An interesting perspective on the difference between a programmer and a manager.

So here’s my theory: Managers must work shallow and wide, while programmers must work narrow and deep. People who are naturally tuned to one particular method of work will not only enjoy their jobs a lot more, but be better at them. I’m a deep guy, I should be doing deep work.

I prefer a slightly different theory.

Producers are the people who really do the work. They learn the hard stuff, they put it into practise, they take pride in their work and they concentrate on the here and now in terms of what they are doing. The “here and now” is defined as the product they are working on and isn’t meant to imply a blinkered approach, just that the concerns of other projects are not primary.

Managers need to do something that Producers do not. They need to manage resources: people, money, time. Depending on the amount of resources to be managed this may preclude them from also being producers. Managers have to not only look after the deadlines of a project and the money taken to build it up but also ensure that the producers are content. Yes, surprise surprise, managers exist to keep producers happy and not the other way round. Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software wrote about the Developer Abstraction Layer.

Everything we do comes down to providing a non-leaky abstraction for the programmers so that they can create great code and that code can get into the hands of customers who benefit from it.

In a small company, like a tech startup, those who are managers are often also producers. If they’re smart they’ll hire an Administrator early on, not to provide instruction but to handle the day to day running. To make sure people get paid on time, to make sure there’s coffee in the kitchen and that the toaster works. This was something that was completely lost on a previous business partner of mine. Their opinion was “Make em work harder” whereas my attitude was “Make it a nice place to work and make them proud of their work”.

Joel continues:

Management’s primary responsibility to create the illusion that a software company can be run by writing code, because that’s what programmers do. And while it would be great to have programmers who are also great at sales, graphic design, system administration, and cooking, it’s unrealistic. Like teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.

Let’s dispense with the idea that management are “above” the producers and we’ll start to understand why it’s usually a bad idea to promote high performing producers into a management position. Why not keep them doing what they enjoy and just reward them better? Some companies have given some lip services to this idea via positions such as Technical Specialists and Software Architects but these positions are few and far between.

Similarly the producers have to realise that there’s a whole support infrastructure that has to go hand in hand with keeping them employed. Just because the 10 code-gurus in your team create all the code you sell, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be aware that everyone has to be rewarded. This includes the managers, the admins, the cooks, the cleaners, the sales folk and the guy who comes in to water the faux plants. The producers are best doing what they do best: writing code, editing movies, recording tracks, building widgets. Everyone else is there to help them focus on that task but again the people cannot be made to feel like subordinates.

In my jobs I’ve constantly had to work with primadonnas. Producers who were convinced that the world revolved around them, managers who believed the producers were only there to provide them with cronies, administrators who were grumpy when you asked them to do their jobs and sales folk who thought the customer was stupid. We are all part of the same machine and it’s as important for the producer to realise that he’d be unclogging toilets and fixing chairs rather than coding or building if not for the managers and administrators as it is for managers and admins to realise they’d be useless without the help of this support infrastructure.

Navizon was one of the pioneers of application development for the iPhone and as such I think we’re going to see something cool from them come February when the official iPhone SDK is released.

The Navizon Buddy Finder is probably one of the coolest ideas I’ve seen and something I’d be interested in a lot, however I think I’d work some on the UI before I would be happy with it. We’re going to see an explosion of IM and VoIP apps for the iPhone around then and I would really like to see location based information being available too.

I want to have lists of buddies, I want to be able to name locations and I want to be able to opt out of some updates easily.

As the iPhone is, in effect, always on, I’d like to be have it send updates to my ‘Status server’ so that instead of seeing

MJ
Love Minus Zero - Bob Dylan

in my chosen IM application - I’d have something like:

MJ
Unsent - Alanis Morissette
At Home

or

MJ
She’s so Lovely - Scouting for Girls
At the Daily Grind

or

MJ
You’re the First, The Last, My Everything - Barry White
Location Private

As I said, the UI of Buddy Finder isn’t to my taste but I think that’s more a question of polish and it’s amazing what they have achieved and an indication of what they could achieve with a documented SDK and no fear of a firmware update killing their release!

