Friday, May 01, 2009
The proverbial “bleeding edge” of technology has always fascinated me and for the most part has been very captivating for me. I spend a lot of time there. In fact too much time. So recently, as recent as a few days ago, I decided that I am changing my policies.
Wouldn’t life be a little less hectic without all the bugs? How about incompatibilities? Performance?
Yeah, its an epiphany of sorts for me. I love the edge, its addicting. But at the end of the day customers just want the code to work, and be reliable.
So here is the change.
I am not totally giving up research, and I am not saying I wouldn’t implement a cutting edge solution for a customer if that’s what it takes to get the job done. But I am saying that we are going to ease off the throttle a bit and find a cruising speed.
Case in point: WPF and .net 3.5 are really cool, and the business case is really valid. The learning curve isn’t even significant. But for our business Win Forms is still the best choice. The reason is performance and deployment. And I just always spend too much time re-engineering stuff to stay on the edge. I know its very compatible and that WPF apps play well with Win Forms and their controls. But I like to keep things lean, and mean, and most of all clean.
I don’t want to switch over to the new way yet, and I don’t want to mix everything up.
It reminds me of the time when I was switching from COM to .Net. It was really a big step for me. Two IDE’s? Does the new IDE do everything the old one did? How does that affect my productivity?
Ok I guess this qualifies as ranting. So I apologize.
Back to work.
Monday, April 27, 2009
I know I said I wasn’t going to migrate the blog, but there are a couple of posts that were recent and I decided to re-post them. There are not many but this is one of the better ones…
My friend Fadhel said to me recently by instant message “if only we could grow time on trees” in response to my statement about being very busy. It got me to thinking about how I do project management. And well I use Microsoft Project, and mostly its a huge outline, or “tree”. So I added a task to my routine calling “growing time”.
To grow time on your tree look for tasks that do not take longer then 10 minutes to do, and just do them. Its just that simple. You will find that this will dramatically increase the amount of time you have for tasks that take longer.
Thanks to Fadhel for the inspiration for this process.
This is my verbose response to this post on c9.
Honda, Toyota, Nissan ...
OIL Company's
Economy in general?
What about free enterprise? How much should I pay to have my yard mowed? How about from a guy in my community? The guy who spent mega-bucks for a professional mower and all the perks to make the job go smooth?
What should I charge my customer for the proverbial man-hour?
"Apple-Tax" , "Microsoft Tax" ..... how about calling it what it really is .... capitol, working capitol
working capitol that can be used to make the company better, used to innovate, used to develop the next big thing
These are publicly traded companies! But its still enterprise.... someone (many people) worked to create them!
Apple prices themselves out of the market for most.
Sometimes I bid a job too high, and I just don't get the job. But I decided that. For good reasons. These companies have good reasons for things they do. They don't want to fail.
Is it a buyers market? A sellers market?
What about the whole antitrust issue? American's are educated at an early age playing Milton Bradley's Monopoly game about "divide
and conquer", then society determines that its wrong for a company to have complete control. Taking control away changes the game.
What I hope to show by this post is that prices are determined by many factors and honestly the margin is irrelevant to me.
If it works and I need it, then if I can afford it and it makes sense or makes me happy then I will buy it. I suspect the same is true for most.
IMHO,
-James
Well I am pretty excited to announce that Dot Net ISV has been accepted into the OISV. I am not sure how much reach the organization has, but it looks like they are doing good work, and from the list of charter sponsors, perhaps we will learn a thing or two.
Thank you OISV for the acceptance.
-James
It’s probably not worth mentioning, however just to be clear I have decided to start fresh and not spend the time to migrate old posts over here. So if you are looking for something and can’t find it that is why. -James
www.argeek.com is now hosted at geekswithblogs.net , I hope to contribute to this community and I hope to make new friends along the way. I am not as active a blogger today as I plan to be. In the meantime feel free to comment and tell me about yourself. What brings you to my blog? Do you like .net as much as I do? Are you a Microsoft fan? Fanatic even? I am. I will be posting about all things geek. But mostly .net.
Thank you GWB for hosting www.argeek.com!!!!
-James
Friday, April 24, 2009
Well I am not really sure about blogging here yet. I wanted to push my content from www.argeek.com my official blog over to here. Now I am faced with managing two blogs or moving www.argeek.com over, which I am not sure I want to do. So the question is should I stay or should I go? If I stay I am going to just point www.argeek.com over. If I go, I will self destruct this instance / blog. Any thoughts?
I am not sure how many readers will get this so in a way this is a test of the domain broadcast system in and of itself. So, with that I would love to hear from you.
-James
I am testing how windows live writer will help me post to multiple blogs. I have to manually switch using the Blogs menu.