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Monday, May 12, 2003 |
FeedDemon (Coming Soon) - "FeedDemon is a Windows desktop RSS reader/organizer, which is a bit of a departure from my previous efforts (TopStyle and HomeSite). The screenshots at the right are of FeedDemon in its infancy. The UI may change between now and the first beta release, but the general concepts are in place." [RSS AGGREGATOR] 
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More thoughts on techies and modelers. <quote>
You may recall an earlier post of mine in which I talked about Chris Britton's IT Architectures and Middleware, referring to his rather elegant categorization of developers into two fundamental categories: techies, and modelers. (Techies are the developers focused on underlying technologies and system details, modelers are the developers and/or analysts who want to focus on building elegant system models and designs.)
I'm finding, the more I think about this, that this distinction between these two groups is a particularly insightful one--almost every developer I know can classify into one of these two groups. In fact, I'm finding that many corporations and platforms also fall into these two broad classifications; the two principal entities I've been thinking about recently are, of course, the Java camp (Sun in particular) and the .NET camp (which means Microsoft). So far, I'm finding that Sun as a company is a modeler, while Microsoft as a company is a techie. No cheers or boos at this pronouncement, however--both approaches have strengths and drawbacks.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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The Failure of Top-Down IT. (SOURCE:TeledyN)-One of the reasons blogs will succeed is because of their bottom up nature.
<quote>
The tools for knowledge management haven't appreciably improved in the last 20 years; email integration and shared folders are the only significant features Outlook delivers that Sidekick didn't have in 1984. And while tons of VC dollars have been spent on intranets and portal creation software, the whole concept of centralized knowledge management feels wrong to me.
Attempting to create a consistent vocabulary and taxonomy across an entire enterprise is misguided. It should be obvious that everyone is unique in the mental models that they create to structure their knowledge. What's more the knowledge that workers create must be portable, for no matter how much companies would like to lock employees' ideas away as intellectual property, the cross-pollination that occurs when people move from company to company is critical to innovation. We should be building tools to encourage innovation and collaboration, not to constrain it or control it.
This seems a domain where open data exchange standards, P2P technologies and powerful desktop computing are the right models. The integration of personal and published web content, content and concept sharing, RSS aggregation and publishing, blogging, email filtering/storage/extraction and powerful collaborative searching is bringing a real revolution in knowledge working productivity into view. It is a revolution that no amount of VC could have spawned as it is the gestaltic thoughts and conversations across hundreds of developers and knowledge workers in constant casual collaboration that is driving this revolution.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Hackers and Painters. (SOURCE:Tim Bray's ongoing)-Another Paul Graham classic must read.
<quote>
When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting. They seemed to think that hacking and painting were very different kinds of work-- that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge.
Both of these images are wrong. Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Questions for Hiring Architects and Designers. (SOURCE:Hiring Technical People)-
<quote>
How do you differentiate true designers and architects from other software developers? This may be the hardest question to answer, and the most necessary. A real designer or architect, someone who doesn't just hack a bunch of software together, is worth more to your company than you can pay him/her. A real designer or architect can translate the vision of what the product has to be into the here-and-now, no matter what development practices you use. (The agile practices help more of us become better designers and architects than the top-down, decomposition practices.)
So if these people are worth a lot to you, you'll want to think hard about the questions you ask them. Here are some suggestions; I'd love to hear your comments:
</quote> [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Pardise Lost - Economist article on future IT industry growth. [INDUSTRY IT COMMENTARY]
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Questions for Hiring Architects and Designers. (SOURCE:Hiring Technical People)- "How do you differentiate true designers and architects from other software developers? This may be the hardest question to answer, and the most necessary. A real designer or architect, someone who doesn't just hack a bunch of software together, is worth more to your company than you can pay him/her. A real designer or architect can translate the vision of what the product has to be into the here-and-now, no matter what development practices you use. (The agile practices help more of us become better designers and architects than the top-down, decomposition practices.) So if these people are worth a lot to you, you'll want to think hard about the questions you ask them. Here are some suggestions; I'd love to hear your comments."
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Dot Boom - "Dot Boom is a satirical card game of the Dot Com era." [GAMES CARD IDEA]
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Beyond cat's cradle - Instructions and photos of a bunch of different string figures. [FUN STRING]
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css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design - A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS–based design. Select any style sheet from the list to load it into this page. Download the sample html file and css file. [DESIGN WEB CSS]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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