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luni, 12 martie 2012

Seth's Blog : The extraordinary software development manager

The extraordinary software development manager

Being good at programming is insufficient qualification for becoming a world class software project manager/leader. Too often, we take our best coders and turn them into incompetent managers because it seems like a logical next step, and because we don't pay adequate attention to what we really want from these critical executives. (Hint, this is about many fields, not merely software).

1. Clients want useful visibility into the future in terms of costs, timing and deliverables

in fact, it's almost impossible to be too clear, to benchmark enough and most of all, to overdo the work of identifying forks in the road when it comes to decision making. When a client hires a developer or a company embarks on a software project, they are lost. Even something as complex as building a house is dwarfed by the rapid change, shifting priorities and most of all, the requirement for the new, that's involved in even a simple software project.

The indispensable software development manager is aware of this and lays it all out for us.

2. Code is going to be used, reviewed, updated and inspected by people other than the person writing it

At some point in the next [insert time frame], a dozen people we have never met will either be updating or using this code, whether they are people we hire or people we partner with. It's tempting to question the value of an organized architecture and clear code commenting, but again, it's almost impossible for an organization to overdo this. We don't have time to do it over so we have to spend the time to do it right. In software programming only the amateur's approach rewards speed over long-term usability.

3. A great programmer is worth thirty times as much as a good one.

Which means that hiring a good programmer in a competitive field is a killer error. It also means that managing a programmer in a way that accepts 'good' will lead to a fail as well.

4. Programming at scale is more like building a skyscraper than putting together a dinner party

Architecture in the acquisition of infrastructure and tools is one of the highest leverage pieces of work a tech company can do. Smart architecture decisions will save hundreds of thousands of dollars and earn millions. We'll only make those decisions if we can clearly understand our options.

Or, you can have some newbies hack something together real quick. Up to you.

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Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

ECB Calls for "Naming and Shaming" of EMU Budget Violators; Public Warnings, My Goodness!

Posted: 11 Mar 2012 02:19 PM PDT

After years of violating the 3 percent maximum budget deficit restriction as stated in the Maastricht Treaty, Germany is finally a solid citizen.

The Spiegel Online notes German Budget Deficit Plunges to 1 Percent of GDP.

Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain may hog most of the negative press when it comes to debt in Europe. But Germany too has been in violation of European Union budget rules in recent years, posting a deficit of 4.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010, well above the 3 percent maximum imposed by the Maastricht Treaty.

On Friday, [February 24, 2012] though, Germany's Federal Statistics Office announced that the country's deficit plunged in 2011 and, at 1 percent, is now well within EU limits.

Toot the Horns, Blow the Whistles

Now that Germany has gotten its act together, it's time for "Naming and Shaming" of everyone else.

The Financial Times reports ECB calls for tougher rules on budgets

The European Central Bank has sharpened its hardline stance on eurozone fiscal policy by urging the still-tougher policing of member states' public finances, including by "naming and shaming" the worst offenders.

Europe's newly agreed rules provided "the 'pillars of trust' between countries". "This trust is essential for the monetary union," Mr Draghi told reporters in Frankfurt last week. "In order to continue, the monetary union needs . . . the willingness to be subject to a discipline that cannot be changed by any government whatsoever."

Among the proposals in the report dated March 7, the ECB suggests the surveillance of countries that run into difficulties in the future should be strengthened by public warnings for the most recalcitrant.

"The threat of publicity, if a member state is unco-operative, may provide an incentive to the member state to take more action," the report says.

Where a country under surveillance is threatening the eurozone's financial stability, there should be an automatic recommendation that it seeks financial assistance, the ECB says. It also backs the EU sending a "permanent resident adviser" to countries in difficulties.

Public Warnings, My Goodness!

Obviously these fools do not know how ridiculous they sound and how useless their proposals are. The Maastricht Treaty was useless and the Merkozy Treaty is just more of the same. Moreover, French presidential candidate Francois Hollande (and likely next French president), has vowed to make changes to the treaty.

Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy has already announced his own budget target of 5.8% of GDP in 2012, ignoring the EMU mandate of 4.4% on the way to an alleged 3% in 2013. Rest assured 4.4% will not be met, nor will 5.8%.

Last year's deficit was 8.5% and with Spain heading into a monster recession, 7.0% might be a more reasonable expectation for 2012.

"Naming and Shaming" will not do a single bit of good, but it does make for a good song.

