I don’t see it
The resemblance that is. Last night I was working on cleaning up the iPhoto library and was confirming pictures of myself using Faces. It was pretty accurate, occasionally finding a few family members and calling them me, but for the most part it was spot on. This image was the one that amused me, clearly not me, but iPhoto thought it was.
I suppose it isn’t a bad thing to look like the NY Mayor but I just don’t see the resemblance.
on Doing It Wrong
From Tim Bray’s piece on enterprise systems:
What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.
I have spent years on the enterprise side of development and pushed on occasion for more iterative development methodologies and can say that the more successful projects I can recall started as a more simple effort and grew. Those that attempted to solve all the problems with the flip of a switch got mired in change requests and requirements docs and in the end made everyone just want to deploy the thing so we could move on.
I have a great sense of accomplishment for the systems I have been a part of constructing, developing and then maintaining but many came before the Internet had as many options and examples as there are today. Building a large scale, flexible CMS in the late ’90’s for example didn’t offer any options to pull from open source or commercial products and tools. Today that is different and I think most companies are starting to understand.
In the last few years with two different large Internet companies I can say that the enterprise is starting to come around. While there are still a few core competencies that are worth that do it all yourself mantra, most are now seen as a utility that should be handled in the most efficient manner possible. It might be that since the two companies I have experience with are both on the Internet side of things and thus faster to catch on, but I think that most companies are realizing that there is no need to write code every time a need arises.
The push for change needs to come from more folks at my level – those that have the authority to make decisions and the influence to explain the potential rewards over the perceived risks. I agree with many of the comments that the enterprise is focused on no risk (or transferring that risk to a partner) and that often backs them into a let’s do it ourselves corner. The job for the next class of leaders and executives is to understand the new Internet culture and take some of this and weave it into the enterprise. This will empower the development teams (and the product teams) and should result in more innovative projects coming from not just the startups but from the once staunch Fortune 1,000 as well.
Disappearing in the digital age
If you have about 15 minutes to read this you should, it was a great piece on how someone tried to walk away and start a new life (as an experiment) and how the community was challenged to help find him.
Of course those that do this for real wouldn’t likely gather the attention and sophisticated audience that would organize around tracking them down, but it does help to understand how people are able to disappear from their life and start over. The challenge was put out to catch Evan within a month to claim a $5k prize, which helped to motivate catching him. In real life I expect most that do this don’t have a reward and you can only imagine the police force having few resources to keep up a search.
Evan in this piece makes a few intentional mistakes to help motivate the search, but it still took a wide network of people to uncover his new home. I wonder if he would have been caught it he truly had done all he could to avoid it.
A great data visualization
So I may be a bit biased since I was there for most of these events, but I found this image, created by feltron, to be very cool.
It mentions in the post that CNN asked him to create a visual record of the site’s last 13 years. I would love to have a higher resolution version (think poster size) but don’t know if anyone will bother to create it.
