KillerSite Blog

Johna Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times makes some libertarian points about mandatory national service that I have believed for a long time.

Obama wants to institute mandatory national service. This bothers me as much as when I see celebrities on TV game shows “playing for their favorite charity”. You know they had no choice in the matter. Why cant they take their winnings and give to charity on their own damn time?!

Volunteerism is good. But why does every good thing need to be orchestrated by government?

Indeed, there’s ample evidence that countries with intrusive and expensive welfare states stifle their citizens’ spirit of charity and volunteerism precisely because people conclude that every problem should be solved by government. Merely paying your taxes substitutes for charity, and cleaning up roadside litter for two years absolves you from doing anything more.

Fred Wilson sends a twitter from Money:tech that encapsulates a huge business opportunity in delivering Web 2.0 and Social Software tools to Wall Street.

the wave of young people coming onto wallstreet grew up with google and facebook and they want tools like that

Here’s a nice article titled “Work vs. Progress” explaining the difference between managers that know how to do their job vs. lazy managers that think if they have something to measure then they can make easy decisions.

…with complex work, building software, running a business, writing a novel, it is harder to identify true progress. Some of the work will require thinking and exploration which may go on for hours or days before there are visible results. Other work may involve so many different sub-tasks or conversations with others that there’s no way to know how efficiently the work is being done, or if the effort expended is contributing to progressing the project. Complex work, or work with large numbers of people, always makes it harder to separate work from progress.

While most times lazy managers will fall back to the simplistic way of finding some metric to measure and focusing on that as a proxy for Project Progress. The most insidious form of this is when managing people and trying to put metrics on their behavior as a way of grading team members.

• How many hours you were in the office
• Number of Reports, specifications written
• Presentations given
• Calls made
• Lines of code written
• Number of bugs fixed
• E-mails sent

All of these are poor measurements, since they only capture activity. Fixing more bugs on a given day may mean that you only chose easy ones to work on. Lines of code measures only verbosity, not quality. All measurements have loopholes that can be exploited. But since it’s so easy to measure these things, it’s common to see them.

My buddy Igor recently pointed me at a great article from 2005 talking about how best to nurture a development team titled How Software Companies Die. This is a short read and envisions a workplace that is setup to unleash the maximum creativity and productive energy from creative people. This is the future of work.

I think all executives claim to want a creative, productive, and positive work environment. The problem is that for a non-programmer (or even a junior programmer) it is very hard to grasp what makes the best developers tick. It’s not money (although lack of it is a sure sign of disrespect and the best people will leave) and it’s not free soda, pizza, or other junk that a person can easily buy for herself with a couple dollars.

It’s an elusive thing called freedom to create and feeling like you are living up to your potential.

This is echoed in my most recent fascination with the possibilities of ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) initiative started by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson at BestBuy and expounded on in their blog.

Here are the highlights:

• Work isn’t a place you go, it’s something you do.
• Employees have the freedom to work any way they want
• Every meeting is optional
• Nobody talks about how many hours they work
• No judgment about how you spend your time

just imagine the creativity and energy that kind of work environment could unleash! It makes my head spin!

Here’s a great post from Mavericks At Work

The really interesting shift isn’t from one profession to the next, but from one way of thinking about the arc of a career and working life in general to the next. It goes something like this:

• Old version: work hard (for a very long time), achieve success, earn freedom (to retire and do all the things you missed out on while you were working)
• New version: find work that affords you freedom = success

This is also one of the big driving forces behind the huge pull entrepreneurship has for the creative class these days. The possibility to create your own environment where creativity and positive energy can be unleashed is very appealing.

For the new year I took a few hours and put together a test Mashup of a few public APIs.

The application simply lets you see the latest news and what the blogosphere has to say about it. Again this was done in a short amount of time and is still very rough - and there are a hundred ways this could be improved.

I will be posting information on some interesting techniques used when I get a chance.

The interesting thing about this application is that it makes no use of any specific sever side code. Everything is done on the client side with browser standard technology.

Let me know what you think - http://www.killersite.com/mashuptest1.html

How to use

• Select a category and get the latest news items
• Double-click on a news item to view it
• Click on the expand icon next to an item to see any blog posts relating to it
• Do the same things on the “Search News” tab

Ypulse.com has a great list of predictions on what will be hot in 2008 for the teen market.

• Casual games
• Mobile social networking
• Facebook
• iPhone
• user generated content

This is a collection of startup tips covering software engineering, infrastructure, PR, conferences, legal and finance. They describe best practices for an early-stage startup.

In ‘07 we saw lot of movement to make the web a programmable environment. Most all popular consumer websites now have APIs and there has been a proliferation of “Mashup” applications like Yahoo! Pipes, MS Popfly, and Google Mashup Editor.
Are these XML services only for the weekend amusement of geeks that are uninspired by their regular jobs? Or do you think there will be a commercial market for API usage in mashups in ‘08?

I just came across the coolest idea for a web service I’ve seen in a long time. recaptcha.net is a free service to put CAPTCHA spam protection on your website.

What’s so cool about that you might ask?
Well the way the service can block spam bots from flooding your website with spam content is to ensure that the entered text is being supplied by a real person. The way this is done is by making the person enter some words that is unreadable by a computer program.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA.

So your website visitors are helping the Internet Archive digitize books via OCR. Amazing.