DRM - Daniel’s Random Mutterings

Last week, I successfully completed my PMP (Project Management Institute — Project Management Professional) certification examination. In the PMI spirit of documenting lessons learned and supporting others on their way to project management certification, I thought I’d do a quick writeup of the experience.

The Journey

I have been active in the PMI community for the last two years or so. Along with a colleague, I have attended the last two PMI EMEA Global Congresses (Budapest and Malta), but kept putting off completing the PMP certification due to work demands. After returning from the Malta Global Congress this year, I decided to finally put in the time and the effort and go through with it. I set a mental deadline of August — about three months after making up my mind to forge ahead.

The Application

The first step, obviously is to put together the Credential Application. Here, you need to document your project management experience, with different requirements depending on your level of education. Check the PMP Credential Handbook for details. In the application, project experience is broken in to hours per project per process and process group. So getting together all the numbers for your past projects can be quite a chore. There are a number of Excel worksheets out there that take the project durations, apply typical distributions of hours across the process group and then give you numbers you can enter. I didn’t use these, I had put together my own worksheet before I even discovered the others.

It appears that XING (formerly openBC), a German business-oriented social networking site has just started running ads on their site. Only, they’re going about it the wrong way (or perhaps are just being too greedy).
According to a discussion thread on the site, the logic is that ‘premium’ (i.e. paying) members don’t get to see ads. Only non-paying members see the ads. That’s quiet a sensible approach in principle. But the non-paying members are also shown ads on the paying members’ personal profile pages.

These profile pages are what XING members use to list their business contact information, their interests, their business focus, etc. Many of these profile pages are also found via Google when searching for a person, they are added to email signatures, etc. In essence, your XING-based business calling card.

And now XING is embedding ads (of the animated, Flash, annoying type) into the individuals’ profile pages.

This is just plainly a dumb idea! XING is effectively fleecing paying members (of which I am one) twice. Not only do these users pay to use the ‘premium’ services of the platform, now they also generate income for XING from their profile page. And to add insult to injury, the model of not showing ads to premium members ensures that premium members have no way of actually checking which kind of ads are shown on their individual profile page. XING members are using the forum to express their anger at their discovery (aided by other, non-premium, users) that their business profile pages are adorned with images of underwear-clad models advertising DSL services, etc. One XING member, working for a large environmental organization, has expressed her upset at her personal profile page being used as a billboard for cheap airplane tickets.

Having klicked through from a Techcrunch posting, I have just discovered GetAFreelancer. I’m amazed. And amused. Is this for real? Are people really doing business over this service?
Just for the heck of it, plonk some names of Web companies / brands into the search box. The results are astounding! Someone has a budget of $300 to $1500 for developing an EBay clone. Great! I’ll take you up on that offer just after I return from the Caribbean vacation I’m financing with the $1000 I make from building this guy a Digg clone from scratch. Oh and someone is offering to build a Twitter clone for $1365.
Just on the off-chance that there are people out there who can actually deliver on something like this, here’s my list of job offers:

• EUR 750 for a Google clone.
• EUR 1500 for a Google AdSense clone (must be fully internationalized)
• EUR 850 for a JavaScript reimplementation of Microsoft Project (must be able to read MS Project files uploaded over the Web GUI).

Any takers? I’ll even throw in the Donuts you need over the course of the three days you’re scheduling to build the system.

Technorati Tags: freelancer, auction, business, nonsense

CYA-Style Disclaimer: I am of course in no way questioning the validity of the GetAFreelancer service or the quality and sincerity of their product. Just a couple of the offers posted on their site.

Recently, I found myself sharing some of my ideas about successful startups with a former colleague I met downtown. He’s seriously considering going for a startup and I felt that a chat over a nice cup of Cappuccino was the perfect opportunity to bore him with my “insights”. He didn’t seem to mind. Here then, in no logical order, are a couple of the points. Maybe I can get some feedback and you can help me come up with more points to add to the list? Or maybe you disagree with me and let me know where I’m wrong, which is also good.

Don’t Do It On Your Own

I know there are several successful startup founders who set off on their own and managed to build a successful startups. I admire those people. Hats off to them! In my opinion, starting a business on your own is a lot harder than doing it together with at least one other Pig (see above). In order to start a successful business on your own, you need to be really focussed, driven and determined.

Starting a business is an uphill battle. You will run into problems and obstacles. If you’re going for it on your own, there’s a danger you will get bogged down in details, become overwhelmed by some problem and totally lose your way. You need someone to discuss with. You need people to bounce your ideas off of. Often, just explaining to someone else what it is you’re doing (or planning on doing) can get you to think about your plan and maybe show you a better way of solving a problem.

What I’d like to have is a Dilbert cartoon making fun of people who still feel the need to plaster Dilbert cartoons all over their office and in the office kitchen.

That is so “bubble”.

Reading Steve Yegge’s recent blog posting outlining what he claims will be the Next Big Language (NBL) got me thinking about things I would like to have in my ideal programming language. Here, in no specific order, and with no claim for completeness (and trying to avoid the obvious ones which everyone else has covered ad nauseam) are my top language features for My Dream Language. I’ve covered some of these points before, but since then some new ones have come up.

Object-orientation

Any new language has to be object-oriented from the ground up. Python’s self parameter always makes me cringe, as it exposes that object-orientation was slapped on as an afterthought.

Multiple inheritance would be useful, but can lead to “strange” designs. A single-rooted hierarchy where everything is an object and is polymorphic to the common base class is vital. This means no int which is incompatible with an Integer and cannot be put into a bag of Object. Operator overloading should be supported on all types.

