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Testing

2008-05-15T16:42:00.001-07:00

Testing

AWS FTW

2008-03-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

This new AWS offering will definitely force me to adjust some business planning architecture. In a good way.

Project | Product Management

2008-02-25T11:13:00.000-08:00

I have come to acknowledge a few core principles that are important to guiding projects and products through conception, development and release. I just want to get them down here for now. I'll come back to add to them and expand upon them further in the near future.

You can't know how effective you're being if you don't know what your goals are.
It is critical to understand how to define requirements in the domain of the client, and to be able map those requirements to the technical execution process.

Change is the only constant. Knowing how to adapt is the key to successful projects.
It is important to understand the likely sources of change, to build variability into the scope of a project, and to control the outcome.

Multidisciplinary excellence is the road to true happiness.
Being able to communicate effectively and with native competence in the creative, technical and business realms is central to managing a modern project.

Focused design is incredibly effective.
Attention is finite, for both developers and users. Keeping an application focused on its most salient elements will deliver a more effective and compelling product.

2008-02-23T16:07:00.000-08:00

Interrupt the Interruption

2008-02-13T08:45:00.000-08:00

Steve Rubel's post is only the latest voice acknowledging the ongoing war of attention and interruption.

The confluence of information technologies (digital-omnipresence), life style changes (always on), and work paradigms (distributed and virtual) have lead us into a state where our attention is always being demanded by one channel or another.

Work calls from across the world, mid-way through what would be breakfast if we did such things anymore. The news pours in via RSS and SMS. Calls and emails across multiple accounts hound us from all corners of the infosphere.

It's time to focus. It's time to redefine our interface with the signal, cut out the noise of destructive interference, and get back to higher-performance living.

Yes We Can

2008-02-12T20:01:00.001-08:00

OpenID Goes BIG

2008-02-07T20:08:00.000-08:00

OpenID got some more amazing support this morning. I've been predicting this growth, and building some plans around it. More to come.

Heroku | Rails done Right

2008-02-07T11:49:00.000-08:00

Heroku has finally launched into a more public beta. TechCrunch picked it up this morning, and they've been getting the kind of traffic and praise they deserve ever since.

Orion, Adam, James... congrats, guys.

Data Evolution

2008-01-27T21:16:00.000-08:00

Oh hell. I've got an interesting idea buzzing around my head like an angry hornet, so I'm diving back in to re-evaluate django/rails/merb and the various ORM solutions to make this light-weight, scalable and fast to prototype.

Things have moved surprisingly fast on the merb front, and I've got some research to do to come back up to speed. Rack-based server integration, multiple ORMs, merb-core and merb-more, clean APIs and intelligent mutex locking. All the joy of using ruby, with none of the headache of rails? Can this be? Ezra's one cool cat, and he's been doing good work, so I'll be smoke testing this for my needs soon.

Django definitely has an advantage or two for my current needs, and I'd enjoy picking python back up, but it needs further review, too. I've decided I don't want to go stock rails, and django does enough things that are rails-alike that I'm a little gunshy.

2008-01-20T14:33:00.000-08:00

Currently thinking about:

2007-12-30T21:00:00.000-08:00

Systempunkts in my life context; ie, where can the systems be broken, what disruption would result?

Possible game-changing events, and how to mitigate their effects or maximize positive changes; ie, what events might be lurking, why am I overlooking them, what would happen if they occurred, and how can I best manage any instance?

Self-determination: concept production, income generation, transportation, communication. Again, this seems to call for a change of systems infrastructure to be (1) more diversified, and (2) more under my own personal control.

More on these items soon.

A|C|E

2007-12-04T21:56:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about this for some time now, and it seems that others have been having related thoughts as well. I'll get into the factors that are driving the consideration of these things in another post, and focus on the 'what' in this post.

In my opinion, any given person has two things that are of value to exchange with most other people: Attention and Creativity.

Attention | Perception by an aware mind has value. It is how ideas spread, markets form and shift, opinions develop, and how people know the world and each other. The focused attention of a person is therefor worth much more than passive and incidental awareness. By choosing what we pay attention to, we determine which ideas can affect us most profoundly. (Whicken has some amusing fiction that's germane to this idea on his blog)

Creativity | The generation of new ideas, or the synthesis of novel constructs out of existing concepts is the other half of the equation. Creativity drives change, changes the rules and rules the markets of attention. Creative content will often draw a disproportionate share of attention in the world, and thus the market speaks.

The interplay of Attention and Creativity (and indeed, many other aspects of life) can be seen to be modulated by Effectiveness.

