Archive for June, 2011

How to Be a Public Speaker

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Speaking begets speaking. Once you’ve created a presentation (or two) that’s closely aligned with your book and will be entertaining to your target audience, practice more than you think is a sane amount of practice. Then keep going. Not so that you sound like an automaton, but so that you know the material so well, you can adjust it in the moment.

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Posted: June 1st, 2011
at 11:26pm by mnp


Categories: weaponry,language

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The Choice of Two Teams

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If you’re a designer, imagine you had a chance to work with two development teams.

Team 1: One team has top-notch developers who know virtually nothing about design. They can code miracles, but the designs of their applications are horrible and frustrating to use. And they show no desire to learn anything about design — how it’s done, why it’s important, and what makes a good design versus a bad design.

Team 2: The second team also has world-class developers, but these guys are hungry to learn about design. They’ve already taught themselves a fair amount and are truly interested in learning more. In addition to producing amazing code, they are regularly producing applications that look good, work well, and delight users.

As a designer, which team do you think would more fun to work with? The team that has no interest in designing or the one that really enjoys it?

Practically every designer I’ve talked to about this choice has told me, without hesitation, they would love to work with a development team that appreciates good design and wants to learn more about it. Those designers won’t be constantly battling for the simplest of design choices, instead be focusing on the hard problems with a group that wants to see the best outcomes.

Guess what? Developers feel the same way. If they had a choice, they’d rather work with a design team that understands development and craves to learn more, than with a team that doesn’t make any effort to learn what development is all about. Not just simple front-end coding either. They want to work with designers who understand the architecture and infrastructure, who can relate to the challenges they are up against and can appreciate it when the team has pulled off something amazing.

Learning to code doesn’t just give you new skills, it makes you a more desirable team member.

.:uie.com->

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Posted: June 1st, 2011
at 5:18pm by mnp


Categories: design,development

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When Close Isn’t Good Enough

For a lot of engineering problems, "almost right" isn’t good enough. Remember the Mars Climate Orbiter? Traveling through space for nearly a year, and covering 700 million kilometers, the Orbiter disintegrated after entering the Martian atmosphere at an altitude just one-hundred kilometers lower than planned. That’s like a $100 million dart exploding when you miss the bullseye by less than the width of a human hair. A less dramatic — though more common — failure is the embarrassing auto-correct. After countless convenient corrections, there is inevitably a mistake that calls into question the overall utility of the system. For one contributor to this blog, that moment occurred when the intended "wild beasts" was publicly disseminated as "wild breasts" — on the bright side, that "correction" did seem to increase interest in the text. via

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Posted: June 1st, 2011
at 12:09pm by mnp


Categories: weaponry,science,"ninja",development

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The Hardest Working People on the Planet

As entrepreneurs working hard is a given (if you want to be successful that is). Of course, there’s always a question of just what truly is working hard. I’ve found that most entrepreneurs, if compared to the average office worker at a big company, work extremely hard. However, just because you’re working harder than your buddy at some Dundler Mifflin clone doesn’t mean that you’re actually working hard. Instead, you need to be comparing yourself to some of the hardest working people on the planet.

To help with that, I’ve assembled some inspirational stories of hard-working entrepreneurs with some non-business folks mixed in for good measure. Two caveats. First, hard work is completely irrelevant is you’re not working smart and being productive. Second, hard work is also counter-productive if you’re sacrificing your health to an extreme degree and if the increase in quantity of hours worked is leading to a decrease in your creativity (often the case!). With that being said, here’s some stories of people who’ve worked about as hard as a human being can. (Source)

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Posted: June 1st, 2011
at 12:09pm by mnp


Categories: business,development,entrepreneurship

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Mind Crunch : 6.1.11 : The Horse or the Jockey

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Many people who want to start their own businesses and many people who want to invest in others’ ideas search answer of this question: "Which is more important the idea or the entrepreneur?" .

In academic journals, this is referred to as the horse (idea) and jockey (entrepreneur) debate. The horse and jockey analogy reflects two different financing philosophies: Either you believe the idea is the key and bet on the horse, or you believe management is the key and bet on the jockey. "Another way to phrase it is to say that you either bet on an A-team with a B-idea or on a B-team with an A-idea.

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Posted: June 1st, 2011
at 12:09pm by mnp


Categories: entrepreneurship,mind crunch

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Quote of the Day

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If you have a frequently asked question about your app, there’s a problem. via

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Posted: June 1st, 2011
at 1:14am by mnp


Categories: quote of the day

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Publishing The Unpublishable

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What constitutes an unpublishable work? It could be many things: too long, too experimental, too dull; too exciting; it could be a work of juvenilia or a style you’ve long since discarded; it could be a work that falls far outside the range of what you’re best known for; it could be a guilty pleasure or it could simply be that the world judges it to be awful, but you think is quite good. We’ve all got a folder full of things that would otherwise never see the light of day.

Invited authors were invited to ponder to that question. The works found here are their responses, ranging from an 1018-page manuscript (unpublishable due to its length) to a volume of romantic high school poems written by a now-respected innovative poet. You get the idea.

The web is a perfect place to test the limits of unpublishability. With no printing, design or distribution costs, we are free to explore that which would never have been feasible, economically and aesthetically. While this exercise began as an exploration and provocation, the resultant texts are unusually rich; what we once considered to be our trash may, after all, turn out to be our greatest treasure. (Source)

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Posted: June 1st, 2011
at 1:14am by mnp


Categories: web,et cetera

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Community Isn’t Free

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At Eclipse, we talk a lot about community. Developing a community is an important part of being an open source project. It is from a community of users, adopters, and contributors that a project draws strength and longevity. Without a community, an open source project is just a bunch of code that might as well buried on a server behind a firewall somewhere in parts unknown.

I can’t think of a single open source project that has found community success through a simple application of "if you build it, they will come". Some projects are luckier than others: sometimes a technology is just so compelling that minimal effort returns huge dividends. More often, the overnight success of an open source project comes after weeks, months, and years of a combination of long work and hard work.

It takes effort to get your message out; and if you want to develop a community around your open source project, you have to get the message out. To cultivate a vibrant community of users, adopters, and committers, a project has to have somebody who is responsible for community development. Somebody has to own it. Everybody on the project team has to dedicate some significant amount of their time to community development, but one person on the team has to be responsible for it. For some projects, this may be a full time job; for others, it may be a huge part of one. In fact, may open source projects have more than one full time person working on community development. In some circles, this role might be called the project’s evangelist, or maybe it’s the project lead that manages community development. Whatever the title, the role should be that of making everybody else successful in community development activities.

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Posted: June 1st, 2011
at 1:14am by mnp


Categories: development

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