Strong concurrency support

Strong support for concurrent, multi-threaded, multi-processor development should be built into the language, as should the required synchronization mechanisms. Modern machines come with high-performance multi-core processors. A good new language should allow application developers to make use of these.

Java has pretty good concurrent programming support, which I use a lot. Using any object as semaphore (block/pass) is quite helpful. One problem I have with Java’s concurrency support is that it involves way too much syntactic overhead for small concurrent tasks. Subclassing Thread, possibly in an inner class, overloading run(), etc. just makes what is a very nice language feature look very messy.

I recently read through (most of) “Founders At Work” by Jessica Livingston. The book’s idea and premise is as simple as it is brilliant: Interview the founders of well-known startups, print the interviews, and - hopefully - give the reader some insight into the workings of an IT startup.

What I didn’t like

Let’s start with one small detail I didn’t like, and get that out of the way as quickly as possible.

For my liking (especially as a non-US reader), the book’s interviews could have done with a bit more editing. They feel as though they’ve been printed more or less directly from the transcript. And people simply don’t always speak in ways that are suitable for print. In general, the tone of the book is fine and it’s quite enjoyable to follow the interviews. The first time, though, that I read

“… and I was like ‘Yeah. Let’s do that’. And he was all like positive.”

(quote from memory), that just made me want to throw up - into the book - then close the bloody thing and put it away. I’m sorry; I know I’m probably being overly critical. Reading language like that just hurts my eyes.

What I liked about the book

This book gives all the aspiring startup founders a feel that the other guys, who succeeded in something you’re just starting out on, are just human, make some of the same mistakes and bad choices, have some of the same bad experiences but were able to pull it off and make it work. There isn’t a single interview in this book where you think the person just succeeded due to some large piece of sheer dumb luck.

A while ago, I had a chance to spend a week and a half in Palo Alto on business. On the weekend, I took my rental car and went for a drive around California to take in a few of the sights. One of the attractions I visited was the Winchester Mystery House south of San Jose.

The story of the WMH

The story behind the house (as I remember it) is this. Sarah Winchester — widow of the guy who invented the Winchester Rifle — was a bit batty. That’s because she lived in America; had she lived in England, she would merely have been eccentric. She lived in this mansion and had all the wealth her late husband had accumulated due to rather satisfying sales of his patented rifle (you know the one — I think Wyatt Earp uses it in one of the movies about the OK Corral).
Somehow, the good widow had gotten it into her head that she needed to placate the souls of those killed by her husband’s invention. So every night she held a séance and listened to the spirits, who would give her visions of what she should add to her house. As long as she kept on building the mansion, she would be safe from the spirits’ wrath. So for 38 years she kept on adding to the mansion, keeping all the builders in the area pretty busy. She added towers, outbuildings, new wings, whole new floors, lots and lots of windows (some of them in interior walls, not actually looking outside), fireplaces, and more. In order to confuse the spirits (and - quite probably - a few builders along the way), she added staircases that go around in circles, doors that are backed by brick wall and don’t actually lead anywhere, staircases that go up to the ceiling and just end there, and several other quaint but not very useful building features. Somehow, I don’t think she was interested in a feature in Better Homes and Gardens magazine. Since she was, for the time, spectacularly wealthy, none of this construction was done on the cheap. She imported windows and material from France, added marble statues and other works of art. She added gas lighting and indoor plumbing. The large staterooms have beautiful wood flooring and divine fireplaces.
She kept up this construction project right up until her death. The result is simply spectacular. A sprawling mansion, covering a large area. There are fascinating guided tours through the grounds and the mansion. If you haven’t been there yet, and are in the area, visit it. It’s a really cool place.

I just upgraded my main PC from SUSE Linux 10.0 to openSUSE 10.2 and I must say that I’m very pleased and very impressed.

Overall, the update went pretty smoothly. There were a few hiccups at the beginning, when the package manager complained about installation conflicts and wouldn’t go away and let me continue the installation even though the conflicts had all been resolved (all I was left with was an empty window with an “OK - Check again” button). After another reboot and restarting the upgrade procedure, this problem didn’t come up again and the installation from the DVD completed smoothly.

The most noticeable new feature, probably, is the new KDE start menu. This makes a very good first impression. Everyday work will have to show how useful it really is (or if it gets in the way a lot). The “Search” feature at the top of the menu is a huge relief. No more clicking through menus, submenus, folders, etc., looking for that elusive system tool you just know is in there somewhere. The customizable favourites menu, providing quick access to often-used applications can also speed up your day-to-day work.

As is to be expected, openSUSE 10.2 comes with a whole bunch of updated packages. A current KDE (3.5.5), OpenOffice 2.0, Firefox 2, Thunderbird 1.5.0.8, and ever so much more. They’ve updated the package management and system update system to the ZENworks system.

As Pradeep just pointed out in my Blog comments, he used parts of my posting on video blogging with Django (which is funnily enough always referenced as “Create your own YouTube site” - a claim I wouldn’t have dared make myself ) as basis/inspiration for a presentation at Bar Camp Bangalore. BarCamp describes itself as “an open, welcoming event for geeks to hang out with or without wifi and smash their brains together.” Sounds like the kind of place I’d enjoy.
Check out his slides, cleverly titled “YourTube” — they’re available online.
Pradeep left out the Django-related stuff and focused on the bare-bones process, with some HTML and some info on the tools - hopefully making everybody think “Hey! I can do that!”.

Anyway - how cool is that? Quoted at BarCamp in Bangalore. Thanks, Pradeep! You made my day.