InnerWorkings Blogs

I have really enjoyed doing some public speaking this year. I’m just back from the DDD Community Event in Galway and, once again, the feedback on my talk has been very positive. I always feel the responsibility of fulfilling people’s expectations, so hopefully I didn’t disappoint anybody. I must be doing something right though: 2 weeks ago I’ve been invited to present at Øredev, a ~1000 attendees conference in Sweden in November!

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As promised, I put my slides on Slideshare. If you haven’t had a chance to attend, at least you could get a fair idea of what the session was all about. Let me know what you think! Don’t be fooled however, the slides are just a tiny part of the whole story.

In my exploration of how to design a better presentation, I used key books such as Presentation Zen and Beyond Bullet Points. I loved the ideas and approach of the first, the Hollywood-style methodology of the latter.
In my quest, I also came across Made to Stick, an eye-opener book which gives amazing examples of how simple, unexpected, concrete, credible and emotional stories can make ideas memorable.

So, what is this new presentation style about? While PowerPoint has been fundamentally the same for almost 20 years, our use of it is beginning to change. Slides are finally becoming more visual and essential, with a renewed appreciation of how people learn. I am particularly interested in the focus on stories and movie structures to make our messages more compelling.

It’s a fascinating idea isn’t it? In fact, I want to develop it further. Content matters more than ever. Pretty pictures that don’t carry a compelling story are just (annoying) pretty pictures.

In preparation for my next presentation, I just received 7 books on screen writing and more are on the way (speed-reading is handy, isn’t it?). No, I won’t be the next Stephen Spielberg and I don’t see myself walking down a red-carpet event any time soon. But I want to learn as much as I can from that industry to be better at mine. My challenge will be to present a potentially dense technical topic in a dramatic and captivating fashion. Who said it is going to be easy? It will be my pet project for my next few months, 48 minutes at a time.

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Yesterday I attended the ReMIX08 mini-conference at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, which is organized every year by Dan’l Lewin’s Emerging Business Team. Due to travel plans, I missed the increasingly popular MIX08 event in Vegas this year, so I was looking forward to a condensed recap led by Scott Guthrie.

The agenda never drifted very far from Silverlight 2 (4.38MB download) which has just been released in Beta 1 (stay awake now, this stuff changes in the blink of an eye). Scott Guthrie’s keynote was the usual mix of grounded enthusiasm delivered by a guy who clearly stays VERY close to the products under his remit. Despite the Corporate VP title and all that must bring at Microsoft, I can picture Scott nosing around his team’s research labs in the wee hours tweaking every product feature and pending release. Well, either that’s the case or he’d make a very good poker player…

We were treated to a really entertaining demo of a working Silverlight application courtesy of Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo Software. Scott’s presentation of the superb work completed by his team at Vertigo showcased Silverlight’s amazing “deep zoom” feature, which sounds cool enough but wait until you see it in action. Hop over to the Vertigo site for a project description, which provides fine-grained access to The Hard Rock Cafe’s varied collection of rock and roll memorabilia. The online collection includes 55GB of raw images comprising 250+ pieces of valuable music history, including sarcastic letters from Paul McCartney, guitars worth more than a 3 bedroom house in San Francisco, and other examples of stunning visual detail. Absolutely brilliant…

Another highlight of the ReMIX08 conference was the panel discussion about what “open” really means to developers, software companies, and entrepreneurs. Moderated with insight by our old friend Sam Ramji who runs Microsoft’s open source and Linux team for kicks and giggles, this was an excellent session with some very clued-in contributors. In particular, I thought Anil Dash from Six Apart and Jeff Attwood of Coding Horror fame had much to say about what defines open source development, community participation, and the messy tangle of software patents and copyright limits.

Apart from learning that Jeff’s developer centric blog has over 100,000 subscribers (and tasteful ads, mind you), he made the excellent point that developers today need to educate themselves on the basics of software licensing and patent laws in order to protect themselves and their work. Like the IRS model of personal responsibility, “Eh, I didn’t know that” isn’t much of a defense when the proverbial knock comes at the door on copyright or patent infringement. Not one to leave the audience hanging, Jeff kindly suggested that every developer should read Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor who talks about the intellectual power grab of large corporations while creative types plead ignorance and stand in the sidelines. Lessig’s published work includes The Future of Ideas and Code: Version 2.0, hardly light reading but ignorance is not bliss when it comes to protecting yourself and your work.

