rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Tuesday, 18 June 2002

food folks & heiferman: One of the most interesting things I've read in a while about how an ex Internet CEO took a job at McDonald's to get in touch with people. Scarily I've been thinking about doing the same at Starbuck's recently - to learn about customer service and making great coffee. Maybe I should take the plunge. nobody thanked me.  i worked hard.  i got paid peanuts.  i even ate mcdonald's food during my break (deducted from my pay).  it was intense:  the cash register was complex, people want their food NOW, the lines get deep, the mcflurry must be made just right.  i was trying hard and i was doing an ok job.  now, i've been the leader/manager for most of my life.  i've had plenty of crap jobs, but i've been the boss for the past few years.  i faithfully read my fast company magazine and my harvard business review.  i've been taught countless times the value of a leader/manager showing appreciation for people's effort.  however, my instinct has often been that showing appreciation really isn't too necessary for good people.  they just take pride in a job well done --- and, anyway, they can read my mind and see the appreciation.  well, from day 1 at mcdonald's, i was yearning for someone there to say "thanks".  even a "you're doing ok" would suffice.  but, no.  neither management experience -- nor reading about management --- teaches this lesson as well as being an under-appreciated employee. 1:38:19 PM  comment []      BEA to unwrap WebLogic Platform 7.0 - poor, PR driven article on BEA's ominously titled Platform 7. Is it just me or has BEA gone so web services crazy that they don't talk about J2EE development anymore? Weblogic Workshop is not a J2EE equivalent of Visual Basic, despite what BEA press releases say. As far as I can tell it's nothing more than a nice way to look at web services as a pipeline. 1:23:10 PM  comment []      I'm at the NN/g Usability conference in Sydney today and tomorrow as a roving reporter. Saw Tog this morning, tomorrow it's Jakob's turn. 12:49:12 PM  comment []      Rusty lays out the sorry tale of the struggle it is to run an independent media website nowadays: "So I thought I'd take a little time and lay out the structure and workings of the media business in general, and K5 in particular, and ask what you think I should do. " [Curry] 3:04:02 AM  comment []      Gerhard Frohlich: And those wizard. EJB wizard, servlet wizard, xml wizard, database wizard, etc. Did *you* ever used them in complex projects? Software development is not a wizarding and drag & dropping, it's engineering. That's exactly why everyone loves IDEA at the moment. It's low on crap, wizard-free, and just a brilliant smart coding environment. Why do I love it? I haven't written an import statement for months. I don't know how I lived without instant renaming across an entire project. The CVS and Ant integrations beat the pants off any other IDE. The refactoring support is second to none. The different autocompletion modes. "View Declaration" (ctrl-b). Instant error reporting. It's all there. The test of a good IDE IMHO is the following IMHO: you know it's good the first time you use it - there's just something nice about it you look for a feature saying "I wish it did X", the find out it does when you go back to your old environment (vim for me), you can't work out why everything takes so long. Actually, that could apply to any new piece of software 2:03:16 AM  comment []      Monday night at the Single's Club? Apple's Real People - hahahah very wittily written. 1:00:18 AM  comment []      Meetup is an interesting site that I discovered via CamWorld [with thanks to James Robertson @ ColumnTwo for the link] The idea is that they help to organize real meetings between people all over the world.  They hand pick locations (coffee shops, bar, parks and so on) in various cities then provide the infrastructure for you to arrange to vote on where you want to meet and when. Interesting - a good idea but lots of people have tried it (albeit with different angles). Perhaps the organised meeting in foreign places will help MeetUp succeed? Seems to be blog-community-powered. [Curiouser and curiouser!] 12:27:47 AM  comment []      The 5th fastest growing company in Central Florida?  An open source consulting company.  Now that is surprising --- even to me. Cracking the key of selling Open Source software to big business as a way to reduce their costs (ironically like Enron was doing with energy saving devices to larg corporates) is a great way to make money IMHO. [The FuzzyBlog!] 12:24:16 AM  comment []      Logica opens SMS to landlines. Would I buy a new fixed line phone just to use SMS on it? I doubt it - I don't see any compelling applications at the moment - and I have a mobile already if I want to SMS someone. 12:19:42 AM  comment []      MVNOs on the move. Media, retail giants explore new model to expand services to cellular . And I bet you didn't even know what an MVNO was. Tsk tsk. 12:15:36 AM  comment []      IBM debuts updated WebSphere Commerce. 12:07:50 AM  comment []      Clover is a pretty nifty tool which determines the code coverage of your unit tests. And amazingly enough - this is the weirdness of the Internet - only after discovering it and using it did I realise that it's written by Cortex eBusiness, a cool Australian J2EE company that used to have an adjoining office to me and Niki at the ATP. Bizarre coincidence. 12:01:20 AM  comment []