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…

Writing a proposal for work. Realizing I overuse the following words:
– key
– capability
Wishing I knew a way to get Word to give me a word frequency picture, so I could see where I’m bludgeoning someone with ‘and this is key, and a key concept, and a key capability’…

My overall writing and editing process works out something like the following:
– brain dump which has half-formed thoughts, extraneous details, and not quite reasonable flow… gathering raw materials, basically
– edit for flow: what ideas need to hit full force, in what order?
– edit for wording: my first dump of words is usually too long and needs to be written to not be so lengthy / imposing / voluminous. (See, I need to edit this post for wording!)

I was mean and pushed out the roughest rough draft to a few members of my team today to make sure I was heading to some sort of reasonable realm. Good feedback from one team member in particular, and need to make sure I laud her in the right circles at work. My ulterior motive in letting some see “raw raw” is to show how rough and dirty these things start, so someone itches to show how they can do it better. Nothing like showing a low entry bar to suck folks in past the ‘oh, I couldn’t do that’ kind of idea….. Leadership gamesmanship of a sort…