Lastly, the day closed with a very lively and entertaining panel on the future of social networking — lots of raucous comments about how Plaxo burned their users’ trust only to regain it, rampant disagreements about how important profile portability is to the average user, and the stupidity of big companies who came late to the social networking game. If it was a title bout, I’d call it a split decision on points between Dalton Caldwell of imeem, Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, and Dave McClure of 500 Hats (who kept stirring the pot with relish). I had to leave before cocktail hour in order to brave the traffic and collect my son, but I’m hoping that I didn’t miss an old fashioned bar fight between the panelists. I would have volunteered to hold someone’s coat near the portable bar, of course!

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I’m just back from Stockholm, where I presented a session titled “Passionate Teams and Cooperative Customers: Agile tales of creative customer communication”.

Based on my direct experience, I offered some concrete suggestions of how to revert seemingly impossible (but common) situations in IT projects using a combination of agility, effective communication and deliberate creativity. All of these are skills that I’m firmly convinced we can learn and improve upon, and I was committed to do my best to push the boundaries and bring the message across.

What can I say? The feedback has been absolutely tremendous, both on the core message and delivery style. I knew I had prepared something good, but boy, the response went far beyond my best expectations. I will follow Tom Raftery’s excellent advice and publish my slides on slideshare in a few weeks, right after my next presentation.

I will indeed repeat my session here in Ireland at the DDD Community Event in Galway on Saturday May 3rd. If you happen to be around, you may consider coming over and join the action; there are plenty of interesting sessions, the event is totally free and you can register here.

At the Swedish event, there were lots of speakers from ThoughtWorks, including my good friend Dan North who, a few hours before my turn, helped me refining a couple of messages I wanted to convey on Behaviour-Driven Development.

I’ve also been really privileged to meet ThoughtWorks’ founder and chairman, Roy Singham, at dinner. His fervour, values and clarity of intent are simply remarkable and totally explain why ThoughtWorks is such a unique and respected consultancy company all around the world. He confirmed that he is seriously considering opening an office in Sweden within this year, an opportunity that the best talents in Sweden should not miss!

There would be so much more to say about the event and the stories behind the new and old friends I met, but unfortunately I just exhausted my small quota of writing energy! Let me conclude by saying that the event has been a great success and was extremely well organized by Cornerstone. I’m really, really delighted that InnerWorkings has such a good partnership with Cornerstone in Sweden. Well done guys!

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At InnerWorkings, we see daily evidence of a thriving .NET community in the United Kingdom. Many of our web customers are British developers and .NET teams who wisely take full advantage of Sterling’s commanding position relative to the weakening U.S. dollar. But that’s another post and I’m no monetary policy expert — just ask my wife!

VBUG is a good example of the real strength of the UK developer community in action; its charter is to serve professional developers with regular local conferences and events.

VBUG also operates a membership plan for both corporate and individual developers, providing additional value in the form of a free newsletter and member discounts for developer tools and training vendors.

In support of VBUG, we decided to become a joint sponsor of the upcoming VBUG Birmingham Spring Conference on April 24th, 2008. The agenda for this conference looks great, so I’d encourage any local .NET developers and software managers to check it out:

• Visual Studio 2008
• Workflow Foundation 101
• WPF Business Apps
• Silverlight Showcase
• MOSS

As a sponsor, InnerWorkings is throwing in some Silverlight and WPF training for conference attendees. If you’d like to stay in touch with the VBUG team, signing up for their free newsletter is the way to go. For those UK developers who attend the VBUG conference, I look forward to getting your feedback on the event. All in all, it looks like a very useful way for developers to spend a day learning the latest .NET tips and techniques.

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We’re always on the lookout for slightly madcap events that support the developer community. Imagine our wry smiles when Tim Heuer approached us about backing the latest brainwave from Microsoft’s Developer Platform Evangelists (DPEs).

The Code Trip is basically a two month tour of the West Region in the U.S. where they’ll be showcasing some of the latest Microsoft technologies (like Silverlight 2.0, LINQ & IE8) at local community events.

Check out Chris Koenig’s blog, which outlines the schedule and list of destination cities pretty well. There’s also a short video piece about the whole concept on Channel 9 if you’re interested in learning more about it.

Imagine selling that business trip to your Better Half! I can only guess that the phone conversation would go something like this:

DPE: Listen, I’ve got a work trip coming up in March. It’s a big event with several folks from work.
BH: Sounds like fun…
DPE: Definitely. How does your schedule look around mid March?
BH: OK, actually…I haven’t much on then.
DPE: Excellent!
BH: How long is the trip?
DPE: Well, I’m off on March 14th.
BH: When do you get back?
DPE: Let’s see…hmmmn…it looks like I’m back in 2 months.
BH: <STUNNED SILENCE>
DPE: Hello?
BH: Is this a joke?
DPE: Eh, no…
BH: <HANGS UP>
DPE: That could have gone better….

