Tim Hoolihan

Tell me these aren’t relevant. Tell me it isn’t like a summation of Wall Streets mistakes leading up to 2008. Deming died in 1993.

Deming’s 7 Deadly Diseases of Management*

1. Lack of constancy of purpose
2. Emphasis on short term profits
3. Evaluation of performance, merit rating or annual review
4. Mobility of top management
5. Running a company on visible figures alone
6. Excessive medical costs
7. Excessive legal damage awards swelled by lawyers working on contingency fees

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

…or some other catchy metaphor that will grab your attention. These technologies were hot over the last 5 years. Flex gained a particular amount of popularity in the Java community where UI technologies have a bit of a spotty record (that’s like saying my Bengals have a bit of a spotty record over a lifetime). Silverlight gained a lot of traction among Microsoft developers who actually cared about design and UX. Many alpha-geeks of the Microsoft space were running around giving conference talks about the MVVM pattern, and sharing code on codeplex. So what happened?

Both of these technologies are going to fade on the public web. Tablets and mobile devices are too big a share to ignore. Html5, phones and tablets did them in. The heavy hand of Steve Jobs probably gets credit for the coup de grâce. The browser vendors and phone OS creators have really put their weight behind Javascript and Html5. If you have have that skill-set right now you can create:

• Web Content
• Mobile Web Content
• Mobile Apps via Appcelerator
• Mobile Apps via PhoneGap
• Windows 8 Metro Apps

That’s a pretty wide reach for a markup / scripting language set.

So what do you do if that’s your trade? You work as an AIR/Flex developer or Silverlight developer, what do you do? There are good options for each camp, and some universal options.

Flex Developers

I think this is the slightly less promising path in the long term (despite it hitting a much higher peak than Silverlight). That said, Flash and Air will live on for a while, and you have some time to make a transition. Additionally, the ability to use the Adobe tools to make mobile applications provides a bridge to the hot mobile market. And you can make long term plans to transition to another cross-platform tool (PhoneGap, Appcelerator, etc), or go native. If you’re in the Adobe camp, new tools like Edge are likely to ease the transition to the standards-based technologies of the web.

Silverlight Developers

Similarly, Silverlight won’t be gone tomorrow. Intranet applications that need rich functionality (and simple deployment) are still a nice fit for Silverlight Desktop applications. And the adjustment to WindowsPhone 7′s flavor of Silverlight is straightforward, though I would be cautious and investigate the financial realities of that market. Finally, while Windows 8 Metro Apps don’t specifically use Silverlight, they can use C# with XAML and a subset of the .Net libraries that emphasize a security sandbox and async data connections. Sound familiar? That’s because they re-animated the corpse of Silverlight and made it an option for writing Metro apps. Long term, you should probably learn to use the Html5 / JavaScript hooks for Metro due to the ubiquitous nature of those skills. But isn’t it nice that you can learn the new API (WinRT) while keeping C# and XAML, and then make the languages switch at your leisure.

For Everyone

Both camps should embrace these newer web technologies and the UI skills they picked up during their time with the respective technologies. Good user experience and design are rare skills in developers, and retraining the languages and tools should be the easy part. Keep your black turtlenecks and invest in the next tools rich applications. You already have a leg up.

I’m not sure why, but Windows Search Service is broken on my installation of Windows. I’ve posted on Microsoft forums, and found other people with the same issue, but no fixes that have worked for me. The service will work, but every time I reboot, the service is disabled and stopped. I have to change it to manual or automatic, and start the service. It’s annoying, and if I forget to do it, I get messages (and slow searches) when using OneNote or Outlook.

Finally, it occurred to me to powershell this. It’s a 2 line script:

Set-Service -Name WSearch -StartupType Automatic
Start-Service -Name WSearch

Then I created a scheduled task that runs the script file on windows startup. The job is something like the following, depending on your path:

powershell.exe -noexit D:\tools\scripts\WSearchFix.ps1

Note a couple of things. First, WSearchFix.ps1 is just what I named the powershell script from above, name it as you please. Second, the -noexit is not necessary, especially once you’ve run the script and verified it works from the task scheduler.

