mike.mainguy

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

I recently had an opportunity to work with Grails, Rails, and Java to solve some similar internal business problems. Dynamic languages are great productivity enhancers for a very small team of highly competent experts in the field. However, in the hands of an average programmer without rigorous guidance and careful review they should be classified as weapons of mass destruction. While I haven't yet tried this with Rails, I did make a recommendation (after using it myself) that we switch some of our simpler new CRUD applications to use grails. Heck, why screw around manually wiring in spring/hibernate/etc when you can use grails and get all kinds of neat things for free? The first problem we're struggling with in grails is that there are some cool and super ways to get things done, but because we can always revert to java, most people just do it the "java way". This means we've forsaken the safety of compile time checking and gained ... nothing. The second prob...

I just took a look at Google app engine. I wrote a quick dirt CRUD application to see what it's all about. It can be found at http://findmysport.appspot.com/ . What amazes me is that it is python based... I wonder why google uses python so extensively. I've used it for a number of things and find it very useful, but it just doesn't seem to have the momentum in corporate america of the "big J". On the other hand, it has tremendous street cred and is embedded in tons of open source tools. I found an interesting writeup here: Python at Google (Greg Stein - SDForum) it looks like google architects from the ground up and the guys on the ground said "python works for us".