While this isn't a landmark event on itself, it somehow shows what can happen if clueful people have idle time. It also shows how simple life can be in a small company like ours. Marc is preparing the xReporter presentation for the GetTogether, my time is fully consumed with frantically (over-)organizing the event and some other somehow-open-source-thus-outerthought-strategy-related activities, and the project (xReporter) Bruno has been working on since he joined us is now in the hands of our customer for beta-testing. Which means there is idle time. And a well-deserved holiday-on-the-workplace for Bruno: basically fooling around and no deadlines to meet. And no real bosses around that become nervous when someone is fooling around, having no clue what to do with the evident existence of idle time.

Fair enough. During the past few very busy months, we were often argueing about the dangerous behaviour of new Cocoon users which are trying to avoid writing any Java code at all, sticking business logic, presentation stuff, and whatelse in complicated pipelines, XSPs-without-logicsheets and (god forgives) XSLT. We on the other hand tend to be Java-purists, and most of the times, we prefer to simply implement some custom Cocoon components (mostly Generators and Actions) instead of trying to use the existing embryonal webapp development components available throughout Cocoon that claim they will not require you to write any Java code. The SourceWritingTransformer for instance is a running gag in our offices - especially if we hear of people using it and believing they are building an industrial-strength content management system with it. Yup - we have evil egos, sitting there and pretending we could do a better job, in our copious free time (tm).

Now when I have idle time, I'm very good at doing nothing. Sitting hours behind my screen reading weblogs and mailing lists, goofing around, but basically doing nothing. Bruno however just pops up a screen and starts doing something about those running gags. Now that is clueful.

But maybe, this is exactly Marc's and mine idea about Outerthought as a business model: providing clueful people with the challenges of interesting work, which motivate them to do even more clueful work when there isn't anything else to do. Or am I dreaming? I always think of the way we do business and do the yada-yada-strategy-thing as something I learned in highschool, but forgot the exact term: it's when the act of quantifying a certain system's state is already a trigger to change that state, so that it becomes impossible to effectively define that system's state: it just doesn't tolerate to be made explicit. Maybe that is the clue about what we do: we better do it than talk about it, since we're much better at doing it than trying to explain it to the outside world.

Mmmmm. I'd better prepare those binders for the GetTogether then, I assume :-)

Nice weekend to you all!
9:53:44 PM    comment []