Monday, November 30, 2009

Alliterative Lists

Four ways to ensure your blog entries are popular

1) Cool Use lots of cool buzz words and wear sunglasses in all your avatar pictures
2) Crisp Use short words and keep it to the point
3) Clear Don't get off topic, or you will lose the people who follow you based on subject.
4) Celery Eat lots of celery.

Now is that a good list of pointers for bloggers? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps they are good points, but when I see lists like that, I always wonder how much the accuracy and efficacy of the list has been compromised to achieve the alliteration.

Perhaps Coolness, Crispness, Timeliness and Brevity were a better choice for the items in the list, but if the author is obsessed with only using 'C' words, the latter two might fall off the table.

It gets more concerning when you see lists of 8 or 10 points all starting with the same letter. By the time you do that many, you are really searching for words with the same letter. Sure, English is pretty versatile. Instead of "Timeliness" I could perhaps say "Clock" or "Coordination" - but unless you luck out with the synonyms, it is usually clear that you're digging by that point.

Anyway that was just bugging me this morning after reading through a few blog posts purporting to guide my entrepreneurial life: success means using the letter "C" or something I guess.

Researchinator gets on to more important things, the letter 'D' perhaps...

Friday, November 27, 2009

Five Ways to Motivate Yourself on a Lethargic Day

A cup of tea in hand and moving slowly thru the morning. The trend for blogging (this is not a trendy blog if you hadn't noticed) is to make every entry about a list. Well, just to aid in your productivity, here's my list of 5 things I like to do to make progress when I'm not being as productive as I like.

1) Luxuriate In It Think back upon the last few days, have they been productive ones? Brains work best in an environment of variety. Working consistently on the same thing in the same way is not conducive to either productivity nor happiness. If you've had a few good days, let yourself take it easy for a few hours, better yet, get away from your desk and take a walk or something that changes the view for a bit.

2) Dangle a Reward That's a reward, don't get carried away with the dangling. Set yourself a very short term goal, pick something achievable and provide yourself a reward for doing it. For example, need to write a document, and you just aren't getting started? Hold off on that next coffee and tell yourself you can have it once you've created the empty document, and the title page. Maybe crafted a very-rough-and-sure-to-be-reworked Table of Contents. Set a time for it, perhaps 20min, and be sure to both hold firm to that as well as go get the reward. You made progress, that's very uplifting to the spirit as well.

3) Make a List A big de-motivator is having several things on your plate that need to be done. Even though they might seem clear, often there is some underlying uncertainty about exactly what constitutes completion of those items, so make yourself a bulleted list and just list the things you need to do, but make the items concrete. Not "Work on analyzing the competition" but "Make a table Documenting 5 competitors and their comparative characteristics." Similarly don't list huge, long term projects, but major steps: so not "Design new Website" but instead "Sketch out 3 front page layout options for approval"

4) Relish Deadlines If you're like me, you find yourself more productive when a deadline is looming. So if your nearest deadline is weeks away, you might find yourself lethargic. Take a look at that upcoming deadline and think about some intermediate steps. Now here's the tricky part, most of us need some threat to make the deadline have the magical power. So jot down those intermediate steps and send them to someone who'd care, preferably a colleague on the same project or your supervisor. Promise to hit those intermediate steps - bingo, now your ass is on the line. You look like a twit if you don't pull it off, so work at getting there. You might just find you deliver them and meet your "real" deadline earlier than expected. Oops, raises anyone?

5) Get Feedback This is a sneaky way to trick your own brain into action. Find something you've done recently that others would know about, pick it up (if it's pick-up-able) or think of a summary statement for it in your mind then go to that person (or send an email) and ask for feedback on how you did, or even better, what could you have done to make it more successful. A co-worker is fine. Even better, pick a person you don't like. The result? You'll probably, not necessarily overtly, get defensive. That's very primal energy you're feeling, it's fight or flight. You've already ruled out flight, as you went to them without needing to. So now channel that feeling of defensive energy into your next todo list item!

