Missing : Kathy Sierra

I used to be a Professional working in airline distribution system business. Man, life was great : I was making good money in the countries I wanted (I even managed to reject an offer from Qantas, stupid me) being international consultant in this niche market with old techs. Then came September 11.

Within half a day my professional skills were made obsolete (okay there were worth things around, but still : it was still bad). I then decided then to switch to new techs in general and Java Programming language in particular. I started this self-training to prepare for the Java programmer certification.

This is when Kathy Sierra came into my professional life (messiah image dressed in white surrounded with a halo of dazzling light). Seriously though : thanks to her books and the amazing JavaRanch site I had the certification and could get a job in that technical area. I've carried on and passed another two professional certifications thanks to her brilliant Head First Series : these allowed me to get a great job (well, surely my favorite job ever) back in my country. I am sooooooo grateful she helped me when I needed the most : she had a definite and positive influence on my professional life.

And then there was this a-ma-zing blog (ranked #1 in The Viral Valley top 25 of marketing blogs). Creating Passionate Users allowed me to keep the pace with Web 2.0 technologies and culture and gave me the energy to blog (this last bit may not be such a good thing though).

And then there was this death threats issue which saw her stopping the blog.

Kathy : I do hope you're well. We really, REALLY are missing your blog.

Please come back to your witty and cherry self and blog again. The IT industry and the blogosphere are definitely not the same when you are not around.

Suck the marrow out of the meatspace bone

(click to play the soundtrack of this post)

Digital Attraction

I quite fancy David Armano's blog. This is full of ideas and nice visual assets about design, user experience and web 2.0.It was strange to see this touching post though. I probably am wrong but this sounds to me like self-persuasion : "hey real life is cool : I can see, I can feel, I can touch, I can smell, I can communicate". But, then, there is digital attraction he cant resist : "OK, I think I'm ready for work now. :)" is the way this blog post ends, rather sadly.

It could well be a misinterpretation but the line between "Working" and "Being connected" becoming more and more blurry, it sounds to me as if he was saying : "Okay, I just had enough of real life to write a blog post with, now give me my electronic hit back".

Meatspace Vs Myspace

In this great post Danah Boyd reckons that "the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical". I would tend more and more to think the opposite and would swap "digital" and "physical" in that very sentence. There has been some kind of shift, here.

Most of us spend the day connected for work. But now we also are connected for about everything as Fred is putting it. The unplugged portion of our day tends to reduce drastically, so does our life in the real world, subsequently.

It's as if whatever happens in our real lives should feed the electronic ones. There is this post on 37 signals regarding Designer Jane Fulton Suri book Thoughtless Acts advocating for observing regular peope doing regular things to improve as designer (may I disgress a bit here : the casual way girls tie their hair back with a pencil is so strangely glamorous - pic from Jane Fulton book).

There is a pretty similar post from DA. Sounds to me like : suck the marrow out of the meatspace bone to make the real life a part of the digital one.

This is a bit of a concern for me. Seeing this post from David allowed me to take a step back and question myself. How do you fellow bloggers feel about that ? Do you think that your electronic and real lives are balanced ? As far as I am concerned, well I wonder.

lo tech poetry

I just love that.

Respect to the AlphaGeeks

Common + Technical

In the early 90s when I started my carreer as an IT professionnal, there was in France this very popular stand-up comedy trio called Les Inconnus (the Unknown - wish they actually were). They had this rather stupid story about software engineers (in-gé-nieur in-for-ma-ti-cieeeeen) which had the whole country laughing. People was laughing with this story because :

• IT job is very common and technical, both adjectives being abuse in France


• the IT professional character was depicted as an autistic guy looking clumsy and uncomfortable about everywhere but in front of a PC : uncool as hell.
  

I dont take any particular pride in being an IT professional. More than often I love my job. It allowed me to find interesting missions in other countries, to meet lovely people and great professionals and, not to forget : it does pay the bills. Sure, I would have preferred to be a footballer, a rock star or a novelist, but hey! you have to be grateful for what you've got.

Not so long ago when I was introducing myself and saying what I was doing, people would change subject pretty fast (unless they also are in the industry). My feeling is that the way software engineers are perceived today, in my country at least, has completely changed. And this is another consequence of the second coming of the web.

Golfers and Programmers

There is this good definition on Martin Fowler's blog of what AlphaGeeks are. This is a concept coming from (yet another) thorough online talk by Tim O'Reilly. It also is used on Martin's thoughts about Ruby and Microsoft. And this is where it gets interesting : "At RailsConf, Tim Bray contended that the key decisions on technology are made by the programming community. " Further, Fowler remind us that "The open-source community does much of its communication through source code." So if you're not a coder, too bad mate.

This avant-garde of IT geeks has seen his power considerably leveraged by the social web. There has been a dramatic shift in the way big decisions are taken regarding software architecture and strategy. A great example in the Java world is Spring Vs J2EE and Hibernate Vs JDO : in both cases, emergent open source solutions became de facto standards when competing against industry commitee solutions. REST Vs RPC/SOAP is going the same way with the former edging slowly but surely past the latter.

Next stop is Ruby On Rails : there is a massive open source community around this new Framework to build full scale web applications. Despite what Cedric Beutch clever thoughts are on the subject, I still believe RoR will also become the new standard. The pressure of the open source community led by the alphageeks will make political decisions less and less sustainable for technical solutions.

