All posts by ajohnson

Links: 2-15-2010

Links: 2-12-2010

  • A Whole Lotta Nothing: Broken feedback loops
    Quote: "So to future application creators I ask that you simply respect the creators of content and help them improve by offering notification, search, and/or backlink capabilities so it’s possible for someone to see where their creations end up. I know it’s a lot easier to just consider it all "output" within your application, but the internet is a great communication medium not just for relaying information from anyone to anywhere on earth, but for also making it a dialogue between reader and writer. "
    (categories: google facebook social communication twitter socialnetworking feedback )

Links: 2-5-2010

Links: 2-1-2010

  • Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: How Google sets goals and measures success
    Excerpt: "Google sets impossible bodacious goals…and then achieves them. The engineering mindset of solving the impossible problem is part of the culture instilled in every group at Google. Tough engineering problems don’t have obvious answers. You need to invent the solution, not just optimize something that exists. Every quarter every group at Google sets goals, called OKRs, for the next 90 days. Most big companies set annual goals like improving or growing something by x%, and then measure performance once a year. At Google a year is like a decade. Annual goals aren’t good enough. Set quarterly goals, set them at impossible levels, and then figure out how to achieve them. Measure progress every quarter and reward outstanding achievement."
    (categories: google business management goals strategy )

Links: 1-21-2010

Links: 1-20-2010

Links: 1-17-2010

Links: 1-16-2010

Links: 1-15-2010

  • ongoing · Doing It Wrong
    Quote: "The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.

    This is unacceptable. The Fortune 1,000 are bleeding money and missing huge opportunities to excel and compete. I’m not going to say that these are low-hanging fruit, because if it were easy to bridge this gap, it’d have been bridged. But the gap is so big, the rewards are so huge, that it’s time for some serious bridge-building investment. I don’t know what my future is right now, but this seems by far the most important thing for my profession to be working on."
    (categories: enterprise software business web web2.0 agile )