Sooner or later, every developer out there gets sick of the long hours, the process, the verification and the deadlines. Even if we’ve naturally gravitated towards leadership, the clarion call of management is strong- it’s perceived as advancement (potentially into a C* role), comes with the benefit of fewer long hours, you have people you can boss around… all in all good things when looked at in the right light. Yet most developers end up in Development Management, which ends up being more about estimates and balancing resources (aka beancounting), rather than Product Management, which continues apace with the thing I love most about being a Developer: Building Stuff.

Unfortunately, the field is incredibly hard to break in to (Especially in software), and books on methods and methodologies are few and far between. So when my User Groups’ book shipment from O’Reilly came in with a complementary copy of Adaptive Path’s “Subject to Change” I was intrigued. From the title, the book is about “Creating great products and services for an uncertain world”. Think I was interested? You bet! Here was a book that seemed to be all about how to create and manage a product in the everchanging world of the internet! Unfortunately this particular edition was earmarked for a colleague of mine, however it took me precisely 30 minutes to track down a copy in a nearby Borders and start reading it that night.

You should note that I rarely, if ever, read professional books, that’s what blogs are there for. But I digress…

It turns out that my initial enthusiasm was a little naive, since the argument presented in the book was substantially different than what I was expecting. In fact, one of its chapters is titled ‘Stop Designing “Products”‘, which made me more than a little concerned. Yet having said that, and taking into account the often blatant plugs for Adaptive Path, it turns out the book was exactly what I needed, even though it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

My parents were huge believers in the roadtrip. Whether this is a cultural phenomenon or not isn’t important: What’s important is that pretty much every summer ever since I was a toddler we’d drive somewhere for a substantial amount of time. Greece, Denmark, Yugoslavia, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, you name it. This tradition continued on well after we’d moved to the United States, including pretty much anything within easy driving distance of Texas.

Now, when you’re a parent, you try to encourage your childrens’ curiosity to see which way their enthusiasm will take them- it’s not a matter of molding them into a particular set of standards (aka Teaching Them Good And Wholesome Values (TM)), it’s more about letting them find their own path, and most of the time… well, it’s a bit of a crapshoot, and you never know whether this new pursuit of theirs is going to be a flighty fancy or a serious pursuit. In addition to that my own ADD tendencies could not have made that much easier. Fixating on a particular task was easy for me, but finding something I’d be willing to fixate on for more than a week or so wasn’t about to happen. Name it, I’ve probably explored it, and my mom and dad’s support in every flighty fancy is… well, I can’t really thank them enough for it.

The additional difficulties with this kind of kid (that being myself) is that sometimes the really significant hobbies and pursuits are difficult to pick out from the noise. There are simply too many hobbies, unfinished projects and pursuits to figure out which one really took hold, and it’s not until I myself have gained the ability to retrospect properly that I myself can pick them out.

The actual point of all that commentary? I like kites.

I have just had one of the most emotionally draining days in a very long time. Which is surprising, given that it’s over something as trivial as a blog post.

What happened? Well, I put out a post that was poorly worded. Someone (at work) took exception. I was told about this, took a long hard look at what I said, realized it could very easily be taken in the wrong way (and was), and so posted a retraction, explaining why. And now I’ve been told several times that the retraction looks like I’ve sold out, and that I’m subversively blaming my company for censoring me. That it looks like someone came down on me with a hammer, and/or that the entire exchange sounded insincere.

None of these are true. No hammers, no coercions, no subversion, no lack of sincerity on my part either. Simply one person’s (well, ok-several persons’) hurt feelings and my attempt to make amends. And apparently, I failed so completely that I looked like a vindictive little prat.

So now I don’t just have the original offense to apologize for, I also have to backpedal on the retraction. And short of pulling the original two posts (which I did) I can’t figure out how.

This week I’m attending the Adobe Community Summit, a once-a-year event hosted by Adobe to connect to their various community leaders. It’s invitation only, usually for Community Experts and User Group Managers, though global advocates are usually extended an invitation as well. Let me begin by saying that the vast majority of material covered is under NDA, so I’m not even going to go into the nature of it, however one thing that isn’t covered is the people I’ve met and some of the managers I’ve talked with.

The monday of the Boston Marathon, Garmin had the official world debut of the Forerunner 405, their latest entry in fitness GPS products. Given that they’d had product specifications on their website since November (with an ever-shifting release date), it wasn’t much of a surprise, however many individuals were nevertheless salivating over its release, myself included.

Two things make this Forerunner so special. First of all, it looks like a watch, and not like a portable computing device strapped to your wrist. Secondly, it doesn’t require a cradle, and uploads all of its data wirelessly with no fuss at all. In addition to that it does all the other neat things that a Forerunner does: Heart monitor connection, optional foot pod and cycling cadence meters, in essence anything that an endorphin junkie type-A obsessive personality (like myself) needs to satisfy both their compulsion and their high. Add to that the former two options and this geek was sold before it even came out.

I fully expect to get a lot of flack for this particular post, simply by the aggressive nature of the title. The topic of unions has been so politically and socially charged for so long that many people are simply not willing to touch the subject, and yet it’s something that, much like any social [...]

More blog neglect, but this time I actually have some interesting things to report.

First of all, in an effort to deal with blog neglect I’ve shifted my usual authoring time to before work rather than after. Afterwards there are simply too many distractions- mental, physical and… ahem… social for me to really get focused on my thoughts and get them down. Whether I can keep it up is anyone’s guess, but for now I’ve got a nice cool morning, a full battery and a patch of sunshine to write in. What else could you want?

I’ve been tossing back and forth about the nature and length of blog posts recently, and while I was going to give the entire topic a pass and go on happily typing a few recent events have made me decide to actually talk about it. The first of which was a discussion among coworkers regarding an article called: "Write Articles, Not Blog Postings". The second was a very good opinion piece on the topic by another coworker, taking the topic to the next step and discussing the blog as a delivery platform. The third was my own struggle to even complete a post (you wouldn’t believe how many unfinished drafts I have) and the last one was a recent list exchange that resulted in tl;dr’s from a few friends whose opinion would have been extremely pertinent (and in at least one case particularly desired).

The question I’m trying to answer is “How long should my posts be”, and the classic answer to that is “it depends”. There’s the question of topic, the question of depth, the question of time that I have in my day and the question of rigor. All of these fall together into something better described by a state diagram than a simple post, and everyone ends up with their own particular preference.