As reported in Computerworld:

In a brief submitted to federal court, state antitrust regulators dismissed companies such as Google and Mozilla Corp. and technologies such as AJAX and software as a service as piddling players that pose no threat to Microsoft’s monopoly in the operating system and browser markets.
…
“In spite of the advantages of arguably superior products and missteps by Microsoft, Apple has been unable to raise its share of the worldwide installed base of PCs, hovering near 3%,”
…
“Competition in the market for Intel-based PC operating systems has not been restored by the five-year term of the Final Judgment,” he concluded.

Not quite but it’s amazing that Microsoft and the DoJ are both appealing against the decision to review the monopoly ruling and see if the restorative measures decided by the DoJ were sufficient. Evidently they were not, as the US states agree.

Does anyone think there has realistically been a change in the market? Is it still not dominated by one player?

The article The REAL Reason the Linux Community Didn’t Come Up With the iPhone starts off with an interesting premise.

Lately, there seems to an explosion of interest in Open Source.

Sure. As much as there has been an explosion in interest in the last decade.

The article is really a rebuttal of a piece about how Open Source rarely innovates. The argument wobbles between support for “wisdom of crowds” to holding up Android and OpenMoko as sterling examples of how the Linux crowd could have come up with the iPhone.

I think, sadly, the author missed the point.

Open Source rarely innovates. I say rarely because the few Open Source projects that have shown some real innovation are usually the itch of one or two smart guys.

I’ve always considered laziness to be a very important quality in someone. The desire to get things done with the minimum amount of work is central to my own work ethic. I want results and I will work for them but I have a hard time starting any piece of work where I cannot see the value in it. (Sending emailed reports is one area that is pointless when there are web tools which generate them. Go click a bloody button)

Some of the best IT guys I know are excessively lazy. They’ll work solidly for 3 days to create a script that will shave five minutes off their work day or remove some piece of work that is boring or otherwise undesirable.

The developers behind most of the Open Source apps out there are similarly lazy. They work hard until the functionality is good enough and focus on areas like stability and when they have achieved their goal, the momentum decreases. Areas of development, like user interface, often are left alone because these guys are hardcore techies. Editing text files is easy. Why should there be a nice GUI? They’ve created apps like vi or emacs to simplify an aspect of their life - it’s not meant to be taken as a life philosophy.

Read the comments. Count how many Linux-philes deride the Mac because of eye-candy without realising that eye-candy in many cases is responsible for the usability of functionality.

What the author misses is that while Linux and Mac OS X share a distant ancestry in that they’re both based on crufty old UNIX designs from 20 years ago, Mac OS X has innovated in ways that are not reliant on the underpinnings of the operating system. Through frameworks they’ve made some great functionality available to developers who want to concentrate on the business logic. Their frameworks inspire people to create new and fabulous.

This is why Android, despite being touted as an answer to iPhone, looks like ass. Might also be important to note that while it is now Open Source, it wasn’t OS during development and there remain a lot of questions about how it will be presented. It’s not shipping for another year on any handsets (if indeed it gains traction) so it’s ultimately vapourware.

Similarly, the innovation apparent in OpenMoko seems to be routed in the rounded edges and the fact it comes in two colours. There’s certainly zero innovation in the current design and based on the fact it can’t make calls or send SMS messages currently (in the GUI) it’s going to be a long while. A developer picking up OpenMoko will be saddled with hardware that barely works. His time and energy is going to be based entirely on working with others to overcome the current shortcomings and get the device to the state it needs to be to compete with the most run of the mill mobile phones. Trotting it out as an example of how the Open Source innovated is very poor show. You can Photoshop/GIMP all the screenshots you want. It currently doesn’t do any of that. (if I draw a picture of a manned rocketship on the surface of Mars, is it the same as actually building it? No, didn’t think so).

The virtue of the iPhone is not in the fact it has a phone or an internet communications device but that people actually find it easier to use. They think it looks lovely, they want to paw it and stroke it. You don’t think “looks” or “eye candy” are important?

Why has the white/orange model of OpenMoko sold out?

The whole article is so inconsistent that it actually makes me cross, gives me irritation.

However, the corporate for profit model is simply NOT how Open Source works or wants to work. In fact, innovation is not usually a profitable undertaking. Consumers fear change. What they love is incremental improvements and businesses like releasing new versions of the same thing - it helps drive sales. The only ones who are free to innovate are those with nothing to lose - like the Open Source world, for example.

Innovation is not usually a profitable undertaking?

If Innovation is, as the author describes, the very lifeblood of Open Source, then where the hell is the innovation in Open Source? The author is quick to correlate “borrowed” or bought technology with Open Source.

