Posts filed under 'Software Development'
“Everyone” thinks open-source is good. Software that’s free to you; software whose code is available for you to learn from, extend, or modify; software that’s presumably updated periodically by a hoard of magic elf volunteers for the sake of their own technical intellectual gratification.
Now.. are you one of those folks who contributes to an open-source project? Hmmm – very different angle.
Now… are you one of those folks who figures out how to run an open-source project, bringing together the disparate interests of that presumed hoard of volunteers into one uber well-running machine?
Wow. I used to think that the hardest job in the world to do well would be to set up a high performing team at a fast food restaurant. Staff turn-over, low pay, and the like. I’m beginning to reconsider: the most interesting leadership and management challenges seem to be in the open-source space, particularly for projects that have a significant user base and vested interests from many parties interested in driving direction. Lots of smart people, lots of competing interests, lots of feeling of a need to get somewhere in particular, lots of directions in particular.
Neat things to think about…
March 10th, 2012
Watching for news of OSCON again this year. Proposal submitted, waiting for word. The topic I proposed a year or so ago on W3C and OpenAjax Hub seems to have prepared me well for topics ongoing at work nowadays. May this year’s proposal topic serve me as well, AND get me a ticket to Portland. Hoping to score the trifecta: a trip to the open-source software convention, an opportunity as a girl geek to speak, and an opportunity to highlight my / my company’s role in something pretty cool. Hoping!
March 5th, 2012
Lots of proposal writing of various forms going on lately. Wrote an SBIR, which we’ll hear about in a few weeks. Advised on another. Wrote an OSCON abstract, per my norm. (Hey, one way to get more women presenting is to be one of those women who presents!) Have notes for a mobile application that I’d like to write to (1) knock some socks off at work for folks who thing I’m “only” managerial, (2) demonstrate some neat technologies that may help us in various ways, and (3) build something that’ll help make next year’s charity auction a bit simpler. While I’m doing everything else with that app, I’ll use it to make me a bit smarter on Git and push forward some ideas on building a geek community.
But all of those are just ideas on paper. They’re informed ideas, to be sure, based on reading up in various areas to make sure I’m not painting us into any corners. But they’re not working code. Need more working code. I think the challenge is to just, well, start! It’s so easy to scribble ideas, to build up that portfolio of useful things to work upon and pick from. But eventually, I’ve gotta kick my tail into gear with action, and focus in on a particular area to get some specific bit of success.
Tomorrow’s goal for the evening: download jQuery Mobile 1.0, build one screen for my auction app, and commit that screen to Git. That’s it – nothing more noble. But it gets a dev environment and two bits of visible outcome (screen + code in repository). It’s something, and something to build upon.
If it weren’t 1:00 in the morning, that would be the set for today. But time to stop procrastinating sleep…
January 16th, 2012
Highly amused by the release notes for Sencha.io‘s beta3 release. Included below in their entirety.
Release Notes for Sencha.io 1.0.0
Release Notes: Release Notes: October 24, 2011
Version Number: 1.0.0
New In This Release
* General Enhancements
o .
* General Bugs Fixes
o .
* Known Issues
o .
I guess if you’re 1.0, by definition there are no enhancements or no bug fixes. Gonna guess there may be some known issues, though. For comparison, as well as to explain why I’m amused: Our projects list the deltas between our alpha versions in the release notes for our alphas. Alpha2′s release notes will list new features added in that alpha since alpha1, as well as any major bug fixes since alpha1.
This empty template just highly amuses me…
November 3rd, 2011
Our project at work enabled a community of 1000+ folks to communicate via a closed google group to chat with us about desired software features, any issues, local extensions or patches, etc. It’s this really neat collaboration area that my team of just a few folks spends quite a bit of effort in their care and feeding. Google groups in some ways makes that somewhat hard. Let me put that differently: there are a few things it could do as a core product that would make things much easier, and there are even some extensions/mashups I’d like to make to help me satisfy some local use scenarios.
First stop: google help forums… Can google groups let me identify unanswered messages in some way, or topics over the last x period of time with the most varied set of respondents? answer: uh, those forums aren’t really active anymore, and no mention seen of such features. Next step: any REST APIs to help me put together a solution? Uh, nope there, too.. Feature request out there for such… Lots of comments of ‘I need that, too!”, but no responses from google.
