BTW: There IS no place like 127.0.0.0!
SOURCE
Showing posts with label Developers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Developers. Show all posts
Thursday, September 01, 2011
Web Designers vs. Web Developers - FIGHT! [INFOGRAPHIC]
For my fellow geeks - if this wasn't so true - it would be funny. Oh, wait... it IS funny...
BTW: There IS no place like 127.0.0.0!
SOURCE
BTW: There IS no place like 127.0.0.0!
SOURCE
Monday, February 02, 2009
Becoming Indispensible
If you just look at raw numbers - more than 100,000 people got the boot from their jobs - just this past week. That really sucks! If you're one of the lucky (or unlucky) folks that managed to avoid the boot - you can take one of two strategies: a) either "pull back" and just try to keep the lights on, or b) innovate and excel.
The typical knee-jerk reaction is to pull back and just try to "survive." Personally, I think that a bunch of crap and a cop-out to boot.
Sure, people are scared for their jobs regardless of their position, but managers and IT folks are are feeling particularly vulnerable (at least from the people I talk to). Here's the thing - people who don't add any value (or save any time or money) are always looked at as expendable. The key - don't be so afraid of your job that you just sit there in fear - take some ACTION that will help raise your value to the organization.
I can just hear you saying "Well, Mr. Know-It-All - got any suggestions?" As a matter of fact I do... for only $29.95 plus shipping and handling... (hey, it's my first day out on my own - I need revenue, people!)...
But I digress... of course I have some suggestions:
Do a process review
There is nothing better to quench the cries of "do more with less", and "time is money" than to look at the way you're doing things - and then figure out a way to do them better, faster and/or cheaper. This can be anything from a full, top-down business review (but it can take a while and is a ton of work) - but it doesn't have to be. No matter what your position is from receptionist to IT manager to coding jockey to CEO - there are processes that you do in your normal every day life that are broken.
Identify those areas and come up with ways to fix them. Then, write it down and quantify how much time/money it will save and how much time/money your fix will cost. Remember - DO show your work. There is nothing a manager or business owner would LOVE than for an employee to come up with ways form them to be more productive. Even if they don't implement your suggestion(s) - just the fact that you're making an effort to become more efficient instantly raises your value to the organization.
Look at virtualization
If you're an IT wonk - then it's a no-brainer. Look into virtualizing servers to consolidate hardware, save on cooling and electricity costs and reducing complexity. If you're a small business owner - see you can virtualize your phone system or customer support or receptionist or anything that is a sticking point in your daily process.
There are literally tons of SaaS software tools out there that can help you run large and small aspects of your business - and many of them either give you a free trial or cost under $50 per month. In other words - the barrier to entry - the cost to try something new to gain efficiency - is extremely low and well worth the efforts if it will endear you to your organization and/or improve your bottom line.
Do some professional development
Yeah, I know that travel & entertainment budgets were the first to do - and that budgets for conferences and seminars are also prime targets for cost-cutting. However, you don't have to spend a lot of money in order to develop your personal skill set. Focus on things that will help you to help the organization. If you're a manager - learn how to read (and write) financial statements, get better at your telephone skill, or your people skills or your management skills. Buy a book, download some free podcasts from iTunes from name-brand learning institutions, take an online course, watch some online videos, etc.
Keep in mind - who is harder to replace - someone who "just" answers the phone - or someone that figured out how to save the company $8,000 per year by changing the way a form is laid out? A person who "just" codes Java - or a person who increases end user productivity by suggesting features no one knew were possible?
You get the idea... now DO something to become someone that's difficult to replace.
The typical knee-jerk reaction is to pull back and just try to "survive." Personally, I think that a bunch of crap and a cop-out to boot.
Sure, people are scared for their jobs regardless of their position, but managers and IT folks are are feeling particularly vulnerable (at least from the people I talk to). Here's the thing - people who don't add any value (or save any time or money) are always looked at as expendable. The key - don't be so afraid of your job that you just sit there in fear - take some ACTION that will help raise your value to the organization.
I can just hear you saying "Well, Mr. Know-It-All - got any suggestions?" As a matter of fact I do... for only $29.95 plus shipping and handling... (hey, it's my first day out on my own - I need revenue, people!)...
But I digress... of course I have some suggestions:
Do a process review
There is nothing better to quench the cries of "do more with less", and "time is money" than to look at the way you're doing things - and then figure out a way to do them better, faster and/or cheaper. This can be anything from a full, top-down business review (but it can take a while and is a ton of work) - but it doesn't have to be. No matter what your position is from receptionist to IT manager to coding jockey to CEO - there are processes that you do in your normal every day life that are broken.
Identify those areas and come up with ways to fix them. Then, write it down and quantify how much time/money it will save and how much time/money your fix will cost. Remember - DO show your work. There is nothing a manager or business owner would LOVE than for an employee to come up with ways form them to be more productive. Even if they don't implement your suggestion(s) - just the fact that you're making an effort to become more efficient instantly raises your value to the organization.
Look at virtualization
If you're an IT wonk - then it's a no-brainer. Look into virtualizing servers to consolidate hardware, save on cooling and electricity costs and reducing complexity. If you're a small business owner - see you can virtualize your phone system or customer support or receptionist or anything that is a sticking point in your daily process.
There are literally tons of SaaS software tools out there that can help you run large and small aspects of your business - and many of them either give you a free trial or cost under $50 per month. In other words - the barrier to entry - the cost to try something new to gain efficiency - is extremely low and well worth the efforts if it will endear you to your organization and/or improve your bottom line.
