Alpha 1 milestone is done. With four days to spare, all tickets are closed. It feels unreal. I can't even figure out what to write about it. It's done.
I guess the only way is onwards. There's tons of stuff that I haven't properly touched. There's the command line scripts, admin page/crud. Not to mention the proper website. Of course, I won't start on doing any of them, because I need to prepare some sample applications for the presentation I'll be having the 12:th. Hopefully it'll reveal some bugs in the software...
Oh, and I've been musing about registering the name Dogfood Software (or something similar) as the force behind LightFrame. Well, it was actually just a passing thought, that just didn't sound stupid one second later...
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Early Awesome Christmas Present!
WHOA! I just got the best Christmas present ever: lightframe.org. AWESOME! Thanks Ville!
A Tribal Manual
So, I finished reading Seth Godin's Tribes, meaning, it's time for yet another reviewlet.
For those who don't know Seth Godin, he's, among many things, a professional speaker. I guess I wouldn't make a great pigeon-holing error to call him a professional motivational speaker. He delivers great presentations. Some of his speaks are up on YouTube, and I highly enjoy watch him present whatever he has to say. Oh, and he has written some books, too.
In his latest book (Tribes, that is), he writes about how the world has changed, or is about to change, from ordering people to do your will to making people wanting to do what they want, making sure that, not incidentally, their want happens to coincide with your will. Converting from Bosses (those who boss people around) to Leaders (those who lead people around). Discarding the workforce and having instead, what he calls, a tribe.
A tribe, according to mr. Godin, is a collection of followers that authentically share your vision and idea. He brought up Steve Jobs a few times in his book, which, in my mind, is a prime example of a guy who has a big tribe – people that passionately, almost zealotously (no, that's not a real word), share and follow his vision.
As for the review: I must sadly say that I pretty much revealed the whole content of the book. Oh, I did leave one thing out. Instead of explaining it, let me just recite the subtitle of the book: "We Need You to Lead Us." Yup, that's pretty much it; after giving a definition to his meaning of "a tribe", he tells me that I can, and must, be a leader for my tribe. There's nothing in my way of becoming a leader, other than my own insecurities, fears and imagined hurdles.
In other words, this was a pep-talk book. I could easily imagine this book being a modified transcription of one of his gigs on stage. The book wasn't very organized and there was just header after header. Some longer and some shorter paragraphs. Endless examples of everyday leaders who were nobodies, just like myself, and became people who grew a tribe, and made a difference.
The problem is, I thought this was a book about how to grow a tribe, or even some hints towards that. Instead, this book was about how tribes are important, and that I, the reader, have no hindrances to growing one. The problem wasn't that I didn't buy every word he written – I did – but that I didn't need any convincing of becoming a leader. I also have grown a conscious resistance against motivational presentations (be it oral or written) for various reasons.
So, if you have a rebellious idea in your head, but don't know what to do with it, Tribes is the book I recommend for you. I, on the other hand, know exactly what to do with LightFrame (roughly meaning: working on it until either it takes off or I lose interest).
All things said, even if you don't need convincing, I wouldn't go as far as saying this book is unnecessary or even a bad buy. The 14€ I spent on this paperback were well spent, especially if I compare to the 55€ I spent on a book and a half. No, it's a useful book for everyone to read. It's just more effective on people who think something sucks, know exactly how it would be fixed, but don't fix it, for a reason or another.
PS: My cousin listened to the audiobook version of Tribes, and he liked it a lot. I believe him. Especially, when Seth himself was the narrator, I can believe that this book in a spoken performance would hit home in a much more effective way. Take this with a grain of salt, as this is the only book by Seth Godin that I have read, but he might be a better speaker than writer.
For those who don't know Seth Godin, he's, among many things, a professional speaker. I guess I wouldn't make a great pigeon-holing error to call him a professional motivational speaker. He delivers great presentations. Some of his speaks are up on YouTube, and I highly enjoy watch him present whatever he has to say. Oh, and he has written some books, too.
In his latest book (Tribes, that is), he writes about how the world has changed, or is about to change, from ordering people to do your will to making people wanting to do what they want, making sure that, not incidentally, their want happens to coincide with your will. Converting from Bosses (those who boss people around) to Leaders (those who lead people around). Discarding the workforce and having instead, what he calls, a tribe.
A tribe, according to mr. Godin, is a collection of followers that authentically share your vision and idea. He brought up Steve Jobs a few times in his book, which, in my mind, is a prime example of a guy who has a big tribe – people that passionately, almost zealotously (no, that's not a real word), share and follow his vision.
As for the review: I must sadly say that I pretty much revealed the whole content of the book. Oh, I did leave one thing out. Instead of explaining it, let me just recite the subtitle of the book: "We Need You to Lead Us." Yup, that's pretty much it; after giving a definition to his meaning of "a tribe", he tells me that I can, and must, be a leader for my tribe. There's nothing in my way of becoming a leader, other than my own insecurities, fears and imagined hurdles.