Shame, Shame

Link if video does not play: Shame, Shame - Magic Lanterns

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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Congressman Norm Dicks, Ranking member of House Appropriations Committee, Steps Aside Following Allegations by Tacoma Lawyer, Doug Cloud; Corruption and Influence Peddling Explain Why Deficit is Out of Control

Posted: 11 Mar 2012 12:24 PM PDT

I am pleased to report that Republican candidate Doug Cloud has finally brought down Democrat Congressman Norm Dicks, ranking Democrat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

Scandals surrounding Norm Dicks are long, and deep. However, it was a Freedom on Information request by Doug Cloud, involving FBI files from the lobbyist PMA Group that finally caused Dicks to step aside.

Here is a bit of background on the now defunct PMA Group:

In return for campaign contributions, PMA group clients received over $200 million in contracts.
In November, 2008 FBI agents raided PMA's offices and removed records of the firm's political action committee and files from some of its employees.
In January of 2011, Lobbyist Sentenced to 27 Months in Prison for Role in Illegal Campaign Contribution Scheme.

Guess who else is in those FBI files.

If your guess is Norm Dicks, your guess is a good one according to Official Wire, in their version of the story One Of America's Most Powerful Congressmen Suddenly Retires.

At the sentencing U.S. District Court Judge T. S. Ellis III called the scandal "one of the most extensive and long-running campaign finance schemes ever," telling [PMA Group Lobbyist] Magliocchetti, "You made this choice for one reason: greed."

This scandal took down Rep. John Murtha, but, miraculously, Norm Dicks skated again.

And it would have likely stopped then and there if not for the tenacity of a Tacoma lawyer and opponent of Dicks by the name of Doug Cloud. Cloud filed a Freedom of Information Act request that the Obama administration denied during the 2010 congressional race to get more of the records.

But Cloud tenaciously responded to the denial with a lawsuit to compel release of records and files pertaining to the FBI investigation of Congressman Norm Dicks.

Powerful, Corrupt Officials Not Easily Dislodged

At long last, and only out of fear of what is in FBI records on the PMA Group, Norm Dicks decided to throw in the towel and step aside at the end of his term.

I supported Doug Cloud in the last election. He was one of only a handful I gave free space to on my blog.

It was not to be. Corruption and power are not easily dislodged.

Doug Cloud Press Release

I am pleased to report Doug Cloud is once again going after the seat of Norm Dicks according to his this press release.

Doug Cloud today announces his candidacy for Congress in Washington's sixth Congressional District. Doug is seeking the position currently held by retiring 18 term incumbent Norm Dicks.

In 2010, Cloud received 42% of the votes cast in his race against Dicks. The 2010 campaign, and its aftermath, ended Dicks career. During the 2010 campaign Cloud hammered at Dicks' frequent practice of rewarding campaign contributors and family members with beneficial legislation. He made the link between Congressional "bailouts" and Congressional corruption. Cloud pinned our economic problems on this type of Congressional arrogance.

"Rewarding your favorites in return for campaign cash is bribery. Allowing people like Dicks to take money from those who earned it and give it to those who didn't has ruined our economy. If Congress picks the winners and losers in our economy, we all lose."

In September, 2011, Cloud filed suit against the Department of Justice, seeking to force release of the agency's FBI investigation files pertaining to Dicks' involvement in the huge PMA lobbying and influence buying scandal. Cloud knew that the Department of Justice position, that the files were not a matter of overriding public interest, was indefensible. The only possible way Dicks could keep the files sealed was to return to private life. On March 2, 2012 Dicks made the only decision he could. His career was done. Cloud explained as follows:

"Dicks was no doubt informed by the Department of Justice that they could not keep the files secret while he was the ranking minority member of the Appropriations Committee. He had two choices, stay in Congress and wait for the files to be released, or leave Congress and claim there was no longer a public interest in the investigation reports. He chose the latter."

Doug Cloud knows what our country and economy needs to prosper. Our country needs honest leaders who understand that our economy cannot thrive by stealing from the public and rewarding political insiders.

"True wealth comes from ingenuity and work. Why make the effort if Congress is just going to steal it from you? If you let people thrive on their own, we will all thrive together," Cloud said yesterday.

Personal Message From Doug Cloud

I was aware of much of this in advance of the Cloud's press release, and asked for for a couple of statements. Here are a few select quotes.

Hello Mish

The reason I was so persistent on this issue is because this type of corruption is what is really ruining our economy. Selling Congressional votes to the highest bidder leads to economic disaster because our wealth is given to con men and political schemers instead of naturally flowing to those who innovate and create the goods and services the rest of us desire.

The confidence game run on the public by senior members of Congress goes something like this: "Vote for me so I can keep my seniority. If you don't, the federal money spigot will close to this district. You are beholden to me, and don't forget it."

Mr. Dicks was no exception. Today, the type of blatant influence peddling practiced by Dicks, can no longer be tolerated. The economic injustice of bailing out failing businesses on the backs of productive citizens and businesses has nearly brought this country to its' knees.

