I recently attended my first coding dojo – which was essentially the first time I’d been involved in programming something with others since, well, my university days.
A coding … what? Something Japanese – martial arts sounding. On being invited to this event I attempted to figure out what it was I’d been invited to, but first it gets worse. On the mailing list where this event is organised, I discovered that since no-one had volunteered to do it Kata style, we’d be doing a Randori Dojo. Upon reading the associated link I added Fishbowl discussions to the list of things I have no idea about – I’m sure you can imagine what a long list this has become through my lifetime.
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Two weeks ago, I attended an IIBA UK Chapter meeting where Michael Brown introduced us to social styles. We had to fill in a questionnaire, which told us whether we were Amicable, Expressive, Analytical or Drivers. Shaking my head, I wondered which consultants were overpaid to create another 4×4 matrix. But really, I’m a sucker for all these psychometric tests, and found the social style tool to be more interesting than I expected.
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And I can’t either. You’ve got to face the facts – as a business analyst, no one is going to read your documentation because of your poetic commentary, your witty explanations or your inspired diagrams. At most, people might read it because they have to. So why do we get so attached to our masterpieces?
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Seth Godin’s free eBook is out. It’s a collection of case studies about tribes, which also happens to be the title of his new book. See my contribution, ‘Power to the Players’, about Steve Johnson and the Geelong Football Club.
A month ago, a talented member of our project team (no, not me) got the business people, developers and everyone in between to agree to a simple, elegant solution to a business problem. This week, all that hard work was undone. We’ve now got signoff on a much more complex solution – we need to do four calculations and one of these calculations is not like the others. So why does this bother me so much? Not because it creates more work (this is one time where laziness cannot afford to win out), but because it sets alarm bells ringing in my head.
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There are many who speak out against patents and copyright. At Business of Software 2008, Richard Stallman explained very effectively why they don’t work in the software industry. At Cambridge Business Lectures, Cory Doctorow talked about its effect on the music industry. So what would happen if we waved our magic wand and removed all patents and all copyrights from the world…?
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“It’s the cat’s pajamas”
“It’s the what?”, I asked. “Why are the cats wearing pyjamas?”
At first I thought my friend was crazy. Then I realised that I had been living in under a rock and was the only one who didn’t know this phrase. It turns out that ‘cat’s pyjamas’ is a 1920s phrase for ‘a wonderful or remarkable person or thing’, or in Wikipedia‘s more restrained language, something ‘beneficial’.
Later that week, I was reading a book on the train and it talked about a product being the cat’s pyjamas. Immediately, this phrased jumped out at me – not just because I now knew what it meant, but also because I’d heard it recently and it was familiar to me.
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My biggest problem with the internet is its size. There is so much information out there, but sometimes I just can’t find what I want. The companies who add the most value are the ones who deal with this. The obvious one is Google, who allows you a targeted way of searching for what you want. Another is delicious (who has finally removed those pesky dots from its name) which allows you to share bookmarks. But can we go a little further to turn the large quantity of information out there into quality?
The wisdom of crowds
While reading about a presentation at Agile 2008, I stumbled upon a theory by James Surowiecki, professing that groups can often make decisions that are better than those made by any single member of the group. Digg and Reddit already make use of this by allowing the collective web audience to highlight and vote up pages they find valuable. But why not extend this to all users and all pages, building it into the way we use the web?
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“Wow”, I exclaimed at the Business of Software conference in Boston last week. And many others agreed with me. No, this wasn’t in response to the speakers, but to a much less wow-worthy* event – the length of the toilet queues. For the first time at a big event the ladies’ queue was shorter than the mens’ queue.
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Did I mention that we’re writing a web app? Specifically, a personal recipe site. Personal in the sense that you get some ownership of your recipes – this means no abusive comments from some stranger about your bad taste (naturally you’ll consider that his comments highlight who really has the bad taste). Ownership means identity which means username and password – with me so far?
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