I’m sure the brave souls on the bus are swapping in and out of the trip, but I’ve got to admit the company road trip concept is a funny one. To show our support, InnerWorkings is offering a bunch of free subscriptions to our entire learning catalog (valued at $1,500 USD). Microsoft has spiced the offer up by kicking in an XBOX 360 for selected winners in each city. You can follow their daily trials and tribulations on the Code Trip blog, which is updated regularly — what else can you do on a bus traveling thousands of miles?

By the way, be sure to check out The Code Trip itinerary if you’re based in or around Denver, CO — there’s a big launch event there tomorrow and Tim tells me that several thousand people have registered to attend. I plan to meet the team during their brief stop in San Francisco on April 3rd, provided the bus makes the long journey without mechanical failure. The Code Trip team is plotting their every coordinate with an onboard GPS unit and Virtual Earth, so you can follow their progress along every bump and turn in the road. Good luck, folks!

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I get a lot of ideas on my way to the office, while on my motorbike. Perhaps Dublin’s traffic and pollution is good for my brain. Or maybe not. At one of our daily standup meetings this week, someone suggested that I should try wearing gloves and helmet at my desk

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As software developers, we love to delve deep into technical matters and write code that delivers value. It’s not a big secret, however, that many problems in software originate with people and not technology. In my experience, the biggest issues arise mostly due to corporate politics, lack of shared values, poor attitude, inadequate communication skills, and, lastly, faulty perceptions.

Ultimately, the way we see the world affects the way we logically reason about it.

Imagine a team of developers and a customer discussing what to do, using agile stories as their starting point. I use the term “customer” to describe the role of the domain expert who prioritizes stories and can clarify what problems a new system is supposed to resolve. Ideally, the customer knows precisely what to program and the team knows exactly how. More realistically, however, requirements evolve both as the team better appreciates the nuances of the business domain and the customer realizes the possibilities and constraints.

But what would happen if both the customer and the development team had a truly open mind and a willingness to be wrong? What solutions would they come up with if they all had a creative attitude and used a language designed to help them restructure their thoughts? I’m suggesting a catalog of practical refactorings and patterns that would add some rigor to anyone’s thinking process!

The great creativity masters can teach us very relevant lessons in this context. Edward De Bono’s “Serious Creativity” book, for example, contains lots of insights and sets the foundation of the first thinking pattern I’m going to introduce:

Extract Concept

Motivation

Extract Concept is one of the most regular techniques I use to deliberately increase my ability to generate alternatives. In fact, it is so basic that, at first glance, it might even seem too obvious. But don’t be fooled. Its mechanism taps into our human talents of abstract thinking, and it is a good step towards sharpening our creativity skills in a disciplined way.

Perhaps the most important benefit is that it forces me to look for alternatives even when I’m fairly confident that the first idea I have is good enough: I’d ask questions such as “this is a way of doing what?” and “how else can this be achieved?” This attitude is particularly important as I know that if I blindly trust my first instincts I may miss tremendous opportunities.

Alternatives must have a reference point: I’d ask “alternatives with reference to what?” A new concept becomes a fresh reference point that can somewhat change my perspective and lead to further ideas.

Mechanics

1. Define the objective. It might be general or specific, but make sure that you are very clear about what you are focusing on!
2. Identify one or more ideas relevant to such objective.
3. For each of those ideas, extract a broader concept by asking: “this is a way of doing what?“
4. See how each concept can trigger further alternatives by asking: “how else can this be achieved?“
5. If applicable, find further alternatives by extracting an even broader concept (a direction) from one or more existing concepts.

Example

• I start defining the problem: “Provide useful help on our website”.
• I quickly identify as many relevant ideas as I can. In this case is pretty easy to get a good few of those, but let’s pick 2 of them for simplicity sake:
  • Add “?” icon beside potentially confusing fields to open a popup dialog
  • Provide Email address

• For each of those ideas, I extract one or more concepts:
  • Using the “?” icon, is a way of answering questions on the same page they arise
  • An email could be seen as a form of human interaction when visitors can’t find the help they need.