Corruption and Blatant Influence Peddling is Why Deficit is Out of Control

Doug Cloud is correct. Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, no one is served by those taking bribes for votes.

It's time to put an end to corruption and vote buying. Please Support Doug Cloud for representative of Washington State U.S. Congressional District 6, Tacoma and the Olympic Peninsula.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

duminică, 11 martie 2012

The Web Developer's Interactive Cheatsheet for SEO and the Open Graph

Posted: 10 Mar 2012 02:13 AM PST

Posted by Ray Grieselhuber

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

A couple of months ago, I came across Danny Dover's excellent Web Developer's Cheatsheet for SEO. It was great for web developers whether or not they had experience with SEO because there is inevitably something that you end up Googling if you don't use it on a daily basis.

After spending a little time with Danny's cheatsheet, I realized that I wanted something interactive so that I could play with the different snippets it offered. So, I decided to build an interactive cheatsheet that lets you enter in the values for the page title, keyword, URLs for links, etc. and would automatically populate the relevant tags for your HTML document.

The finished product is the Web Developer's Interactive Cheatsheet for SEO and the Open Graph. (Finished may be too strong of a word because there is more that I'd like to do with it. :-) ).

Web Developer's Cheatsheet for SEO and the Open Graph

In addition to the traditional metadata recommendations included in pretty much every SEO guide, I wanted to also make sure people had an easy way to start including Open Graph tags on their pages. Ensuring that these tags are set up and structured correctly has a big impact on the shareability of your content across social networks, especially Facebook. This, in turn, has an impact on SEO. So, in the cheatsheet, I also automatically generate correctly formatted Open Graph tags.

So, the way it works is this: you specify the desired values in the form at the top of the page. Some of the fields, such as title and meta description have a character counter that automatically decrements as you enter your text. This gives you a simple way to ensure that you're exceeding the recommended characters for each one of those fields.

I've also been using this tool to explain to beginners how to set up metadata and the importance of optimizing for search engine crawlers and social sharing.

Once you've set up your fields, just scroll down and copy-paste the metadata you want into your own HTML document.

Here is an example of the HTML tags that are generated:

Cheatsheet SEO Tags

And some sample Open Graph tags:

Cheatsheet Open Graph Tags

There are few things that didn't make it into this original release, but things that I plan to add soon. These include:

More explanation on each of the fields / tags
Ability to download a boilerplate HTML5 document populated with your data
More explanation around other related topics such as setting up redirects, etc.

I'd love to hear from people with suggestions for improving this tool. Thanks for checking it out!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Seth's Blog : "It's not business, it's personal"

"It's not business, it's personal"

It's too easy to blame the organization and the system and the bottom line for decisions that a person would never be willing to take responsibility for.

Whenever you can, work with people who take it personally.

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sâmbătă, 10 martie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Spain's Two Largest Unions Call for General Strike; Mood of the Nation

Posted: 10 Mar 2012 12:57 PM PST

The Spanish economy is deteriorating rapidly, and a general strike will not help matter any. Nonetheless, strikes, and I am willing to bet increasing violence, will soon befall Spain.

Please consider Spain's new government faces first strike

Spain's two largest unions, Comisiones Obreras and UGT, voted on Friday to call for a general strike on March 29 against reforms they called "the most regressive in the history of Spanish democracy".

The labour reforms of Mariano Rajoy's government grant employers greater flexibility to pay lower compensation when they fire workers, a change Mr Rajoy argues is crucial to increase Spain's economic competitiveness, but one that has enraged the country's unions.

Spain is struggling with more than 5m people, a fifth of its workforce, unemployed. The government argues that strong support from employers for the labour reforms demonstrate that it is taking the right steps to tackle joblessness.

The previous general strike in Spain, called in September 2010 against the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero for raising the national retirement age, saw 7.5 per cent of all state workers walk out, according to the then government.

"There is no precedent for a decision this brutal, that puts us on an unknown road without considering the consequences," said Cándido Méndez, head of the UGT union. "It is a general strike both just and necessary."

Work Rule Changes Desperately Needed

The irony in this sad mess is that work rule changes and pension reform are desperately needed.

However, with Spanish unemployment at 23.3% and youth unemployment at 49%, few are going to see it that way.

Making far matters worse, the balance sheet problems of Spanish banks and debt problems in Spanish regional governments are both dramatically understated. There is no way Spain can meet the EU demanded 4.4% deficit target, or even Rajoy's higher target of 5.8%.

For more on the problems confronting Spain, please see

Bond Yields Still Show Stress

The Spanish 10-year bond yield is down from a peak near 6.7% to 5%, but that is a steep premium to a 10-year German bond yield of 1.79%.

The 2-year government bond yields of Spain and Germany are 2.33% vs. 0.16% respectively.