There you go a five item list. Some you've heard before, but I think some will certainly be subversive new ideas for you. Now am I eligible for Twitter link-backs and angry dissenting comments?

Researchinator turns to item 2 for inspiration...

Friday, November 20, 2009

Changing Landscape of Tools and Languages

Planning a weekend escape to the outdoors. A late autumn, not quite winter thing. Should be nice.

Meanwhile I'm shifting back and forth between python and javascript/AJAX stuff while also reading up a bit on jQuery. The latter looks interesting, some of those features appear to offer some good benefits to my stuff. Will have to plan a migration, or exploration of it anyway. For now, just raw .js and hope that continues to provide good predictable results on most browsers. The landscape of tools and languages, and development environments, and hell, just OS versions is constantly changing. Would like to do some upgrades, but need some stable time first.

Fighting a migraine this morning too, as if I needed some distraction when trying to be productive. Such is life - I'll pretend this is a simulation of raucous staff noise, and my goal is to persevere and still be productive. Yeah, that's it.

Researchinator... well... you know...

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Exposing the Gears

Met up with my student project team this morning. They seem on track. Struggling to understand one or two concepts, but are basically getting it.

It's interesting to see this architecture through other eyes. While it all seems clear to me, I'm aware constantly that it might not seem that way to someone else, and so try to evoke that perspective where possible. Even with explaining it to someone, it's not the right level of depth until they start trying to work on elements of it from a technical implementation perspective. Then the comprehension evaluation becomes much more valid.

One might understand what their transmission does, but until you open it up an start removing gears, you're never really sure how well you understand it.

In discussing the project it always leaves me enthusiastic and pumped to see the project financed and working flat out. But I know the stats are against that ever happening. Still, I hope I can at least persevere to get it live and out in the wild on trials before I have to admit failure.

I guess that's my typical approach to life. Expect the worst, but try for the best, and hope to be proven wrong.

Researchinator totally hopes for some pleasant surprises...

Monday, November 16, 2009

Monday Housekeeping and Firefighting

Morning starting with technical challenges remaining from the weekend. My primary email and website is down, due to my hosting company changing nameservers, and my registrar being unable to propagate my new nameservers after 3 days.

Not too impressed, I wish this was happening on a different account, but unfortunately I'm currently bouncing emails from friends and family, and unfortunately some professional contacts should they be trying to reach me.

Can only hope it's resolves shortly, but will be looking around for a new registrar soon.

I also have to think about Django hosting. I see a nice list of Django capable folk, but I'm also considering the google app engine hosting option, but will read a bit more about how hard it is to get a Django presence up. Perhaps try it with a dummy app first to see how it works.

I've also seen some details on how to get Django running on Amazon EC2, though there are some CPU time costs associated with that at earlier stages.

The morning is ticking away, and I'm still isolated... but I'm at least glad that my hosting and email are separate from my broadband service ensuring that the failures I have on any front is never wiping out everything else as well.

Researchinators mundane day is progressing slowly...

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Oh the Highs, and the Lows...

Well, the lows anyway. The highs are few and far between for the start-up maven. There are pleasant euphoric moments when something works. And others when some high-falutin' VC will return your call, (before quickly backing away at any sign of risk). There are moments of supreme satisfaction when you face a barrier, hammer away at it for a week, then see it crumble before you.

But the lows, oh the lows. Slaving away with no support, for months on end. You just KNOW there are a dozen big technical barriers still ahead, and two dozen people who are going to lethargically block your path in sluggish disinterest, flippant lack of vision for anything ever being different or better. The dwindling savings are great too. Knowing you're forgoing a six-figure income while you burn cash in spite of your penny-pinching ways.