The most common problem is that if you don’t use powershell scripts, they are disabled by default. You can either sign them and use a semi-secure policy, or just open it up with:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

Finally, I went into the advanced options for the schedule tasks trigger and put it on a 2 minute delay. This is just a hunch, but I think something is setting the service to disabled on boot, so I wanted that to be done before the fix ran.

Of course this is a hack, and I would like to just have the service work and stay disabled. But all things considered, this is a band-aid that works.

I read The Myth of Multitasking this fall, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I let the book sit a bit after reading before writing this post, in order to see what type of difference it has made. Having read it, and worked through the exercises in the book, and put the principles into action, I feel ready to sum up my experience.

The gist of the book is that people attempting to multitask are fooling themselves. They are generally task-switching quickly, a term familiar to anyone with a computer science background. There are tasks that can be done in parallel, but generally these are menial items. Running while listening to music is a great example.

The book encourages you to be proactive about your interruptions and realistically budget your time. Obviously there is more to it than what I’m summing up here, but you get the idea. It’s a quick read, in the neighborhood of an hour.

So is it simple? Too naive? Can you really tame your schedule? Sure, a lot of people have probably read this book and never implemented the suggestions. But I think it’s possible. The idea of proactively setting meetings with those who interrupt most is more practical than it sounds.

The larger win is just being aware of the cost of interruptions. Similar to a Pomodoro Technique, save your tasks like email, twitter, etc for set intervals, like every 30 or 60 minutes. I find that I make better use of communication tools like email and twitter when I give them focused attention at an interval anyway.

The concepts in this book can be as helpful in your personal time as they are during work. I’ve found my time and tasks at home to be more organized because of these ideas.

Clearly I recommend this book to almost any professional. Like Who Moved My Cheese, I think it should be handed out to ever professional interested in self-improvement.

A while back, I bought a Windows Phone 7, specifically an HTC 7 Surround. I bought it used via ebay (for under $150), so as to not have it count as my contract subsidized phone. It was not an unlocked phone, and I was able to switch my SIM card from my main phone (an iPhone 4) to the WP7 without problems.

I bought the phone in order to have a chance to do some Windows Phone 7 development. As a developer with Silverlight experience, it’s a pretty easy transition to make. Sure, the dev toolset has a simulator, but I wanted to try out some apps and have my hands on the real thing. Plus, it serves as a nice backup phone, and it makes a nice portable gaming distraction (with achievements). Even without swapping the SIM card, you can use email, online apps, as long as wifi is available.

Soon after the purchase, my wife’s iPhone 3gs broke. At this point, we knew a new Apple phone was coming soon, so I gave my new iPhone 4 to my wife, and used the WP7, waiting for the new phone. She knows I do a lot more “technical stuff” with a phone, and was fine with taking the 4 and letting me getting the new revision when it released (I used her upgrade for the 4s). Yes, for a tech guy, that’s a great way for a wife to show love. All I had to do was holdout for about 45 days with a WP7.

I kind of looked forward to it, thinking it would be a chance to get a feel for just how good the platform was. For the record, this was the version of the OS just before Mango. Mango released the week I got my iPhone 4s.

So what did I think?

What’s Good?

It was a very usable phone. Contact management is nice on Windows Phone. All LinkedIn, Facebook, and regular contacts are merged (including Twitter in Mango). From that persons page, you can contact them via any of those methods. And rather than a favorites person list, you can pin them to your homepage, allowing very quick access to your favorite contacts.

The basics are covered in terms of apps. Social sites, games, utilities. And they are cheap and often free. The store is closer to Apple’s than the wild west that is Android, so that’s good.

The phone itself had pretty good battery life, nice sound, and I liked the kickstand. That line has been discontinued, and I’m not sure why. Maybe HTC wanted some new Mango specific features and needed a redesign. Regardless, it was a fine phone.

You only have one page to customize, but it’s completely customizable. And the second page is essentially a list of every app on your phone. It was a different way to organize than iOS, but I found it very usable.

Those front page tiles (as of Mango) can show you various news and status updates. For example, the weather app shows the current temperature on it’s icon, and contacts show their latest social status. iOS could use this feature, though I suspect it’s icons are too small to provide useful data.

Zune pass is nice. Spotify is taking a bite out of this market, but I did a month trial of the Zune pass, and I could listen to anything I wanted that was on the store. A few gaps, but in general the marketplace has a lot of songs. Zune recently added some new pricing structures to compete with Spotify.

