Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

As a proud gadget geek, I’ve got my first palm (a palm III) when I was still a student: at this time in France it was more of a geek oddity than the cool and fashionable gadget for young executives it was in the US. (things have changed, and now in France or US it is no more than a “has never been” gadget )
I was REALLY using it, for all my contacts and all those tiddibits of information one needs to acced/enter anytime. Then I grow up, I began to work with a wifi notebook and above all a cellphone was always in my pocket: my beloved palm Tungsten 3 had been downgraded to a poor game boy like device…And one inspired day I bought a Treo 650 on eBay.
I’m really amazed by this device:

• The keyboard is BRILLIANT, fast, precise: I can really use it to enter data (like this post, or above all ideas/todos).
• It is a phone…so it is CONNECTED email, sms, web all in one package, in comparison my bluetooth phone + my tungsten T3 was a lame package (The treo phone part is good enough to forget easily my K700i).
• And above all it is COOL&FUN to use it

The key part of the equation is that I’ve became addicted to my own adapted (rather simple) GTD methodology, and the treo, as a great data gathering and consulting device really makes the whole thing …hum…should I say efficient?
A next action to add/change/mark as complete…treo. A whiteboard to be saved after a meeting…take a picture with the treo. A new idea that will revolutionize the whole world (hey a boy also can dream)…add a todo or note in the treo.A quick mail check/send…treo.
I’ll describe more precisely my GTD implementation in another, long term due, post.
Anyway I’ve came up with few downsides:

• The treo is far from being as thin as my K700i, and you look like a kind of goldorak/bioman/power ranger with this small brick on your ear … Now I really use my bluetooth headset
• If you have a good keyboard…it is easier to write messages…my sms plan has exploded.
• If you have a good browser/mail app and it is easy and quick to be connected….your data plan, like mine, will explode
• Add/test/remove/configure applications … Procastination takes a looooong time, but it is sooooo fun (more on my treo setup in yet another post)

So for now I use my treo everytime, for everything… Did I say waiting for the next gadget? Anyway I really feel this time I USE my gadget, I’m not only PLAYING with it…perhaps after all I’m really growing up…brrrr…frightening isn’t it?

After 4 lost bids cause I was not in front of my computer and/or I’ve not checked my email, I decided to react! I need to be notified on the only thing I carry around (beside my palm, my trousers, my keys, …) : my cellphone. Here is a really simple trick to achieve that (if you are an orange user) :

• In your gmail account (? what, you don’t have one? ask me one if you need) add a filter working on the address watchnotice@ebay.fr
• Set this filter to forward the mail to yout orange mail (yournumber@orange.fr)
• Enable your mail in your orange portal
• ….tadam! you recieve an SMS on your cell.

Hope this helps, my 2 cents, and all this kind of little things.

To be fun, hype and cool today you have to read your news throught RSS feeds (ok not sure it will bring you a lot of sex apeal, or any social success in big garden party … a geek can dream). Simply going on cnn.com to get your daily dose of news, then to slashdot is sooooo old fashionned. Google and Yahoo were already aggregating many things for you, but as a technology overlord you need something less common here come the rss and blogs are coming to your rescue. Yahoo, slashdot, and many other “corporate” web sites are offering feeds, plus many individuals via their blog: it is now possible to make your own news aggregation, choosing your sources, and at a glance, you can visit all those sites in few minutes staying in your feed reader without opening your web browser … thus missing the beloved “side links”, best path to discovery.
It may sounds paradoxal, but choosing the news we will read on an “a priori” basis has a strange side effect: we only read the same things, on the same subjects/topics, forgetting the rest of the world knowledge.
I have around seventy (70!!) feeds in my agregator, and, as a glorified geek, 30 are toward technology/hardware/Palm, 20 for GTD productivity, 7 for comics … and only 10 for general news, and to be honest the later ten are many time left unred.
So OK, I loose less time wandering around the net searching for fun and cool news … but I always read the same kind of things, missing the great discoveries that can only happen jumping from link to link: my point of interests are more radical, more focused … but really less fun and rich, it’s time to react! Let’s go back to web wandering …

Thomas

I’ve came up with this question recently : I need a new team member, but How to choose him/her? What are the good criterions? The right interview questions?.
With my point of view in mind, I’ve made a first interview and, after the interview, found this post at lifeHack.org which emphasizes on reading code from the candidat (I can’t disagree more), but point to a nice entry from artima (?).

