Aaron Johnson Now with 50% less caffeine!

Links: 8-9-2009

• 40 to 7: How We Sped Up Confluence’s Build by a Factor of 5 - Atlassian Developer Blog
  Seems like something we’d benefit from.
  (categories: testing development atlassian optimization )

• Nick Bradbury: If You Want to Write Useful Software, You Have to Do Tech Support
  Quote: If you really want to write useful software, stop spending all your time keeping up with technology. Don’t worry if your resume isn’t filled with the latest buzzwords. Instead, invest your time in talking with your customers. They don’t care what programming language you use - they only care whether your software meets their needs, and the best way to ensure that is by breaking out of your cone of silence and opening the lines of communication.
  (categories: business development support customerservice software )

• scottberkun.com » The Lefferts law of management
  The Lefferts law of management: It is your fault. There are a dozen reasonable excuses in any situation for why things are not going well: don’t use them. If you need more help, it’s your job to ask for it. If someone let you down, it’s your job to plan better next time or find a way to recover. If you are the bottleneck, it’s your fault for not delegating more. Whatever the thing is that isn’t going well, you are the primary person to do something about it. If you’re not sure what to do, it’s your job to ask others for advice. If you have the title ‘manager’ in your name, step up. Practice the habit of absorbing blame for what is going on, while distributing the rewards. When all else fails, be the fall guy. If people see you take enough bullets for them, soon they’ll be taking some for you.
  (categories: business management scottberkun failure )

• scottberkun.com » The Netflix Inc. guide to culture (Analysis)
  Scott’s quick review of the Netflix culture slides.
  (categories: management business culture netflix process productivity )

• Official Google Reader Blog: PubSubHubbub support for Reader shared items
  Google rolls out pubsubhubbub support for Reader.
  (categories: pubsubhubbub googlereader feed pubsub rss atom google )

• apophenia: I want my cyborg life
  Had multiple conversations about iPhones / laptops in meetings last week. Agree that it’s helpful to be connected during a meeting / presentation, but I wonder sometimes if we could cut meeting time in half if everyone was paying attention for the entire thing. Half of the onus is on the presenters IMHO: get better at presentations.
  (categories: attention learning socialmedia twitter conferences backchannel )

• Suddenly stopped receiving emails - microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage | Google Groups
  Quote: If you see this in just one or a handful of folders then right-click or Control-click that folder, select Folder Properties and click the Empty button to empty the cache. You can also select the account itself and empty the cache for all of your folders.
  (categories: lame entourage )

• IDEA 2009: An Interview with Leisa Reichelt - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
  Drupal 7 getting a heavy social makeover by a UI / UX person.
  (categories: ux ia design drupal )

• The Content Conundrum - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
  Quote: Whether it’s visual comps, or a prototype, it’s important that whomever is responsible for creating and approving the content is actually involved with the visual designer and prototyper as they ‘package’ that deliverable. It’s impossible to fully evaluate the effectiveness of a web experience without having the content represented and under the same microscope as the design. Brand, product, and even training teams all have their own perspectives about what the content must communicate and are contributing to its development and we don’t want our design to fall apart once this ’collaborative’ writing process starts. Assign accountability to content upfront and place content professionals under the same creative deadlines you’re marching to.
  (categories: design ia ux usability process )

• Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart | FutureNow’s GrokDotCom / Marketing Optimization Blog
  Graphical evolution of the ‘buy now’ button.
  (categories: amazon usability ui optimization abtesting a/b testing design )

• Designing Social Interfaces: Main Page - Social Patterns
  Wiki for the Designing Social Interfaces book coming from Oreilly.
  (categories: design usability socialmedia social community socialsoftware ux patterns )

• The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles, Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets)
  "Patterns" for social software. Awesome. Book coming from Oreilly in September.
  (categories: design usability socialmedia social community socialsoftware ux patterns )

• Room: tinychat.com/jive | Topic: jive software
  Handy little video chat room with some nice integrations (sign in with twitter, tweet the room, etc..)
  (categories: video chat tinychat )

• How to do A/B Testing with WordPress on Vimeo
  Would be awesome to work this into the supportal development.
  (categories: wordpress optimization a/b testing abtesting )

• Defragmenting the Stimulus: 5 easy steps to take Recovery.gov to the next level | Analysis & Commentary | Rhiza Labs
  Bunch o’ suggestions on how to make recovery.gov awesome, mostly around freeing up data.
  (categories: economy socialmedia transparency government government2.0 )

• Military Open Source Software
  Couple interesting companies we should hit that are attending: Redhat, Accenture, Alfresco. Interesting to note that we could have participated / attended under the guise of Openfire.
  (categories: opensource military conferences events )

• 6 Steps to Kill Your Community — Matt Mullenweg
  Somewhat blog specific but general enough for most types of communities.
  (categories: community wordpress socialmedia blogging communities web2.0 )

• The Longest Way 1.0 - one year walk/beard grow time lapse on Vimeo
  Now if I can only find a job where I can take a year off.
  (categories: video adventure inspiration china travel )

• Flickr Photo Download: The largest hot-air balloon gathering in the world, Chambley, France
  Great picture.
  (categories: photos photography flickr wallpaper )

• YouTube - High Speed Robotic Hands
  Want.
  (categories: robots video speed )

• Blog Joyent | What I would want a “cloud” to do for me: a functional view
  Quote: "As a consumer, I fundamentally want the entire technology stack for an application to: 1. Just work 2. Just scale 3. Just tell me everything." Good summary of what we should be aiming for.
  (categories: cloud scaling ondemand )