It’s one thing to point at Mac OS X and claim the GUI was invented at PARC and Engelbart invented the mouse - but the innovation present in the original system in the first Macintosh was so far ahead of what Xerox were offering and what Microsoft would eventually deliver that it beggared belief. The reason - a couple of really really REALLY smart guys at Apple who had a vision. The PARC design couldn’t overlap windows but the Mac developers didn’t know that. So their version had overlapping windows. What the author misses is that Apple paid Xerox for access to their lab. There was no Open Source involved, these were both companies investing in innovative research.

I’m not a critic of Open Source; quite the opposite. Open Source is incredibly important in establishing the fundamentals of a system. The guys in Infurious are very motivated to feed back patches into the frameworks they are using in order to build apps. We use Linux, we use BSD, we use MySQL, we use Apache, we use gcc - Open Source is at our core.

I am a critic of revisionism however. Trying to paint IBM as a proponent of Open Source 50 years ago is silly, as is claiming that Xerox PARC was the result of open source philosophy.

It’s a silly article.

Robert Scoble was quietly raving about the Kindle for the last week but as he says, it’s easy to get geeks excited by new and shiny and much harder to excite the mass market.

1. No ability to buy paper goods from Amazon through Kindle.
2. Usability sucks. They didn’t think about how people would hold this device.
3. UI sucks. Menus? Did they hire some out-of-work Microsoft employees?
4. No ability to send electronic goods to anyone else. I know Mike Arrington has one. I wanted to send him a gift through this of Alan Greenspan’s new book. I couldn’t. That’s lame.
5. No social network. Why don’t I have a list of all my friends who also have Kindles and let them see what I’m reading?
6. No touch screen. The iPhone has taught everyone that I’ve shown this to that screens are meant to be touched. Yet we’re stuck with a silly navigation system because the screen isn’t touchable.

It seems apparent to me that Kindle would have done a lot better if released one year ago but like the Nokia internet tablets, I’m betting that Amazon is trying to build a platform here.

The crazy thing is the comparison to the iPhone.

This gripe list reads to me like a iPhone wish list for OSX version 1.5. I’d expect that we’ll see some new features on the iPhone come February but anyone who’s Mac-development savvy should be getting up to speed with Leopard, Core Animation (LayerKit), Objective C 2.0 and starting to fill these gaps.

Build a Reader application which will hook into the dozens of online novel repositories, read PDF. Make a deal with O’Reilly to get their book into the new format (even if it is just reformatted PDF). Make the sharing thing real, make it like your book lending. Get Wil Shipley to make Delicious Library more than just what it does. What if it actually stored your books and allowed you to lend them in a reader format. How freaking cool would that be? Make it hook into the net to tell you when friends are online so you can send them your books directly over the net, rather than having to be in the same room.

Make sure the iPhone has capability of social networking. I’m not talking about MyFaceBeboSpaceBookster here, I’m talking about drawing the social network away from the big firms and where it belongs. Sure, there will be some rich apps for JaiTwitterMicroFaceBlogging (like my earlier mentioned Ghost) but realistically we really need to take back what is ours rather than waiting for big companies to provide it. Let’s see something from developers to fill that gap.

Some developers are gaining early access to Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch software developer kit, according to reliable sources speaking to Electronista. A handful of companies are said to be getting rough versions of the tools to help code more advanced applications than would be possible with the current web-only solution.

Wasn’t me, I didn’t say NDAnything.

The London Underground could really learn a lesson or three in how to entertain customers.

Ever been on the Tube?

For me, because London is a rare treat, the Tube is a guilty pleasure and I consider it much like le Metro. It’s true that the stations under London perhaps hold less art, attraction and glamour than their counterparts in Paris, but I enjoy the trips, the freedom and the novelty.

If you’re using the Tube every day, however, it can be a chore. I’ve had less than stellar experiences when working away from home - the blasts of hot, stale body odour which fly around some of the tunnels, the cramped body crushes during the rush hours, the wall of people facing you when the door opens and the general misery of people who cannot find room to smile because of the oppression of the same grind, day in, day out.

The Lady who does the Voice of the Underground, voice artist Emma Clarke, has been sacked by the London Underground for allegedly criticising their services. Apparently she described the Tube as “dreadful”, referring to the fact that at every station she would have to listen to herself saying Mind The Gap. The L.U. took this as being her impression of the service as a whole and as a result, fired her after 8 years of work. They fired her via the media. And are not engaging in conversation.