I did trip across mention of ATOM and RSS feeds. Hopefully, those plus some cloud storage of additional metadata may get me to a solution. Aiming for the following: discovery of unanswered messages, discovery of outlier topics (revisited after long time or large number of responses or…), moderator tagging of topics to flag for team, maybe end user tag clouds sorts of stuff…. Lots of ideas, and then the idea of further integrating with some sort of crm kind of system also appeals. (Nope, not proposing writing a crm here. But integrating with one would be useful. Wonder if crms take email feeds or rss or atom feeds to auto handle much of what I just described? Hmmmm….)
July 6th, 2011
Day 3 of iPad adventuring. After getting set up on day1, my kids started asking what games I had on it. First request was for Bejeweled (Callie). Second request was for Angry Birds (Cameron). And then they both clamored for Fruit Ninja. I blame their grandfather for the first two, and their babysitter for the third. I did download a free Angry Birds and spent too much time throwing feathered missiles at pigs. I had had a version of AB on my Android and never been impressed. On the iPad, the user experience worked a bit better – still a pain in the neck game, in my opinion. Though that hasn’t stopped me from spending too much time on it.
Typing this blog post from my laptop for no really good reason – I pulled out the laptop to do some Javascript development. So I now have my Android in front of me, updating its apps and downloading Google Voice to let me do some voice command trickery I saw on LifeHacker; I have the iPad in front of me that I’m using as my eBook kind of thing to read ‘Learning Ext JS 3.2′. And, of course, I’m typing on the laptop for my blog. I type all right on the iPad – it’s just that I type faster on a physical keyboard as of yet. Appreciating some of the niceties of the on-screen keyboard: if it knows I’m entering in an e-mail field, then the ‘@’ sign is part of the primary keyboard; as I shift to type a punctuation mark, after I type the mark, it returns me to the main letter keyboard. However, it doesn’t do that if I’m typing numbers – very smooth.
Did finally set up a cellular plan on the iPad. $20 / month for 1GB data. I figure if I primarily use the thing at work and at home, both have wireless connections. But the $20 gets me accessibility in other places, without relying on wireless networks that I worry may be less secure. That reminds me: I need to find some sort of virus and other network protection software for the iPad.
Having a very funny geeky weekend!
July 4th, 2011
So, I’m connected up through iTunes, registering my new iPad. I worked a few years ago for a cellphone company, and as part of our website, we had folks register their phones. There was always a question of how to get the information we wanted from our customers without annoying them with all of the information we wanted, and how to confirm that the information for key fields like serial number was typed correctly.
iTunes iPad2 registration experience: I typed in my iTunes id (gmail address) and password, and got taken to a screen that had my address, my phone number, and my serial number, all already populated. For everything but the serial number, those fields were editable. They had my phone number wrong, but I first corrected it, and then actually deleted it. Not sure I like that they had a phone number for me. It WASN’T the phone number I gave the Best Buy guy yesterday, or any mistyped variant of it. Not sure where they got it. Slightly weirded out. Really appreciative on the serial number thing, though: that info was amongst the set of common errors when registering cellphones where folks would fat-finger.
I skipped the set of questions they ask (what I do for a living, how old I am, primary usage purpose, etc)… It always bugged me when our end-users would skip those questions, but here they’re not listed as required: interested in seeing what Apple does with my “non-compliance”. Oooh, it does require my phone number – not liking that. Giving ‘em the fake number run-around. Whoever has number 366-2273, sorry: your number also maps to “FooBard”.
Did set up the ‘Find my iPad’ feature. I’ll trade potential loss of privacy here (explicitly granted, instead of just likely going on anyway) for the reward of being able to find my lost device.
By the way, impressed that the keyboard on the iPad counts the ‘@’ as part of the alphabet keyboard, rather than the symbol keyboard. Nice touch.
July 2nd, 2011
After too many conferences where my options for staying in the loop with my team were (1) lug a laptop around all day, including powerpack, etc or (2) receive/type emails on a phone keyboard while not being able to get to all of my filed emails (probably solvable with better software), decided to go for the iPad. Then the choice became: Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi + 3G? There’s a reasonably significant price difference between them, and of course the 3G requires a service plan with a carrier, which usually goes against my cheapskate side. But this time had a bit of extra cash at my disposal, so decided to go for the gusto. Because the iPad isn’t subsidized by any of the carriers in the same way a phone might be, there’s not the same requirement to lock-in to a contract. In other words, pay a bit more for the ability to do 3G, but not locked in to paying month over month necessarily. OK, workable.
