Category Archives: Just Rambling

Joel Spolsky on one man shops

Just Rambling

Avonelle points out Joel Spolsky’s comment in a discussion about being a one-man shop and Christopher Hawkin’s response.

Although Joel’s backup logic is bull, I do agree with his main “thesis” – that a consultant is not an entrepreneur. In 16 or so years I have been a consultant, I have never considered myself an entrepreneur or a start-up business, so I don’t even care about qualifying that one.

However, he uses some dead-wrong points to back up that statement. Pure bull.

I am hardly the low man on the totem pole with my clients. I am a business partner – a trusted business partner. The owner of my largest client absolutely sees me that way. I have acquired such a good understanding of his business over the years that it is not uncommon for him to discuss other areas of his business (other than technology) with me and seek my opinion.

Perpetual Job hunting. My very first client came to me as a referral. I had a full time job then and was not even looking for contract work. Since then, almost all of my work has been word of mouth for all of these years. That does not mean that I “put the word out” that I was looking either. I’m talking about totally unsolicited. The only real caveat to this is that when I moved to Vermont, I needed a full time job in order to get a mortgage. At that time, I did have to actively look for a W-2 position.)

Back to work…

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What do I think of the Code Room pilot?

Just Rambling

I have only watched about 1/2 of it so far. I am definitely a little jaded since I know Russ Fustino (the MSDN presenter) and Scott Bellware (making the obvious naughty joke about master pages) pretty well.

What I have seen so far strikes me that the video is a lot more about the MSDN event than the experience of the programmers. I’ve seen discussions of this where people are saying that it’s designed to be accessible to non-technical people. I just can’t see that at all. It’s all way too technical. Who, besides a programmer, could possibly care what ASP.NET 2.0 is? (I just want to drive the car. I don’t care how thermodynamics makes the engine work. And please, if thermodynamics has nothing to do with a car engine, don’t bother correcting me, it’s just an example!)

The one thing I think an average user could connect to (of what I’ve seen so far) is Scott sitting there trying to figure out how to log in to the computer. It’s actually a great moment because here’s this total braniac whiz-kid (yes he’s an extremely smart guy and he’s not really a kid…Scott always has to remind me that he’s not quite as young as he looks :-)) being daunted by Windows – because you know what, we *all* are! Security, even at the level of just being a user on your computer, is really hard for most of us to deal with. And also it is a completely laugh out loud moment to recognize in all of us that we typically don’t think *we* need to read directions. Like when you are setting up a new computer for your parents or friends. Those nice posters that Gateway and Dell et alia create – plug this here, plug this there. Ahh, better yet, I think I blogged a perfect example in my pre-blog blog over here…yup… gad this is embarrassing – but very true!!

Another hour went by before I figured out that I probably should install .Net Framework on to my IIS server. I have been using IIS server on my Win2K server for VS6/ASP development for the past year – but the server obviously needs something more to handle .Net. We’ll see.

Four hours later I see that this is still not working. Aaargh!

3/13: I have finally found explicit instructions about installing to a remote webserver, which include going through the motions of installing VS.NET on the my server. These were right in the initial setup instructions, which I should have seen at beginning but did not in my presumptuousness and impatience. Click here for the explicit instructions for setting up your webserver to host your .Net Web Applications.

Hooray. WebApplication3 is alive!

So, regarding this as something with possible mass-market appeal? I just don’t see that at all. Though, really I have never seen anything official that suggests this is MSDNs goal. Is it a tool to lure new developers? Hmmm, I have to see the rest of the episode to see if they are successful. If they aren’t, then the answer might be no because if Microsoft is promising that it’s SO easy and these guys can’t do it, then I’m not sold. Granted, you are taking serious developers and asking them to do something that is out of the norm for them. These guys are not drag & drop developers so it’s got to be way too hard for them to let go of their way of doing things to use the tools that were probably not really designed for them.

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Don Box on giving presentations and conundrum of slides vs. whitepaper

Just Rambling

If you are doing any conference speaking or hoping to, definitely watch this Channel9 video.

One of the things I have the hardest time with is the amount of content on the slides. Don and Mike talk about this. What is the purpose of the slides? A tool for the speaker? A visual aid for the speaker/audience? Or a whitepaper? I tend to go for the whitepaper because I want people to be able to go home with those slides and still have a great reference. Then I will skip whole slides or some points on certain slides during the talk. I would love to minimize the content on the slides during the presentation. I think that I am even comfortable doing this with talks I have done a few times. But I still want the audience to have more than a few bullet points to refer to when they go back to their computers.

I will be thinking about this as I prep for Connections, Windows Anywhere and EdgeEast over the next few months.

The A#1 most important thing according to Don (and I wholeheartedly agree from experience) is get enough rest. “Don’t stay up till 4am working on your demos”. Being rested and alert will carry you through a lot more then being, as Don suggests, an exhausted encyclopedia.



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MS Contest: Small BUsiness Technology Makeover

Just Rambling

Oooh – if I were a Microsoft Certified Partner, I have a client that would be PERFECT for this contest. Perfect perfect perfect. An office of about 6 people all using machines ranging from 7 yrs old to maybe 4 yrs old. Some boxes are still onWin98, maybe win2000. I wrote a VB6 app for them years ago which still uses Access as the backend (and management tool). Their network is peer to peer. I love this company and the people who work there. What I wouldn’t do to be able to give them this gift. boo hoo.

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