Matt O’ Rama

I do like my profession, I don’t like my job

To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one’s bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion. I am very thankful.

The Mythical Man Month, p. 291

via CLOSED-LOOP: The passionate developer: I do like my profession, I don’t like my job.

This is great stuff. I’ve always felt the way Fred Brooks talks about in that quote and this post captures a lot of how I feel about my job as well. Well worth reading.

If architects had to work like software developers

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Monochrome Blog – If architects had to work like software developers.

Painfully true. Very painfully.

I’m trying to decide if sending this to our product owner would be informative or insulting.

Eye Candy IS A Critical Business Requirement

Great presentation. Goes very fast too, don’t be scared of the number of slides.

Tr.im and The Short URL Conundrum

I had been writing a post about how my new favorite URL shortener, Tr.im, was shutting down and stranding all my precious links when just this evening they apparently decided to keep the service running. I should be happy about this but I still feel weird about the whole thing. So in place of the original boohoo post about Tr.im, I’m going to think out loud about the URL shortener business/ecosystem for a bit.

I’ve been thinking for awhile that Google should play a role in this URL shortener ecosystem. They’re big enough not to go away and they maintain such a central role in the web anyway I think they’d be a good default choice. But they’ve shown no interest in getting into the shortener business as a competitor to Tr.im, Bit.ly, and the rest so I was thinking they should take the role of a shortener warehouse. If a service like Tr.im goes away, they transfer the list of links and short codes to Google and the URLs keep working at a minimum. Apparently Bit.ly is trying to get something like this going but I have a feeling since they’re in the business, their competitors aren’t going to sign on. And I fear Tr.im has helped sow some amount of distaste for Bit.ly with their blog posts about Bit.ly’s favored status with Twitter so that isn’t going to help.

But narrowing this down to Tr.im, I’m trying to decide if I should start using them again. I like them much more than Bit.ly, but this incident hasn’t helped them at all. They said originally they couldn’t make a business out of Tr.im if Twitter was going to explicitly favor Bit.ly. This is obviously still true. They’re not on firmer ground now than before, they’ve just made a bunch of noise. The tempest-in-a-Twitter they caused with their frankly somewhat offensively curt shutdown messages may end up causing Twitter to rethink their One URL Shortener To Rule Them All stance but if the favoritism really comes from their VCs and board members personal connections, I doubt it. They have to know if they starve out Tr.im and the rest, people will grumble but in the end we’ll all move on.

According to some stats I saw, Tr.im was a minuscule percentage of the number of links on Twitter. I think the brouhaha about Tr.im shutting down was really a reaction to the realization that one of these services could just evaporate almost overnight. And that isn’t going to help them survive but it may kick some kind of warehousing service like I mentioned above into gear. They may have been tricked by feelings of importance when really they were just the canary in the mine, in the end serving only as a warning to everybody else.

So Tr.im hasn’t been saved by this, the creators just caved and the service will limp along not making money like it wasn’t doing before. And on top of this, their willingness just to shutter the service with very little notice doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Until people start hearing news about money coming into the service or of a buyer swooping in where one hadn’t been willing to swoop before, users like me are going to switch if just to minimize the number of links a shutdown would endanger. They may have just doomed themselves to a more public death later with this resurrection.

Just Enough MBA to Be a Programmer

I’ve always been curious about what MBAs really do. In my weaker moments, I’ve even thought that the only reason people got an MBA was to demand a higher salary or to “move up the corporate ladder” into some management job. What did these MBA ninjas actually learn in school? Would having an MBA help me better understand how I affected my company’s bottom line? Although I had the curiosity, I never acted on it. This changed when another programmer recommended that I read The Ten-Day MBA by Steven Silbiger.

via Moserware: Just Enough MBA to Be a Programmer.

This book looks like something both my wife and I would both like. I’m like Jeff Moser here, I’m curious about what people actually learn doing this stuff but not enough to read a bunch of boring books full of business-speak. $12 for an overview sounds good to me. It never hurts to be more well-rounded as a team member in any case. Even if I just get an overview of the financial pieces and the jargon people use, it’ll be worth it.

My wife is also in the process of setting up a business with a couple of partners to market some software she wrote. Even though she’s the programmer and her partners are the sales/business end of things, it’s never good to cede control over something that important to somebody else with no understanding of what they’ll be doing.

Jeff does a great job of going over the various sections of the book and what you’ll learn in each and I applaud him for the effort. If you’re cheap, you can probably get by with just Jeff’s post, to be honest. But an overview of an overview is one level of remove too much for me. I read fast anyway so it’ll be time well spent I think. Plus, when somebody asks me something about business I can say I read a book about MBAs, not that I read a blog post about a book about MBAs. :)

The Management Myth

The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.”

via The Atlantic Online | June 2006 | The Management Myth | Matthew Stewart.

Excellent article. I didn’t expect the veer into philosophy there near the end but I enjoyed it. Good stuff.

8 rules to discourage your employees

If you are committed to pissing off your employees, but can’t quite find the way to do so, you can follow these rules and achieve success.

via 8 rules to discourage your employees | Geek Stuff Daily.

This is one of those things that’s not funny haha, but funny sad.

I’ve been thinking more and more about management recently after the JavaPosse Roundup. I’ll go into that more later but it’s funny how these kind of management things keep popping up since I’ve come back.

Making Albuquerque into a real Silicon Mesa

It would be a pretty cheap experiment, as civil expenditures go. Pick 30 startups that eminent angels have recently invested in, give them each a million dollars if they’ll relocate to your city, and see what happens after a year. If they seem to be thriving, you can try importing startups on a larger scale.

via Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe..

