Software Geek

Since Doug mentioned me doing lots of GUI stuff, I thought I’d mention an interesting UI design book - About Face. It’s worth a read, although I think that Cooper goes a little bit far in saying that the “File” menu should be nuked. There are some things that don’t always follow a rational model, but get ingrained into the system so deeply that you shouldn’t try to change them. I agree with probably 80% of the book though - self describing UI, error messages with intelligible text (and solutions), etc… basically stuff that MS typically does poorly… although hopefully we are starting to show signs of improving.

The question for Doug is - are you going to JavaOne this year?

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I speaking tomorrow at a internal Microsoft event. I’ve spoken at tons of conferences (PDC, TechEd, etc.) and for groups ranging form 1 to 2000. Today I did the rehearsal for one of the demos i’m going and it didn’t really work… I had tomorrow blocked off to run through all the presentations to make sure i’m ready, but sometimes its good to get a little slap in the face to remind me to prepare adequatly… it’s easy to get a little cavalier about these things…

Scott made a good posting about presentations also…

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What ever black magic made this work last night isn’t working right now. For the time being I have to plug my machine directly into my cable modem to get publish to work. Otherwise the FTP connection just times out. I’ve tried every combination of SPI, DMZ, PASV, etc, that I can think of. If anyone has a suggestion, let me know!
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Reading “On Becoming a Leader” has been really interesting, mostly because it suggests that a key differentiator of leaders is the vision that leaders provide, while others are content to be driven. Interestingly I have been spending a lot of time at work trying to determine what I should be trying to do… I have been asking a lot of people to try and understand what my role should be, but instead I should have been defining my vision. Coincidentally enough I’ve been working on a vision document around developers as a core customer base…

Thinking about my career path is interesting. I started software development in grade school. I wrote a math quiz program that we used for about 1 day in class. I wrote some interesting stuff in middle school; Snake Bit, a Nibbles clone – although at the time I was cloning Snake Byte, an Apple II program, and a GUI environment… although I may have wrote that closer to high school… In high school I decided that I was going into architecture and took several classes. Eventually I determined that I spent more time configuring and learning AutoCAD than I was learning about architecture, so I decided to continue down the software course.

I have worked a bunch of fastfood/retail jobs, but the one of interest for this story is Waldensoftware. When I left they had just been bought out by Electronic Boutique (now EBX). It was interesting to watch a brick and mortar bookseller like Waldenbooks run a software store… anyway, more on that later – the interesting note is that it was at Waldensoftware that I began talking with lots of software people. At the time Waldensoftware was a fairly book oriented store, so we got lots of actual developers in. Here I met Jim Flippin. He was a regular customer.

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I’m not sure if this is a universal truth or not, but I suspect it is.

People can’t manage their email.

This isn’t a spam problem or tool problem. This is about people that don’t understand how to deal with mail in a timely fashion and manage their time. I have seen people that proclaim proudly that they have 4,000 messages in their inbox with 1,000 unread items. It must make them feel important to be so popular?

It is time to take a stand. We must demand action.

Jeff Bogdan (a coworker) and I have been trying a new system. We basically compete with each other to keep our inbox as small as possible. We read mail several times a day and try to respond, file, or delete each mail as we read it. The goal - less that 20 messages in your inbox.

It’s amazing - Once you get your email under control the frustration you feel when someone isn’t responsive to your mail is even worse. We are hoping that we can use shame and humiliation as a tool to convince others to follow our lead on agressively managing mail.

This is such a huge deal at a company like Microsoft. We communicate almost exclusively through email. It is not uncommon for people to get 200 mails a day, with some people toping at over 500. I’m sure that many other large companies out there are the same way. People get bogged down in mail, stop responding, and next thing you know you are always walking down to someone’s office asking them to read you mail right away. Or, even worse, you start tagging every mail with a !

1. Read mail several times a day (not continuosly, but also not only in the AM or PM)
2. When reading mail try to respond, file, or delete the mail when you first read it. The goal is to touch each mail only once.
3. Use Outlook (or whatever program is your favorite) to auto-file large mass mailing lists into folders so that they don’t pile up in your inbox and hide important mails.
4. Keep less than 20 mails in your inbox.

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So if you read my career history (which isn’t mandetory to understand the rest of this post) you will see that I spent a bunch of time working on Microsoft’s WFC and then WinForms for.NET. In the later part of this, I got the chance to meet Chris Sells. Chris wrote, debugged, and deployed what I believe to be the first real over-the-web Windows Forms application (wahoo ). In the process he continued to find bugs and issues with our deployment and security model. Hopefully with the release of Everett (.NET 1.1, should be out “soon”) most of these issues will be resolved. Just had to give chris props… you rock!
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As Dave Winer points out, this is exactly what the web is about… (not to be too biased, i’ll also point out that this ASP.NET site is pretty cool also…) in both cases you have one to one communication between the community developers and the product team developers. Of course, one of the best things about the Safari link is that Dave Hyatt is actually posting patches in almost real time! That is damn cool!
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Wow… I hadn’t played with any aggregators enough before, but Syndirella is really cool. The ability to fly through blogs with a simple space-space-space browsing is just awesome… it kills me that one or two my links don’t have RSS feeds.
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Starting to inject some ASP.NET code into my site… I sure wish that Radio had a mode that evaluated it’s script on the server with ASP.NET - i’d love to be able to add some more dynamic content to the server.

The first content - my list of movies.

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Why, oh why, did Radio decide that an HTML page was the way to implement a client application?? I have lost 2 large entries so far with Radio… once I commited the “sin” of clicking an icon on my desktop… IE navigated to that page, my entry was gone… just now, I accidentally clicked the back button on my mouse, boom! another entry gone.

Given that Radio is a “smart client” application (being that it runs a complete WEB SERVER) on my machine, why couldn’t they actually write a real client application to do editing?

Oh well… i really need to write my own blog authoring tool…

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