In other words, this was a pep-talk book. I could easily imagine this book being a modified transcription of one of his gigs on stage. The book wasn't very organized and there was just header after header. Some longer and some shorter paragraphs. Endless examples of everyday leaders who were nobodies, just like myself, and became people who grew a tribe, and made a difference.
The problem is, I thought this was a book about how to grow a tribe, or even some hints towards that. Instead, this book was about how tribes are important, and that I, the reader, have no hindrances to growing one. The problem wasn't that I didn't buy every word he written – I did – but that I didn't need any convincing of becoming a leader. I also have grown a conscious resistance against motivational presentations (be it oral or written) for various reasons.
So, if you have a rebellious idea in your head, but don't know what to do with it, Tribes is the book I recommend for you. I, on the other hand, know exactly what to do with LightFrame (roughly meaning: working on it until either it takes off or I lose interest).
All things said, even if you don't need convincing, I wouldn't go as far as saying this book is unnecessary or even a bad buy. The 14€ I spent on this paperback were well spent, especially if I compare to the 55€ I spent on a book and a half. No, it's a useful book for everyone to read. It's just more effective on people who think something sucks, know exactly how it would be fixed, but don't fix it, for a reason or another.
PS: My cousin listened to the audiobook version of Tribes, and he liked it a lot. I believe him. Especially, when Seth himself was the narrator, I can believe that this book in a spoken performance would hit home in a much more effective way. Take this with a grain of salt, as this is the only book by Seth Godin that I have read, but he might be a better speaker than writer.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Moving to Github
Because I can't get Assembla's git repository being shown to the public, I've decided to give github a try. I've already put stuff up to the repository. For the less-than-24-hours that I've used github, the features it provides seem pretty neat, at least compared to those in Assembla. The Pull Request might become handy, should the project take off and get more developers.
You are free to look at the code, download it, poke at it, modify it, break it, port it to Haskell and then sell it, if you so want – it is, after all, licensed under Apache 2.0.
You are free to look at the code, download it, poke at it, modify it, break it, port it to Haskell and then sell it, if you so want – it is, after all, licensed under Apache 2.0.
Friday, December 12, 2008
More Book Reviews and Commentary
The two books I mentioned earlier have now been read: Presentation Zen and slide:ology.
Presentation Zen
A nice book that any and every person that has to do any kind of presentation or speech (be it a status report, or a full-fledged Jobs-can-kiss-my-ass-two-hour-keynote). This really teaches you how not to suck at giving an oral presentation. I can not emphasize this enough. This book doesn't mention much concrete stuff about doing public speaking, but rather talks about, as the author calls it, the zen of presentations (hence the name); the dos and don'ts of PowerPoint presentations. Hell, let me reveal the biggest and most important thing the book tries to get across: Avoid bullet points at all costs. If you absolutely-positively-my-life-depends-on-it must use bullet points, keep them at a minimum. Even then, use huge font sizes.
This book belongs almost to the practical psychology category of books, and actually makes you a more likable person around the workplace, or wherever you are going to do presentations. Can't argue with that, now can you?
slide:ology
You want to read this only after Presentation Zen. You do not want to read them the other way around, or you'll ruin Presentation Zen. These two books are tightly coupled. I'm not sure who copied which, but they share content. Let me rephrase that: A few chapters are more or less copy-pasted from one into the other. Both books quote each others' authors. Presentation Zen first, slide:ology second. Trust me.
While the first three chapters in this book made me want my money back, I was perhaps a bit hasty in that judgement. Slide:ology is more of a hands-on kind-of-book. While Presentation Zen was more about the philosophy and psychology of doing presentations, slide:ology tries to give you concrete examples for your slides. The first three chapters was Presentation Zen in a tight nutshell. Once you skip them, you start to get to the original material, which is pretty interesting, case studies and all. There is the occasional shared content scattered also later on in the book, but since you already have read Presentation Zen, you are safe to skip (i did say skip, not skim) those parts.
Slide:ology works best as a reference book. There's not much you need to ingest and understand, unlike with the other book. Read it through once, put it in the bookshelf and take it out again once you have PowerPoint (or, as in my case, Keynote) running in front of you. Slide:ology tells you how an ad agency does its slides, what elements they to convey which pieces of information, etc.
So, that's that. Mini reviews: Ingest and embrace Presentation Zen first, then use slide:ology as a reference to how to build your slides (if you use slides, that is).
Commentary
So, I first sat down in front of my computer, opened FreeMind and started plotting stuff about LightFrame. Three hours of in-the-zone mindmapping later, I had all features pinned down – in a nice hierarchical manner, no less. Time for slide-making, I thought and launched Keynote. I subsequently hit a brick wall.
