Juixe Techknow

My direct manager for the past two years has decided to leave his current position in the firm to look for other opportunities. Our CTO said that he “had served his time with the company.” To which I responded, “You make it sound as if it’s a jail sentence to work here.”

Over the last two days my manager was in the office, the whole development team spent that time with him in knowledge transfer sessions. Earlier this year I wrote about past knowledge transfer sessions with a former colleague. What follows are a few words of advice from my former manager which he gave us before his departure…

Use standard off the shelf components whenever possible, replace our custom ORM component with Hibernate, replace our client scaffolding code with NetBeans Platform. Use, reuse, and make use of open source software, don’t reinvent the wheel. In essence work smarter, not harder!
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I am already looking forward to JavaOne 2007. I had a great time at this year’s JavaOne and I thought I clean up and shape up my JavaOne conference blog posts into a single PDF document. The JavaOne 2006 Conference Notes highlights the following 21 JavaOne sessions…

Wednesday, June 17 2006
JavaOne Wednesday General Session – Thomas Kurian of Oracle talks about EJB 3.0.
Effective Java Reloaded – Joshua Bloch on Effective Java with Generics.
Web Services With Eclipse – Eclipse Web Tools Project.
Design This Container – NetBeans GUI Builder.
Dos and Don’ts For Swing Apps – Karsten Lentzsch of JGoodies gives Swing tips.
Groovy On The JVM – Groovy = Java Tech + Ruby + Python for the JVM.
RAD Frameworks For The Java Platform – Grails, Trails, RIFE panel discussion.
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The November 13, 2006 issue of BusinessWeek had a great cover of Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s move into webservices such as Simple Storage Service and Elastic Compute Cloud. As part of the cover story, BusinessWeek had a nice inset of Jeff Bezos playbook. Some of the best practices I have covered here recently from my the Future of Web Apps coverage.

According to BusinessWeek, Bezos best practices include: Measure Everything, Keep Product Development Teams Small, Don’t Be Afraid of Weird Ideas, Open Up To Outsiders, and Watch Customers Not Competitors.

Technorati Tags: s3, amazon, simple storage service, webdevelopment, web services, businessweek, fowa, webapp

The last speaker of the Future of Web Applications conference was Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame. Matt’s talk was a nice way to end two days of great presentations. According to Matt, in the future of web applications everybody will have their 15 pixels of fame. Matt also said that, “The luckiest thing I did for wordpress is allow for plugins.” In Matt’s view some open source software projects try to resolve conflicts with more options. In his view, a better way to solve conflicts is by enabling plugins. In addition to conflict resolution, he believes that plugins limits forks. A word of advice regarding plugins is to never break the API they are built upon. Breaking APIs is worse than never having any at all!

“If one thing that I know about the future of web apps is, you will be spammed.” Matt believes that spammers are like cockroaches that will be here long after us. Social software are things that gets spam. To combat spammers, the scourge of the internet, Matt has developed Akismet. Akismet is a learning web service spam filter for blogs. From his experience with WordPress.com and Akismet Matt, like other conference speakers, believe that you need to plan for success. According to Matt, “WordPress.com has been lessons in scaling. … All hosting sucks.” Since hosting sucks you can buy the cheapest hardware available, because you can easily miss utilize expensive hardware with a bad hosting service. The best you can do is hope that your web hosting doesn’t suck all the time.
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Jeff Veen of Google is the Project Lead of MeasureMap and he spoke at the Future of Web Applications regarding designing a better web user interface. Jeff start off his talk by saying that buzzwords are often used as a proxy for intelligent thought. He also reminded the attendees that booms and bust are cyclical. What I like most of Jeff’s talk was when he said that web applications need to go beyond visual design and move into interaction design.

Another key theme from Jeff’s conversation was about building trust with your users. Jeff recommends that the UI be developed in such a way that it builds a sense of trust with users. Another way to build trust with users is to allow the threat your users as peers and share the users own data in graphs and by providing power tools to passionate users. You should think of new ways to expose data to your users. A social network is built on social trust, don’t be antisocial with your users!
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Ryan Carson is the Future of Web Applications conference organizer and he spoke about what he wish he had known before starting his online ventures, Hey Amigo, Drop Send, and Think Vitamin. Ryan started his session by saying, “We built three web applications, the first one we don’t talk about.” Here are the 14 things Ryan wished he had known before he started his applications. Hopefully they will help you, if you didn’t already now them. Before I begin I should not that his advice sounds more appropriate from small teams, not multinational conglomerates.

1. Ryan recommends working with people in the same time zone. Ryan said that if you don’t work with someone in your time zone you will spend time on the phone when you should be sleeping. Ryan lives in the UK so this might be good advice for him. For people that live in the continental United States or Canada working with people anywhere from Eastern to Pacific Time zone should be fine.
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