Category: Commentary

An article on PicoBusiness highlights Six Questions the Interviewer Wants To Know.

If thinking of hiring someone, I guess they are a darned good place to start without going on nonsense soft skill courses on how to be an effective employer.

In my day job, we’ve hired people and sometimes they haven’t “fit” with the team. Suffice to say we killed them and hid the bodies….

So, here we are in our new home with all of it’s AJAXy goodness and ripe, succulent ruby-ness as well.

Cool.

We’ll catch up with some content soon enough. Just say Hi if you’ve just joined us.

….to bring down the final curtain…

Well, not quite.

We’re MOVING.

Aidan has configured up a copy of Typo (because he’s become a fully certified cult-member of the Cult of Ruby. Ruby, I hear, is one of the Great Old Ones, descended from the Elder God SmallTalk…

Anyway. We’re moving. Update. Update. Update.

http://blog.quayperformance.com/

As mentioned earlier, we have switched blog software (from b2evolution to typo). We’ve also moved the URL from http://cimota.com/blogs/ to http://blog.quayperformance.com – this is because blog.quayperformance.com lives on a server under our control so we can run our choice of software there.

The old blog page will remain, but de-activated, for a month or so, till we’re sure all the traffic there has dried up.

Feedback welcome 🙂

I can’t seem to find any decent ruby blogging software. I got fed up reading the explanation of Hobix (read it, go on – it’s annoying), and everything else doesn’t seem to support the things I want supported (mulitple users and an XML-RPC interface like one of the major (non-ruby) blogs – WordPress, Bloxsom, etc.)

I don’t want to have to write one (although I will if I can’t get what I want), and I don’t want to use WordPress or something similar because it’s written in PHP which gives me the shivers.

*sigh*

Can’t I have my cake and eat it too?

You can tell I’m peripherally involved in motivation issues at my day job by the recent blogs posts eh?

A blog I read I WIll Teach You To Be Rich has a great article today.

2006 is already 25% over.

Around mid-February, people start to forget their New Year’s resolutions, or they start rationalizing them away: “Well, I’ll go to the gym next week but I’m so busy this week” blah blah blah.

I think the best part is near the end:

Will I look back in 10 years and be satisfied with what I did in the early part of 2006?

I’m pretty happy where I am this year. I have procrastinated a little but it’s not all been bad. I’ve worked the day job, I’ve done stuff for infurious (no, not really much “work” – sorry, mate). There are things I’d like to try again. I’d think a bit before speaking in some cases. I’d shut the hell up in others.

I’m sometimes concerned about whether or not I’m delivering. My job is probably 60% technical, 20% admin and 20% management. I know I’m right up there technically. I know I need to work more on the admin and I think I’m doing okay with the management. Or they could be just blowing smoke up my @$$.

We all have a lot of work ahead. Another 3/4 of a year to endure or enjoy.

Regardless of how many people you have in your team, and how experienced they are, there is always a trade-off to be made between productivity and increasing production capacity. In my case this is a balance between my desire to produce a working product (SyncBridge at the moment) and a desire to learn more about the development environment in which I’m working (Cocoa, and related technologies), which would then make it quicker for me to produce working code.

My skill levels with the various technologies will improve slowly if I focus all my energy on producing a working product.

My skill levels will improve very quickly if I spend the time just learning, but then we’d never release anything.

So I have to try and strike a balance. I’ll never learn everything, so this is a balance that always needs adjusting, dependent on many factors (e.g. toolset, experience, time of day … ).

And when the team grows, I’ll need to ensure that we keep that balance. Many developers say that they most enjoy an environment where they are constantly learning – if there is too little learning and too much production, we won’t retain staff. Likewise, if we don’t produce, we have no money to pay the staff.

The current balance is very heavily leaning toward getting production code out there. Once we have done so (and things are relatively settled), then with luck I’ll be able to spend a bit of time learning more.

Damien Mulley, who does something-or-other for a living has a great, if succinct, posting about how following your dreams is probably a good thing.

I riposte with an equally pithy quip in the form of a series of questions.

What are the three most important things in your life?
Are you doing something for them right now?
If not, why not?

My three things are my professional life, my private life and my personal life.

Professional: My day job pays the bills (not really, but it will…). Infurious keeps my soul going. Other ideas will keep these two fueled and on the runway.

Personal: I think about my kids when not fixing tough IT problems – which means about 50% of the time. I enjoy my solitude in the evenings as it helps me focus. This blog keeps my “need to write” fulfilled.

Private: Obviously this has to remain private. Tonight I tried to fix something but, as usual, it’s still broken and it all ended in a fight. I’m reminded of a recurring theme in The Mexican

Dragging things back to Damien’s topic, I have dreams for each of these. I’d like to live somewhere a little more rural. Would need to be quite a big house, but nothing ostentatious. I want to stop fighting all the time in my day job – surely adults can just get along – I just hope we don’t lose the spark at the same time.

For Infurious: We have a heap of things on the Big List Of Things To Do. We discussed games too and we’d both like to put out at least one game (no, it probably won’t be on the scale of Doom 3). Would be cool to live in the same country.

I am working on all of these dreams.

I reached a small turning point with the SyncBridge code tonight. There are no more features to be added for the 1.0 release, i.e. it’s “feature complete” (which is a crappy waterfall software development term meaning the development team is about to be bombarded with bug reports from the testing team).

Everything that remains from here until we release is bug fixing and eye candy.

It’s interesting, when MJ and I first discussed doing SyncBridge, I estimated it would take a team of four developers roughly a year to deliver. It has taken me four months doing it part-time. Of course, the scope is drastically reduced compared to what I originally estimated at, but a lot of the business value is still the same. It also helped that Apple released the SyncServices API 🙂

I was pointed at the Unity guys by my friend Graham. Graham was a code monkey for Nortel when I was there as a network admin and though our paths started to cross through mutual friend Paul McK. it wasn’t til we found we were on the same flight to Paris to go to Apple Expo that things got a little chatty. Graham, as I mentioned, is a code monkey, that class of people like Aidan that I respect and envy. He’s been working at SARC recently and currently is placed with the Unity team in Denmark. Their CEO and Game director both have blogs and the company has an RSS feed as well so go read already. Unity seems like some exciting tech if you’re capable of writing code, capable of working in some graphics and have a few ideas for fun games. I sadly only have the latter.

Graham was going to run an ObjC course sometime this summer but I think he’s more fascinated with Unity right now and might run a game development course. I’d sign up for either to be honest. I reckon the MAc market is just aching for another “Bungie” to appear and it’s be nice to see or even BUY a game that didn’t have a numeral at the end of the name (Whatsit 2, PlayedItBefore 3, TimeWaster 2006, EvenMoreFastAndRepetitive (sequel to FastAndRepetitive). It would also be an opportunity to exercise my writing muscles so I could see if any of the fantastic (ahem) storylines and plot ideas I used to have when I was an RPG designer are still any use. (Note to self; any product which is 10 years in development, especially RPGS, is going to be 9 years out of date). Would there be an opportunity for building a brand there? Providing some unique IP? We could then release sequels and cash in (cue quote about staring into an abyss and how that’s really bad, mmmkay?).

I guess I just like working on stuff that’s exciting and don’t want to get involved with some people who would skin me if they needed something to write on.

Anyway, Unity looks cool. I itch to have the time to have a go….just playing y’understand.