No Free Time

Given that there are Things That Need To Be Done:

If you don’t do something, someone else has to.

If you don’t do the work, you are creating work for someone else.

That’s why when you come to me with reasons why something can’t be done, you’re really saying you can’t be bothered figuring out how to get it done, and you want me to do it for you.

So don’t get pissy with me if I just tell you how to move forward instead of going ahead and doing the work for you.

Repeat after me: Some problems have no solution.

Some problems have no solution.

Some

problems

have

NO

SOLUTION.

I’ve been thinking about this lately.

Frequent dialogue

Communication within a team should be frequent. But more importantly it should be a dialogue – there is more than one voice contributing to the conversation. What I often see in meetings is one or two people dominating a discussion and not allowing others to pitch in. It’s especially concerning to me when I see people who simply do not notice that they are taking up more than their fair share of time and that others are waiting for them to stop talking so they can let their thoughts out. Unfortunately there’s no helping people like that, as far as I can see, it’s just something that pisses me off.

Trust; no fear

You can only participate helpfully and with compassion if you feel trusted and respected by your team-mates. The only way to promote that ethos is to trust and respect your team. It makes you vulnerable, but when these qualities manifest in a team great things can be accomplished. So it’s worth it. You must constantly strive to be gracious and humble, sometimes in the face of irrationality. It’s the only way, and this is a life lesson in itself.

A holistic view

A member of a team can do their job well if they only understand their role, but one must understand how they fit in to the larger process in order to excel. With this understanding you can shape your role to better serve the needs of your team and the business – and yourself. It also helps you with the previous point; when you have perspective on the team as a whole you also gain perspective on your individual priorities and assess whether your personal misgivings are truly important or not.

A GTD attitude

Getting Things Done. This is more complicated than it sounds, because it’s important to know what to get done. You don’t want to be micro-managed, and you shouldn’t be, because you’re trusted. Hone your judgement. Pay attention to but do not indulge your ego. Help your team to achieve its goals. Earn the trust and respect you expect from your team. Pick your battles. Map your faults. Strive to improve.

With a group of people who embody these qualities I can’t see how you can go wrong.

@shanselman mentioned my website the other day:

And check out the effect it had on my stats!

That’s right – 7 more visitors in one day! Damn!

Just saw this – Postal is a .Net library that uses the ASP.Net MVC view engine infrastructure for email templating. Slick.

http://aboutcode.net/2010/11/17/going-postal-generating-email-with-aspnet-mvc-view-engines.html

So I created some files in my TFS workspace, then forgot about them. Then the branch they were part of was deleted on the server. Oh no!

No I have a whole bunch of ‘Pending Changes’ where the files actually don’t exist in TFS *or* my computer (I deleted them locally too). I can’t Undo them – TFS tells me “No pending changes were found for [file]“. I can’t commit them then delete them. Basically I can’t get rid of them.

This is irrational. Basically TFS is being quite obstinate about it’s belief about the state of my workspace even in the face of the facts that:
a) the files physically don’t exist anymore
b) I *say* they don’t exist anymore

Why is TFS contradicting me? Why can’t TFS just believe me when I say “those files can be totally disregarded, they’re gone, I don’t care, *THIS* is what my workspace should look like”. Instead TFS replies “no it isn’t”.

“Yes it is”
“No it isn’t”
“Yes it is!”
“No it isn’t!”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMhj3X9lN1E]

Sigh.

I just updated my blog’s theme. No big deal.

Speculating about whether Google Buzz will ‘halve Facebook’s value‘ is an interesting diversion but not ultimately satisfying to me. As a developer I want to consider the ways in which Buzz can change the way the web works, and the way that users can use the web. I’m particularly interested in understanding Buzz’s place in the platform ecosystem, how it relates to Twitter and, of most curiousity to me, Wave.

So far Wave has not been the game-changer Google suggested it would be, but I’m not discounting it. As far as I’m concerned it’s Email 2, and Google would only have to roll out Wave as a ‘new version’ of the current Gmail to all of a sudden garner a lot of interest.

But again that’s pure speculation and not what I’m interested in writing about today. A particular aspect of these services has caught my attention, in particular the embedding features.

Mashable have added a ‘Buzz This’ button to their blog, which looks like a little hack on Google Reader:

<a rel="nofollow external" target="_blank"
href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=http://mashable.com/2010/02/10/google-buzz-contest/&amp;title=Google+Buzz+Contest%3A+Win+a+Google+Nexus+One&amp;srcURL=http://mashable.com/">
<img height="58" width="50" alt="" src="http://mashable.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-digg-this/i/google-buzz.png" original="http://mashable.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-digg-this/i/google-buzz.png">
</a>

The link provides a prompt to add a comment and post the item in your Buzz profile. It’s a really simple way to blogs to push their content out through Buzz.

Wave as it’s own embed strategy, which is to actually embed a Wave into a page, as @kevinblake demonstrates in this example post.

At the moment these two features are disparate, but they indicate an overriding theme that Google have hinted at before in rhetoric around Wave – a ubiquitous sharing and conversation platform across the web. Layers over the web that unify individual websites into a single whole. This is, to me anyway, an exciting idea.

I also see Buzz as a way to blog.  There’s currently no direct integration between WordPress and Buzz (nor with Blogger at this stage), and until Buzz offers the kind of features that make WordPress useful to me (stats, mainly) I wouldn’t use it as such. I would however cross-post, which is what I’m going to do today.

Google’s vision is just much bigger than Facebook’s. So perhaps Buzz could hurt Facebook, but I also imagine Google aren’t bothered. Facebook is one of the engines that keeps the web churning. Google on the other hand is more about infrastructure, they’re the banks that the river flows between. What would the river be without something to produce a current?

Well I’m finally back from an extended stay in my home country, New Zealand. The particulars that brought about my prolonged visit to NZ are boring and long-winded so I won’t go into them here. While I’m grateful to my employers for allowing me to work remotely while I was over there, I’m also thoroughly grateful to be back home, in London. Yes, my time back in NZ has brought the realisation into stark relief that London is, presently at least, home. It’s a nice feeling.

Moving swiftly to the point of this post, that being what I want to share.

It’s a testament to the connected world we live in that keeping up to date with the latest findings and speculations of scientific research no longer requires subscriptions to obscure publications and painstaking focus, analysis and consideration. Nowadays you can just have that stuff piped straight into your computer apparatus and consequently into your brain, in a much more passive and relaxing way. How, you may ask? YouTube!

I was introduced to Daniel Dennett a few weeks ago, and I’ve added him to my list of Great Human Beings. If you don’t know who he is, here’s a nice taster for his work: Ants, Terrorism, and the Awesome Power of Memes. It’s a quick TED lecture, so it’s a sample of his ideas which is suitable for untraumatic digestion, whatever your persuasion. If you watch that video and find yourself hungry for more, there are schools of in-depth, full-length lectures available on the YouTube also, so you know how to plunge further into this sumptuous mind-steak. This lecture for instance is a fuller expansion on the TED talk linked above. Let me google that for you.

I’d be interested in hearing from anyone at all in London who finds the above interesting and would enjoy meeting up to, er, talk utter nonsense about it? Leave a comment or hit me on twitter. If there are, say, half a dozen such doomed souls I’ll organise something.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/07/five-things-googles-chrome-os-will-do-for-your-netbook/

But will I be able to play games on it?