Cost… If you’re due for an upgrade, you can get a nice WP7 phone for free. And I think the free options for WP7 are higher end phones that the free versions of Android phones. And the only free iPhone is the 3gs, which is fairly dates at this point.

What’s Bad?

The depth of the marketplace just isn’t there compared to the App Store. This is understandable because of how new the marketplace is, but with such a low marketshare, I’m not sure it will ever catch up. Developers are monetizing on the App Store, and Microsoft and Google can’t make that case as well.

Mango changed this, but when I used the phone, it was one app at a time. That’s hard to go back to. Especially when Apps seem to take a while to initialize.

Phone manufacturers can brand some parts of the phone, and even have their own sub-pieces of the marketplace. There was an HTC Apps shortcut on my phone, that took me to specific versions of apps like Youtube, etc. I assume this is so they can optimize the experience for their phone, but it fractures the app stats, and makes integration with other apps harder. It’s a step in the Android direction, and I don’t think that’s a smart direction. (Why does it matter if app stats are off like popularity? When I’m looking for popular apps on a new phone, I would expect things like youtube to be at the top. But if youtube has 6 private label versions, it gets pushed down the list.)

Finally, there’s just a certain je ne sais quoi to the iPhone, that WP7 doesn’t have. Yes, that’s completely subjective, and a lot of it is based on personal experience. But this is a blog, and I’m telling you about my personal experience with the phone.

The Fine Print…

I bought a used phone, with some mild wear and tear. I have had 3 iPhones, all brand new purchases. That adds to the experience.

I’m invested in the iTunes store in terms of music and apps. I never really commited to WP7 and the Zune marketplace that way.

I should have spent more time seeing if there was cool integration options with my XBox. That kind of stuff sells me on a product.

Summary

WP7 is a nice platform. If I were banned from Apple products tomorrow, I would have to think long and hard about WP7 vs Android. I think WP7 is better (than Android), my only hesitation is that phones are about apps and integration, and both of those things suffer when marketshare is low.

Maybe the best way to describe the difference is by saying what I like best about iPhone. Despite being closed and proprietary, it doesn’t feel commercialized, because Apple is the only hardware maker, there isn’t hardware advertising and private labelling. Those things detract from the experience, and Apple is all about design and experience. Combine that with content, and you have a winner.

Apple brings huge headstart in content, and that’s hard to overcome. Just look at Windows vs OS X. There are virtual machines and compatablity layers, but at the end of the day, users had years of content and applications that ran on Windows, that they weren’t ready to give up on. As cloud based services and web-based applications take over, we’ve seen that the Windows market erode a bit. And eventually, that may be the case for phones and tablets too, but we’re not there yet. Apps still matter.

That’s why I think Microsoft’s Windows 8 strategy is smart. The more they can move developers to HTML 5 and Javascript, the easier it is to develop cross platform for mobile and tablet platforms. The WP7 and Windows 8 marketplaces can merge, and leech off HTML 5 developers that are targeting the higher marketshare platforms. If there is minimal overhead to developing cross platform, then WP7 will get a number of apps that is disproportionate to it’s marketshare.

I’m happy to have the WP7 around for development purposes. And would recommend it to users who don’t like the iPhone and aren’t invested in App Store already. Particularly if they are gamers with live accounts. But it isn’t a primary platform for me.

I have an Acer netbook from a couple of years back. I use to get a fair amount of use, for times when I wanted to read pdfs, browse the web, etc. It was great to have at the hospital to upload pictures and post updates to facebook when my daughters were born. All that aside, I don’t use it much these days, given I have an iPhone and regularly borrow my wife’s iPad.

But I’ve found a really good use for it. I’ve loaded up all the PC games I’ve saved over the years, and a few new ones that have low requirements. The netbook serves as a great portable gaming system. Sure, it’s not a pocket system, but many of the newer portable systems aren’t. The iPad and Playstation Vita aren’t pocket systems, and the 3DS and PSP are a bit of a stretch. And you can find large numbers of great games still available new on Amazon, or used on EBay and Amazon.