The New Plane of existence

Most connected people has a second life, be it the game , Myspace new plane of existence as Kathy Sierra daughter's would put it , a blog or whathaveyou2.0. As David Armano is putting it in his Geek 2.0 definition they need us more than we need them. AlphaGeeks are now priceless assets of the global economy thanks to their ability to envision the way to build our digital world. Web 2.0 media democratization has allowed sub cultures to emerge and voice different opinions. This culture is now accepted and respected : having a digital (video games, technologies, internet) column in french culture magazines would have been unthinkable last century : it's now compulsory.

End result is : this stand-up comedy band joke isn't funny anymore (it has never been as I far as I am concerned) and golfers shall no longer rule the technical IT world. So respect where it's due : to the AlphaGeeks indeed.

No Jobs Vs Gates

Be warned ! There is no reference whatsoever in this blog about the Jobs / Gates meeting.

Enough words, gimme some pizzas

I talked about Matt&Kim in a previous post : here they are. This is what pop music is all about. Raw, funny, fresh, cheerful and catchy.

Dont miss the bit when they change the tee-shirt : the drummer tries to get her drum sticks back and she just misses one.

Superspecialize Me : leveraging Web 2.0 to entertain the neighborhood

Atomic Punk

I have just bought a new guitar amp. Believe me, this is a killer. The crispy, dynamic sound and the raw power of tubes, the vintage look. And the serial number 115.

I've been using this new generation of amp modeler technology. This is very handy : you can just plug anything (Headphones, PC speakers) to enjoy the great sound. It emulates famous vintage tube amps, comes with multiple effects and allows you to create your custom sounds. My problem was for live gigs, though : I needed a power amp.

Superspecialists gallore

Wandering around on the internet I've been amazed by the amount of information I've found. I'm not talking about "it's cool + it sounds great, lol" type of comments. I'm talking about real and thorough super expert reviews by the community.

Every single day I am amazed with how fast information and ideas spread all around the globe with the internet. And this cool side effects : internet creates super-specialist in about any domain. I'm not saying that this type of people didn't exist before the google years but hey ! sure they were not SUCH expert.

Sliding arm and sharing sense

I've met guys half my age on forums who know far more that I ever will on musical equipment. When I was that young, I would only know the sliding arm technique to tune my amp (sliding the arm on all the knobs at once to tune each one on level 10). Back then, they were no such teenager experts around : now they all are.

I guess this is what Wisdom of Crowd is all about. Or Seth Godin when he says that Web2.0 is about sharing sense while 1.0 was just about to get some hints.

Anyway : thanks to all these electronic conversations, I've eventually ordered my Atomic Reactor 212-50 to a small shop in Germany whose business is to exclusively distribute in Europe musical hardware coming from the US : Small is the new big indeed.

Having Serial number 115 of this amp designed in California, built in China, bought in Germany and delivered in France, I guess I've juste became a super-specialist enjoying the global long tail here ...

Internet moves so fast

Pumpkin

In the amazing and weirdo Maxinquaye album (a must have, in my personal 90s TOP10) by one hit wonder Tricky , there was this brilliant duet with Alison Goldfrapp : the track name is Pumpkin. It's a bit of a sticky and suffocating 6/4 ballad based on a Smashing Pumpkins sample (hence the title). In this song, Tricky, with his usual psychopath whispering voice goes "MTV moves so fast, I refuse to understand".

That's a bit of the the way I sometimes feel about the web 2.0 (MySpace owners saying they are the MTV of this generation makes it even more applicable) and the welter of technologies, toolkits, frameworks, langages and components coming down on us on a regular basis. On one hand I have to admit these really are exciting times to work in the IT world. But on the other, I cant help feeling discouraged by all the new stuff we have to go through to keep up to date. It was a bit of a relief to read even people like french Techcrunch feeling about the same (sorry I havent kept the actual link) .

Hibernate with GWT

I am sooooo depressed when I read guys like Sami saying in his nice blog post on GWT "When I want to learn about a new technology, I just hibernate for a few days preparing the material for a training on that very subject". This makes me feel so unprofessional. I have just finished doing my Spring and Hibernate self training. After a long time observing the Ruby or Groovy debate (I just dont have enough time to go through both), I have just ordered my Ruby On Rails book. But still, I just feel like a slacker, a part-time IT professional.

So here are my questions : how do all these tech savvy do to keep up to date with what's going on, where do they find the time to be (on top of their own job) superstars of the open source community ? Do they have special authorization to have 48 hours day ?

Walking the dog and running Tiger

Man, I have a family, a house to DIY on a regular basis, a dog to walk, a pop band to run, CDs to listen to, movies to watch , books to read, oh and secondarily, my own company to run (I'm self employed).

And you know what ? I think I'm not the only one. When I talk with my colleagues at work it just occurs that most of them don't know as much as I do on this new tech topics. All these techy web sites are the avant-garde of the IT world. Real world is a different story : as an example, I had about 10 jobs interview in February with different IT companies, none of them (well in management team at least) had ever heard of Ruby On Rails, none of them was running Tiger either. Okay I dont work in the Silicon Valley but still ...

So I guess that for us, the geek next door, they just are like Super heros. I'm not saying that we should not do anything to keep up with the technologies : we should do our best within the time and space that is given to us. And as the Radiohead song goes along, "the best we can is good enough".