simondelliott

PONG is more than just a game … its a way of life

Have you ever wanted to learn a new programming language?
Have you ever had to introduce a student to programming?
Have you ever had to teach a team how to code for a new platform?

Well if you have you will know that all these are difficult jobs, most seasoned professionals will have done them many many times.

Its difficult to learn these things straight from books, infact to get the real experience you neeed to professionally make software quickly when you dont have the skills inplace its downright impossible.

I have a standard approach … and too keep it all fun it involves pong
.

When Im setting up a team using a programming language that they dont know, I ask them to make pong, without using copy and paste.
Pong is a simplistic game that involves very few computing tricks. However it is also very challenging for the platform. You dont need a functional spec before you start codeing as everyone knows pong.

The ball has to travel quite quickly.
The bats have move slowly enough to make it a challenge
The AI of the computer opponent can not be too good.

If they can make a good imitation of the game on the platform then you know that have a good grasp of the programming language. It teaches them how to structure the code, the repository, the build procedure and also how to get the most from the platform. You would be surprised just how many platforms Ive worked on that simply cannot run a good pong game.

If you love pong / programming and working in a team then join my Facebook pong group

Thoughts on thought leadership

Thought leadership is good because …

1. The “thoughts” that are published are valuable to your company, as they will make you Faster, more efficient or introduce new products
2. The “thoughts” that are published are valuable to other companies, who will see benefits in deploying your thoughts, you will therefore have their respect.
3. The “thoughts” that are published are valuable to individuals as it increases their profile and therefore sense of self worth

Thought leadership is about

1. Having good thoughts
2. Having good publishing
3. Having an effective publishing feedback loop

If you want to get into thought leadership

1. You must create a distribution channel
2. You must create an editorial team that is empowered to publish
3. You must create a community of thought leaders

If  you want to beat your competitors

1. You must accept that this will not happen over night it will take at least a year
2. You must find a way to allow the editorial team to freedom to make technical changes to their site and to have skills and resource available (i.e. you must beat their media organisation)
3. You must encourage controversial views and livley debate under your brand (thought leaders ideas are not the same as every one else’s, so dont over govern them).

If you achieve this

1. You will notice the diference in sales and marketing, leads will come from diferent directions
2. You will have better staff retention
3. New opportunities will be presented to you far further down the sales process,

A good management strategy is … there go my people, I must follow them. Your organisation probably already has some great thought leaders, you can nurture their media and editorial talents and help them to better publicise their thoughts.

Technical architecture drawings

Firstly I am a big fan of pen and paper.  A blank sheet is the best tool for a clear mind.

Secondly, index cards …. I use these almost every time that I am designing, you can CRC card with then, you can story card with them, you can plan a presentation with them, you can use them to carry water, you can support heavy objects with them …

For flow diagrams or software component diagrams I deliberately try to keep it simple and just use shapes in Visio, or Open Office.

I do however have a large number of shapes that I have made over the years, its a good idea to start collecting these as and when you make them. It really cuts down the time to make a diagram if you have a good libuary.

After a traditional flow diagram, the diagram that I find best describes a step by step procedure is a sequence diagram.

These diagrams are great for both software and people process and can often help to find glitches that cannot be seen with a traditional boxes and lines style flow diagram. I also find that when you talk someone through your thoughts with a sequence diagram, it really gets them to lean forward and understand the concept that you are trying to convey. I used to just draw these with either Visio or a proper drawing package (Flash, illustrator or Photoshop), but now I use umbrelo.

I recommend to any professional that uses diagrams to convey complex ideas, that they simply learn the standard drawing package, which is adobe illustrator. It is reasonably accessible to the beginner, but it can go much, much further.

Your diagrams will look much better
and as diagram styles change faster than drawing packages, over your whole career you will have less learning to do.

I prefer to use a wiki to publish the diagrams so that when others see them it invites them to comment and contribute to the problem that is being described. When you do this you invariably find that you have to render the diagram to an image so that it displays on the web page.

To make life easy for the possible contributors I have found that I have had to simplify the tools that I used to create the diagram, photoshop is a good choice as nearly everyone knows the package, but I guess visio would do just fine.

Design simplicity and the trouble with requirements.

I design products are either highly involved with the user interface on consumer devices or designing web portals that sell consumer media products, and I keep coming up against requirements wars.