The notebook has:

• 1.6ghz Intel Atom Processor
• 1.5GB Ram (Upgraded)
• 802.11g Wifi
• 150GB 7200RPM Sata Drive (Upgraded)
• Third Party Hi Capacity Battery (Upgraded)

The games I have installed:

• Baldur’s Gate
• Diablo, Diablo II
• Starcraft (w/Brood War expansion)
• Warcraft III (w/Frozen Throne expansion) [Note: has some resolution issues]
• World of Warcraft
• Torchlight
• Fallout 1, 2 & Tactics

The system has great battery life, and is very versatile. You can use just the trackpad for more keyboard centric games, or use a usb mouse for games like Diablo or Torchlight. You have support for an external monitor if you want it, but it’s certainly not needed. For extended gaming sessions, the power-brick is very portable.

One limitation was games that required the cd to play (mostly the Blizzard games). This required taking an external dvd drive with me, and cut battery life considerably shorter. I lived with the limitation for a while. I own all of these games (see the photo above), so I wouldn’t feel bad legally about a no-cd hack, but just don’t trust that such programs aren’t viruses or trojans.

Finally, I realized all I needed was a virtual iso mounter. I ripped all the discs I needed and put them on the netbook. With the larger drive installed, there was plenty of space. And I use the free Virtual CloneDrive to mount the iso files as needed. Load times are drastically improved from when the cd drive is used. I may or may not be in a gray area of the EULA for these games, but I sleep at night. I’m certainly not violating the spirit of them, as I own licensed copies of each game. And given these aren’t games that have been patched to deal with modern systems that may not have disc drives (as many games have for distribution on platforms like Steam), I don’t have a problem circumventing the drive requirement.

I’ve been playing a lot of Diablo and Starcraft in particular on the system. It reminds me that gameplay is king. These games have very dated graphics, music, etc. But at the end of the day, they are unforgettable games with addicting campaigns. If you can find a buddy who likes the idea as well, imagine how easy it is to setup a LAN party with these systems. Anyone who enjoyed pc games over the last 15 years or so should consider such a setup. It’s a relatively cheap setup that can provide hundreds of hours of gaming time.

Let me say up front, Steve Yegge is my favorite blog writer. I think I started reading his blog in late 2007, and really picked up digging through the archives in 2008. He is the reason I still write blog posts. This blog does decent traffic for a hobbyist technical blog, but it’s still like pulling teeth to get comments. And blogs may just be fading in general, as people want more bite sized content. I’m not complaining, that’s just the 140 character world we live in.

Speaking of 140 characters, that’s one of the great things about Steve’s blog, brevity be damned, he writes what he wants to. Unlike twitter experts regular pithy updates, he drops novels, and then walks away for 3 months. But you need time to stew on the posts. I consider it an honor that one of my posts is cited on his wikipedia page.

So what did he do? He mistakenly posted an internal essay to Google on his public Google+ stream. It’s everything his best posts did and maybe even more. It’s brutally honest, funny, and making points at several different levels.

First, I wonder if it even was a mistake. His follow up on Google+ tends to make me think it was. But if not, there’s some “friggin’ genius” in his blundering. You can’t unsee things on the internet (insert your favorite internet porn meme here). By “accidentally” dropping a note like that, he may have just saved Google. Their lack of platform and dog-fooding is a real issue. And now, it’s clear to everyone at Google, and everyone outside of it. Every new product that Google launches will be scrutinized through the lense of that post. Google _HAS_ to react and take that demand serious. Speaking of, Facebook just launched an iOS Platform.

Again, I don’t think he did it purposefully. But you have to consider the analogy of a lawyer saying something inadmissible in front of the jury. You can tell them to forget it, but there is no “undo” button that takes you back to where you were.

Everyone wants to know what Google thinks. Will he be fired. First, I doubt it. Google’s “don’t be evil policy” would make it hard to fire a guy for being a public whistle blower, albeit on technical matters. But I want to know what Jeff Bezos thinks, as Steve takes him to task pretty well. Now he does call him the Dread Pirate Bezos at one point, which may be a hint that he’s just doing that for humor and realizes that Bezos is nothing like his own legend. But still, he may have done some career damage by talking that candidly about a former employer where he was pretty high on the chain, and for putting Google in that kind of spot. Facebook would certainly have some questions about that post before hiring him.

