Herculean Olympic-Like Development Effort

Big news story of course is the Olympics, and you can't help but be aware of it with all marketing machines pumping out the juice for that spectacle. One must wonder if today's incursion of Russian and Georgian forces into a clash was merely coincidentally timed with the Olympic Ceremonies, where many foreign leaders are attending?

I also wonder how many governments queue up bad news and sleazy deals to await a big news story and then dump them on the wire, knowing the media's attention will be elsewhere. There are only so many minutes in a newscast,and a lot of them will be on Beijing.

Meanwhile, around our little research group office space, things are quiet. I'm picking away at my software project, made some first progress on defining a UI and now starting to craft the application. Nothing beats pencil and paper for drafting a UI. Well, perhaps a whiteboard, when many people are collaborating. But so much can happen without needing to articulate it into words when you craft something on paper with pencil. Scribbles get captured as meaningful things quickly... well, as long as you write it up quickly.

A thought as I craft a new business idea is always about my implementation role. Seriously, I am not going to be the guy who writes all the code for this venture, but to capture my vision quickly I need to do it. You'd think the mere fact that I can do that would be a big value to me, as many people who lead organizations can't actually implement an idea. Sure I don't do it in my regular day job - and I wouldn't want to. But I don't know that my career of 20-some years has gone anywhere further because of it. Hard to know I suppose. I do know that I can have a much bigger impact directing 15 or 20 guys coding and building HW/SW stuff than I can just doing it all myself. The battle then becomes keeping people 'on vision' rather than roaming wildly based on personal interests. But you also have to balance that against valid better-path options that might arise from their expertise. Not easy to do, especially as every one of them will have an alternative path, whose failure may not come about until well after your going-in vision has been thoroughly trashed and diffused.

The benefit of experience, though is that if you've pushed back on such influences before, to see that your vision was in fact correct, it gives you good strength to stick-to-it in future go-arounds.

But then, doing it yourself, you're down in the weeds and wearing both hats is tough. Writing lots of notes can serve to remind you of where the forest starts and what is just random trees.

Researchinator wants to squeeze in a few more minutes of coding before lunch.