning when I came across a expose DogTime did on Bad Rap, a rescue group for Pit Bulls out of California, that took in ten of the Pit Bulls from Micheal Vicks home. It is really crazy to see how far these dogs have come:

I can imagine taking in these dogs into your home can be really scary but I have outmost admiration for anyone who is taking that risk. I am sure they are being rewarded ten fold by the amount of happiness the dog brings to their life.

You made my day Bad Rap, you made my day! :-)

Disclaimer: I do not wish rape onto anyone… I can’t even fathom how difficult being raped would be on someone. I used the term rape really just to depict how friggn angry I was when I heard what was happening to those dogs.

“I strongly recommend that you find a vocation in your life where you just really enjoy the act itself. Not just the results, not just the external incentives. The actual work. There’s not enough time to spend it doing anything else.”

From David Heinemeier Hansson blog post “In it for the long haul“

But seriously, are you doing what you love? No? Time to change. No friggn excuses. Just do it!

Every year it is funny how all the keynote presenters topics end up overlapping in such a way that it makes each one of their messages that much more powerful. A smart ass would say that it is probably because of the theme we choose but you would be surprised how many presenters don’t even take into consideration the theme of the conference. That is not a bad thing though, we choose these presenters because they are smarter then us, they need to talk about what they think will have the most impact on us.

So, gros-aux-modeaux, these are the three messages that really stuck with me this year at CUSEC 2008.

1) If You Are Passionate About Software Then To Be Happy You Have To Work For A Software Company

I think this was mentioned in at least three keynote presentations at CUSEC and if I remember correctly Joel Spolsky also recently mentioned this in one of his blog posts.

I have worked both in companies whose product and main source of revenue was software they developed (both desktop and web-based applications) and I have also worked in companies where we developed software to support the business.

I have to say their is a significant difference. If you work for a software company the majority of the focus is on the product. The company lives and dies by the quality of the software. The software developers are respected and play an important role in the process. The application is constantly being improved and even the smallest changes that improve the user experience are appreciated. (If you want to work for a software company make sure you choose one that is lead by someone who comes from a tech background and has a passion and appreciation for software development.)

If you work for a company where you just build software to support the business you are looked upon as “just a developer”. You are lucky if they give you a say in what you are building. There is a project manager, business analyst(s), internal customers, network engineering team, architect, standards compliance office, etc. You as the developer are the last person they want to talk to and they tend to hate to deal with you. That is one reason, in my opinion, why many companies have outsourced the developer role to India. There is ton of politics and a ton of red tape.

What I personally hate the most about the enterprise software world is that their is good enough. In my book their is no such thing as good enough, there might be good enough for this iteration because it is an improvement over the last from the user perspective but we are still going to continue to improve it in the next iteration. If a user is forced to use an application that does not put a smile on their face then my work is not done!

Just look at it this way. For those out their who work in large corporation and use both enterprise software and traditional public applications… which ones do they talk positively about… which one puts a smile on their face? That is what I thought. The process to develop enterprise software is flawed!

(I have to say my experience has not been that bad developing enterprise software. I have been very lucky that my bosses/co-workers have allowed me to improve the way we work and the way we look at software but it took a lot of effort and earning their trust from my side.)

2) Writing Might Be Even More Important Then Programming

Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror fame really drove this message home for me this year. If you are lucky, a couple people might read the code you write but thousands, and if you are as lucky as him, tens or hundreds of thousands might read what you have to say. The pen is mightier then he code.

And it is Jeff’s presentation that drove me to start writing again. For a couple of reasons: 1) I need to work on my writing skills, writing is probably the hardest thing for me to do; 2) Writing will help me structure my thoughts, it is one thing to have your thoughts in your head which always seem perfect, but once you put them on paper you find all the flaws in your reasoning and writing gives you the opportunity to refine them; and (3) I am extremely opinionated and want to test my ideas out, I want feedback on them so I can take my ideas and thoughts even further.

3) Concurrency Is A Problem… And Nobody Has A Good Solution

Why is concurrency a problem? If you have not noticed the frequency of CPUs has not increased significantly over the past 3-4 years because chipmakers have run into the laws of physics. So what chip makers, like Intel and AMD, have been doing is putting more core’s into each CPU and in some cases more then one multi-core CPU into the same machine.

That is sweet from a geeky level but now the problem is that the large majority of applications have not been written to take advantage of multi-core multi-CPU systems. Having programs designed to run on single-core single-CPU systems run on multi-core multi-cpu systems do not directly benefit from the new architecture. (The new architecture can indirectly benefit the application performance since the applications running can be split between the cores but a single application can not run on multiple cores to speed up processing time.)

And that is for when we want to fun an application on a single system. As we move towards cloud computing we might have dozens to thousands of computers available to work on any mathematical calculation you are throwing at it. If we want to successfully move to cloud computing we have to re-think the way we architect the applications that we write. We need to move from thinking sequentially to thinking concurrently… and that is not an easy task my friend…

What messages hit home the most for you from CUSEC 2008?