Next choice: which carrier (AT&T or Verizon) – you have to determine which when you buy your iPad. Just like phones (grumble, grumble), the equipment varies based on which carrier you’re going with. Having an existing contract with T-Mobile (being bought by AT&T) and not being entirely happy with that (lots of dropped calls lately), decided to test out Verizon.
Next choice: how much space – options include 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. I don’t intend to use this as a heavy entertainment platform, so opted to go for the 32. Probably still more than I need.
Next choice: I was at Best Buy, so they wanted to set me up with a Geek Squad policy. Listened to what they covered, listened to the price ($120), opted to pass.
Out of box experience: you get the thing, it has a 2×2 inch instruction sheet that tells almost nothing. You turn on the iPad, and it shows two icons with a line between them. The first is a drawing of the connector for the iPad with a line connecting to an icon for iTunes. Really? They’re really counting on knowledge of iTunes being ubiquitous for their customer base. I didn’t have iTunes on my work laptop (I’m a Pandora fan, and usually listen on my phone rather than eat network bandwidth at work), so installed it.
Once it’s installed and started, with iPad plugged into my laptop, iTunes recognizes the iPad device and starts me up for registration. Looking forward to fun here – just really amused by the out-of-the-box experience.
July 2nd, 2011
A few folks from my company are working on putting together a ‘Young Women in Computing Day’ next month. Women are generally under-represented in the software field, particularly in the software development field. I’ll avoid stats here, but will just say that at my last job they sent out an email to the guys in the office saying that they could no longer use the womens’ rest room since there was now a girl on staff. In my career, I’ve seen women in the requirements analysts role, women in the tester roles, women in the project leadership roles, but it’s been very rare to find women in the pure development roles. So very happy to have opportunities to expose girls to fields that are harder to expose them to then the teacher that they see in school every day or the doctor who helps them get better when they’re not feeling good. Those roles are needed – but already have plenty of men and women heading their way. Want to have a way to more concretely expose them to the fun they can have and the good they can do in software development – and hey, the money in the field’s not bad, either.
The Wall Street Journal recently had a section, Women in the Economy, which was the result of a conference bringing business and government leaders together to talk about what’s holding women back in the workplace. One of the phrases that jumped out at me was the statement that women are promoted based on performance, men are promoted based on potential. It occurs to me that part of that may be that by helping young ladies recognize their own potential in the field early, we can help escalate them up both the potential and the performance curve. What’s more appealing to a recruiter looking to fill their slots with young talent than someone who’s been excited about technology and doing things with it for years beyond their peers?
Hoping someday to look around a technical company or a technical conference and see a better mix of men and women. Think it’s part of my responsibility to advocate and work to help make it happen.
April 15th, 2011
This past week, I was part of an interview caucus at work. In these, all of the folks who interviewed a given candidate get together to make a decision as to whether to make an offer to a candidate. Each candidate at our company is typically interviewed by 5 or more people, including a mix of technical staff and executive staff. Makes for a long stint for the candidate, but at the end of it, we’ve gotten a good sense of them and they’ve gotten a good sense of us.
Our “victim” this week was a solid contributor at his previous company who was recommended by some of our current team who’d worked with him previously. I had some concerns, though – through no fault of his, his current company wasn’t really doing anything that we’d consider particularly relevant, from a technology perspective. He’d actually argued for using more current technologies, and had eventually decided to leave based at least partially on this problem. All good, so far. The challenge was that he couldn’t tell me how he was scratching his “geek itch” outside of work, since work wasn’t doing it for him. Reading blogs? Doing some coding on the side? Couldn’t even get him to give me a list of the things he _wished_ he was doing. No extra effort to get more current, other than to raise a concern with his company that he wasn’t staying current.
All of this boils down to me to a “watch what I do, not what I say I wanna do” sort of lesson. He says he wants to be more current, but isn’t doing anything about it. I called out that attribute in the caucus. And now I’m feeling accountable to myself to a bit more. Working on an OSCON brief right now, so surveying my topic and making sure all of my points look like they’ll hang together technically. Plan to poke a few components of my brief and really push ‘em to their bounds, whether or not my topic is accepted. [Desperately hoping it's accepted... need to push myself technically, and show a few more women up there, all in one fell swoop.] Looking to build these geek opportunities into my regular work-life, as well, since I’ve become more of a team enabler and leader than technical contributor over the past year.
Oh, by the way, see what I do not just what I say is spilling over into the rest of my thinking, too… called someone else on it in the work world, but I see it hitting my Christian walk, my fitness approach, my interaction with my kids and my hubby, …. starting to feel like I need to be careful when I open my mouth!
February 6th, 2011
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