Mood of the Nation

My friend Bran who lives in Spain writes "Here we have a general strike announced for the 29th, and the political sniping and arguments are going on as usual. I expect some initial protests this week. The sad situation is an unusual confrontation of ethics and abilities that is hard to describe. The strike on the 29th will show the mood of the nation - for now not obvious how it will be."

Indeed. And it will be the mood of the nation (over time, not just on the 29th), not the mood of bureaucrats in the EMU and IMF, that decides the ultimate fate of Spain.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Damn Cool Pics

Angry Birds in Space

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 09:07 PM PST

The first ever game announcement and gameplay footage from space. In this video, NASA Astronaut Don Pettit plays Angry Birds in Zero Gravity. Rovio is launching Angry Birds Space on 22 March and the game will be available on iOS, Android, Mac and PC. Here watch the video and don't forget to see the gameplay footage at the end of this video.

Seth's Blog : Learning from four viral events

Learning from four viral events

March 2012 is a big month for viral ideas that change the way people think about more than just LOLcats. Here are four that happened in the last week or two and each brings its own lessons:

Marilyn Hagerty's review of the local Olive Garden was a huge Twitter sensation, an easy target for ironists in search of something to snark about. The octogenarian (as much fun to type as it is to say) was fabulous in her refusal to take the bait, and this is a classic Internet meme, here today, gone tomorrow. One lesson: you can't count on media stories to pop, and when they do, they are not worth much to the media companies that publish them. You need more than one to make it a business.

The Kony video is the fastest-spreading internet video of all time, and one that is much harder to pigeonhole than an Olive Garden review. The most important takeaway is that this overwhelming pop is unlikely to ever happen this way again. A video this long, on this complex (and previously little known) a topic, for a non-profit--no, this is the exception that proves a bunch of rules. I have no doubt that the success of the video (seen by more people than any single TV show this week) will lead many organizations astray in the naive belief that they can emulate this one. If a non-profit board decides to spend precious resources on a video hoping it will change the world in three days, I think they're misguided.

I don't have the stats of time watched, but my confident guess is that the vast majority of viewers only lasted a few minutes. It's also worth noting that 60,000,000 or more views led to significantly less than a dime donated (on average) per viewer, and that unlike Dollar Shave Club, there was no well-rehearsed method to turn a viewer into a fan into a donor into a repeat donor.

I'm hopeful that good causes and complicated ideas benefit from rapid viral spread among strangers moving forward. My fear is that this looks like an easy shortcut, and it's not.

One thing we can learn, I think, is that production values are rising. For an idea to spread, it's more important than ever that the sneezer (the one spreading the idea) feels comfortable enough to send it along. In the case of the Olive Garden, the sneering tweeter could do so feeling comfortably superior. In the Kony video, the production values were a clue that the story was safe to share.

Dollar Shave Club isn't just a clever online video, it's a business. Of the four, it's the one that was most intentional and was best designed to lead to long-term success. The key distinction: Use the viral spread to gain a permission asset. Then, turn that asset into a profitable business.

Here's how they did it:

First, realize that razors are boring and expensive and that buying them is a bit of a hassle. If you address all three of these issues for the consumer, you don't need to deliver a better razor in order to succeed--all that's necessary is a better way to get the razor in the hands of the buyer. The model of permission is at the heart of the project--the razor business can't possibly pay off if consumers only buy one or two times and then get bored. Instead, Dollar earns the right to send you a bunch of razors every month forever, making the value of a new customer very high. They can invest that value into a clever video and into aggressive pricing. Also very smart: The affiliate program doesn't encourage you to pimp your friends to make money for yourself. Instead, they politely remind you that if you share their affiliate link, you get free razors, the very thing you're encouraging your friends to buy. The symmetry is compelling and successful.

And finally, my free ebook Stop Stealing Dreams continues to spread, with tens of thousands of new readers every day. There's no doubt I could have dramatically increased the number of viral engagements if I had made a video instead, and if I had created some sort of deadline (free this week only!). On the other hand, one lesson from this sort of gradual viral spread is that while it doesn't happen overnight, it can spread for months or even years into the future.

Here are two books on the topic, a new one by Dan Zarrella and an older one by me.

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luni, 12 martie 2012

Seth's Blog : The extraordinary software development manager

The extraordinary software development manager

More Recent Articles

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

duminică, 11 martie 2012

The Web Developer's Interactive Cheatsheet for SEO and the Open Graph

The Web Developer's Interactive Cheatsheet for SEO and the Open Graph

Seth's Blog : "It's not business, it's personal"

"It's not business, it's personal"

More Recent Articles

sâmbătă, 10 martie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics

Seth's Blog : Learning from four viral events

Learning from four viral events

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luni, 12 martie 2012

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