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Effective June 25, 2010. I am resigning my position as Manager of Web Services at The University of the Arts.
Effective July 6, 2010 I will be starting as Project Lead/Project Architect at http://www.rockriverstar.com
To say that I’m excited, is an understatement.
As @alexknowshtml would say: “JFDI”
Its a conference…
I could tell you about the technology I saw.
The vendors I met.
The products that look “cool”.
Or even the next versions of drupal, and how much they’re going to make drupal better…
But none of that matters.
I’ll tell you the coolest thing that happened here was Meeting Dries.
After the Core developer summit on saturday, I came over to where people were getting some drinks and food, and ran in to my friend Alex, and he pulled me in to the crowd and said “I’ll introduce you to Dries. I told him at first “man, I don’t need to be that guy…” I’m not a fanboi, and I’m sure he’s got more important people to talk to…
Alex shushed me and said “no, he’s great…” So I walked up to him, and shook his hand, and introduced my self.
I’ve had the chance to meet the “leaders” or “executives” of companies, and/or products before. The people who steer the ship, make big decisions, and help form the strategy of what their company / product does. Generally, they’re kinda dick, who don’t really care, unless you’re a big player of some kind. 2 years ago I met the CTO of a vendor my current employer has spent a good healthy 7 figures on over the past 10 years. In my position, I had some legit questions about how I can do the work I do, in conjunction with the work they do.
He brushed me off, said he’d get back to me… and I never heard another thing. Polite, but dis-interested.
Dries is the polar oposite of this.
Here I am, just one of the many many many users of Drupal. I’m far from being a powerful figure in the community. I’ve only contributed to a few modules, and not even in code commits, but by assisting in testing. Dries didn’t care about any of that. He asked me how I use drupal, and he asked me how I could use drupal better.
And he listened. He listened to how my work at a small place on the east coast of the US is using drupal in a small way compared to others, and how I want to use it to make the web better. And he cared. He asked me how drupal could be better for me, and he actually responded to my comments, and questions.
This is why Drupal is awesome.
This is why this is the best conference I’ve ever been to.
This community cares at a really base, fundamental level about the work they do on this framework, this platform.
They care about the way its going, and where its going.
And its led by a guy, who doesn’t get paid a licensing fee, doesn’t get paid a wage for standing on that stage giving a keynote.
He does this cause he cares about the community and the work we’re all doing in it, and he wants to hear about it. He wants to talk to you about it.
Everyone I’ve met here has been like this, and cares about what Drupal is trying to do, and trying to be in the internet.
Its an amazing conference, in an amazing city, filled with amazing people.
I feel really good about the work I do now, and I’m invigorated to be part of this community.
/ Tek’o / adj. / An almagam of “tech” and “eco” and a fitting Newspeak modifier for the fusion of lab-born textiles and back-to-nature neo-traditionalism, e.g.,
My three-piece techo suit looks like hemp, but it’s actually a NASA-designed fabric that repels stains, blocks out UV rays, raises my sperm count and charges my iPad
— Doubleplusgood. Horacio Silva.
—
As seen in The New York Times Style Magazine. March 14th, 2010. page 75.
Pointed out to me by @sarmari
If I see one more holiday/seasonal commercial talking about love and gifts and giving… I’m going to punch something…
And they’re usually diamonds… so I wonder how many one armed african kids are behind them also.
*sigh*
One of them is having perspective on the universe I live in.
This blog post at : http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/12/11/incredible-vista-of-the-cosmos/ has done that to me today.
Here’s another phenomenal picture. It’s an amazing 2 x 1.5 degree field toward the center of the Milky Way, revealing about a million stars! It’s taken completely in the near infrared, just outside of what the human eye can see, and shows dust and stars mostly invisible in optical light.
Click here to see that amazing image, and fathom that most of it is invisible to our naked eye, but is there, sitting there, in our galaxy…
Yeah, tears in my eyes, at how amazing our existence is.
Even after all this time,
the sun never says to the earth,
“You owe me.”
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights the whole sky.
- Hafiz
—-
Now
That
All your worry
Has proved such an
Unlucrative
Business,
Why
Not
Find a better
Job.
- Hafiz
—-
Known also as Hafez.
Some info on the poet
http://reddit.com is one of those nerd/geek websites doing social news aggregation. Its much more geeky then digg or others, so the content seems to be of higher quality, if not focused more in to my spectrum of interest. A lot of it can be tripe, but every so often, a diamond comes out of the rough.
A few weeks ago one of the members posted this simple sentence.
I’ve had 4 “real” programming jobs in my 5-year career. They’ve all ended the same way: innovation isn’t allowed, new features are all emergencies, and development ends up the least of my responsibilities.
Sounds like some self pitying whining talk to me… except every so often I wonder if I’ve been in the same boat as well… Then my optimism and naivety kicks in and I forget about complaining, and just do the best job I can. But it still was there, scratching at the back of my head… Something is wrong, at a larger level then I can identify…
A friend of mine, who follows reddit as well apparently noticed one of the comments on in the thread. I’m reposting it here in full, but please visit the thread to at least give reddit a few more hits in their ad counters 
If you are talking about the US, no, it’s not just your job – it’s most medium to large corporations, and too many small companies. The last decade of corporate strategy can largely be characterized at all levels of operation as a “fear strategy”.
The company I used to work for has been in pure fear mode for most of this time – it is economically imploding now largely due to its own mistakes caused by this fear, not for lack of market opportunity as they tell their shareholders. Most other companies I visit as my customers or suppliers are also.
