Treat Contractors Well (please)

I like this post from Scott Berkun. (of the Art of PM book)

One habits many managers have is to dump the boring, unpleasant work of their team onto contract workers. The thinking is that full timers deserve the best treatment and contractors are mercenaries: they deserve whatever they get since they won’t be around long.

It’s a mistake - good managers finds a way to treat everyone well. And there are some reasons contractors deserve special attention

I don't think it applies 100% to government contracting, but it does make a lot of sense. Please treat my team well government overlords!

Wiki Patterns

I have been trying to get a good collaborative space set up for my company forever now. It just has never risen up high enough in the priority chain to really become a collaborative effort...although I have had some very good support from a couple of people that really get it.

Anyway, I happened across this link to Atlassian's wikipatterns site at Web Worker Daily. So far it's a pretty basic set of patterns, but I plan on adding a few of my notes.

Here are some random things that I think are decent ideas for a making a wiki well used with the audiences I have been dealing with.

1) WYSIWYG editing. Most people don't want to learn a markup langauage. It really lowers the barrier to creative usage.
2) Make it the authoritative source. No one wants to look at or update data that might be wrong, if there is another place where it is definitely right. If the wiki isn't the authoritative source, link the other content in, don't make copies that will get out of sync.
3) Fun stuff. It's absolutely worth having a few pages where people can post silly stuff when they feel frustrated.
4) RSS Feeds or change summaries. Crucial if you are using it for anything new-sy, as opposed to reference.

I have set up MediaWiki and many others. MediaWiki looks like a really ugly piece of code. I had problems with it on some customer networks with strange proxy behavior. Instiki and most of the Ruby on Rails wikis are missing crucial features- like security models. I actually like the Trac wiki for development projects, even though the wiki isn't really the crucial feature. I am extremely disappointed Google snapped up JotSpot right as they were about to release a self-hosted version. As convenient as Software as a Service things like Blogger are, I just would easily prefer hosting the app myself. JotSpot, while also being vastly more than a wiki, really benefits from being the engine behind dojo.js development. Dojo is a great ajax lib, and makes Jot cool.

I never thought the Atlassian Confluence stuff was worth the price, but the patterns site is a good idea. In fact, I suppose that was the origin of the wiki concept in the first place, Ward Cunningham's c2 wiki for the portland patterns group is still the canonical example. How far we haven't come: web 2.0 v. Web 1995.

Google Earth and Standards

I can't comment on the all points blog...they must have me marked as a spammer.

Anyway, I won't link to the post by Adena Schutzberg due to that, but here's the content, jacked from a Federal Computer Week article.

"I have a question on this:

Interviewed in the Google booth, which resembles the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, Painter [director of Google Earth Federal] said that although the public Google Earth uses commercial satellite and geospatial imagery, Google Earth Fusion allows federal agencies to manipulate and integrate their own geospatial imagery with the company’s software tools.

Imagery or software? Isn't Google a member of OGC? Is it moving forward on implementing those standards such that it can do both with ease? Is that not the point of OGC? Is DoD pushing Google to implement such standards? See for example: NGA Announces Requirement for OGC and Complementary Standards
Imagery."

I don't think there is a high performance streaming 3D imagery XML standard, is there? In any case, NGA is presumably rational. They are not going to sacrifice user experience for the sake of standards compliance, particularly where the standards board is as commercially fractious as OGC has been.

While there may be a requirement for support of those standards, this is already easily met by Google Earth in the form of reflectors for OGC Image Services as overlays or super-overlays to the base streamed data. All of the major data types can already be imported to Google Earth server to form the base layers.

To somehow suggest that Google should use an OGC format as their primary streaming format is a really bad idea for everyone- especially the data owners that would end up giving away their data. I remember the same insinuations being made against ESRI in years past, and then people deciding they didn't want to pay the performance penalty for standards compliance. Why don't standards committees ever look at what works best, and then choose that as the standard, instead of trying to prognosticate the market, technology, and user needs years in advance? While the shapefile was never an OGC standard, it was easily the lingua franca of the GIS community for a long time. The same with the good old .e00.

