Metamorphosis

From the dictionary over at Reference.com:

Metamorphosis:

1. Biology - a profound change in form from one stage to the next in the life history of an organism, as from thecaterpillar to the pupa and from the pupa to the adult butterfly.

It is said that education is a life long process, that you never stop learning.  My experience holds this to be true considering, at a minimum, the last few years of my life.  This experience has also taught me recently, that if you let your education change you for the better, it can magnify your abilities and your vision of the world around you.

For over a decade I had been working strictly in the realms of the IT systems administration world, dabbling in the arts of computer software engineering only enough to know what it was, that I wanted to do it more and what a lot of the basics were.  This time as a sysadmin exposed me to many different software solutions of varying quality and scope.  Sometimes I cursed the authors of what somebody dared to call a solution.  Other times, I was pleasantly surprised by the ease in which my appointed task could be accomplished with an elegant tool.

Finally having my fill of 2am wake-up calls to go reboot a server, about 2 years ago I was able to begin the transition into full-time software development, fully shedding my sysadmin mantle approximately 6 months ago.  I still run servers of my own, but nobody else depends on those servers to keep there businesses running.  So, if they go down at 11pm on December 24th, they can stay down for a couple of days while I celebrate my holiday…  Now I am fully experiencing the role of software engineer at a small company who’s primary role is software development.  I am also learning what operating in a team of intelligent and capable people trained in similar areas is.  That is to say, I am learning what it means to be a mentor and a trainee, all at the same time, contributing and learning.

This experience is also teaching me about communication and the art form it really is.  Going back in my post history here you may notice that I am a little rough around the edges in my methods of delivery.  Even as I type here I can’t help but feel clumsy and unpracticed.  That can only change with repetition and analysis, which is both what I am learning, and what I am sharing today.

In what will likely be my next post, I will talk about some of the thoughts this has triggered on the nature of communications itself, much of which is not new, but is newly realized to me.  For this post I will simply state that a few things have done well for me in the past 6 months:

1. “The enemy of good is perfect” – This is a widely used saying in the engineering industry that I have taken to interpret as: If you settle only for perfection, you will never accomplish anything but continually tweak a project until it dies before ever seeing its purpose.
2. “Never pass up the opportunity to write down your sparks of inspiration” – While probably a piece of advice given by many, this is one I have found recently is very important.  The sparks of inspiration comes when you are doing the most minute and mundane of things.  They tend  to come not during your study and exploration, but afterwards when you let your subconscious take over while doing the more mundane things like yard work, sleep or even exercise.  Study and exploration with a purpose, while not expecting the inspiration to come until later, is a great way to let the rest of your life assist in the creative process.
3. “Communication is the most complex functions we as human beings partake in” – More of a realization lately as I have been exploring a particular idea, I have learned quite poignantly that communication consists of much more than the words that come out of our mouths or that we commit to paper.  We must be careful to consider what we has already been communicated and what we leave out when we make an attempt to convey our messages.  We must also use that same consideration when we are receiving somebody else’s message.
4. “If you don’t see something that needs improvement, you aren’t opening your eyes wide enough” – A corollary to #1 being that while perfections is not generally available, that means that there are very rarely no improvements that can be made to a project.

I have more to say on this relating to what types of things I think young programmers should be doing, especially as I work through some of those ideas in my own path of education and growth.  However, those will have to wait for another day, or at very least another article.

Blogging and Internet Reputation

Lately I’ve been doing some searching for consulting gigs / full-time jobs / funding for my startup ideas, and I’ve started realizing that I haven’t really put much information out there and interacted with other tech communities as much as I probably should have.  I know there are privacy arguments to be made, but those can mostly be addressed by either posting technical details in a fashion that don’t give away any confidential information or trade secrets.  What has mostly stopped me was my tendency to want to over-think and perfect things before publishing anything.

Let me be clear to anyone looking to contribute their thoughts and expertise to the Internet community.  I have come to realize that most people generally don’t care about minor grammatical mistakes if the information has value to them.  This means that it is more important to get relevant information out there into the public, and not worry so much about how it’s formatted or whether the writing voice is eloquent.  I have heard from a least a couple of creative writing types that writing styles emerge with practice.  If you’re truly worried about looking foolish with your words, practice for a little while on a private blog, where nobody can see it.  I would really encourage people to start sharing of their expertise and experience though.