I thought he did a really nice job of summarizing what Microsoft does well, and what they don’t. Microsoft is baffled that it’s strength in tools (Visual Studio) and languages don’t trump environments like X-Code and Objective-C. Microsoft community members cite Objective-C as proof that developers just care about market share. That may bare truth, but Steve’s right about platform. Microsoft has opened up more API hooks into their products than you can imagine, but Apple does it elegantly. There is a much smaller surface, and a straight forward interface to working with things. I think that’s due to Apple’s desire for everything to have a clean design, and a gift that came when they chose to build a system with Unix under the hood. No wonder ever described Win32 as “by programmers, for programmers”. Want more proof that Steve is right? Look at what Microsoft just did at build. They didn’t release new languages, or new tools. They even resurrected C++. But they did release a new Platform, with a much cleaner API surface.

Finally, look at the community around Google for confirmation of what he’s saying. There are developers around Microsoft, Facebook, Adobe, Amazon and Apple. Because they can leverage those platforms while still striking out on their own. Adding value. How do you add value to Google Docs? Once you’ve configured a business account for a company, and trained their users, how do you continue to add value? You don’t. The only place Google has done this is with Android, and they screwed the pooch on the store model.

If Google rallies around his message, they could get their mojo back. After all, they understand Big Data better than anybody. They get horizontal scaling and Data Analysis like nobody’s business. And people generally still buy their ethics, and their is a culture around quality and intelligence. But marketing, innovation and what Steve calls Accessibility matter.

Now go read some of his best posts like:

• Math for Programmers
• Software Needs Philosophers
• Lisp is not an Acceptable Lisp
• The Pinocchio Problem
• The Next Big Language
• Done and Gets Things Smart
• Programming’s Dirtiest Little Secret
• The Universal Design Pattern
• A programmer’s view of the Universe, part 1: The fish
• A programmer’s view of the Universe, part 2: Mario Kart

That list may take you a day to read, and that’s if you can resist following the rabbit trail into further articles. Enjoy.

Finally, one of my favorite recent discoveries is his keynote inspiring developers to solve bigger problems:

Now if he would just write on his blog more often…

Oh, and for those new to following Steve Yegge, he’s one hell of a guitar player:

“Beware of becoming an Agile zealout, because this can backfire and put people off. Don’t treat people who are not applying Agile as fools who just need to see the light! This is disrespectful, and people simply won’t listen to your rants.” -Rachel Davies in Agile Coaching₁.

Why is this comforting? Good communities self-monitor. Many of today’s communities with momentum have some ego issues. Communities like Agile, Ruby and Mac folks. All three of those communities are great and everyone should be learning more about them, so this isn’t meant to start a flamewar. But what comes off as passion in an upstart community can be obnoxious in an established community. And it certainly doesn’t fly well with the 2nd and 3rd tier adopters that are often the target of such zealotry.

This isn’t an excuse for half-assed Agile. Go for “full-assed” commitment to whatever system a team uses, and in more cases than not, they should be doing a flavor of Agile (usually lean) throughout the software lifecycle.

But blind assertions and a condescending tone won’t win anyone over. No matter what is being sold. This can be a particularly hard trap to avoid when a person or their business are sold as Agile experts. Or… “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” -Maslow

When leaders and authors in the community stand up for moderation, it is a sign of maturity.

1. Note that Agile Coaching is written by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, but Rachel Davies only is cited above as the quote is in a “Rachel says” section.

Through the years, a fair amount of my projects have been with small companies and startups. One thing I notice almost universally, is that members of smaller teams tend to have hunger for success, and a real feeling of ownership over their product. They take personal pride and consider themselves invested in the project.

That tends to change as the team size grows, for better and worse. On one hand, relying on “heroes” can be a dangerous thing, and people need to learn to pace themselves out. So a maturing and growing team can be a step in the right direction. On the other hand, it’s hard to see that desire for success and personal sense of pride in a product die off.

Everyone who has seen a big struggling project knows that feeling. “The wheels of bureaucracy are turning, and all I can do is what the product owner has asked of my piece. Suggesting improvements is just going to cause argument. And besides, why stick my neck out and risk being listed as one of the causes for project failure?” Also, there is a big difference between the amount of responsibility you feel when you are part of a successful team of 10, compared to a successful team of 100 or more. And projects of that size face unrealistic expectations and rarely feel successful.