My wife worked with the poor fellow ESRI designated as their OGC standards body rep. He was not a person who loved his job. Basically he was a punching bag as he watched their competitors attempt to push things away from technology that would be compatible with proven success.

Manual Reverse Geocoding

So this guy's letter was delivered without an address- just a map. Reverse geocoding at work. Humans rock- it's dead hard to get a computer to do this. Actually, maybe I should just say the the UK Post rocks, I can't see our USA civil servants doing anything with this besides sending it to the DLO or trying to arrest the person that sent it for subversive activities.

One of the worst experiences in my life was spending three days geocoding a dataset of points for Wien (aka Vienna, Austria) with ArcView 2.1. (ArcView would try to suggest a point, and I would try to move it to the right place.) House numbers there don't follow a very organized pattern, and I hope the errors I inevitably must have made didn't get anyone killed. Or didn't get the wrong person killed, or anything like that.

link via: /usr/bin/girl , which incidentally is one of the first blogs I ever read.

Beautiful Brochure...ugly product

I have been doing a light evaluation of some software products in anticipation of some upcoming requirements for a project I am working on. The product that the architect in my position before me had been ready to buy is a real piece of work. It commits three violations of trust that no company selling software should:

1. Where's the product?
I don't trust that there even is a product when you can't go to the website and have any clue about how to buy the product or even a wild guess as to it's cost. You can download a gloriously illustrated brochure of bullet points of software features, with teeny tiny pictures of UI. You can read about solutions and services, but you can't buy anything? It sounds like a services trap: call us, we'll figure out how much money you have to set our price, then buy/rent our software and we'll finish it for you at an hourly rate, but own the code we write for you.

I guarantee there isn't a "there is no three step" install process.

2. UI design = sorry, we spent all of the design money on our brochure.
What does it say when a company has an obviously professionally designed and frankly beautiful brochure, but their actual product looks completely undesigned and frankly is just plain hideous? They care about people's experience until they have their money?

3. No mention of an API anywhere.
Monolith sensors on full alert. This thing has to integrate with my enterprise, I don't need to buy an ERP system where everything is a module of your system, versus a distributed architecture. (no one does need to buy a "complete" ERP system...ever) Currently dealing with the seemingly vast, but still incomplete, APIs of Microsoft Dynamics Great "Pains" has me watching out for software that makes itself hard to fit into a distributed world. This software isn't even a web app, so there's no chance of URL hacking.

Sorry, no dice. I am specifically not naming the guilty party here so that they don't begin any legal actions against me for defamation of character, or in case I decide to apply for a job there someday to rewrite the thing. I'll post an offensive screenshot at some point in the future on an unrelated topic.

Refactoring Ruby

Jay Fields and friends are rewriting/porting Martin Fowler and friends' Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code book to Ruby. I guess since the IDEs aren't there yet, we might as well get going on the manual process! Good show to Jay et. al. They've made a dent in the first section, hope they keep it up.

I still keep a copy of Refactoring on my desk. It's one of about 20 books I still need to keep around on my desktop. The content is somewhat timeless, and (was) not readily available on the internet. Still, the Jav-oid nature of the text makes it a little less relevant to my current world of Ruby. It also serves as a badge of good programming knowledge.

I've been selling off a lot of my other books on Amazon. Someone bought the Sun Certified J2EE Architect guide from 2002 for $16. Someone else bought Rod Johnson's old Expert J2EE development, the early edition, before he finished Spring, for $15. No takers on Tapestry yet at $10. Many books have a used value below a $1. I am debating what to do with them as it's not worth my time to sell them. The chances I need a Turbo Assembler reference have dropped about as low as they can, no library would want it, still, it was a good book in it's day, and it is sad that it is no longer relevant to anyone's life. I also think "professional Java Web Services" is probably not worth the shelf space. Well, maybe it will be recycled into a better book someday.