Do some professional development
Yeah, I know that travel & entertainment budgets were the first to do - and that budgets for conferences and seminars are also prime targets for cost-cutting. However, you don't have to spend a lot of money in order to develop your personal skill set. Focus on things that will help you to help the organization. If you're a manager - learn how to read (and write) financial statements, get better at your telephone skill, or your people skills or your management skills. Buy a book, download some free podcasts from iTunes from name-brand learning institutions, take an online course, watch some online videos, etc.
Keep in mind - who is harder to replace - someone who "just" answers the phone - or someone that figured out how to save the company $8,000 per year by changing the way a form is laid out? A person who "just" codes Java - or a person who increases end user productivity by suggesting features no one knew were possible?
You get the idea... now DO something to become someone that's difficult to replace.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Apple Poised To Screw Up (AGAIN)
Yesterday Apple killed the end run that one scorned developer did in order to sell his application after it was not allowed in the blessed iTunes App Store.
Alex Sokirynsky, creator of an application called Podcaster was shut down by Apple two weeks after his application was rejected for inclusion in the App Store because it duplicated features in the company's own iTunes software. "Since Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes," Apple told Sokirynsky.
Yeah, right. So what's the big deal? The big deal is that Apple is about to royally screw themselves. Read on, dear reader, read on...
It seems that Mr. Sokirynsky did an end-run around Apple by selling and allowing people to install his software via the "Ad Hoc" mechanism that Apple created for people to beta test their software with actual users - and for enterprises that wanted to be able to distribute their apps to up to 100 internal folks.
So what Sokirynsky did was to create new "build numbers" of the application to get around the 100 person limit. He charged people $9.99 for the product and then had them send them the device's UDID (unique device identifier) code.
The UDID is needed by the Ad Hoc program to allow the install of the software without going through iTunes and thus bypassing the App Store all together.
Pretty ingenious!
Well, Apple, being the draconian institution it is - caught on and then just yanked his account. Done.
Yeah, good move, Apple! Bravo! That's a terrific way to motivate developers to spend time and money developing software for your platform. With the crepe paper still up at the new Android phone's coming out party - it would seem to me that it would behoove Apple to stop this kind of heavy-handed bullshit and just do what Steve Jobs said he would do at the Spring SDK event - and that's keep out the "bad" programs that crash, do malicious things, are just porn apps, or ones that are illegal or are bandwidth hogs.
Podcaster is none of those things.
And, I'm sure Mr. Sokirynsky is not the only developer hoping to bring cool, actually useful apps to the iPhone rather than just the 1,000 calculators and variations on to-do lists. What about things like other browsers like Firefox or Chrome?
And as Engadget's Ryan Block points out in his blog about this debacle - it all stems from a super restrictive SDK legal agreement:
Alex Sokirynsky, creator of an application called Podcaster was shut down by Apple two weeks after his application was rejected for inclusion in the App Store because it duplicated features in the company's own iTunes software. "Since Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes," Apple told Sokirynsky.
Yeah, right. So what's the big deal? The big deal is that Apple is about to royally screw themselves. Read on, dear reader, read on...
It seems that Mr. Sokirynsky did an end-run around Apple by selling and allowing people to install his software via the "Ad Hoc" mechanism that Apple created for people to beta test their software with actual users - and for enterprises that wanted to be able to distribute their apps to up to 100 internal folks.
So what Sokirynsky did was to create new "build numbers" of the application to get around the 100 person limit. He charged people $9.99 for the product and then had them send them the device's UDID (unique device identifier) code.
The UDID is needed by the Ad Hoc program to allow the install of the software without going through iTunes and thus bypassing the App Store all together.
Pretty ingenious!
Well, Apple, being the draconian institution it is - caught on and then just yanked his account. Done.
Yeah, good move, Apple! Bravo! That's a terrific way to motivate developers to spend time and money developing software for your platform. With the crepe paper still up at the new Android phone's coming out party - it would seem to me that it would behoove Apple to stop this kind of heavy-handed bullshit and just do what Steve Jobs said he would do at the Spring SDK event - and that's keep out the "bad" programs that crash, do malicious things, are just porn apps, or ones that are illegal or are bandwidth hogs.
Podcaster is none of those things.
And, I'm sure Mr. Sokirynsky is not the only developer hoping to bring cool, actually useful apps to the iPhone rather than just the 1,000 calculators and variations on to-do lists. What about things like other browsers like Firefox or Chrome?
And as Engadget's Ryan Block points out in his blog about this debacle - it all stems from a super restrictive SDK legal agreement:
Besides a few very specific callouts (like the no VoIP on cellular bit), all we've got to go by is one vague, gray, largely unspecific blanket statement: "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built in interpreter(s)."Now I get the fact that Apple wants to protect the iPhone platform overall - but I agree with Ryan Block when he says:
Basically, that means that you can't build anything that you haven't prescribed in its given tool and feature set. So if the iPhone already has something like, say, a browser (read: mobile Safari), and Google wants to port a mobile version of Chrome for the iPhone, Google's out of luck. And Apple's legal wiggle room is unbelievably broad. Is a Word / Excel editor a code interpreter? Is a BitTorrent client a code interpreter? Should one have to build a complete and fully functional piece of software just to find out?
Now, if you want to do the right thing -- the thing that may ultimately keep you out of some grumpy developer's class-action lawsuit, the thing that will take away Android's biggest consumer appeal right now -- you'll simply stop filtering apps based on content, and only look for the kind of code Steve specifically promised to protect users against in the first place: grossly buggy and broken, malicious, or otherwise evil.Apple, PLEASE do not mess up this perfect opportunity to dominate mobile communications the way you completely screwed yourself in the OS marketplace! Allow developers to develop cool, meaningful, useful, business applications. You're the cool kid right now - do NOT let it go to your head - or your heart (and marketshare) will suffer - AGAIN.
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