Matt Cosier Joins Readify

Here is some exciting news – Matt Cosier has joined Readify. Some of you may know Matt from the work he did in the public sector vertical at Microsoft, although most people will know him from the work he did with the DPE team (where Microsoft meets the developer community).

I think Matt is going to be a great addition to the team and it already looks like we have him busy!

ACS Membership and Meetings

Michael Still gives a review of a recent ACS meeting he attended in Canberra. He’s come closer than I have to joining the ACS so I found it to be an interesting read. At the moment I am trying to decide whether joining the ACS does anything for me.

That sounds kinda selfish but its true. The fees aren’t insignificant and for that kind of money I need to see some real benefits.

In talking to some of the office people at the ACS its been suggested that employers value ACS membership. I don’t think that is true – or it hasn’t factored heavily in any feedback I have provided to the hiring process.

Perhaps the true benefit is derived from getting involved at all levels of the organisation, not just putting your bum on a seat – thats been suggested to me more than once.

Neil Rieck’s New to .NET Blog

Neil Rieck who attended Code Camp Oz (I) has just put up a blog, it called “New to .NET”. He’s put up an interesting first post but I think the intent is to have people post questions on his blog and he’ll try to find answers.

Neil is new to .NET, so this supports my hypothesis that the best way to learn about something is to help someone else learn about it too. Subscribed.

Wisdom of the Masses?

I found this interesting post on the “Creating passionate users” blog. It talks about how always hiring the same kind of person can hurt an organisation. I guess I agree to a certain extent, but when it comes to software engineering I think our principal tool is our mind, and we should keep our tools sharp – so while the backgrounds of the people you hire can be diverse make sure that their mind is in good working order and that they have a desire to keep it that way.

One thing that Kathy Sierra did point out was this book (Amazon). I read down through the editorial reviews and picked up this little quote:

While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.

This isn’t always correct, in fact it is incorrect often enough to make it a dangerous thing to rely on for decision making. It also leads to a situation where everyone can make a decision but no one is responsible.

Mind you, the average customer rating on Amazon for “The Wisdom of Crowds” is four out of five stars – I wonder if crowds are useful for reviewing books

Timeline

Here is a neat little visualization for time passing that I picked up from Wil Wheaton’s blog (yep, thats right, the dude from startrek).

Guess-the-google game.

This is a very cool little game implemented as a flash game where it fetches images from Google using a single keyword and you have to guess what it is based on the handful of images that it gives you. Neat – picked it up from Gretchen’s jobsblog.

Quad Core Processors from AMD in 2007?

I picked up a link to this article about the potential to see quad-core processors in the future from Mike Taulty’s blog. Its funny to see this kind of stuff after I posted this entry back in January.