How do you change this?

Maybe you don’t. I was once part of a startup, the 3rd man in. There was the founder (with a marketing background), a designer / developer, and I joined to help with the the rest of developing. The feeling of pressure and control that we all had on that project is something I’ve almost never felt on larger teams.

However, there’s no need to throw in the proverbial towel. There are techniques to strike a balance. Agile methodologies usually push for smaller teams and more distributed responsibility. And products can be broken into smaller pieces using a module or a SOA approach. (Yes, putting SOA into an agile approach is a challenge, and possibly a contradiction).

In the context of your business and its goals, you have to find the balance. All aspects of the business can be controlled and dictated from the top, but your subordinates aren’t going to innovate and grow organically, and they are only going to work extra hours if you force them. For a mature business with stable returns, that model probably fits. But in industries that face a lot of change and require innovation, you probably need to risk the destabilization of delegating out large amounts of responsibility to small teams. You will have less consistent results, but they will hit some homeruns.

I think Microsoft has seen this in recent years. It’s a common complaint that the teams don’t coordinate and share information there, but they have developed some interesting products. Their having been more surprises than there were under the old centralized management of the Gates’ days. Look at products like ASP.Net MVC, Win Phone 7, Windows 8, WebMatrix and Azure. Not the most integrated products, and some are not commercially successful yet (WP7), but they were more surprising and interesting than a lot of prior products.

The real outlier is Apple. Steve Jobs flew in the face of everything I just described. He notoriously kept the decision making power to himself, yet left Apple workers with a feeling of investment and devotion to the company. Even the customers feel invested. I can’t imagine a Windows sticker on the car of a person whose pay isn’t from or closely related to Microsoft, but I see a lot of cars with apple stickers in the back window.

So as a business grows, you can either try to keep the teams small and empower them to feel invested, or find the next Steve Jobs. Best of luck if you chose the former. Sometimes growth is the mistake. There are industries (like service / partner type models) where growth can risk lowering the profit share per owner / partner / investor. See Managing the Professional Service Firm for more on that risk.

What do you think? What has your experience been? Comment below.

Build answered a lot of questions for developers who wondered about the future of the Microsoft platform. WinRT is the new API for “Metro ” applications, which are streamlined enable both tablet and pc inputs. These applications can be built in .Net or native C++ using XAML, or in JavaScript with Html5. The traditional desktop interface is still available and it still runs all sorts of full .Net and Win32 applications.

But I’m left with a lot of new questions…

Silverlight is dead but not dead

Silverlight is alive on the desktop version of Windows 8. And it’s easily ported to Metro. But it seems like a big deal to me that the Metro version of IE won’t support Silverlight and Flash.

XNA is dead but not dead

XNA is not supported for Metro games. Given there is no XBox touch screen, maybe the point is that the input libraries could never be made compatible with Metro. Still, that seems like a big deal. C++/DirectX works on the desktop, on metro, and for the 360.

There is no legacy layer for ARM, but is there a Desktop mode

Will the desktop mode even run for ARM? It’s known x86 binaries won’t run on ARM, but will the desktop be recompiled for ARM? Because if not, then all the non-metro supported paradigms (Silverlight, XNA, WPF & more) can’t be recompiled to run on the ARM version. If you have an ARM tablet, you can’t use a flash site or silverlight site. Even if docked. The iPad has that restriction, but keep in mind the iPad was never marketed as a tablet / dock-able laptop like these new Windows 8 machines are. In other words, are desktop applications now “fat binaries”? Which leads too…

You can write Windows desktop applications in almost any language, what about Metro apps?

Did they also just close the door on people who write in Java, Python, Ruby etc? There are windows bindings or even portable UI toolkits (think GTK+) that run on Windows and enable a variety of developers of other languages to write Windows apps. Are they now only able to write desktop mode apps for consumers who have x86 based machines? Or will Microsoft help foster a community of bindings to WinRT for a variety of languages.

Speaking of, anyone notice that F# was not on that diagram as an option for metro apps? They didn’t say .Net, they said C# and VB.Net.

There was a lot of exciting news, and it’s generally a good direction. But they definitely shook up the developer community and didn’t answer everything. What do you think?