Effectiveness | Effectiveness is the measure of impact, relative to the desired outcome, that any given action has. Effectiveness is of far greater importance than Efficiency (as so eloquently put by Tim Ferriss), and should always guide our efforts.

How does one become more effective? By maintaining awareness of (and Attention to) the process of action and the results thereof. By constantly tuning and refining (and experimenting, ie being Creative), it is possible to constantly improve the quality of action taken. This concept is core to the paradigm of Agility that I so often tangle with in the world of software development, but it is of far broader reach and importance than just that industry, as some simple exercises can confirm (again, in posts to come).

Attention | Creativity | Effectiveness

The choice of how to use each of these is up to each individual, and the outcome of adjustments to our decisions relating to them can be realized as profound changes in our lives.

For the next day, watch yourself: what are you paying attention to? what are you creating? how effective are your actions?

How can you improve?

RE<C

2007-11-27T09:04:00.001-08:00

Google goes for the green. This should be exciting.

AWS Tools Aplenty

2007-11-21T09:16:00.001-08:00

With the AWS tools/stacks being built by the likes of WeoCEO and Heroku, it is becoming increasingly clear that leveraging the flexibility and scalability of EC2, S3 and SQS is going to be a key component for a lot of up and coming web services. Why? Because these services offer a lot of flexibility and some massive savings on overhead.

I'm predicting that either Amazon or one of the players dealing with their services regularly is going to roll out a full tool suite for public consumption sometime soon. Sure, WeoCEO is pretty solid looking, but if they combine some of the other ideas out there (not sure which I can enumerate here, so I'll update more later), and make it a flexible toolkit for anyone to use in deploying an app, the whole hosting/deployment game will change radically (and with it, the costs).

Open Brain Function Analysis

2007-11-21T08:55:00.001-08:00

Brainscape, one of the finalists for Amazon's AWS Challenge, is an interesting way to store, analyze and share fMRI BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) signal data. Privacy/access control and evaluation/analysis tools make this a great resource.

Can't wait to see how it progresses.

Very cool that they're building the app on top of Amazon's amazingly flexible services. AWS is really a platform/tool set to watch closely in the near future.

NeuroLinguistic Sports

2007-11-08T12:30:00.001-08:00

Tim Ferriss has a fascinating article up about an analytical procedure for deconstructing languages to test their fitness for acquisition by a given learner. The system also gives a quick insight into language patterns and usage.

Simply excellent.

I'll have to see what else he has to say.

Lost Angeles Industries

2007-10-03T10:24:00.000-07:00

Lost
We realize we're lost: we don't have all the answers, we know that we have to look, learn and wonder. We think for ourselves. Take nothing for granted, and maybe you'll get lost, too.

Disruptive Development
Making the tools we want or need to get around the edges. Information can be, sexy and powerful.

Ethos
It's about rewriting the rules, redefining the boundaries of what is possible, and challenging the preconceptions of the people around us. Whether through philosophy, programming or cognitive science, or by moving through the world in ways that people assume are impossible or implausible, we get people to re-think their assumptions and come up with new ideas based on their own exploration of the world.

Techne
Do. Don't just learn, theorize or understand. Do.

Agility | Cybernetics | Jeet Kune Do

2007-07-17T22:14:00.000-07:00

In the software development game, there is a lot of talk about being agile. It's a set of practices and methodologies that describe a light-weight, flexible, adaptive and reflexive way of doing things.

Really, the concepts are pretty simple and straight forward: It's all about communication, collaboration, feedback and the acceptance of change.

do what works

Back in 2001, a respected group of developers let loose with the Agile Manifesto. This statement increased the visibility of the movement a great deal. Unfortunately, it was also partially responsible for the branding of various Agile (big A) belief systems... and my sense of it is that any sort of dogmatic belief system is a bit counter to the agile mindset.

use the right tools for the job
even if those tools change over time

A consideration of all the various brands and flavors of Agile led me to rethink my own take on agility, both as I practice it in my work environment, and as a conceptual space.

I found that I'd already encountered agility several times in my life, in different arenas of experience. In the foundational theories of cybernetics, from Wiener to von Neumann, I'd seen the theories many times before: a self regulating system that optimizes itself through reliance upon protocols of reflection and feedback. Or, as Louis Couffignal more artfully describes it, cybernetics is "the art of ensuring the efficacy of action."

point
and counter-point

I'd also encountered this modus operandi at an earlier age, and as I thought back, I realized that it was very similar to two of the principle tenets of Jeet Kune Do: be like water, and embrace an economy of motion.

Simple power and graceful elegance, adapting to situations in both mindset and practice - these are the unifying concepts that drew me to the agile way. It's the startling efficacy of the paradigm that keeps me there.