Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk
I just finished reading Crush It!
I guess it is a narrow path to walk. To cater to both those who don’t know about the power of Twitter, Facebook et al. and those that already know who @garyvee is.
It was a really nice successor to David Allens Getting Things Done
The lessons learned are the obvious: Get your sh*t together, stop procrastinating and start pushing that flywheel where YOU want it to go.
All three books have already had some impact on my life in getting me to step up the effort with my latest project that I’ll write about in my next post.
I’m a scrum novice
I have been forced to learn what Scrum is due to two independent assignments.
So in the spirit of learning stuff by myself I just read Agile Software Development with Scrum and I’ve got Agile Project Management with Scrum in the pipe.
It struck me that Scrum is a little like it has turned out when I, and the good developers around me, have had some saying in the organization of software development.
I’m by far an expert in the field but I get the feeling that it will be hard to convince a customer to embrace Scrum. I would gladly work in a Scrum team though.
My Scrum encounters this far is by one customer that want to use Scrum in a project to migrate a rather large application from VB6 to .NET, and one customer where I helped them inspect and evaluate a software supplier (and their software) that uses Scrum for their application development.
Done in the right way I really think it enables both transparency and creative thinking.
Sharepoint Services
I think that I’m not sold to anyone next week, so I will probably spend the week reading Developer’s guide to Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0
My intent is to get through it all, including some coding to get to know the product.
I think WSS is a good base to start with when the client wants a web based internal solution. I’ve read somewhere that it works better for extranets now, so it might be a good starting point for those solutions also.
I did a solution at one client that I based on the Portal Starter Kit from ASP.NET a couple of years ago. I integrated it with Reporting Services and Active Directory. It has been running without a glitch for more than a year now. The .NET 1.1 runtime doesn’t get along with ASP.NET 2.0 on their 64-bit server though, so they want to migrate it to .NET 2.0, but I think it will be better for them to remake my portal modules into web parts and run WSS instead of a hacked and migrated starter sit portal. I will also gain more from learning WSS than pushing the client forward with an, essentially, unsupported application. It should be a lot easier to find someone that can do things in WSS.
Passing on knowledge
This week I had the opportunity to introduce a recently employed colleague. He came out of school when there were almost no programming work available. Being a smart guy he has nurtured his programing skills while doing other things to pay the bills.
I really like spreading the little knowledge I still have. It feels like I have forgotten a lot more than I remember. This week I worked on a couple of Visual Basic 6 applications. At the beginning of the week I didn’t remember anything. I had some small fragments of ghosts of memories in the back of my head. Thanks to Google I could find a lot of information about the topics involved. Information that filtered through my remaining knowledge lead to an understanding of the problems at hand.
This got me thinking about what I should try to pass on to the new guy. Experience is not easy to teach and we are working in an industry that is still very immature. Technical details can be found withing seconds on the net so that’s unnecessary to teach. I ended up recommending him to read Code Complete, Second Edition
I really hope he enjoyed it as much as I did. It’ll take more than three days to pass on more than fifteen years of work life knowledge.
The Long Tail and The Diamond Age
I’m almost done reading The Long Tail
It is the kind of book where I feel I’ve thought of the basic ideas presented before. Not that I could have written it myself though. Far from. Chris describes the long tail as all the small niches that doesn’t get any shelf space at Best Buy, but are very lucrative when exposed on the web. This is because web sites like Goggle and iTunes helps bringing niche consumers and niche producers together. It also looks like more and more people are turning away from being hit consumers when it becomes easier to find just the right niche products.
Anyway; this infinite range of products got me thinking about The Diamond Age
Working offline with Team Foundation Server
I’m just about done reading Professional Team Foundation Server
This tip needs the Team Foundation Power Tool (tfpt.exe) to work.
When you are working offline you just clear the read-only attribute on the files you want to edit. Later, when you are online, you open the command line, navigate to your workspace and run:
tfpt.exe online
Now the power tool will find all those writable files and create a change set from them.
Remember that you can not rename files while offline, but it is ok to add or remove files.
