You can not imagine how easy it is to learn. If you want to every little piece that you read, see or hear can enrich and advance your bag of knowledge. You never know when you are going to use what you learn, but one day you will not regret that you born this baggage.

This time it was this neat post by Seth Godin. Simple yet powerful message, but there was one word that really caught my eye: "Moleskine" .

Did you know that Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway used the same notebooks and were all called Moleskine? I didn't.

It is really interesting that many of the sources referred to Moleskine as "legendary notebook". Some people argue that one should not buy Moleskines as they will not make him Hemingway or Van Gogh anyway and some no-name "set of sheets of paper put together" will do just fine. The important thing here is not that all those famous artists, writers and painters are great because of owning a Moleskine, which is apparently not true. The important thing is that there must be something to these Moleskines that made all those great people choose these notebooks and stick with them.

What you do is important not what you have. And if something can help you do better then it must be a good thing.

It has been a really long summer, winter, whatever blogging vacation for me. And I really feel sorry for that. The excuse for me is that I learnt a lot and will try to share my discoveries and observations with you from now on.

In this New Year 2009 I want to wish you to enjoy your life no matter what and always have a dream that will inspire you and drive you to success.

Happy New Year!

... someone has to be using it.

Guys from 37signals got it right:

It feels great to be done with something on the programming side and then feeling free to move on to the next thing. We all do that at times. But it’s not really real until our users are able to enjoy it.

Way too often more attention is paid to the process of creating something than to the actual value of the result for others. The truth is that value is realized not at the moment the product is created and the more so not in the process of creation. Value is realized when the product is delivered and used.

Declaration of Interdependence which is going (hopefully) to drive the way we manage projects puts essential focus on delivery of value:

We increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus

Like quality is everyone's business every day, so delivery of value should be.

Labels: Agile, Business, Software Engineering

Some days ago I watched David Heinemeier Hansson's presentation on creating a profitable startup where he suggests that is generally more effective to sell to businesses than individual customers. That was kind of a useful observation that I, not being very experienced in running businesses, took for granted.

In several days I concerned myself with checking out latest article in Joel Spolsky's column in the Inc.com magazine. It happened to be How Hard Could it Be: A Real Cool Customer. It was like one of those not rare alignment of stars that make certain idea pop-up again and again.

In his article Joel gives great arguments on why you'd better sell to businesses and not to consumers:

Businesses will happily spend large sums of money on fixed costs, because those costs can be spread out across so many of their customers.

Also Joel discusses this with Jeff Atwood in stackoverflow podcast #5, which I listened to yesterday.

This line of coincidences made me think a little about this idea. Being myself a part of a business I see that businesses pay easier not because they have lots of money (well, not only), but also because often for businesses it is easier to evaluate the value of certain costs.  Businesses can see how "costs can be spread out across so many of their customers" and what they would have in return. Individuals usually do not go that far to do such kind of analysis and therefore their decisions to buy tend to be based on momentary considerations.

Labels: Business, Startup

Software developers like being "agile", whatever this means. They say being "agile" liberates their creativity and lets positive energies of the Universe flow through them to the code to (hopefully) solve customer's problems. They are committed to using all the practices that e.g. XP suggests, but it generally would be better if somebody else writes unit tests.

For me definition of "agile" changed forever when I first watched David Anderson's  interview "Writing Agile Software" and read his book Agile Management for Software Engineering. All the other books on "agile" topics I've come across focus of how freaking cool it is to use agile to develop software, of course, from the point of view of developers. And you are a, hm-m-m, short-sighted conservator if you want developers to do development with, say, RUP.

"Agile" does not equal to "Say no to BDUF and documents". David in his book explains what is agile and why it is better for clients and their businesses.

Jurgen Apello in his blog provides a review for this book, but focuses mostly on the form, not the meaning. True, the book is not fun and makes you think, but it is gratifying when you finally get the clue. Again, this book is not about the fun you get working on agile project, it is about why agile works in business landscape.

Anyway, if you want to better understand the book my suggestion is to watch the video first.

Labels: Agile, Software Engineering

Via Presentation Zen I recently found out that videos from Startup school '08 are now available at Omnisio. If you like to hear smart people talking about interesting ideas then you should probably check them out.

So far I've watched David Heinemeier Hansson's presentation and Paul Graham's one and I should say I like what I see. Tim Bauer has published his notes from these presentations. You may also find them useful:

• David Heinemeier Hansson: Forget Free, Go Fee
• Paul Graham (YCombinator): Unleash the Cockroach In You

And, by the way, I agree with Paul that you should not drop out of college in order to just start making money.

Labels: Creativity, Startup

I recently subscribed to TechCrunch and so far I noticed 2 things:

• This blog literally chocks up my RSS aggregator (which happens to be Google Reader) so that I have to modify my reading habits not to miss posts from others feeds. Near dozen posts a day may be not that big number, but it definitely outperforms my other subscriptions.
• Every once in a while TechCrunch posts really touch my soul and make me stop to think.

One of such posts was What To Do With Failed Startup IP? It was always sad for me to see humans' ideas, aspirations, accomplishments becoming thrash. Be it physical objects or results of intellectual effort.

Labels: Technology