Rails Maturity Model

The problem with RMM is that it sets someone up as the judge and jury. And no one likes to be judged. Also we have seen things like this fail so many times. To get people on board, Obie needs to address the fears that are cropping up:

* How will it be different than getting java certified?
* Customers and employers have been burned those java certs, how will RMM avoid those problems?
* How will you keep shops from labeling themselves Tops in RMM when they haven't yet been judged?

Cisco certification came to mind when I started thinking about certifications that had meaning. It is a very rigorous test that is difficult to pass, and expensive. RMM would have to be all of those things but... Is it really worth it?

The top dogs in our industry are well known because they all speak at conferences or have open sourced their work. It is the "lesser well known but still provide great coders" companies that could be helped by this. But I think there is a much better way. How many contributions has the company made to OpenSource projects?

Provide a way for companies to publish who their developers are and then look in different repositories to see how much that company has contributed. This would be a much better tool to determine the merits of a company.

Jing is awesome

I needed to make a quick screencast recently, and I just happened upon someone's blog who used Jing to create one. It probably isn't the most robust screencasting tool out there, but it worked great for my needs. Jing also allows you to take screen captures quickly and easily. I was using Skitch for that work, but Jing has taken it's place. Take a look at my previous post about ads taking up to much realestate on websites to see an image created using Jing.

The thing I dig about Jing is that it adds a little orb to your screen that just unobtrusively sits there until you need it, mine is sitting in the top right corner of my screen. Then, you click on the orb and it gives you three choices: Capture, History and More. You click on Capture, it allows you to create a box around the area you want to capture and then asks if you want to capture an image or a video.

It is quick and easy. It comes with a quick way to share your screencasts or captures online too.

Ad Space

I needed a synonym today so I decided to hit up my favorite synonym site: thesaurus.com. I did the search and the result came back and I found a word to replace the one I had. But I had difficulty finding the answer on the page.

The grayed out portions of the image are all ads or whitespace. 78% of the screen is taken up by ads! I didn't even count the popup blocker at the top of the page which was blocking another ad. Some may point out that the content on the left is actually navigation to other words, but these lead to dictionary.com and all cause a popup ad. It is a gray area (pun intended) but I counted it. It constitutes about 15% of the screen so if you want to give it to the content side of the equation you are still talking about 63% in ad space. Worse still is that they break up the useful parts of the page with a huge ad. That little sliver that tells you what you searched for and the actual answer that brought you to the site is separated by an ad that interupts your flow and makes it difficult to actually find the information you are looking for. Making it hard to find the value on your page isn't a good thing.

Having 78% of the screen taken by ads is the equivalent of a one hour television show having 45 minutes of commercials. Google has succeeded as a search engine and done so well as a business because they don't take up that much space with their ads, they don't blink and they are actually relevant. This argument seems late to the game, but obviously service providers are not understanding. Please, if you are going to put ads on your page, make them relevant, give me easy access to your content (which is where the REAL value lies) and don't flash things at your users.

Accidental Leader

I am an accidental leader. Seth Godin says that to be a leader you
first have to make a choice to lead. Well, I made that choice a very
long time ago, but it wasn't until recently that I actually started
leading. Humorously, I actually started leading just after I had given
up on the very idea and just started trying to get things done. This
is why I feel like an accidental leader.

In fact I am not an accidental leader. I just finally got out of my
own way. I just stopped looking for the credit that I was due and just
worked to do the right thing. I was given the title "Lead" and did a
pretty bang up job. But when the job was finished and I had to move on
to something else, I remained a leader, but was happy just being one
of the troops again.

My next step is to figure out how not to be an accidental leader, but
to sucessfully create a tribe and move them in a direction
purposefully. The first couple of things to work on are:

* learn to not scare people with my passion
* learn to effectively communicate goals and direction
* learn to communicate in a way that is not perceived to be grumpy

The second item above will be worked on through this blog. I can learn
that through writing. The other two will require conversations with
people about things that I am passionate or upset about. Most of the
perceived grumpiness comes from quick statements, replies, or requests
that don't have the appropriate amount of politeness to buffer the
thought being communicated. I believe that will be my most challenging
change.

No more accidents!

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