Tech & Work World

Quick Hits

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The look of a leader
Developer Events Run Down: What’s Coming Up and What Not to Miss - nice list of developer related events coming up
Comparing Uber &co. To traditional taxi fares - yes, indeed.
With New Analytics Service, Salesforce Challenges Startup Visualization Crowd - back in the 2000s or so, Business Intellegence was a natural next step for ERP. Once you’d gotten all the business’s data and info in one centralized place and were regularly updating, it wanted analytics. Little wonder that the first wave of BI companies were gobbled up by SAP, Oracle, and IBM. We’ll see how this next round does. It does point to an interesting/annoying issue in tech: each time the underlying platform changes (here, on-premises Unix/Windows to SaaS), you need new tooling on top of it, it seems. There’s some sort of “upward leaky abstraction” there that I think a lot of us miss because we don’t look at things in terms of 10 year chunks.
EMC Files Muted Response To Activist Investor Push For EMC-VMware Split - as one CEO who went through going private recently said, “you wake up every morning and it’s like your lawyer is by your side, all the way to going to bed.” So, you just don’t say much.
Effectiveness of Meetings in Development Process - see the larger overview of the Atlassian study this draws on. The thing about meetings is this: most people don’t know how to use email and what I jokingly call “The Internet” effectively. In white-collar world, the only effective place to collaborate is in a meeting. Think about it: we don’t eve have proper version control in Word and Excel, Intranet search is awful, people don’t like to share. Meetings for most people are the only time and place where they’re expected to meet an collaborate; worse, it’s the skills they have. Even worse, most people aren’t good at the skills of meetings: they don’t treat that 30-60 minutes like a unit of work, they treat it like passing the time. Developers have spent decades learning how to collaborate with just “The Internet.” There used to be a time before GitHub and blogs…and even Google! I guarantee you developers sat in meetings a lot back then. The white-collar people need to catch-up, but they spend very little time doing so; it’s a Rumsfeldian unknown-unknowns: they don’t even know there’s a better option. So, let’s fix that shit. And while we’re on the topic of Rumsfeld and meeting, it’s always good to revisit his “rules for successful meetings.”
Cloud to kill off legacy apps, says Rackspace CEO Taylor Rhodes