The problem that I had with “requirements” was it was always less risky to add to them than to remove them. Political business people who did not care for the consumer user experience would often pile in a whole shed load of requirements that in some way benefited their department (sometimes this was just to halt development till their department could publicise a rival solution)

Inexperienced product managers and marketing people who were uncertain about user behaviour would always add bells and whistles till the original product concept was hidden in a miasma of crap

The result was always the same;
A requirements document that was compromised, with no design simplicity.

This often resulted in commercial failures, and blots the good name of my development.
Where as … the things that we “just did” and that managed to get highlevel backing often made headlines and were always met by rave reviews.

Agile offered me mild relief, as I could control scope or even back out of committing to products that were clearly plagued by too many stakeholders and requirement bloat, and I could do this even after development had started

The problem is that someone who is seeking to mitigate risks will see a small requirements set as a risk, where as this is not compatible with reality. Design simplicity is a great way to reduce risk, it is also a great way to make “nice to use” products.

My belief is not that it was the process of requirements gathering or the format of the requirements that causes the problem, as I over a number of years I changed this again and again trying to improve the number of hit products.

What I want to be able to understand is how the traditional requirements gathering procedure is compatible with increasing the risk so that a company can be commercially competitive?

A happy motivated company that is making good products operates at the highest comfortable level of risk.

The solution is … don’t have the traditional approach to requirements, make a list if you like but certainly don’t use it as your major design document. Instead make a diagram or picture or animation or movie or podcast or wiki or even code – any thing that best expresses the essence of the design

I want to Chrome, I want to go Chrome

We have lived with Google chrome for nearly two weeks and everyone is talking about it.
Half of us think it’s great, the rest are wondering what Google are doing with their data.

I’ve been looking at it and I have to say that it’s a great product, the design is sublime, it installs perfectly and it works on all my personal and work systems. To be impartial I tried to install IE8 but it never even got past the company firewall.

The release of chrome is shows that we have not only left the old world behind but that we have arrived somewhere new. Innovation lead companies like Google are taking on the old process lead companies like Microsoft, as Dorothy would say “Were not in Kansas now Toto!”.

One last question … What If Google really is evil?

How to make the most of your enterprise wiki

Top tips and tricks for the for the new wiki user

So you’ve installed a wiki in your company and some people love it but other don’t … dont worry here are some tips and tricks to get you going.

1. You may wonder why people are not visiting your project or team wiki, use the news or blogging feature to keep people coming back.
2. Make it look great, make your wiki look better than the other ones at your company, If you can afford it hire a graphic designer to do it for you.
3. If you want to author content quickly ditch the rich text editor – use the wiki markup instead, its really easy and much faster.
4. If you want to bring a team together quickly – create a new wiki for them
5. Once you have a wiki for your team, create a blog, get some discussion going
6. If you see a page you like, open it, look at the markup and copy it
7. Use pictures to emphasise points
8. look on the web – there are literally millions of how to articles
9. If you cant do it then someone has made a plugin that will
10. Instead of emailing the content, send a link and ask for them to add comments to the page
11. Leave empty links in your content so that others can help fill out the content

remember, some people just dont like collaborative working … try and support them, but dont give in.

How to generate ideas

All you need is one piece of paper, your favorite cafe, a pencil and a lack of inhibitions

Often I am asked to think up a few ides on a specific topic, or to come up with a new architecture for a product.

This can be really difficult, especially when you have to get somthing quick. Here is one of the methods that I use to do this I call it an Ideas sheet.

The process is straight forward,

1. get out of the office … find a cafe, park, street corner any where that is comfortable that you are in control of any interuptions.
2. get a blank piece of paper,
3. Clear your mind for a while
4. Think about the essence of what is being asked for,
   who is it for?
   why is it fun?
   what is so great about it?
5. When you get an idea write it down on the paper, if words are too restrictive … then draw a picture.
6. Now try to completely forget the last idea, turn the page up side down so that you cant read it. or place another piece of paper on to of it.
7. Go back to thinking of the essence of the issue or what you want to make, when you get an idea .. repeat.
8. Now just keep going till the paper is full
9. If you spend more than an hour on this then give up, try again another day.

As you can see this often makes some funny ideas. Which are all good. When you come to discuss the ideas with your collegues they can all have a good laugh, which really helps with making the job fun.