Entries from September 2005 ↓

Good to see that Activehotels, the company at which I cut my dot-com teeth, have started a travel blog. Not sure if it lives up to its tagline yet – ‘Travelectomy – removing the dull parts of travel’ – but we’ll be watching…

Not that they’ll listen to me again, but all you activehotels bloggers, why don’t you link to other travel blogs in the same way as SlowTrav does? And why, if you’re mentioning the Dog Collar Museum on your blog won’t you link to its webpage?

Interesting presentation from Adam Bosworth, VP of Google, talking about how the way to win is not through a 5-year plan, but through confidence in your ability to ‘intelligently react’.

The gem in this speech – though not its main subject – is that there is no useful distinction between operations and development. Successful development teams are initimate with the operational realities and specifically with the people who are using your product.

By widening the definition of ‘development’ to include any part of the business that needs to create, learn and build we come to the conclusion that it’s hard to outsource a developing business not because of distance or process or communication – but because the context of learning should be the context of your operational, day-to-day, business and that that context tends to happen in-house.

Revieworld is growing and desk-space is getting tight. So, my desk having been usurped by one of the development team, I find myself blogging from the small round table that we also use for improptu meetings.

It’s much smaller than my previous desk with neither drawers nor filing space. So I’ve transferred my files to a box that I cart around with me.

Previously, my desk was piled with documents, scraps of paper, bits and pieces, etc. Now I leave the office with the table clear and everything sensibly filed. I feel much more organised and am working more in the here-and-now than before. The only thing that’s bad is that the size of my previous desk carved out a larger part of the office that was clearly mine, whereas now those implicit boundaries have disappeared.

We’re getting some new furniture delivered this week and I may be going back to big-deskness.

Not sure if it’s such a great thing…

Last night I read Behind Closed Doors – a book about technical management that I’d actively recommend to anyone, technical or not.

It’s great to read a management book that focuses on my own mantra: people over process every day. Now if I could just live by that…

My favourite development tale this week.