Mindful Leadership and Technology
Jonathan Fries on .
It's funny how having a strategy makes it easier to achieve your goals.
That makes it sound easy of course and it isn't always.
But sometimes what you are missing you can find quickly: take a break from the urgent, collaborate, ask for help.
Come up with a direction and you suddenly find yourself on the way.
Jonathan Fries on .
I see the converse of this (Code is Poetry) show up here and there on the internet. I agree with the sentiment behind it, which I will sum up this way: Code is Art.
I agree with that, but I think we should let code be its own art.
The art of writing eloquent code is more closely related to construction, engineering, or architecture.
Is the Eiffel Tower beautiful? If you think it is then you can probably appreciate the beauty in a well-written piece of code.
This is the Modernist idea of beauty in materials or beauty in the way materials may interact to produce an effect.
Code isn't poetry because code has no sound, and poetry is about sound and words.
Code can't be pronounced, spoken, or voiced. At least, I've never seen anyone do it in a way that made sense.
It might be interesting to see someone try.
But what about the title of this blog post, which is looking at it the other way? How is poetry like code? How are the things that go into development - design, testing, compilation, and execution - analogous to things that happen in the writing, reading, and hearing of poetry? That to me is (mostly) unexplored territory and seems interesting.
Jonathan Fries on .
I recently rebuilt our employee recognition tool using AngularJS.
The old tool had been built as an add-on to our case management tool, which we are migrating away from.
Since Angular is our preferred web direction, I believed it beneficial for me to dabble a bit and rebuild it using a modern, strategic technology.
The process was challenging for me mostly because I was not much of a JavaScript developer back when I did a lot of development. So, to do almost all my development using JavaScript required a fair amount of brute-force-through-googling just to get me past the basics.
Once I was able to do that, it was relatively simple to get done what I needed. My app was about 6 pages with 2 input forms, 3 grids, and a port of an old jquery-centric billboard form with some basic fade-in/fade-out animation.
This was no enterprise system mind you, but it had enough moving parts for me to learn the basics and prove to myself how hard it was going to be for others to learn.
For our existing JavaScript stars this will be an easy technology jump, but for others it will involve training on both JavaScript and AngularJS best practices.
The Amadeus Innovation Team has already developed a lot of our AngularJS best practices so that portion of the transition process is covered. There's a fair amount to think about in terms of project structure and approach, but I have left that to the more expert development minds.
Jonathan Fries on .
New number 1 rule of the internet: my CPU fan should never turn on because I am visiting your site.
Jonathan Fries on .
I am using Ghost for this blog.
I am running my own instance, which made it a bit of work to set up.
You can use their hosted version: ghost.org Which is a much easier way to get things up and running.
So, Ghost - it's a simple but very effective tool for blogging.
With simple you let go of some features and control, but that can be good. Focus on what you want to do. In my case what I want to do is write blog posts on the internet. Other features? Extraneous.
This is what happens when you pick a good software tool or platform:
If I need something else later I'll figure it out later.
Jonathan Fries on .
Well, it is time to do something different. The old site - a static HTML site on AWS - was fun but did not lend itself to frequent updates. So, I am going to try Ghost and see how that does for me.
I am going to try and focus this blog on the things that I wanted the other site to be about, namely: software, software development, writing, reading, and the art that is the overlap of all those things.
Wish me luck and inspiration!