Today I decided I'm going to play with twitter; so I signed up like so. I can't really picture myself having the time to twit (or tweet?) every few hours, I signed up for slightly less conventional reasons...
It all stems from how I use this blog. When I started blogging, I foresaw a channel for my original thoughts, a way for me to share my experience in the industry - real life problems and solutions from the world of running webscale engineering. It was my opinion and what's worked for me; I didn't want to get into simply posting links to other people's opinion, unless I can substantially build on them, and thus add some value to the idea being discussed. I wanted there to be some substance, some usefulness and some kind of conclusion to what you read here.
I have stayed true to this vision, but these days I am increasingly coming across content I want to share in a briefer 'check this link out' kind of format. This of course poses the question; do I dilute the purpose of this blog by posting shorter, less meaningful messages with links or embedded external content or do I find another way (or, that oft-forgotten option we always have, do nothing)?
A tool that seemed fit for purpose to me was micro-blogging. Small snippets of text pushed out as regularly as you see fit and a whole culture which prohibits verbosity (how will I cope).
So I'm going to play whack-a-link on twitter. Anytime I see something I like or agree with (but don't want to more formally expand on) I'm going to demonstrate my support for it by posting the link into my feed.
For me this is one of those kind of experimental things - start using the technology and see what value emerges.
While we're talking about twitter I want to give the fail whale an honorable mention for achieving the pinnacle of error message accomplishment - being a popular sight. No kidding.
Failure joins death and taxes in the hallowed halls of unavoidable inevitability. I spend a lot of time working out how to detect it, avoid it, and recover from it but sooner or later it gets us all. This is where architecture stops operations and customer service starts; personally I consider the likes of web server 404's and 500's to be the middle finger of the internet - if you can turn these into disarming, apologetic messages then you'll at least have a chance to keep your customers on your side while you work out your issues.
The fail whale is almost too good at this. It's grown into some kind of phenomenon of it's own. People have made fail whale models, you can buy fail whale t-shirts and mugs, and there is even a fan club. Remember; this is a holding page they show when their site is down!
I recently had a bit of "homework" to do as part of our professional development process. Nothing profound, but nonetheless a few very interesting questions to address. My favorite this time around was what the 5 most important qualities of a leader are. Here is what I thought:
1. Vision – they have to know the goal, know the results and be able to effectively communicate this and get buy in.
2. Foresight – they have to be able to see the future coming, plan for it and know the key activities that, over time, will realize the vision.
3. Respect – they must set the example and engender confidence from the team, people must want to seek their opinion and emulate their behavior.
4. Impact – they must be seen to make a difference, to make tough decisions and stand by them, to wield whatever power they have to effect visible change.
5. Determination – they must have the grit and the resolve to show the team that they stick by their principles and stay cool and clear even when the environment is at it’s harshest.
There are as many [correct] answers to this as there are leaders in action, drop me a line with yours.
Have a look at this interview with Horacio Falcao from INSEAD on cross-cultural negotiation.
I found the points about overestimating and underestimating proximity in relationships particularly interesting - Horacio says that we often make too many assumptions when dealing with people from similar backgrounds and nationalities and this can end up costing us. When dealing with those we perceive to be obviously different we take extra care to ensure we explicitly state everything up front, a valuable practice we can take foregranted when we strongly relate with the other party from the start.
I am never a fan of deadline-oriented architecture and sometimes you get a whopper; this is most certainly my biggest one to date.
Well, it was get our Euro 2008 features out in time or mow the worlds largest lawn. Marketing eh?
Pictured here in flight at our secret testing centre in Royal Ascot. I'm sure Bert would back this, he's always been a fan of new tech.
A while back the SAI 25 was published on Silicon Alley Insider and we're sitting at number 4. There is a reasonably scientific approach to how these companies are measured and, based on that, I can see how we're climbing the list. Growth, margin and market share are all strengths of ours. Kick ass.
One of our engineers posted this link on our internal forum and made a spirited appeal to our charitable sides in an attempt to stir up some volunteers. I like to help good causes (we all have our favorites) and I would always rather donate my time - help out in a practical way - than simply giving money away. I get more of a sense of satisfaction doing that and I don't feel like I've 'bought' my conscience off!
I’ve helped some charities in a similar capacity in the past and I have to say I found it curiously rewarding in a way I wasn’t quite expecting. But even if you're just not that charitable then among the many, worthwhile philanthropic reasons to help out like this there are also some perfectly good selfish motivations - or maybe symbiotic might be a better word:
The thing you have to remember about charities is they are almost always terminally short of resources – most significantly cash and people – yet they still have the same IT challenges that a lot of small/medium businesses have. That means you’ve got to work with constraints you won’t be used to because you can’t just buy hardware, you can’t just use something commercial or licensed and you [often] can’t use expensive network connections or hosting. This means you have to be really creative with what you put together and you also have to exercise your end-to-end solution muscles because, chances are you won’t be able to assemble a reasonable team either – it’ll be all down to you. This will be a totally different environment for you to learn to be effective in because most of us are in the fortunate position of having a budget that’s appropriate to the problems we're trying to solve. Sometimes this 'plenty' can make you lazy – necessity is, after all, the mother of invention.
I guess the summary is you'll get exposure to a very different size and type of problem to the one you're used to working with every day and, because of the unique constraints, you'll really get to exercise your problem solving skills. So give it a go, you’ll probably find it quite refreshing and might even learn something too.
A few days ago we dragged some giant balloons around London to promote our trading exchange market on the London mayoral election. It was quite a unique promotion - it even made the BBC =)
Our Italian Sportsbook is live now (whew!) and the marketing leading us up to Euro 2008 have started. You can see one of our clips here.
I just watched Michael Pollan's TED talk on the relationship between humans and the plant world. I've always been fascinated by the idea that perhaps we don't have the whole biological world totally under our control as we like to believe. Perhaps everything is getting exactly what it wants out of our domineering programmes of domestication and agriculture. Better yet, perhaps some of these 'subjugated' organisms are really driving us to build, farm and plant... Worth a 17 minute work break.
Not the pokemon, the presentation style. These days I am particularly interested in unique presentation styles that promote attention and retention as I tend to do a lot of public speaking. And when have to steer a reasonably big organization you can't expect to be able to spend long periods of time with every single individual so being able to effectively get your message across in a more public 'batch' forum is a key leadership skill.
What's attractive to me about Pecha Kucha is the 20/20/640 concept; you use 20 slides each shown for 20 seconds (for a total of 6:40 talk time) and that's it. I think it is particularly good for engineers because we just love verbosity. There are so many great things you could say about your architecture, about your new product or how you solved problem X while still keeping that instant fail-over why wouldn't you want to say them all? Because people will die of old age. Putting such strict constraints on the normally freestyle art of presenting forces you to think carefully about the information that makes the biggest difference, culling the marginal and the good-but-irrelevant. It's a lot harder than it sounds, as George Bemard Shaw once said "I'm sorry to have written such a long letter, but I didn't have time to write a shorter one."
There is always gold on Presentation Zen but my current favorite is punchy pace, lots of images and heavy use of repetition; like Dick Hardt's Identity 2.0 keynote. It makes for a big deck but if you have a nice flow and keep it moving it really holds people's attention and leaves an impression.
