So everyone knows what song I’m talking about when I say, the surf song in pulp fiction. Maybe a few people can actually say which song that is or by whom its played. (kp, I know you know) Well its called Misirlou by Dick Dale.

That’s beside the point. The point is, there are things that are so ubiquitous on their own, that the creator becomes irrelevant.

The obama poster that was actually someone’s creation, has no attachment to him anymore, its the obama logo. Obama didn’t hire this artist. This artist created this piece, and now its so ubiquitous, who created it and how it was conveyed is collateral damage to the mission.

Should software strive for that kind of success? I think this is the ultimate point of what the free software movement should strive for. However, I don’t think they go about it in a subtle enough way. They attack organizations for making software that is not free.

Why aren’t they making software that becomes ubiquitous, to the point that it has a social/cultural place,  it so happens its free. Let free be the byproduct, not the ubiquity, and the world will naturally use free software.

I attended  The Central Ohio Day Of .Net. It turns out, there were a lot of progressive talks there. Some had less than an once of .net in them. It was refreshing to go to a technology gathering that was for an audience that spoke to that audience. There were ruby and python talks, testing talks, scaled caching talks. All things that are emerging solutions to problems we all have.

The guys who spoke were mostly from a .net background, which made the talks easily consumable. This gathering was a template for how a conference should be run. It was efficient and only 1 day. The talks were all “audited” by at least 1 other speaker so that the community’s leaders can hone their craft.

One of my favorite speakers was Leon from edgecase (@fallenrogue) who spoke on javascript. The stand alone language that has little to nothing to do with the DOM.

A good time was had by all. I enjoyed meeting everyone.  Hope to see you all again soon at another great community focused event.

So apparently a lot of people feel this way. Not only that, they have stated this opinion before, just not in those words. Apple is basically built around the concept. The only thing they value is execution.

Here is a video to a recent talk by David Heinemeier Hansson - FOWA Dublin 2009 on the subject.

PS. I was going to post this yesterday, but amidst all the foolery I thought that serious posts could wait a day. and the vimeo embedded player didn’t play nice with my theme, sorry.

Going along with my hypothesis that authoring code and books are similar. When you are in a position to write creatively; you should be having fun.
Stephen King, does not write thrilling fiction books because he was told to by his publisher. He certainly does not need to write any more books to be notable. Yet he cranks out thick books on a regular basis. Why? Because he has fun creating.

Most people enjoy creating things. I do. Obviously the high school counselor speech is to do that for a living. Most people are not in a position to just get paid for the thing that they like to create. There is also no money in being an apprentice creator. Given that most people will come from a non-creative, rigid even, background into creative efforts. Its good to remind ourselves that the creative things we do, should be fun.

There is no one telling you how to write it. If you don’t like it next year, but it is still running and working for whatever purpose it serves, you can change it or leave it. Most likely no one will be complaining, since it was just a little thing you created. If people start making use of your creation, great. If you can leverage that use into some kind of creative job, even better.

Until the day comes that you can be creative for money, HAVE FUN WITH IT.

Take the evening, try and turn that idea into a prototype. Throw a real fun curve into it, write it in a new language or style.

I have been reading Blink  by Malcolm Gladwell. This book is about how our unconscious makes decisions based on small amounts of information. He aims to explain the pros and cons of this situation and how to control the perception of those decisions with minimal information.

The ultimate message of the book is that our instincts are better than we give them credit. So just trust your instincts.

If you second guess yourself or what you currently know about your customer, you will never get something to your customer. You can have analysis paralysis or just work yourself into a corner. Ship version 1 with the minimum stuff that the user can use. Add things as they need them. Trust your instincts when looking at a new feature, is it good enough to make it. If the feature feels wrong, toss it or at least table it and take it off the menu.

The nice thing in software is that you can just keep all your dead ends in source control so that if you need something, go get it back. The bad thing, is that allows us to get too far into something without too many consequences. Knowing that you can just roll back is the excuse for many bad efforts.

Listen to your instincts earlier, throw things out when they feel wrong. You’ll head a lot of wasted time.

Have you ever had a bad feeling about a feature or project? Did it come true? Was it more than a self fulfilling prophecy?

Have you ever looked at a solution and instantly gotten a visceral reaction to it, good or bad? These are your instincts talking, listen.

In that I’m thinking of hosting it on typepad or some other service, maybe blogger.

I haven’t really thought about it except, that I hate comment spam, and I get tons of it.

Do you have any good suggestions?  Preferably free, but if not at least customizable to not have their logo everywhere.

I get new ideas daily. Some get more thought than others. The fact that I am not blogging from one of these ideas’ websites, proves that ideas don’t make businesses. I just wanted to reiterate that thinking about doing something and doing something are not the same thing.

I heard someone say something this week that struck me as odd. He said “Do something, if its wrong or right, just do something.”. It took me a few days to realize how this is good advice. At first it seems quite meat headed. After thinking about it, I realized that its the truth of the business situation. Businesses that are calculated to succeed are boring and stereotypical. Businesses that are truly innovative and fun, are not planned to succeed, they just do something. They never get worse at that something, but initially they just do something.

So, dear reader, I emplore you to just do something that you get the idea to do this week.

Automation is certainly not new. In fact its the purpose for the computer in the first place. So why is it news to some programmers that the deployment and compilation or batching up of the interpreted code can be automated.

I wish that every person writing code would spend 1 day deploying their code with a batch file. Don’t focus or fuss with network things, just do a build and put it in a certain folder. For extra credit make a batch file that fetches the code from source control, and then execs the former batch file.

This simple exercise will show you how that fancy IDE is all parlor tricks. We all enjoy being entertained by parlor tricks. There is nothing wrong with them. However, you can’t call yourself a magician and actually think that david blane can levitate. Same thing here, in order to respect the parlor trick, you have to at least acknowledge that it is in fact a parlor trick.

In writing there is a struggle to undo what institutions have taught you. Which is to use your SAT words and exercise your vocabulary. You have to be clear and communicate your message. This usually is at the cost of most sophistication of bigger words and constructs which are more efficient but more vague. And a lot of grammar rules are broken, just to make things read like a conversation. This is fine. Because being an author you understand the technical aspects and can accurately weigh the choices of these things.

Continuing on the train of thought, that authoring code and books have the same complexities. There is a need in software authoring to treat the communication as king. If there is a really succinct sophisticated way to do something, and a clear but only slightly less efficient way to do something. The answer should always be the clear one. Authors of books and other works, constantly strive to remove cruft and sophistication from their writing to make it more clear. This should be the goal in writing software as well.

Next time you refactor something. I beg you to make it simpler, and easier to understand. Don’t make it more bloated or full of acronyms and jargon.

I worked from home for quite some time over the last few years. It has been hard to get used to. Everyone looks at me funny when I say that. However, for me it never quite felt right. It always felt a little forced, and design was much more difficult. I was able to get work done and design things, it just took a little bit longer.

I was talking with a colleague about a problem today, and we immediately hit the white board. After a few minutes of discussion, we had pseudo code and diagrams in seconds. This was the missing link. It is the white board I was missing. Not just the fact that there is a white board, I have a white board. The fact that we could actually get on the white board and design something, marker to marker.

It was so refreshing to be able to discuss and design something in real time.

I know that the Getting Real guys think that being in the same location can be a productivity drain. They are right, if all you do is design in groups and loose lots of time, by essentially having meetings. However, there is something to be said for at least occasionally getting on the white board and just hashing things out.

What are your experiences with designing in the presence of others, as opposed to over the phone or some kind of chat?