That’s the way to deal with customer feedback.

How crazy is that? The best way to deal with criticism is now officially to plug your ears with your hands.

Now I know I’ve stated a preference for “firing the customer” in cases where the customer is proving to be seriously uneconomical. There are always going to be some troublesome customers and there will be times where a parting of the ways is best for all concerned.

Similarly a friend of mine emailed me yesterday with a customer services report. He was cold-called by a competitor of mine and grilled about his services and purchasing. When he said he used “us”, the caller hung up on him immediately. Is that the way to solicit business? Certainly when we’ve been called by their customers we’ve been nothing but courteous (and we don’t do cold-calling). Of course they may be a bit sore about the revelation last year that they used us for their hard work which caused some laughter in some parts.

Just be nice to people, it really works. If you be nice they’ll tell maybe 10 people. If you treat them badly, they’ll tell everyone.

A few weeks ago, Her Indoors made an off-hand comment about how I should do more for good causes. At the time I grunted as my attention was elsewhere but the statement didn’t leave me and I’ve been mulling it over for the last few days. The outcome of this internal debate is that I’m happy with my charitable contributions. I’ve helped a charity with their network issues when they had a fire and were forced to move. I’ve installed the wiring for a school left high and dry by C2K running out of budget. I’ve been running NiMUG for the best part of a decade for free and allegedly done heaps for Mac users in Northern Ireland (according to some of those Mac Users). I’ve done FOC house calls for some people who really couldn’t afford another option and Mac-Sys regularly donates to raffles for worthy causes. Infurious, though still just starting up, contributes patches back to the open source world and take it from me, if they were in a position to “give something back”, then they’d be doing a lot more than just that.

Today I set up a web page for a campaign for improving a playground. It’s based around Colby Park in Four Winds in Belfast. Have a look at the Campaign for Colby Playground. Sure, it’s just a little Wordpress install but it takes my time (and my money) to set these things up and the people doing this aren’t technical people. My kids won’t even see the benefit of this park as they don’t live anywhere near it, but I was asked and it’s a good cause.

If you have any knowhow in the political process or even know how to motivate people, get in touch with them. It’s not about what you can gain from it, but rather what will become of it on it’s own.

The proliferation of sites like Flickr (and their options for aspiring photographers to license their work) as well as cheap online stock photography web sites is apparently damaging the livelihoods of professional stock photographers. Chances are you can find the image you want, get it for a small fee (or even just an attribution) direct from the creator and if not, have a good chance of making it yourself.

He now has to produce 60 saleable shots in one session rather than the 10 he used to aim for and the budget cuts affect his entire operation.

God love him.

Funnily enough the creator of Microstock was a photographer who was trying to sell his photos and none of the agencies would touch him. So he created something which threatens to destroy the delicate balance of the stock photography world.

Tough shit.

It’s not as if someone couldn’t have seen this coming. It’s time for everyone in every industry to take a long hard look at their business model and wonder whether or not a punk kid with a laptop could take them down legally by undermining their business with something a consumer would prefer. Again, this was pointed out by Rich Segal on his blog that entire development teams in corporations need to consider that while it may take 6 months to add a feature button to a product in their workflow, a “good enough” replica of their app could be build in a modern IDE by the punk kid with a laptop, utilising services like EC2 and S3 from Amazon to provide on-demand CPU and storage.

It’s not about protecting the status quo but rather trying to pre-empt what will happen and getting in there first. It’s about not worrying about what your existing competitors might do and more about the ones who may blindside you. This should drive you to create, to innovate, to be better, to be the best.

Let me start by saying that I’m not a gadgeteer. I don’t rush out for the latest and greatest. That said, apart from Mac computers I have had my fair share of palmtops and phones over the last decade.

Nine gadgets in 10 years isn’t bad. I’ve only ever bought one gaming console, a Nintendo Wii, which I bought last Christmas and haven’t played much (it’s more for the kids) and other than that I have no “spare” computers. I’ve resisted electronic photo albums, I don’t have a massive HD TV, I do have a DVD recorder (at me mums), I don’t have a Gameboy, PSP, DS or any other handheld devoted to games, I’ve never owned a WindowsCE/PocketPC/Windows Mobile device though at one point I had real gadget-lust for a Casio model. I do have an iPod Video 60 GB which stores the kids movies and my music (which means I don’t need to break out the DVDs when the kids want to watch something). Every old Mac has gone to a new home so it’s only a few other smaller, more personal, gadgets that remain.

