Speakers | dConstruct 2010

Speakers | dConstruct 2010.

This was a fun presentation to listen to and I think Merlin makes some great points throughout.  I loved his comments about how nerds aren’t doing what they do for the money.  To paraphrase one portion:

If you give a painter a bunch of money to not paint any more they won’t be happy because they have money.  What makes them happy it to paint

This is spot on and describes well this idea that jobs that require creative thought generally can’t be done better by throwing money at it.  There are other things that you can give those “creatives” that can have a bigger impact.  I’m not saying that money isn’t important.  What I am saying is that there is a point at which more money isn’t doing anything good.  Pay enough to take the issue of money off the table.

If you can give the “creatives” autonomy and control to do what they think is best you’ll have happier developers and designers, and I guarantee happier customers to.

Merlin also talks about looking to the horizon and preparing yourself for what is coming next.  He encourages “nerds” to always keep looking ahead and try to avoid getting stuck the the rut of what you think is great right now.

Here’s what I see on my horizon:

Rails is great, but the time of server side is transitioning to client side.  This has been a while in coming but I believe that Javascript will be the primary language web developers are using and only secondarily their server side language of choice.  I’ve been eyeing this space for a while know and it’s only getting riper for the change.

If you are a math nerd start brushing up on your statistics and big data.  We’ve figured out how to collect huge sums of data, but only in the last few years have we really started understanding scalable and flexible ways to process that data out side of academia.  I’ve heard this elsewhere and I’ll echo it here: Statisticians will be driving the next generation of crazy cool apps.  It’s already starting especially around the twitter api, and it’s going to grow even more.

Fun times!!

The Data-Driven Life – NYTimes.com

The Data-Driven Life – NYTimes.com.

This sort of data collection and information extraction is becoming easier and more accessible.  I’ve personally used tools like RescueTime and TrackYouHappiness.org with some benefit.  I can see this becoming more prevalent and also the quality of information (as opposed to data) going up.  I’ve been trying to track my migraines and workouts, but don’t really know what I’m looking for and it is difficult to maintain.  One thing I love about tools like Kissmetrics is that they allow you to throw data at them and then build funnels after the fact with that data.  That sort of post processing seems ideal for life tracking like the article talks about.  Along the same line of reasoning, being able to combine multiple life streams that may individually include different pieces of data about you in to a single system would simplify collection as well.  If my Twitter stream, RescueTime log, Gowalla checkins, and happiness reports were all pulled in and correlated together I imagine I could get a much clearer picture of what things impact my mood and productivity.

Animal and human behaviour: Manager’s best friend | The Economist

Animal and human behaviour: Manager’s best friend | The Economist.

I plan on having Niko as a regular fixture at the ProFounder offices once we move to our own place.

Great Hackers

Great Hackers.

This is an old article, but I finally got around to reading it from my Instapaper queue.  Very well reasoned descriptions about a number of topics.  The main goal of the article is to describe what companies can do to inspire both the hiring and continued working of great software developers.  I completely agree with what he has to say here and I hope I can create the kind of environment he describes for the developers on my team.

Create an environment that promotes inspiration and focus and discourages boredom and distraction.

4 items that have reinvented my workouts

4 items that have reinvented my workouts.

I know Josh from our ELC days and he’s always been much better at maintaining a workout routine compared to me.  I’ve been struggling for a number of years now to find a routine that I could maintain for more than a few weeks.  This types of posts really inspire me to try again and keep it up.  I think staying active has a huge impact on my happiness.