Planet SCM

After reading about TagCloud at the blog of Grady Booch if decided to give it a try to. The tags of Technotari I find too difficult to maintain so I will abandone them.

Note added on July 11th 2006: For some reason, the TagCloud does not display a cloud of tags anymore, and there is no way I can find to login to TagCloud. Until I find an alternative, I will leave it.

I have only recently discovered Gerald M. (Jerry) Weinbergs weblogs on consulting and on writing, and with it his books. I am not much of a reader of books but after reading his blogs and the reviews at Amazon.com, I get the impression that it's worthwhile trying Jerry's book More Secrets of Consulting.

I recently found the blogsite of Paul Graham. He has a prozaic way of writing essays which reads like a novel. That's good if you like to read novels, which I don't. Yet, I do love reading his essays and I have not discovered yet why.

One thing I notice is that reading his work is very relaxing, and that the message sticks better in my head than reading the succinct things that are mostly written about software development. May be that's the reason that I also like reading Joel on Software.

Soon, I will be switching to the new blogger format. Unlike many others, I will not try to add a tag to all my old posts, only to the new ones.

Update 25-Feb-2007: Using a new template.

Every journey starts with a first step. I have never been confronted with Blogs before so I am curious how it is to make and maintain one. A lot still has to be done to make this a decent source of information.

My objective is to use this blog to capture my thoughts and experiences at work, possibly as a means to share it with other people, possibly just as a reminder for myself.

If you are looking for a free gmail (Google mail) account, then drop me an email and I will send you an invitation. I have 10 invitations left.

Information sharing is one of the more difficult issues in modern companies. Many hours are lost in meetings to tell people about important information that they could have read in 5 minutes. Time is wasted because people are out of sync with the real status of the project.

I read an interesting blog from Michael Conté called Enterprise blogging in practice about his experience with introducing blogs within the company and on the Yahoo! group Scrumdevelopment is requested for reactions.

If you're reading someone's blog and you would like to comment on it, you have the choice to add a comment on it, or write a blog entry at your own blog with a reference (link) to the blog your are commenting.

I wonder which one is the best approach. If you comment to an existing blog, you probably lose track of all your own contributions leaving your own blog empty, or you have to repeat yourself in your own blog. If you comment in your own blog however, the comment is probably not read by the writer of the article.

So, I tend to have a slight preference to write your own blog entry and put a link to it in the comment of the other blog. It would even be nicer to have a "link" that works by value instead of by reference.

Technorati tags: blog

The blog of Kathy Sierra is really a recommended read when you want to get excellent insights in user community building and how this influences user's experience and perspectives.

For example, her blog entry about ultra-fast change explains how extremely frequent updates (of a product or service) help create user satisfaction because the user doesn't even get enough time to get upset about a broken feature. Due to the fast pace of changes, the fix or rollback is already available before anyone gets really upset about it. That's an enormous reassurance to the users.

Another one I like is Creativity on Speed. It explains how the best creativity comes forward when people have the least time to be creative. She is not talking about unrealistic deadlines (which kills creativity) but about needing a solution and needing it quickly. Under this pressure, people tend to rely more on their intuition and other subconscious parts of the brain, rather than rationalizing and trying to link logically.

I haven't read all, and I don't like it all, but her blog struck me.