Zed Shaw

Zed is king of the internet...for now.

If anyone out there is using this newfangled Ruby on Rails framework, Zed's (open source) Mongrel product has become the de facto container for running your app. It's a tiny little c program, and dead fast and stable. He co-wrote a little PDF on it that I had printed on a pillowcase. It's so comforting to know that my apps are running on Mongrel that the pillowcase serves as a little reminder so that I can go to sleep- without a glass of wine and one of those little blue capsules.

For a more general interest look at why Zed is such an interesting character, check out his essay blasting Joel Spolsky and Don Norman's articles on simplicity vs. complexity. If you aren't following that "debate", good for you...I'll summarize though- some people think simplicity is good. Some people think complexity is good. The people that are right think that good design makes complex tasks as simpler as they can be, but no simpler.

Metrics

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/10b.html
I love Joel's send up of management consulting applied to software development through the use of metrics.

My question is a real one though. The CEO of one of the places where I work as a "working" consultant (in terms of actually doing productive work, not just analyzing what other people do) just downsized a whole bunch of smart people. He wants to look at our metrics- including things like customer satisfaction. That's going to be tough to measure. How do you measure customer satisfaction in such a way as to rate people on it?

I think step one for me is figuring out who my customers are...I am taking over a project that one of the downsized guys was running, and I haven't even met some of the key stakeholders. When I do, I am going to be sure to remind them to send a monthly note to the CEO reminding him of how satisfied they are! If he gets 5 or 6 of those notes per month, that would be a good metric.

Of course, then the only way to show continuous improvement is to increase the number of messages, or the intensity of the satisfaction they convey. So, I guess I should only tell one person the first month, and then two people the next month. And, I'll need a satisfaction score in order to quantify the satisfaction level. It should probably be an integer, so that it can go negative to indicate dissatisfaction, not that I would tell any of the dissatisfied to send email, they would just do it on their own anyway, and could include a little number. Then he just sum the satisfaction level to get total satisfaction index. With multipliers added to gauge the relative importance of the people that are being satisfied, maybe the multiplier would be their salary divided by 100k.

Hmmm, I don't know how else to do it, but I am afraid if I pose this, I will look like a sarcastic jerk...even though it's just the best I can do sometimes.

Rails for Java Developers- beta book

I just started reading the early beta of Rails for Java Developers. It's a new book published by the Pragmatic Programmers and written by the Relevance guys- Stu and Justin. Perhaps the most shocking thing is that they have time to write a book. I have been lightly involved in the review process for O'Reilly's upcoming "Rails Cookbook", currently available as a Rough Cut. It's a lot of work to stay current with a moving target and make sure all of the code works.

As far as the book goes, I think it really is going to fill a gap in terms of being a reference for people that know how to do something in Java, and want to know what the equivalent thing is in Ruby on Rails. It's like those options in a new version of a product to see the menus for the prior version, so that you know where to find things. Of course, I haven't tried much in the book yet, so I can't speak to it's quality, but I like the tone and the approach so far. It appears to be just over half way to their 300 page target, so, there's a lot to do before Nov.

Google Enterprise Professional- on earth

Google's expanding their partner program to include "Google Earth Specialists" Spatial Energy. Noah D. wrote a brief note on the enterprise blog. Our company joined the partner program initially to do things with the search appliance, but maybe the earth appliance is around the corner.

Spatial Energy looks like they have an interesting angle. It's a good match for companies with a lot of experience in imagery and orthorectification to get involved with Google Earth Enterprise. If you want to make a good looking globe, you need some good looking data. Their focus is in the energy market, where perhaps the inability of Google Earth to look underground will be felt more acutely? If anyone in the energy community is in Houston on Oct. 18, they are doing a seminar that is going to cover a few topics, including SketchUp integration.