Fear strategies are characterized by irrational risk fear and reduction efforts, by inward looking diminished goals and reduced scope of activity and outlook, by general pessimism and CYA.
The negativity is so pervasive that we now are gaining major advantages over far larger competitors with just our small modicum of optimistic planning, strategy and execution. Most of our competitors have literally lost the capacity to innovate as far as I can see. I like it but it’s scary for others who depend on them to be otherwise.
There are two coupled reasons: most Fortune 1000 companies are in their terminal phase of life cycle “fade”, and various major events have triggered fear. Each of these feeds on the other in a positive feedback loop (taking them in the wrong, fatal direction).
The first is the diametric opposite of corporate start-up and being on a leading edge of something productive which is dominated by optimism. Just as corporations are born, they can and usually do die. There is usually a small cluster for key mistakes that get made that transition the company into a declining, trailing edge organization – most of corporate America is in that phase.
One of the big ones was to abandon manufacturing almost entirely and embrace financial services. Remember that before the crash, FIRE was 70% of US GDP. The Fortune 1000 was 70% of GDP. Not always the same 70% but close enough when it’s the majority of economic activity.
The events are the obvious ones such as the displacement of Cold War fear attention, the dot-com crash, 9-11, general fear-mongering by politicians, over-reliance on single point, profit-driven news sources (the Internet partly ameliorates this), the Wars, Peak Oil, Boomers reaching a similar biological terminal life cycle phase, etc.
Only creative destruction and embrace of their deaths will ever fix anything. The Fortune 1000 is largely not repairable and trying to do so is akin to putting a terminal, comatose 90-year-old on life support; mostly a futile and wasteful effort despite the superficial emotional satisfaction of false continuity and false permanence it brings.
Individually, join or start a small, new company. Consider emigration. Be responsible for your own destiny – the Fortune 1000 never really cared about that and certainly won’t now. Downsize to what really matters, which once you try it you’ll discover is a whole lot less material and less expensive.
My wise father said that you can tell what part of a corporate life cycle a company is in by the credentials of the CEO and executive staff: start-ups have creative professions which include engineers and scientists to imagine new ideas, products and markets for a new company; young adult companies have sales and marketing people to take advantage of the leading edge profit opportunities; the middle-aged company is led by process people and accountants because there is no growth left and every dime of profit comes from cost control and efficiency; and terminal phase is led by lawyers and politicians because the company must do merger & acquisition to grow, lie about its products’ value and have legal cover, or must go through “probate”.
Think about why the Fortune 1000 “needs” to own the political process at all these days – this is why we have the political corruption they’ve caused: if they could compete at all it would be easier and cheaper for them but they can’t so they have to “buy” political cover to survive. Have to have bail outs from the government to survive. It’s pretty obvious.
… join or start a small, new company. Consider emigration…
How about both?
An interesting read, that helps cement some things I’ve been thinking about pretty hard.
Seriously, this weather? Awesome.
Things achieved this morning.
1. got up
2. had coffee
3. took a shower
4. launched a website
http://www.uarts.edu just launched with a new home page, and a refresh to the interior style sheets. its *MUCH* cleaner now.
bigger changes are down the road, but we’re on to a great start.
Its 1230pm on a saturday, and I feel great.
Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks
Written by Jeff Ello
September 8, 2009
Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks
September 8, 2009 (Computerworld) I can sum up every article, book and column written by notable management experts about managing IT in two sentences: “Geeks are smart and creative, but they are also egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business-challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring. To overcome these intractable behavioral deficits you must do X, Y and Z.”
X, Y and Z are variable and usually contradictory between one expert and the next, but the patronizing stereotypes remain constant. I’m not entirely sure that is helpful. So, using the familiar brush, allow me to paint a different picture of those IT pros buried somewhere in your organization.
My career has been stippled with a good bit of disaster recovery consulting, which has led me to deal with dozens of organizations on their worst day, when opinions were pretty raw. I’ve heard all of the above-mentioned stereotypes and far worse, as well as good bit of rage. The worse shape an organization is in, the more you hear the stereotypes thrown around. But my personal experiences working within IT groups have always been quite good, working with IT pros for whom the negative stereotypes just don’t seem to apply. I tended to chalk up IT group failures to some bad luck in hiring and the delicate balance of those geek stereotypes.
Recently, though, I have come to realize that perfectly healthy groups with solid, well-adjusted IT pros can and will devolve, slowly and quietly, into the behaviors that give rise to the stereotypes, given the right set of conditions. It turns out that it is the conditions that are stereotypical, and the IT pros tend to react to those conditions in logical ways. To say it a different way, organizations actively elicit these stereotypical negative behaviors.
Understanding why IT pros appear to act the way they do makes working with, among and as one of them the easiest job in the world.
It’s all about respect
The author goes on to discuss the nature of respect from the perspective of an IT professional and the various character traits that come out of that mind set. How the stereotypes of the nerdy anti social and rude IT person actually are reflections of legitimate frustration among IT workers in an environment that doesn’t support their LOGIC FIRST attitude about getting things done, and being productive.
If you’ve ever even been the guy who helped fix your granmoms computer… let alone work in a “serious” IT environment. This is a great read.
I read it twice in fact when I was linked to it via Twitter, in fact…
I just need to figure out a way of tactfully making my bosses read it… all 3 of them *headache*.
Congrats!!!!! That’s awesome!