After kicking myself all weekend for not heading to SXSW. was getting ready to head to sleep last night and saw a post by Michael Buffington announcing that Stikkit won an award for Best Technical Achievement.
Congrats to Rael, Michael, and the rest of the Stikkit team!
InformationWeek has a short story titled, Poor Communications, Unrealistic Scheduling Lead To IT Project Failure.
“Communications failures top the list of reasons IT projects fail, according to poll results from the Computing Technology Industry Association.
About 28% of 1,000 respondents identified poor communications as the main cause of project failure, according to CompTIA, which offers project management training.”
So, while we’re all spending so much of our time focused on improving our technical skills, are we also investing our time into becoming communication superstars?
If you look back at the following posts, you’ll see some links to some excellent books on this topic.
d3](http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2006/09/27/project-enlightenment-with-d3)
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- [The Technology of
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Dialogue](http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2006/09/12/the-technology-of-dialogue)
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- [Those that Tend the Store need
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Dialogue](http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2007/01/04/those-that-tend-the-store-need-dialogue)
As” mentioned a few weeks ago”:http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2007/02/20/seattle-in-late-march, I’ll be up in the Seattle area in a few weeks. I took the invitation to head to the 2007 Microsoft Technology Summit in Redmond, WA. When I received the invitation… my immediate response was, “Why me?”
Their response?
“The event is specifically for people other than Microsoft fanboys… they want to have a dialogue with influential members of the developer community outside of their comfort zone to see what we can learn from each other..”
Fair enough. Perhaps they’ll convince me to switch our entire team to Microsoft products… but I highly doubt my team would be cool with that. ;-)
It looks like Michael Koziarski (of Rails Core fame) will also be at the event. Supposedly, there will only be 50-60 people… so if you’re also going to be there, let me know.
I’m not sure what to expect yet from the event and they don’t have a web page dedicated to it. The most that I could find was a few blog posts from attendees of previous years. I plan to do some blogging during the event to share my experiences (good and bad).
s. thanks to those who invited me to have drinks/dinner while I’m staying in Bellevue. I’ll be responding to your emails in the next week. if you’re interested in meeting up, drop me a line.
It appears that Seth Godin is catching on to the concept of Dialogue.
Seth writes, “Some organizations are good at listening. Some are good at talking. A few are even good at both.”
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how I listen to clients, employees, friends, and family. All of our relationships are a series of conversations. Sometimes we can have healthy dialogue, sometimes we just fall victim to debate. (see Dialogue vs Debate)
If you’re really interested in Dialogue, I’d encourage you to review the technology of Dialogue. and check out the Dialogue-Driven Development project and introduce yourself.
While reviewing some articles related to small business management, I came across the following post… titled, Note From Boss to Employees, by Michael Wade. As a young business owner, who only 16 months ago was working in his attic… to now trying to figure out how to run a company with over ten employees (and growing), posts like this remind me that we all have so much to learn. :-)
Here are a few that I appreciated…
“I may not have been given a huge amount of training before being named to a supervisory position. As a result, I’ve had to learn through trial and error. That’s not always bad. Many of my responsibilities can only be learned through practice.”
Yep… that’s me! The only difference is that I promoted myself instead of being promoted by someone else. I’m still not sure what I got myself into sometimes. ;-)
“I will make mistakes. Please give me the same understanding that you’d like me to give you when you blunder.”
This reminded me of a blog post from last year, titled, Avoiding the most common software development goofs, which points out that things like ignorance and stress are often to blame for mistakes in development. I feel like these are reasons for goofs in just about any environment, especially business. Let’s face it. We’re not perfect and we’re going to make a lot of mistakes. Once we’ve agreed on this, let’s take the next step and see what happens.
“If I do something dumb or am on the verge of doing so, please tell me. Don’t hint. Tell me.”
Perhaps this is a common problem for most small business owners. Are employees afraid to tell me that I’m doing something dumb?
“If either of us has a problem with the other’s performance, let’s talk about it.”
As they say, real friends will be honest with you about your faults. Not because they want to make you look bad, but because they care.
Each of the points that I have listed here are pointing to is… healthier Dialogue, which is always a challenge to accomplish… in any relationship… whether with clients, coworkers, bosses, or employees.
I’d like to add a few to this list.
remind me if I forgot something.
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- Ask yourself on a regular basis, "Am I having fun?" If not, make
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time for some.
“Showing up on time …with a smile on your face is almost always more important than what you actually say or do.” —Seth Godin
overhead here.
