Friday 04 May 2012 at 5:00 pm
I always find it amusing when my mind evolves its thinking to a point of self-proclaimed wisdom only to then realise somebody in my life has been telling me just that all along.
In fact it's often the case that the wisdom that people credit you with is far from original. Knowing and walking the path are indeed very different things.
One such wonderful piece of wisdom came form my father when I first ventured into the world of commercial software development;
"If you can be a bin man and be happy, be a bin man."
I always knew what my father meant, not that he would advocate settling for less than your true ambition and potential, that you must love what you do and if that happens to be emptying bins - so be it.
He repeated this several times over the years, largely because I was often unhappy in my career, ambition got in the way.
Ambition vs Challenge
I realised many years ago much of my career-related angst was caused by being caught up in a wave of career progression that superiors assumed would pass my celery test. It didn't. I'd just quit and find another job challenge. What I really craved was an innovative environment that could supply me with a constant stream of mouth-watering development challenges.
Joining AHC in 2009 as Development Manager, a split role between development and management, was perfect. Spliting my time between architecture and training, whilst embracing the opportunity to demonstrate that management "done right" can support team growth, innovation, and cathedral building - whilst meeting business expectations, has been amazing.
It has however presented me with an wonderful dilemma, that with growth of our team do I concentrate on management and pursue the associated career path, or do I return fully to architecture and training? The decison has to take me to where I pass my celery test, to what I love doing most, and that's writing great software.
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Sunday 08 April 2012 at 08:04 am
Reflecting on my posting about my early days writing software last night, and in particular my then crowning achievement - NodeManager v1.00, I suddenly felt quite ashamed - this is why (click).
Although I may have written the (somewhat awesome) code behind NodeManager there deserved to be two names on that front page.
As a Bulletin Board System (BBS) SysOp the people you would connect with most would be other SysOps; I still count many as personal friends to this day. One fellow young SysOp I connected with was Edward. The same age it wasn't long before we began talking regularly on the phone and asking parents to drive us to others' house for the weekend.
I honestly can't remember who came up with the idea for NodeManager, it could quite likely have been me on my own or in a discussion with any number of people, but I do know that it took the two of us to build it into a successful product.
Inception
You could easily argue that any idea in history can be credited to interactions or experience that person had; no matter what it's point of inception might be there has to pre-cursor. I have no problem with ideas being owned by a single individual, it would be too complicated to connect the dots backward to events that sparked it, but I do have a problem when those who helped build it - YOUR TEAM - are forgotten.
Looking back through history, whether it be Woz & Jobs (I purposely put them in that order btw), Lennon & McCartney, or Ben & Jerry; I have yet to find any example were it didn't take at least two people to build something great.
Building
So.. you have your great idea and a design emerges, you start to write code for endless hours (fainting on occasion from lack of nourishment - no kidding!), but when you hit a problem that challenges you what happens? You ask the opinion of someone you value and trust.
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Wednesday 11 January 2012 at 10:30 am
I’m one of those managers who believe your team being involved in ‘the community’ is of excellent benefit not just to their own personal growth but also the quality of software they produce; I also believe lack of recognition of this only leads to demotivate or worse - high staff turnover.
We have several schemes in-house to reward or compensate for personal time spent including reimbursement of expenses to ‘events’ and in the case of all-day attendance a day-in-lieu. I now don’t think this is enough to /encourage/ participation and contribution back to the community.
With this in mind I’ve been playing with the idea of introducing some kind of credits scheme for my team and the comment made on twitter seemed to spark some interest:
@Cranialstrain: Wonder if some kind of team credits scheme for community participation and contribution might fly at work (e.g. blogging/StackOverflow) :=/
I thought it might be good to crowd-source this idea into a more concrete proposal, perhaps one you could take to your company too?
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