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The size and shape of your computer monitor can have a big impact on your productivity. Both its physical dimensions as well as its resolution and aspect ratio are important.
Gordon discusses the 10+2 method, a productivity trick popularized by 43 Folders. Download the free 10+2 timer application he built to keep himself on track!
You were hired for your skills and expertise. If your company forces you to use sub-standard tools, you can’t be effective in your role.
…It’s how many friends you have. Any self respecting Facebook user knows that, right?
And what’s better than collecting loads of friends? Collecting loads of social networks, that’s what.
In the wake of the Microsoft/Facebook story comes Google OpenSocial (launching this week) – a unified accessible interface to a whole collection of information from Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle. (Details from TechCrunch)
The idea being that Google ties all of this related infomation together, and allows developers to create widget style applications that work across multiple social networks, without having to learn a whole new markup language. (OpenSocial uses standard HTML and javascript, unlike the Facebook API).
It’s going to be interesting to see exactly what can be done with this tool – assuming that the host networks will have the final say as to what can and what can’t be built on their platform. More than 7000 Facebook applications have been built since Facebook opened it’s API. (Most of those applications are really silly.)
The fact that at least two of the OpenSocial host networks (SalesForce and LinkedIn) are veritable goldmines of enterprise worthy information should be of note to anyone working on Enterprise 2.0 solutions. (like um.. us!)
And in the middle of it all, Google controls all the data and the network (in a non-evil way, of course…)
This “Everyone Else vs Facebook” approach reminds me a bit of Microsoft’s catchup play for developers in the early 90′s with .NET – “It’s every other language vs Java”.
That one didn’t work out exactly as Microsoft had planned, but it wasn’t exactly a failure – .NET and Java are both alive and well. I suspect something similar will happen here. Assuming that OpenSocial has legs, it seems safe to assume that developers would much rather target multiple platforms than one.
Does this mean they are going to have to standardize (or at least consolidate) identity across multiple hosts? Now that would be really something…
Gordon and I jokingly call infovark an “N-complete” enterprise. We do this for two reasons.
This means NUnit, NCover, NDoc, and NAnt. For the non-nerdy, these are frameworks that help developers manage unit tests, determine code coverage for said unit tests, document our code, and automate our build process. We bring all the tools together using SharpDevelop. (Though I do miss Microsoft’s Visual Studio a bit.)
Why use all of these tools? As a small software development shop, the most important thing for us is to manage our time properly. As Joel on Software pointed out, multitasking developers face context switching costs. Revisiting our code after the fact to write automated test cases or add documentation is a huge time-wasting exercise. It’s much better to do these things while we’re down in the weeds, working with the bits and bytes. Having the N* suite running within our IDE makes us much more productive.
We think being our own testers and tech writers gives us better quality code as well. After all, the person writing the code is best equipped to describe what it does and the most likely ways it could break. It makes sense to do these tasks ourselves as long as we can minimize the switching costs.
Our thanks to all the open source developers that worked on these tools. We wouldn’t get far without you. And thanks as well to the FxCop team, whose code security tool is a real godsend. (But couldn’t you guys have named it N-something?)