For me an interview has to be fair: When I was myself a candidat I enjoyed my interviews (ok, difficult to really enjoy this bright stress moment for a junior) when I had the feeling that I shown what I was ABLE TO DO, that I understood QUICKLY what the interviewers explained, that I had no issue COMMUNICATING with them … But it was no all the time like that, and many interviewers were only looking at my diploma (a good one in France) or my communication skills, really never going down to the code, algorithm, scientific/technical culture etc: even if this last interview category led to some job proposal, I had a mixed feeling about the company: Why did they choose me? They don’t know If I’m goog or bad, Are they all like that? …and so what are the core values in that company? certainly not technical, so “political”?

So I’ve took some times before the interviews, and here are my own tricks to have the feeling to not loose my time and the candidat one’s :

• What profile do I really need? … a good question isn’t it? In my case I need a programmer…
  • …but it’s not enough, here a some more precise profiles:
    1. An Executant: someone able to execute well defined tasks, great organizational and coding skills… the “process” kind of guy, able to finish cleanly a product.
    2. A Communicant: this one is able, and like, to be in front of client, write docs and presentation.
    3. A Creative: someone able to bring new ideas to the table, able to impose those ideas, invent new things (certainly not an executant…), this one will defines what he has to do.
    4. The guy who fiddles around: give him something, it will work … but forget about testing and process…
    5. Background : this one is not a profile, but is a measure of the scientific and technical culture of the candidat.
  • Knowing those profiles I try to give a % to each profile for the best match I’m looking for (ex : Executant: 70% Communicant: 5% Creative: 5% Fiddle: 20% for a good release manager ). Giving that it’s now possible through questions to “extract” this profile … and see if it is matching.
• Execution Skills
  • Asks for process vision: versionning tools, branching process.
  • Testing: Testsuites? is it something normal for him? who has to test a code.
  • Release view and policies: When could he say that his code is ready to be externalized, what citerions did he choose?
  • C/C++ Code questions (we have a pretty good question list here in Open-Plug ): Synthaxe questions, memory management, etc…
• Creation Skills: Find some good exercises (I have some good one .. thanks Cadence!), be sure the candidat doesn’t know the exercise before, and listen carefully to the ideas, good and bad he is trying to complete (or not) the exercise.
• Communication Skills:
  • Let him explain a big and complexe project he has been involved in, if you don’t understand … the candidat has perhaps a communication issue .. or worse few synthetic skills.
  • Talk a little of his passion, hobbies, etc.
  • Try to put him in “bad and stressfull” situation (the exercise given to check its creative skills can be enough )
• Fiddle Skills: See if he had done some “personal” technical project, from the ground and how he made it working. How autonomous he can be?
• Technical Culture: Let him talk about its skills … and ask anything that are (or not) related to your own expertise field, just to see if he is curious and a self-teaching kind of guy.

For me the idea to see some of the candidat own code can be a “false good idea”: Now that I’ve worked with a lot of different coders, on different projects, I can safely affirm that no one code as any other one, and that at first sight I’ve never liked ANY code not written by me, and many times for bad reasons. The only important thing are architecture, algorithm and professionalism (CPU and memory care, readability, testing coverage), but to judge a snipet of code in few minutes we tend to only focus on synthax, programming style and tricks and so only on the style, not the content…bad idea to say the least.

Thomas

Update: Sergiu gave me some nice references for technical questions (mostly C++) :

• http://www.beyondcode.org/articles/interview.html
• http://www.techinterviews.com/?p=238#more-238
• http://www.geekinterview.com/Interview-Questions/Languages/C-Plus-Plus/
• http://www.duke.edu/web/ACM/interview.html
• http://www.possibility.com/epowiki/Wiki.jsp?page=CppInterviewQuestions
• http://oneparticularharbor.net/sam/interview.html

Again, I ‘ve tried software to … gain time, putting my business laptop stability in jeopardy, loosing hours of processing and hard drive stress use for indexing and re-indexing my files, slowing down my PC to the point where it was barely usable … everything to be sure at the end that I have choosen the best desktop search application … what a satisfaction Despite this infinite source of happiness, I hope this test will help you choose the best solution for you!