Given this, I will be aiming to not filter my thoughts and inclinations to share nearly so much as I have in the past.  I the past I would think of an idea and store it away on some todo-list for later processing.  You can tell by looking at my blogs’ history how often I’ve actually gotten back to those ideas though.

So, what I would ask is that you have patience with me while I find my “blogger’s voice.”  I hope you’ll interact and find the information I share valuable in some fashion to your lives.

iLike – No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook

A business lesson for those that are interested in that sort of thing:

While I don’t fully agree with Michael Arrington’s application to Facebook of the concept posted in a recent article over at TechCrunch, he does pose a very valid point of innovation versus customer appeasement.  I’ll be writing up a more full blog post in my WorldOfTech blog in the next few days.  Here I wanted to highlight the intelligence of Michael’s post and encourage others to “look beyond” what customers are literally saying, and figure out what they really want.  You can never innovate if you don’t apply some real creativity to solving the problems presented by customers, instead of simply saying “if they want X, we’ll give them X”.

So next time you are presented with this type of situation, dig deeply to find what the customers really need instead of simply what they’re asking for.  If you’re really feeling innovative, you’ll fundamentally change their needs and improve their habits and methodologies all at once.

iLike – A Good Explanation of OpenID versus OAuth

Over at Defying Classification, the author posts a very good explanation of the differences between OpenID (authentication) and OAuth (authorization).  If you’re interested in either technology, or in Internet authentication and authorization standards, it’s worth the 10 minutes of your time to browse over the article.

iLike – ProBlogger

I’ll be starting a series of posts I’ll be calling my ‘iLike’ series of posts.  They’ll be short and simple postings mostly designed to get topics of conversation started surrounding other interesting blog posts that I run acrossed.

The first in this series of references is a post on ProBlogger regarding freelance writing and idea generation.  I’ve read very similar concepts in a few different places now.  This one happened to hit home as the style of the post and the referred author both resonated with my personality.  Thanks to these guys, I think I’m going to start honing my writing and communications skills.  I’ll try to keep my posts fairly short unless I really have the time to explore a subject in depth.  Chances are, though, that I’ll just be trying to start up enlightening conversations.

So, give ProBlogger a read some-time.  If your interested in another good read, give Writer Dad a chance too.

NetworkGoalie Labs

I’m now working on getting my creative juices flowing, I have decided to setup a virtual laboratory to track ideas that I come up with, or that my friends come up with and want to colaborate on.  I am hoping that I’ll get at least one or two good ideas out of it for projects, but it should be an ongoing project in itself that I’ll be treating as a project incubator of sorts.

Along with my virtual laboratories I’ll be stepping up my efforts to actually interact with my peers to come up with new and fresh ideas.  I’ve been playing the role of lone small business IT gun-man for too long without venturing out to keep up with the outside world.  I’m hoping I can both provide my network of peers some added insight, and gain valuable vision from them.  Maybe we can come up with some projects that benefit others in various ways, and make us a bit of living ourselves.

New Blogging Engine, Again…

Okay, so I bit the bullet and actually installed WordPress MU, the multi-user wrapper engine that uses the highly recommended Wordpress engine.  I’m impressed with it so far.  I’m also impressed with what my brother has been able to do on his blog sites The Revolution Orange and How I Got a Job In Advertising.  I’m wishing he would get more active on those blogs again, but hey, I can only ask so much of a guy, right?

Anyway, I’ve had quite a few thoughts lately about things I could discuss in the blogosphere, and that I could speak at least a little intelligently about.  Hence, the reason to get this site back up and running.  I’m opening the site up to my friends to create their own blogs and speak about topics they feel passionately about, so I’ll hopefully get some really good discussions going here.  Maybe this time I’ll be passionate enough about the actual blogging process to do it right this time   This time I’m also going to be seeking advice from peers and helping newbie bloggers out as well.  We’ll see how it goes.