• Using each concept, I can now identify more alternatives:
  • The concept “Answer questions on the same page they arise” leads me to the following ideas:
    • Use the “?” icon to inline-expand helpful hints
    • Add permanent “why?” sections beside each form section
    • Add (light-grey) instructive text directly inside each field (that disappears when the visitor clicks on a field)
    • Add help search section within page
    • Add inline validation (to show error messages within the form before the visitor has the opportunity to click the button that submits the form data
    • …
  • The concept “human interaction” helps me finding further alternatives:
    • Phone us (visitor calls us)
    • We phone you (visitor gives us his/her number, we call)
    • Forums (let visitors help themselves)
    • Chat
    • …

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I blogged about our first Silverlight coding contest at Sogeti a few weeks ago and congratulated our winner on his Silverlight coding prowess. Now I’ve two more very worthy winners to announce, which makes me feel a bit like a virtual game show host. On that note, the following winners should step up to take a bow:

• Sam Heck @ Hitachi Consulting
• Jason Menezes @ Capgemini

Each winner qualifies to receive an InnerWorkings subscription ($1,500 value) and a shiny new Xbox 360 from Microsoft. Not bad for a few hours of expert coding time tweaking VideoBrush and MediaElement in a sample Silverlight application, eh?

You can pit your own Silverlight skills against our code checking engine by taking the following Drills from our catalog — topics covered include creating a simple Silverlight control, layout and formatting text, and using brushes. These Drills also cover drawing 2-D shapes, using animation and transformations, and MediaElement and VideoBrush:

• Silverlight Fundamentals using Visual Basic
• Silverlight Fundamentals using Visual C#

And now a bit of background on each of our winners…

Sam Heck (pictured right) is a senior consultant at the Custom Development Practice in Hitachi Consulting. He lives in Baton Rouge, LA where he earned bachelor degrees in computer science and biochemistry at Louisiana State University. In his spare time, Sam enjoys hiking, kayaking, watching sports (and configuring his new Xbox 360).

Jason Menezes is a software developer at Capgemini, based in the company’s Mumbai offices. He’s been working for Capgemini for 18 months, spending most of his time on a core implementation codenamed the Assurance Project. Jason is always keen to learn new technology, and Silverlight was high on his list. Jason really enjoys playing computer games as a hobby and will no doubt make good use out of his new Xbox!

Congratulations to all our latest winners on their well earned prizes — don’t forget to leave some time for learning .NET in between your Xbox sessions, folks!

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For those of you that have simply run out of space and time in your first life, I sympathize. Or maybe I empathize. At any rate, I’d encourage you to check out C# Day on Second Life.

InnerWorkings has teamed up with Michael de la Maza from DRC, Microsoft, and the SLDNUG to offer this virtual event for C# developers.

A full schedule of the event can be found on the SLDNUG website, but we’d like you to join us at Visual Studio Island on Saturday February 16th, 2008 in Second Life. If you’re interested, register now while the event is still open.

You should note that this is NOT another boring lecture-based event for developers — the focus is heavily weighted towards active participation. That approach should sound pretty familiar to all you InnerWorkings users out there!

There will be a short demo of the InnerWorkings product at the very end of the day, and we’re giving all participants 3 hours of free training on Object Oriented Development Fundamentals from our catalog:

• Creating a new class by extracting logic from a form
• Defining an interface
• Creating an abstract class
• Implementing the Liskov Substitution Principle
• Replacing inheritance with delegation
• Replacing an error code with an exception

Here’s a sneak preview of the event on Visual Studio Island - you don’t want to miss out on this one. There’s even a virtual cocktail party to get you in the mood. So come out and show your support for C# Day in Second Life. Enjoy…

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Over the years I have used several productivity approaches, from goal-driven/top-down (e.g. Steven Covey’s First-Things-First quadrants) to more reactive/bottom-up (e.g. David Allen’s Getting Things Done).
I have also used more tactical approaches, such as the 48 minutes rule, which I always find surprisingly effective, particularly when I know I can work for some time uninterrupted.

To beat my worst procrastination habits however, I’m now using another set of productivity weapons: David Seah’s The Printable CEO tools.
In the last few months I started measuring where my time goes during my work day. It is always a good idea to know where you are, before taking corrective actions and get where you want to go, don’t you think? Armed with my trusted TimeLeft countdown, every fifteen minutes I tracked my activities (and distractions) in the Emergent Task Timer. After a while I got pretty used to it.

The form that really got my attention, however, is the Concrete Goals Tracker. David suggests a brilliant motivational approach which comes from his experience in the gaming industry: every time you complete something worth doing, you award yourself points.
In the last couple of years I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on motivational patterns emerged in game development and it is amazing to realize how simple things like adding a score to value our activities can trigger some of the most primitive mechanisms of our brain.

This morning, I thought I could use this system at home to help me focus on the tangible things I can do in preparation to my next talk.
Here is my first draft:

Don’t worry if you don’t quite understand some of the items I have written for now. It will all become clearer in the next few weeks. Let’s just say that these are relevant to my talk. The actual deliverables (slides and narrative) are worth 10 points, the goal supporting activities are worth 5 or 2 points, the attitude 1 point.
So what do you think? Would a system like this work for you? In my case, I have absolutely no doubts!

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