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…overheard on an internal forum…
“My my passion for nifty server tricks will blow peoples minds” —Daniel Johnson
Okay, this is a little overdue… but better late than never! ;-)
We’ve had several new people start with PLANET ARGON over the past few months. Some of them are blogging about their experience of working with Ruby on Rails and being a part of our team. I wanted to quickly introduce you to a few of them and their blogs, which I hope that you consider subscribing to.
For quite some time, we’ve been needing more design assistance, so late last year… we hired Chris Griffin, who moved here last year from Florida. He’s our new User Interface Designer and gets to work within the Rails environment everyday with the rest of us. It seems that Brian and Chris worked over the weekend to get his new blog up. Chris is self-proclaimed genius. I suggest that you keep an eye on his blog… because I’m sure it’s going to be a pretty active one. Chris joining our team marks a pivotal point in our teams evolution as we continue to place more emphasis in our Design and Development process on the User Experience.
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Our newest hire is Graeme Nelson, who recently moved to Portland from Seattle. He just joined our Design and Development team and if you’ve been reading the Rails-related blogs, you might have seen his blog already. He’s been blogging a lot about using RSpec with Rails and other fun things. He’s been contracting with us since the start of the year and I’m really excited that he’s accepted a job offer and joined the team!
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Last… but not least is Gary Blessington. I believe that I first offered Gary a job with PLANET ARGON about 2 1/2 years ago when we were still focused on PHP/PostgreSQL…. but PHP apparently wasn’t enough of a catalyst. Gary and I previously worked together at Imark Communications several years ago, when I first started doing web development. He was the senior developer on the team and was an important mentor during my early days of developing in a professional environment. Late last year, he hung up his .NET tool belt to become our Design and Development Director. He started blogging earlier this year and is sharing his experience of switching from .NET to Ruby on Rails.
I’ll introduce the others as they start blogging and such. :-)
I’m going to be hanging out in Redmond, WA. late next month… why? That… I’ll explain at a later date. ;-)
What I can say is that I’ll be available on a few evenings if anybody is interested in meeting up to talk shop, which can include anything from d3, ruby on rails, bdd, agile interaction design. to BBC comedy shows. :-)
I’ll be flying up from Portland to Seattle on Saturday, March 24th. I’m going to try and stay downtown for that night… and then will be staying at Sheraton Bellevue until Tuesday night. So… Saturday-Monday nights are currently open.
I’m also planning to head to the monthly Seattle.rb meeting on Tuesday, March 27th.
If you’re interested in meeting up, drop me a line.
UPDATE If you’re taking the kinky aspect of BDD too serious. please don’t email me. ;-)
Recently, Seth Godin posted a short blog post, titled, Apologies, ranked, which points out several ways of apologizing. When you work in a service industry, it becomes very important to develop good apology skills. Let’s be honest for a moment. Not everything works out for the best in every customer experience. Sometimes it’s their fault and many times… it’s our fault.
In response to Seth’s post, Marc Chung has written up a similar post that adapts this to software bugs, titled, Seth on Fixing Bugs.
It’s worth a read and definitely relates to the communication issues that we keep talking about within the Dialogue-Driven Development community and how that can translate to a healthy testing process with BDD.
Thoughts?
In this new series, Get to Know a Gem, we’re going to take a look at hpricot.
WhyTheLuckyStiff released Hpricot in July of 2006 in an effort to bring fast HTML parsing to the masses. It’s currently unknown what prompted it, but my guess would be that Why is secretly scraping all the pages on the internet that archive the future. To speed it up, Why has written the Hpricot scanner in C, to be much faster than the other options available in Ruby.
This process… is as always with most gems, very simple.
In a project that I’m currently working on, we’re handling recurring payments for subscribers. I’ve decided to play with a different payment service API on this project (TrustCommerce), which supposedly has one of the easier systems to handle recurring payments as well as one-time charges to the same credit cards. They store all the credit card data so that our delivered product to the client is CISP-compliant.
I came across the TrustCommerce Subscription plugin for Rails, which does just everything that I need to do in this first product release… as well as things that aren’t requirements just yet.
Well, I got my test account from TrustCommerce and was working on some RSpecs to test my new subscription and noticed that it was failing. After some snooping around the error responses, I realized that… test accounts don’t give you the ability to test the Citadel features of TrustCommerce. It’ll be another week or so before finish getting our account setup, so what am I to do? I really want to finish writing these specs and move on to the other portions that are dependent upon this working.
Suppose that you were going to perform something like this in an AR callback.