My Varied Interests

I woke up this morning thinking about the various technical trends of 2009 that have affected me in a significant way.  Here they are:

1) Force.com. 2009 was the year where I really started digging the Force.com platform.  For those of you who don’t know, Force.com / Salesforce.com is the key technology I work with every day.  Don’t get me wrong — I’ve enjoyed it since I started working with it in 2007.  But in 2009 I was deep in several very cool — and very different — projects.  Each of them relied on brand new functionality and creative uses of existing features, and each one of them had a material impact on the customer.  Very cool.  Cooler: it’s on everyone’s top 10 trends to watch for 2010.

2) Kindle.  I use it every day.  I buy all my “books” on it and have switched many of my magazine subscriptions.  I love the Kindle and would be very sad if I had to live without it.  There was a piece the other day that bookstores are now going to die because of devices like the Kindle.  Although that would make me sad — I have spent a great deal of time and money in my local Border’s — it would make me much sadder to give up having the biggest Border’s I have ever been to in the palm of my hand.  If I had to pick one to keep, it would be the Kindle.

3) GoGo Inflight.  I love using the internet while I fly.  Hopefully this doesn’t get killed by the events of 12/25.  A flight with GoGo feels faster.  A flight with GoGo feels less pointless.  A flight with GoGo feels like I haven’t put my life on hold for a 4 hour ride in a big silver tube. It’s just excellent.

4) Wii Fit.  The Wii Fit didn’t help me one bit.  Nada.  Zippo.  Zilch.  This surprised me a bit.  I was completely optimistic that a more interactive experience would motivate me to work out a bit on it.  And it did not.  The Wii Fit is  now sitting in my basement, unused for months.  Oh well.

5) Facebook, Twitter and The Blog.  At the end of 2008, I killed my Twitter account and put my blog on hold.  This was a good thing.  I was a little too engaged.  But I brought them both back in February or so and they have both been quite a bit more manageable since taking that much needed time off.  I like social media again.  I like it when I don’t get completely sucked in all day every day.  And having Facebook — a fairly private Facebook — let’s me post to separate audiences when I feel the need.  Not to mention a reconnect with a bunch of people I haven’t spoken with in a long, long time.  Even if it was just one connection — that was very much fun.

6) iPhone Apps.  I was not an early adopter for the iPhone (and even when I tried to get one I suffered through iDenial) and I pretty much hate AT&T.  But the Apps (especially those produced by these guys) have sucked me in.  I’m stuck and I know it.  Drat.

7) Amazon Web Services.  Where does EC2 fit in to all this?  Well, that’s a tough one.  I have an application running on EC2 and I dig it but it’s not substantially different for this app from any server I might get anywhere.  EC2 definitely has a cool place and it’s definitely useful — but I haven’t had that super ah ha moment with it yet.  It’s hardware.  It’s hosting.  And hardware and hosting, even really cool hardware and hosting and even back in the bad old days when I sold monthly hosting aren’t that interesting to me personally.

So that’s it.  I’m sure there are more I should include.  I’ll update the post when I think of them.

IT Conversations over at Conversations Network.  This morning, specifically, Will the promise of location based ad models ever get off the ground? I could put almost everyone one of their pod casts on the list — I’ve found them to be very enjoyable.

Another is the book Adventures of an IT Leader.  The flow of the book, a fiction account of a new CIO’s first year on the job, is a bit strained, but the message is pretty good and it’s given me some good things to think about.

Finally, caught up on the latest “You Look Nice Today” which never fails to crack me up, even when I’m listening while shopping a major home supply stores.  That guy laughing out loud to something on his headphones while buying some boxes, yeah that’s me.

And Modern Family is ridiculously good.

Several weeks behind on The New Yorker and have at least two MIT Technology Reviews to at least skim.  Oh and well over 1000 articles in Google Reader.  C’est la vie.

I’ve been more focused than usual on the question of sustainability lately. Why?

A more interesting question might be why I lost focus on it. Any of my college crew who reads this from time to time will probably remember me trying to sell them recycled paper and printing a couple of books on 100% post consumer.

Why did I lose it? Probably a whole bevy of reasons. Living in Chicago with it’s general lack of recycling programs, etc., played a role for sure.*

Anyway, so my three things:

Science Commons, from the Creative Commons crew, is working on something called GreenXchange with Nike. It’s super cool.  And, I think, more than just a feel good publicity stunt.  Time will tell.

