Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Productivity

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Productivity before elegance

In this article, webservicespipeline.com discusses the rate of adoption of .NET compared to J2EE.  Its conclusions are quite suprising.  It seems that the rate of .NET adoption continues to grow at quite a rate, and puts usage on a par or slightly greater than J2EE.  It puts .NET success mainly down to increaded developer productivity and ease of deployment and management. 

This is signifiacnt for three main reasons:

  1. In the hard nosed business of IT software development, even with all of Microsoft’s woes, when it comes down to making business decisions, many IT companies still seem to make decisions based on rational criteria, and long term strategy and architectural elegance or portability don’t win out in many cases.

  2. There is likely to be a lot of new software developed for the Windows platform

  3. Mono is going to be a pretty important Open Source project

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3 Monitors is the way to go!

I have been quite happy with my two monitor setup at home,  but using maxivista I am now able to drive three monitors from my main desktop PC.  This is just great.  I can now have my email in one, my RSS feeds in another, be using Office in another...

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RSS and it’s impact on productivity.

I just read this post by Greg that describes the impact RSS has had on his productivity,  it’s as if I wrote it myself so for once I will repeat it here in full!

My RSS reader saves me about 300 hours a week

The one about how using RSS opens up information to me in a way that is so reliable I could only do it this way manually if there were two of me…

Okay, so maybe it’s a little exaggerated. But seriously, I read an incredible amount of information these days. So much more than I ever did, and a lot of it on the Internet. Not only that, but I get the information I need (or want) so fast now that I can practically always act faster than most people when news breaks. Research that used to take hours and hours of searching and browsing now takes just minutes. I’m consuming much, much more information and doing so in much, much less time. What I can accomplish today in the information gathering department would have taken two of me just a year or so ago, before I found the real beauty of RSS.

I use RSS feeds …

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Get it working then make it better.

I have recently been doing some research into Open Source, its an interesting subject from so many perspectives.  That’s not what this article is about but if you want to follow up on it I recommend The Success of Open Source.  Anyway reading this book prompted me to think a bit more about daily builds.  Yes I know I already posted on this topic a few days ago but I can’t resist linking it with the Linux philosophy which can be summarised as:

 

“get it working then make it better”  

 

Now this really appeals to me for a few reasons:

 

  1. I am a pretty poor programmer, a reasonable designer and a pretty good architect, (hopefully :-)).  So I incline to grand concepts, but I can never get them to work in code unless I start really simply.  In fact in most cases I start with someone elses code first and hack it around until I have proved the basic concepts.

  2. My real background is in systems integration so I never expect anything to work as documented.  In fact when I started programming with VB 2, I fell found of a whole …

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We the media.

Dan Gillmor has written a book about how the web and blogging in particular are changing the nature of journalism.  Its available online here there is a companion blog here.  This is the marketing spin:

Grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media’s monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation. In We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, nationally known business and technology columnist Dan Gillmor tells the story of this emerging phenomenon, and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make and consume the news.

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Daily builds.

Another link to Joel this time on daily builds another of my favorite techniques.  Many people rebel against the idea, especially project managers who like to see release schedules and milestones.  There is nothing in the daily build concept that contradicts good project management process however, its just that the progress towards milestones is tested daily, so that the chance of suprises are reduced and the dependency on key individuals is reduced.  Here is a snipit but please read the whole article if you develop and IT system, and take note that the concept can be applied to all types of development not just software.  I used the daily build concept on one of my projects and I think it was a great success.

Here are some of the many benefits of daily builds:

  1. When a bug is fixed, testers get the new version quickly and can retest to see if the bug was really fixed.

  2. Developers can feel more secure that a change they made isn’t going to break any of the 1024 versions of the system that get produced, without actually having an OS/2 box on their desk to test on.

  3. Developers who check in their changes right …

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Blackberry and Personal Productivity.

I have recently given up my Blackberry for economic reasons, and spent the money I saved on an IPAQ which I convinced myself would be more, “life enhancing”,  after a month I think I made the right decision but I do miss my Blackberry a lot and still feel it would add a lot of value to my work/home life if I still had it.  A recent report brings the issue into clear focus:

Research In Motion has today published the results of a survey it commissioned with Ipsos Reid into the benefits of using BlackBerry handhelds. Among the report’s conclusions is the compelling statistic that employers recuperate on average 188 working hours a year, or more than a working month(*1) for every member of staff they provide with a BlackBerry handheld. Employees also benefit from the improved productivity enabled by BlackBerry, salvaging on average more than 108 hours a year in personal time. This is the equivalent to more than thirteen days extra holiday a year (*2).

A 2004 DTI survey highlighted that 87% of employees would like more time to spend with friends and family and that nearly four in ten adults (38%) between the ages of 35 …

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Perfection – or good enough.

Every month or so someone tells me my work is too detailed, or that I am a perfectionist.  Ironically every week or so someone also tells me that I have not covered some topic or other in sufficient detail.  However the, “its too detailed”, or “too complex”, audience tends to be the one that pays the bills so they are more important to listen to.  I came across this nice little post on the subject, and I have extracted a snip from it here:

One important lesson I’ve learned about designing software is that sometimes it pays to smother one’s perfectionist engineer instincts and be less ambitious about the problems one is trying to solve. Put more succintly, a technology doesn’t have to solve every problem just enough problems to be useful. Two examples come to mind which hammered this home to me; Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web and collaborative filtering which sites like Amazon use.

However I am not a person who likes to compromise so I am gradually working towards a way of solving this problem, and its pretty simple and obvious.  Stop writing documents and start writing web sites.  This post is an example, (although not a …

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Outlook – Domino Connecter.

I was seduced, (for the third time), into installing the Microsoft Outlook Domino Connecter for the following reasons:

 

  1. I wanted a single place to manage my RSS feeds, personal email, tasks, calendar and work email

  2. My trial of mNotes completes in a few days and I needed to decide whether to buy it, or whether I could use Active Sync alone, (as my Local Notes replica would now also be in Outlook)

  3. I would get a unified search environment, (because X1 would search my Notes data, which would now be in Outlook)

  4. Graham said it works fine for him

 

I have tried it twice before, and had to give up both times, despite considerable effort.  I kept telling myself the problems were to do with the sequence I did things, by interactions with mNotes, X1 etc, because I did not leave it alone – i.e. I tried to use it!  Having tried again a few times these are some of the problems I have had:

 

  1. Synchronisation is painfully slow

  2. It does not synchronise according to a regular schedule, it just does it in the background, but not as frequently as I would like

  3. It affects …