• Newton MessagePad 120 - given away

• Newton MessagePad 2000 - can’t quite bear to part with it
• Palm Vx - lying somewhere about the house
• Ericsson T39m - traded in…for…
• Sony-Ericsson T68i - traded in…for…
• Motorola RAZR V3 - in my room, as a spare phone
• Sony-Ericsson K800i - spare phone again, just in case
• Nokia N800 - sitting in the house, abandoned…
• iPod touch - with a new master
• iPhone - toy of choice

I guess it depends on how you define empowerment.

Empowerment

# To equip or supply with an ability; enable: “Computers … empower students to become intellectual explorers” (Edward B. Fiske).

For the most part, the phones never changed the way I worked. The only devices which have seriously changed the way I did things were the Newton MessagePad 2000 and the iPhone.

The MessagePad was the first device that made me leave my laptop at home. When travelling I’d have it on the plane, keyboard placed behind the screen, typing away. I’d download email over the modem before dinner at the hotel, eat dinner and reply to email and then when I returned to my room, upload my replies to the mailserver. It worked well. It had enough utility to mean I stopped bringing a heavy Dell laptop bag everywhere. When I got ethernet and a VT100 terminal emulator on it, it became indispensible for my work. I could connect to the routers and switches in the network using either a serial cable or over ethernet. The battery life lasted days rather than minutes (my DELL had a battery life of about 90 minutes) which meant it just stayed with me everywhere. Of course it was massive which meant I had to keep it in my hand, inside a large jacket pocket (and this was before fatigues-style cargo pants were fashionable). It changed my lifestyle. I felt connected. But it got left behind as my job became less “footwork” and more “deskwork” and the keyboard was no match for the Powerbook that graced my desk and powered a 21 inch monitor. People still wax about the Newton and take the jokes about it in a good-natured way. No-one who really used it found it funny - it was just essential and we’re reminded of it every time we empty the trash in Mac OS X or delete a message on the iPhone.

The iPhone has done much the same. Heavy laptop and bag doesn’t often leave the house. It’s still used in the evening because it has apps I need (iWork, Mail for the accounts I don’t carry with me, XCode) and a massive screen. But day to day I carry iPhone with me because it means when I get home I have 10-20 emails to clear down rather than 200-300. Again I feel connected but this time it’s the real thing. The technology here makes Star Trek look positively dated. The only issue is battery life. I get a full day of heavy usage out of it but I’d really like a good bit more than that. It’s not much different to my crappy, blocky, slow K800i but the difference being that I’m actively using the device all day. It’s checking my email every 15 minutes, dragging down updates all day, letting me view my new house, searching out WiFi hotspots continuously and dazzling me with the brightness of the screen. I’ve yet to completely run out but this device is working constantly for me. Web pages load faster than on my allegedly 3G K800i and the whole device is just a lot more fun.

Other than that - technology that empowers me?

• Wordpress - accept no substitutes.
• Mac OS X - working with Windows every day makes me appreciate my Mac all the more.
• Cocoa - based entirely on what I learned and achieved last night with NSMutableArray and NSTableView.
• RSS - because it brings the web back to 1995 in terms of formatting and delivers it to your doorstep. Content-enriched!

There’s more. Digital photography so I can keep photos of my kids with me everywhere. Instant Messenger applications which help me work, collaborate, ask questions, help friends and otherwise be part of a rich social network. Text-Messaging (SMS) because it’s the norm for communication - it’s like RSS - a content rich form of communication with really low overheads. And I’d add social networking because it’s how I met her-indoors. And I’m really grateful for that.

I can’t wait to see what technology empowers my kids. They’ll take so much for granted and it’s getting to the point where they will need to have their own computer, complete with iSight, just to maintain their own social network. I would like to think that our children would grow up educated and informed and wouldn’t be stupid and arrogant enough to believe they can get away with things that are illegal or just wrong.

We can marvel at the iPhone but I marvelled at the Newton and the comparison there is 10 years of technology. Our iPhones now will look as bulky and ridiculous as the Newton does now by the time my kids are in their teens.