Thought I would repost something I wrote for my companies blog here, it’s exciting news and I thought it would be appropriate to share!
In the design and development world there is a lot of talk about constraints and embracing them to foster creativity. I love this movement and subscribe to it (at least I try to).
One thing that has slowly crept up on me though is that this type of attitude is starting to gain some real ground in the music world. Historically it would seem that sometime after the 60’s and the era of the power trio, musicians decided that adding more to bands was the way to go. Another guitar player here, a keyboard there, heck throw in another drummer and a triangle player for good measure! and even more so lately you have big bands like The Go Team (7+ members) and The Arcade Fire (5+ members). Now I don’t have anything against any of these bands (in fact I love the go team and the arcade fire), but it seems like the culture of bigger is better is getting out of hand!
Now I know in recent history the popularity of electronic music has soared and often times is a single person mixing records or composing using a computer this doesn’t seem as revolutionary to me as the advent of small rock bands.
Lately, and especially with new rock type bands you are starting to see a lot of 3 and 2 person setups
These bands are realizing that great music can be made with less, embracing the constraints (whether by choice or otherwise) and not only succeeding but excelling at what they do.
Where have you seen people embracing constraints? Or creating constraints to foster creativity? I think it’s a fascinating topic and would love to hear more about it.
Tomorrow, the Mozilla foundation is releasing the latest version of the Firefox browser. While they are at it they are also trying to set a record for the most software downloads in a 24 hour period. If you aren’t using Firefox tomorrow would be a great time to try it, it really is one of (if not the) best browsers you can use.
I just had to post this video I came across the other day, it’s a google tech talk and the presenter is Aza Raskin (Son of Jeff Raskin, the guy who started the macintosh project for apple). He’s also one of the founders of Humanized who make the most excellent Enso launcher product, a company and product that I am a huge fan of.
Anyways, this is a fantastic video on the topic of “Humane Computing” and I think it’s well worth your time to sit down and watch it all the way through.
Max Poole is holding a contest at his blog to give away a copy of Bamboo 2.0 (continuous integration software) and a copy of Slick Edit (suite of add-ons for visual studio)
I’ve never used the Slick Edit product but I’ve got lot’s of experience using Atlassian products (Jira and confluence) and would love to get my grubby mitts on a copy of bamboo since I am a huge fan of the other Atlassian products I’ve used.
So head on over and find out how you can win some of this software (hint, writing a blog post about it get’s you 25 tickets in this raffle style give away)
For the past 2 years the amazing sales team that I work with at Q4 Web Systems have ventured out to San Diego for the annual NIRI conference. It’s a really important event for us and it’s always great to hear about it when the team get’s back.
This morning while I was going through google reader, I noticed this post from IR Web Report talking about some of the newer social networks (twitter and friendfeed specifically) and NIRI’s presence on both of those social networking sites. There is a friendfeed room dedicated to this years conference and you can follow niri08 on twitter.
I was really excited to see this, as part of my job going to these events doesn’t really make sense for me personally but I’m always really excited to hear about the event afterwards. This year it looks like I’ll be able to follow the event a little more closely and share in the experience even though I won’t physically be there.
It’s great to see these newer technologies playing a role in business sector that’s just starting to realize some of the potential of these new networks, it goes a long way to prove how valuable some of these services can be.
So as part of our company alignment and implementing the Rockefeller Habits at Q4 our quarterly theme was moving rocks together. We set aside a room with a video camera and plates with peoples names on them, if you felt the urge to recognize someone you could go into the room and record a short video message and give the person a rock. The end result would be that someone would *win* and get a prize.
Well we watched all the video’s today, which was hilarious and very very inspiring at the same time. It’s amazing that you can work with a group of people every day for months and years on end and sometimes never know what they are doing, seeing those people recognizing and rewarding there peers is a great way to better understand what the people you work with do on a daily basis.
Anyways as part of the moving rocks theme, the person with the most rocks at the end of the month would win a prize, and much to my surprise I was the winner this month (the first month). I’ve got to say it’s a great feeling being recognized and rewarded by your peers (this months prize was 100 at Canyon Creek). Even though it was me that won this month I think this is an amazing step for a small company to take and really makes me feel appreciated and valued.
One thing I personally have to do for the next month is give out more rocks, I want to make sure someone else wins next month and this has just inspired me to give those rocks out. If anyone at work is reading this, you guys are all an integral part of an amazing team, YOU ROCK!
I was working on some code today and was getting ready to do a check in and I thought to myself, should I be checking this code in? I made tiny change that would end up being part of a bigger refactoring of some tests I was writing, I wasn’t sure if I would be working on the refactoring again in the short term so I figured I would check in what I had done, even though the unit of work was small, it was done and left the project in a running valid state.
The longer you wait, the more painful it will be
Kinda like ignoring that aching tooth, or that tweak in your back, it can wait it’s not that serious right now is it? I’ve seen much of the same attitude when it comes to working with source control systems. Developers will work on a task and not check in any of there changes for sometimes weeks. This often time’s leads to code conflicts and merging tasks because the developer waited so long to check in.
Check in early, check in often
The project I am working on at the moment is a small wrapper for the 37 Signals backpack api. It’s just me working on it right now so conflicts are unlikely, but i still check in any work that i have done when I leave the application in a valid state, even if the complete task isn’t done. For me it feels like the right thing to do, I can be sure that the repository is always in a state that works (if someone else ever felt like contributing) and it also helps me sleep at night knowing that if for some reason my laptop decided to off itself during the night, my project is still there ready and waiting for me.
Is the reason why I haven’t been posting here, I’m working on building a c# wrapper for the 37 Signals Backpack API. Nothing terribly exciting yet (I’m basically just implementing the services per the api docs). I’m hosting this at Google Code and this will be an open source project. I’m also taking the time to try out doing Test Driven Development. I’m pretty happy with how that’s going so far, but it’s a new process for me so it’s taking some time (though I’m happy to report i have 33 tests for 13 implemented methods!)
Future plans include (some might happen, all might never happen)
If you are interested in this at all please have a look at the code and let me know if you are interested in using it or contributing. Oh and any / all feedback is great too.
100 Pushups
I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled on the 100 Push ups Training Program, but it immediately caught my attention as something I could integrate into my existing exercise program (note: my current exercise program consists of nothing more then waking up every morning). The frequency and pace of the program seemed like something I could handle so I’m going to get started. You basically go through a steadily increasing routine of pushups, 3 times a week for 6 weeks, I think it’s an achievable goal and I have a plan for sticking to it.
One of my favourite blogger’s Leo Babauta of Zen Habits offers some great advice on staying motivated to achieve a goal, basically the idea is that to hold myself accountable to this goal I’ll post a weekly update on my progress through the program.
Here’s to the gun party at the end!