I realized that all this knowledge of how to deliver nice speeches and design un-sucky slides was worthless, without interesting content. What I had written down were only features and facts, not content. I could of course talk endlessly about how LightFrame works, what technical decisions I've made with each part of the design, the history of it and such. But who's interested in that. The most common theme of all practical psychology books I've read thus far have touted one thing, over and over again, with little variation in wording: People are only interested in what they can benefit from you.
People aren't there because they want to listen to me (actually, half of my audience will show up only for the company's breakfast, and will be oblivious of my presentation intents) – people are there to listen to what I have to offer them. That's a tough question to answer. I probably will be unsuccessful in giving a good answer to that. So, I'll aim at getting a few laughs out of them. Wait, make that a few approving nods...
As some wise and famous guy once said (paraphrased): I can deliver a five hour speech with only five minutes' preparation, but for a five minutes' speech, I need at least five hours of preparation. I could almost swear it was Churchill, but I can't find anything to back it up. Anyhow; I know now what this guy's talking about.
Presentation Zen
A nice book that any and every person that has to do any kind of presentation or speech (be it a status report, or a full-fledged Jobs-can-kiss-my-ass-two-hour-keynote). This really teaches you how not to suck at giving an oral presentation. I can not emphasize this enough. This book doesn't mention much concrete stuff about doing public speaking, but rather talks about, as the author calls it, the zen of presentations (hence the name); the dos and don'ts of PowerPoint presentations. Hell, let me reveal the biggest and most important thing the book tries to get across: Avoid bullet points at all costs. If you absolutely-positively-my-life-depends-on-it must use bullet points, keep them at a minimum. Even then, use huge font sizes.
This book belongs almost to the practical psychology category of books, and actually makes you a more likable person around the workplace, or wherever you are going to do presentations. Can't argue with that, now can you?
slide:ology
You want to read this only after Presentation Zen. You do not want to read them the other way around, or you'll ruin Presentation Zen. These two books are tightly coupled. I'm not sure who copied which, but they share content. Let me rephrase that: A few chapters are more or less copy-pasted from one into the other. Both books quote each others' authors. Presentation Zen first, slide:ology second. Trust me.
While the first three chapters in this book made me want my money back, I was perhaps a bit hasty in that judgement. Slide:ology is more of a hands-on kind-of-book. While Presentation Zen was more about the philosophy and psychology of doing presentations, slide:ology tries to give you concrete examples for your slides. The first three chapters was Presentation Zen in a tight nutshell. Once you skip them, you start to get to the original material, which is pretty interesting, case studies and all. There is the occasional shared content scattered also later on in the book, but since you already have read Presentation Zen, you are safe to skip (i did say skip, not skim) those parts.
Slide:ology works best as a reference book. There's not much you need to ingest and understand, unlike with the other book. Read it through once, put it in the bookshelf and take it out again once you have PowerPoint (or, as in my case, Keynote) running in front of you. Slide:ology tells you how an ad agency does its slides, what elements they to convey which pieces of information, etc.
So, that's that. Mini reviews: Ingest and embrace Presentation Zen first, then use slide:ology as a reference to how to build your slides (if you use slides, that is).
Commentary
As with How to Win Friends..., the story doesn't quite end here. Once I had read these two books in three days, I was psyched. I was pumped. I was ready to Deliver A Presentation. I had the know-how, I understood the philosophy.
So, I first sat down in front of my computer, opened FreeMind and started plotting stuff about LightFrame. Three hours of in-the-zone mindmapping later, I had all features pinned down – in a nice hierarchical manner, no less. Time for slide-making, I thought and launched Keynote. I subsequently hit a brick wall.
I realized that all this knowledge of how to deliver nice speeches and design un-sucky slides was worthless, without interesting content. What I had written down were only features and facts, not content. I could of course talk endlessly about how LightFrame works, what technical decisions I've made with each part of the design, the history of it and such. But who's interested in that. The most common theme of all practical psychology books I've read thus far have touted one thing, over and over again, with little variation in wording: People are only interested in what they can benefit from you.
People aren't there because they want to listen to me (actually, half of my audience will show up only for the company's breakfast, and will be oblivious of my presentation intents) – people are there to listen to what I have to offer them. That's a tough question to answer. I probably will be unsuccessful in giving a good answer to that. So, I'll aim at getting a few laughs out of them. Wait, make that a few approving nods...
As some wise and famous guy once said (paraphrased): I can deliver a five hour speech with only five minutes' preparation, but for a five minutes' speech, I need at least five hours of preparation. I could almost swear it was Churchill, but I can't find anything to back it up. Anyhow; I know now what this guy's talking about.
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