TechNation had a really interesting podcast on with Ray Anderson the other day.  Never heard of him?  I hadn’t either.  Excellent speaker on the subject how commercial enterprises need to change in order to not kill the planet.  39 minutes that are worth a listen.  Interesting note: his company reduced their use of water by 70%.  Listen to find out how!

TechNation also had Greg Papadopoulos on the other day to talk about sustainability at Sun and with computers in general.  One interesting concept is a periodic table of the elements with a number of them crossed out as unusable.  Cadmium for example.  Cool.

Which brings me to my question for Trader Joe’s.  From a sustainability standpoint, is it better for me to buy their frozen prepared brown rice or to buy unprepared brown rice that I cook at home?  My first reaction was that I should be making it, and then I started to wonder about how the efficiencies of making it in bulk would be offset by the inefficiencies of freezing and transporting it to my local store.  I’d love to have a definitive answer on this, something that featured carbon load (or some other useful measure) for product alternatives (like their food guides).

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* Yes we have Blue Bag. No, I have no faith that it works. Yes, I haul my stuff to the big blue dumpster anyway.

First Snow, Idaho, September 30, 2009, originally uploaded by ReidCarlberg.

Ran into this on my way out of Swan Valley.

Oatmeal, Upside Down, originally uploaded by ReidCarlberg.

In case you’ve been wondering about recent innovations in oatmeal, I’d like to present Upside Down Oatmeal. The idea is to put a bunch of fruit on the bottom and then the hot oatmeal on top. The oatmeal ends up cooking the fruit. So tasty.

Where does this innovation come from? Well, if you head to the Parc55 in San Francisco, their restaurant has a Creme Brulee Oatmeal that is pretty darn tasty. The main difference is that all of the fruit is on the bottom here where the Parc55 is all mixed in.

Anyway, tasty stuff.

For reasons I’m not going to delve very deeply into, I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about how people become good programmers. Two things jump out.

First, learning to program is like learning to speak another language. There’s new syntax, new verbs and new ways of thinking about stuff you took for granted when you only worried about one language. When learning a new spoken language, you have familiar ideas that you need to express in a new way. In a programming language, you have have familiar things you need to accomplish but you have to do that within the confines the programming language sets up. Either way, you have to adjust your way of thinking to get what you want.

Second, to get good at programming, you have to do it a lot. Why? Good programmers develop something akin to the muscle memory talented athletes rely on. Part of the goal of practicing a sport is to get so comfortable doing the key moves that you don’t have to think in order to do them well. You can then devote your brain to the tiny details that help you win. This same approach delivers a substantial advantage in programming. You get to stop thinking about the basics — variables, expressions, loops — and concentrate on the complexities of what you want to accomplish.

Finally, I’ve also been wondering whether or not everyone can become a good programmer. I don’t know the answer to that. I firmly believe that more people can become good programmers than do, but I have no way of quantifying that. Many people either never attempt or quit trying before they get good. Why? I suspect one factor is not having either of these experiences — language or sport — in their life and so don’t have a psychological pattern for success.

I haven’t mentioned logic and math. They definitely help, but I should point out that some of the best programmers I know didn’t come from logic or math or even formal computer science backgrounds. They came through language.

Just a couple of Sunday morning thoughts. What do you think?

A prospect asked me the other day, “What’s your value proposition?”

That’s a fair question and something I’m comfortable answering in a number of contexts.  However, this time, it made me think about value propositions more generally.  I wanted to put together some broad categories and think about their associated challenges.  Here goes.

Silver — the customer already knows what they want and you know how to do it.  Value: you can execute.  Challenge: executing an existing idea becomes a commodity as soon as someone blogs about the method.  Think writing a simple computer program.

Gold — the customer knows they have problems but not how to solve them.  You help them define their problems, figure out how to solve them and can also implement it.  Primary value: you can communicate and design.  Challenge: once you define what they need, it can usually be boiled down to an existing solution and execution is low value.  Think implementing an existing software package.

Platinum — you know the customer and can help them see an opportunity where none existed before.  You can help them flush it out, design it in detail and implement it.  Primary value: you can synthesize disparate information and create something new.  Challenge: ideation, communication, design and execution are highly intertwined.  Realizing the value of the new opportunity requires substantial expertise in all areas, which is rare and very valuable.

What do you think?  Are these decent buckets to group value around?  What other buckets are there?  What other challenges are there?

Personally, I usually land between Gold and Platinum — I think.  I always want to land in Platinum, but the world being what it is, I don’t always make it.