When I first moved to Albuquerque almost 15 years ago now, I heard talk of it being “Silicon Mesa“. For a giant geek like me, that was exciting talk. Especially since Albuquerque was Podunk as far as I was concerned, having grown up in San Diego. (I don’t think of it that way any more, so you don’t have to send me hate comments.) But that talk was just hype, basically. We have good tech companies here but nothing like a Silicon Valley culture I don’t think.

This idea of Paul Graham’s though, could make Albuquerque into a real Silicon Mesa.

It will be easier in proportion to how much your town resembles San Francisco. Do you have good weather? Do people live downtown, or have they abandoned the center for the suburbs? Would the city be described as “hip” and “tolerant,” or as reflecting “traditional values?” Are there good universities nearby? Are there walkable neighborhoods? Would nerds feel at home? If you answered yes to all these questions, you might be able not only to pull off this scheme, but to do it for less than a million per startup.

Albuquerque meets all of these criteria, to some extent. We’re tolerant and pretty hip, even according to outsiders like Richard Florida of The Rise of the Creative Class. UNM is a good school, and New Mexico Tech is a great geek school and only an hour away in a city nobody in their right mind wants to live in (sorry Socorro, it’s true). There are a lot of walkable neighborhoods and downtown is coming along nicely. Plus, we have an extremely low cost of living and the weather is livable, even for people like me that grew up in shorts and tshirts.

A plan like this could not only attract startups from outside of New Mexico, but it would certainly help a few startups stay here instead of living for the West Coast. Even for New Mexico, this isn’t a lot of money. Paul talks about giving the startups anywhere from half a million to a million and I think we could do a lot closer to half. That would buy a good standard of living for the founders, and hardware easily. The deal could even include the big data center, BigByte, and give the startups a discount on internet access since they’ll almost certainly be internet companies. Sheesh, give me and some of my friends half a million and we’d have all kind of stuff built in no time. :)

I would absolutely love to see something like this happen, just to get that startup feel in town. That kind of energy would help really get downtown kicked into high gear and would help the areas around UNM as well for sure. Yeah, it would cost millions but unless the absolute wrong startups were chosen, I don’t think it could help but give back to the city.

If one of the 3 people who reads this happens to become the next mayor, get Paul Graham on the phone first thing and get this thing started!

New Digital Rights Protests, Just Like The Old Ones

Digg on HDDVD “key” posts

Recently one of the keys that is used to encrypt the new high-def DVD discs was found and released online. Using this key you can decrypt the movie and put it on a computer or otherwise get around the idiotic restrictions the movie companies have put on the discs. This is obviously troubling to the movie companies since the HD encryption schemes were said to be “un-hackable”. hahaha.

So this key has been floating around and the movie companies have started issuing what are called “DMCA notices” to websites printing the key. These notices are the result of a law, the DMCA, that says you can’t get around restrictions on copyrighted stuff. This is a horrible law and has been used in even more horrible ways to restrict many people from doing various projects, giving speeches, etc. The notice says you have to take down the offending material and the website Digg had been fighting its users all day about them trying to post the key on the site. Finally, Digg relented and has stopped fighting its users and will not comply with the DMCA notices in this case. Good on them I say.

But what interests me about this is how similar it is to the situation a few years ago around the DVD key that was released which allowed the creation of applications to read regular DVDs, again to the chagrin of the movie industry. That also involved a released key, basically just a series of numbers, and attempts to take down the number. However, that was before the DMCA. Before the industry had a real legal tool to use to try to get people to remove this number from their website. In the DVD case, they tried and failed to use the standard copyright infringement against people, which didn’t work and which backfired just as in this case as people who would have never heard or cared about the key heard about the controversy. Now that the movie industry has the DMCA though, they could have actually stopped this information from being released. That’s the danger of the DMCA, it is a tool used solely to information from flowing. Has the key been found by an academic who set out to “release” it in a paper or a presentation, they could have been stopped. People like to think that information is always going to be replicated infinitely out on the net but with laws like the DMCA, the information can be stopped before it even reaches the net.

Also, with the previous DVD key release, the geek community rallied behind the release of the key. Tshirts were made with the key numbers on them, people even got tattoos of the key. Now though, the DMCA forces sites like Digg to fight its own users on this stuff. It’s not like the guys at Digg were itching to rile up their users or delete stuff from their site. They had to, under the law. Even if the notices end up being bogus (as some people are saying since the key is really just a number), Digg had to remove it.

The DMCA is a gift to big media companies and serves no one but them. It stops innovation, silences speech, holds back progress, and much more. This incident should serve as yet another example of why the DMCA needs to be repealed. I hope that the big blowup about this with Digg and the many other sites involved leads to real change. Eventually the DVD key issue went away and a great many new projects and applications sprung up around DVDs. The industry will surely fight for their “right” to stop people from knowing this key so they can try to control HD-DVDs a little longer but just like with DVDs, they’ll fail in spite of the new legal club they have to bludgeon people with.

Here’s a good article on the DMCA notices

Buzz about Co-Working

Well, this is a good sign I’d think: BusinessWeek is covering co-working, which I’ve written about before. The first time I saw an ad featuring a reference to the internet without specifically explaining what it was, just assuming you’d know, I knew that was a marker for the future. Even though I doubt I’ll ever get to do my own co-working place here in Albuquerque it sure is fun to think about and hopefully this article is a sign of things to come.

Also on that note, a friend of my wife’s (thanks Kevin!) sent me a link to a local place here in town that is sort of a cross between a co-working place and a regular executive suite and when I was at the gym the other day I saw an ad on TV for the place. It’s called Office Alternatives and while it’s a little more high end than I was thinking for co-working (they have receptionists and a lot of other amenities that I’m sure are musts for people in suits but not for geeks who need a place to put their laptop), it’s a step in that direction.