mike.mainguy

First off, let me confess, I am employed by Sears Holdings Company, so my evaluation might have some bias. I have tried very hard to be as unbiased (for OR against) as possible. That having been said, one thing that really bothers me is how many large retailers with an online presence continuously fail to understand basic things like web design. As a quick and unscientific measure, I thought I'd review a big box retail sites and give a quick once over. The selections are based on my personal preferences and have no real scientific backing. Let's use the following sites: Wal-Mart Sears (obviously) Target To make it real, I'm actually going to try and buy some new socks. It's winter here in Chicago and my last pair of Smartwool socks now has a hole in it. Again, not scientific, pretty practical. First off, the 800lb gorrilla of retail. One thing that blows me away is the huge waste of real estate for anyone with a wide-screen monitor. If you look at this image,...

I was reading slashdot this morning and saw an interesting ad pop up. It was for a site called http://www.earncashfastwithgoogle.com . It sure smelled funny, but thought it was an amusing approach. From what I can determine it's something like: #1 Target advertising #1 Ask a bunch of questions to "Qualify" the applicant (Optional?) #2 ask for some cash up front to "ship" the "instructions" (Dubious) #3 Profit! First of I took [very quick] peek on google about this and found a couple of complaints: here . Then, I started thinking about it... What better way to make money than to charge people a very low amount of money for instructions on how to make money. From what I can see, while this really seems like it could be a bit unethical, it is an interesting way to make money. If one keeps the number of people "in" the network widely distributed enough and keeps the costs low, this could continue this for quite some time. I'm not a l...

A quick question, how is Information Technology like the proverbial genie in bottle? I don't know if you're familiar with the story, here's how it goes: A man finds a genie's bottle, opens it, and in a cloud of smoke, out comes a genie. The genie states "Your wish is my command, what would you like me to do for you?". The man immediately responds with "Make me a million dollars!". Can you guess comes next? Well, in the story, there is a large poof of smoke, and where the man was previously standing, a lifeless pile of money has now appeared. The genie as literally transformed the man from a living breathing human into a pile of money. Now for the Philosophical part: Did the Genie do the right thing? Obviously he did what the man said to do, but is that likely what the man really wanted? Probably not. When a business client starts asking for things, many organizations begin scrambling around doing EXACTLY what they heard was desired... "Bu...

I'm amazed at how flawless some people think they are. Judging by the responses I often get to questions, I happen to work at an organization with a handful of people who NEVER make mistakes and know the answer to EVERYTHING. Oddly enough, though, these people seem to always have to work with a bunch of morons who never understand the genius in their presence. It seems like my job has become that of gradually bringing a lot of these folks down off their high and enlightening people to problems with their reasoning. There seems to be an abundance of overconfidence in IT that "I know what I'm talking about" without and abundance of careful thought about all the options available to us or the inevitable consequences (everything has a down side). The troubling thing is, while there are obviously solutions to make this determination (documentation...), there are really no economical ways to determine if someone has done the careful thought or not in the time scales our...

As someone who is ushering in a new customer focused software development process at a very large corporation. I'm certainly validating a many tried and true axioms that we all know and love. I thought I'd share a few of what I feel are the most important: A team of great players doesn't necessarily make a great team A team is a group of people who have interconnected things to do that will bring an organization closer to it's goals. If the organization can reach it's goals with only 1 member of the team contributing, then it's not a team, it's just a bunch of people in the same organization. One problem is that there are people who are legitimately superstars. In the time it takes the rest of us mere mortals to print off initial copy of the requirements, they have: comprehended the requirements, acquired some dev infrastructure, built a prototype, and are asking questions about problems that have occurred. The problem is, with a whole team of people li...

After a brief (okay, six month) hiatus, I'm continuing to work on my app engine app. One thing I'm noticing is that it appears that data access is considered pretty CPU intensive. I'm not sure if this is because they're abstracted IO and CPU to a higher level and just labeled EVERYTHING as CPU or if their method of getting to data actually uses more CPU than one would expect. I tend to think it's the former because there is no apparent measurement for IO. --Begin shameless plug In any event, check out my progress at http://findmysport.appspot.com --End plug