Then with all that weighing on you, up comes the next technical barrier. You know you can get through it, but you also know that it will involve many hours of slogging. What once was stuff you'd assign to a junior employee, and support them along, now you have to do yourself. It's a hard row to hoe, when you know your skills are better used elsewhere.

But perseverance is the key to success in entrepreneurship. If you can look at what you've done and be sure that you are taking a pragmatic approach to the product and a real market opportunity, you know there must be a path through the challenges.

Having been in 'the industry' for a couple or so decades, the most frustrating thing is seeing that projects and products I defined for other companies but which couldn't find traction among those who wouldn't buy in to the vision, emerge 10 years later as a brilliant new product from some other firm. Oh, the foregone first mover advantages. Oh the many ground-breaking advances lost to history but for the handful of people who saw the demo. For each one of those things, there's some former executive dope who probably tells people "Huh, we had a plan for that ten years ago, but we killed it."

But I'll take responsibility for all that failure myself. For each or any of those things that failed due to big corporate reticence and lack of vision, I should have persevered to the point of taking the design to customers in an end-run around the vision-less multi-layered marketing echelons, packaged up the design and requested ownership for external spin-out, or perhaps just blatantly stolen the design and launched on my own, and settled later if anyone noticed. But I didn't, so I'll bear that burden myself, and grumble about what could have been.

Researchinator struggles along....

Friday, November 6, 2009

Pausing, Logging and Keeping Up Momentum

A funny thing happens after a goal is reached sometimes - you naturally withdraw for some head clearing time. I've noticed this in my intellectual freedom zone that is my start-up. I'm motivated and pushed by my own actions and interests, so there's nobody else telling me what to do.
When I manage development groups, I'll usually do something following an accomplishment, take the group out to celebrate, skipping off an afternoon. Larger milestones often schedule a lessons-learned meeting to chat, vent and capture best practices. Even though there is much still to do, there's benefits of doing this take a breather approach.
I notice it in this free-form development work too. As I attain a goal, I seem to pull back and do some tidying, and do some big picture thinking. There's no shortage of next steps still required, but one seems to mentally need a bit of perspective after climbing a mountain.
That analogy is pretty good - it is like climbing a steep hill. When you reach a plateau on the way up, you tend to stop and take a breather in preparation for the next steps.
A downside though can be that it is sometimes tough to get back into the flow again. One should ensure that they know what the next steps are rather than waiting idly for divine inspiration. Just like the other development steps are planned, so should be your pauses and your re-engagements.
A technique that seems to work for me is to get back into the work by leading with to-do lists. I'm using this approach quite heavily. The rule of thumb is - if you're pausing, make a short next steps list in your log book or worklog file/blog/etc. It really has helped with productivity boosting, as you tend to make an effort to close off all the outstanding items before your next pause.

I run two worklogs these days - one is a private blog, the other is a text file in my core development area. When I'm working in the Eclipse environment I have a WhereAmI file that gets continually updated, in a very prosaic style. There I will often capture thought processes in trying to fix a problem, outlining my thoughts, the sections of code that are likely involved, even variable names and routine() names that are key. The result is that if I pause for some reason, I can quickly recover the area of activity. As well, I can recover the thought process I was going through.
The ancillary benefit is that the act of describing a problem will often evoke the solution. We see this as young engineers and scientists, talking to our mentors or supervisors. As we would start to describe an insoluble problem, you would come upon the answer half-way thru, and feel embarrassed for having brought it up. Later, I learned to have mock gripe conversations in my head to see if that turned up the solution, and often it would. The logfile/book does the same thing.
The file is also searchable, as is the private blog of course. The blog worklog I use for my other notes. Development that is not specifically in the Eclipse milieu, but also business building work, and broader interactions.

So those are just a few thoughts on managing the pauses, the tools associated with re-engaging, and not losing the threads of your engagement. Perhaps I should now turn to my task list at hand and try to make some progress following this last milestone achievement.

Researchinator reaches for the oars to find that they are still attached, functional and ready for action...