Mindful Leadership and Technology
Jonathan Fries on .
Oh Contentful, where have you been all these years?
I wish this existed 5 years ago. It would have been helpful for so many clients.
Well, it is here now. And it is pretty great. Check it out.
Jonathan Fries on .
When building your city you should not view the city-design part as a way to solve your plumbing problems. Not if you want someone to live there, anyway.
Nor should you build a city for which plumbing cannot be designed.
But rather, in your dream, in your vision of what a city should be, consider that you will still need plumbing and it shouldn't cost a million dollars to fix a leaky faucet.
Beyond that, the plumbing shouldn't be much of a consideration, unless you are building a city for plumbers.
Jonathan Fries on .
The side project that I've posted about occasionally (here, here, and here) is in a beta state, and ready for a few eyeballs.
You can check it out here: Trouble @ Work.
This is what I am calling an MVP, which stands for Minimum Viable Poems. I have put together what I feel is good content (poems), and I have basic site navigation and responsive design working.
I realize there isn't huge overlap for those who might be interested in this blog for the technical or work related stuff and those who might be interested in poems and literature.
None the less, it's an area of interest for me: poetry and technology. I am curious about these two things, how they overlap, and how they can help us in our everyday lives.
Jonathan Fries on .
Yes, the new VM has fixed my performance problems on this blog.
It was easy to upgrade and all very seamless. I did do it while walking through LAX.
I guess I will add to my warning about $1 icons (beware of $1 icons) a warning about $5 VMs:
Beware of any VM that only costs $5/month.
Jonathan Fries on .
We're great at tracking costs, money, time spent.
But where do we keep track of time saved? What bank can you put it in?
Of course you can't. You can really only spend time - so you save time in the same sense that you save $2,000 when you buy a car. You save it by spending $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 instead of slightly more than that. Which is really just a smaller outflow than it is a true saving.
It would be great to have a system that told us how much time all our previous efforts have saved us on a current task. With money there can be a net accumulation of 'savings' (like the car example) into actual savings in a bank.
Time affords us no such option. The only way to keep track of such savings would be to create a record of such transactions and do the bookkeeping necessary to maintain that. Something like this:
By planning ahead and due to all my previous experience, I saved an 5 hours today.
It would be great if you could show how much time your efforts saved yourself and others. Would it be worth it to keep track of those things?
A quick Google search indicates that no such record keeping system exists.
Jonathan Fries on .
If you are a developer what code are you accountable for?
Is it only your own? Is it your own plus that of a system that you've worked on for some period of time? Is it your team's? Is it every project ever worked on at your company?
I ask this because I've seen a lot of different answers and I will share with you my own approach to this and why that has been my approach.
When I approach a code base I did not create, my first question is to ask, "What can I learn from this code?". This question can and should consume you for some time. You won't know the answer right away, if you think you do, you probably aren't listening closely enough.
Once you know what you should be learning and have begun to learn you can ask how you can make it better. There are always ways to make improvements and to meld your learning with what you already know.
At no point during this process do I use the phrase 'spaghetti code', precisely because it places the source of misunderstandings outside the self onto an inanimate object: 'the code'.
Code is, at one level, a tool to communicate to a machine what you want it to do. It can't be 'spaghetti' if the machine understands it and does what the humans in the room wanted it to do.
On another level, code is a tool to communicate between one developer and another the intent to make a program and what that program was supposed to do. You may choose to blame the previous developer (who completed their assignment), but I don't see how that helps any business situation you happen to be in.
My approach was to be accountable for all code that I touched.
For code written, from scratch by me, I am accountable for all of it, no matter how long ago I wrote it.
As a boss or manager, I don't necessarily expect every person to have that level of accountability, but I expect them to be on a journey that moves in that direction.
And I hate, hate, hate the term 'spaghetti code' (if that wasn't already clear) because it is such a victim phrase. Are you the victim of code? I certainly never wanted to be. I wanted to win and make the code do what it was supposed to do.
Think of the great developers you know. Do they use that phrase? I've never heard one do it.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is very instructive on this point in general. Stephen Covey was not a developer but the lessons are apt to all of us, at all times.
Become proactive. You'll be glad you did.