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Ok, it’s time for me to face reality : I have a team, I have too much work, I have to get serious about my productivity.
So let’s go web shopping for Productivity secrets ! … and let’s face a second reality : I love to dig for information, try software, in a word, loose my time playing with new toys, not sure it is good for my current issue .
Being a proud arrogant froggy, I feel really uncomfortable with the zillion of anglo-saxon self-management craps we can found everywhere, promoting the same mantra every time :”If you really want it, you can do it”.
Then I found a great community around a great Guru with an interesting approach : David Allen and it’s GTD, “Getting Things Done”. For me all the great “teaching” books has to be easy to read, all the depicted ideas have to appear as simple and good sense ones, and above all make me feel that, with an hour of thinking, I could have come up easily with a fair amount of those “brilliant” ideas . The Allen’s Book is one of those. It’s not one of those change-your-lifestyle-with-mine approach, but a more personal one, Allen seems to say : “Ok, you are good at what you are doing, I’m good at productivity, let me give you some tricks I’ve learn, and see if it fits”. Ok, I like that.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying tools, tuning my setup, reading web blogs, etc…

1. I’ve lost A LOT of time studying
2. I’ve lost A LOT of time tweaking a system that may fit my needs, even learnt VBA to tweak Outlook and adds macros…
3. I’ve lost A LOT of time … because I began tweaking my system before discovering my needs
4. I have a A LOT of FUN doing that

Now it’s time to use it …. ahum, do I really need that? Is that all? Only few categories in Outlook? those four added buttons?… Yes I think it is, the real step, as always, is in my mind, not on my laptop: what I’ve learnt, tools stay tools, a mean, not a finality, and many time, especially in computer science, we tend to forget that!
My day to day practice is changing (albeit slowly), following those common sense principles:

• Even if it may sounds obvious, GTD made me really think about what has to be DONE, how to translate “stuffs”, ideas, meeting outputs into actionable items : giving time to extract tasks from this information magma, on a systematical basis, is, for me the greatest contribution from Allen.
• Power of delegation without loosing control.
• If something takes less than 2 minutes, DO IT NOW.
• Track, write and forget : once actionable items are extracted, store them in your system (delegate or deferre them) … and be confident in your system, forget: it gives you the freedom to think about new ideas, longer term goals … precisely what I was missing, as I was overhelmed by short-terms goals and views.

Those four points may sound like GTD propaganda, blablabla … but, to be honest I’m myself surprised to follow them naturally, with few efforts. David Allen gave principles, few details, and I think, like Kathy Sierra in her great post Making happy Users, that fewer details equals better identification and appropriation of the ideas. Check also Metagrrrl Post about a similar GTD point of view.
Does it really helps my productivity? Not sure at this time. So does it help me ? definitively, cause I have less and less of those “little-things-to-change-to-improve-to-say-to-write” in mind, leaving room for more important thinking.

I’ll certainly add some other posts about my setup, my outlook/evernote customization, desktop search etc.

As a side effect of all this self-teaching I’ve discovered many great blogs and posts, particularly those GTD few ones:

• Working Smart
• Office Zealot and The Latest Getting Things Done Blogs
• GTD Wanabe
• The famous 43Folders

And a special mention to the excellent Creating Passionate Users, that has nothing to do with productivity, but is one of my preferred read, waiting eagerly each new post with a mixed feeling od admiration …and yes jealousy for the Kathy Sierra’s style sharp mind and clever comments, thanks Kathy for sharing your talent! Do not miss her posts about the Devil’s advocate or Making happy Users.

For english readers … sorry for my style but, hey, I’m french

Thomas

Ok, I have a big hard drive … sounds cool? Not that much cause I’ve a really hard time retreiving my data : I have over 700Mb of mails in outlook, Gigs of specifications and docs and many CVS trees full of source code…. Here comes the Desktop Search apps to my rescue. But which one is the right/best for me? So here we go for a round-up of the four main players : Copernice Desktop Search, Yahoo Desktop Search, Google Desktop Search, Windows Desktop Search

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Ok, I use it for a few months now with a 1Go San Disk SD card Ultra II, a wedding, our holidays many many shots … (see the family blog for shots)

• Battery life : impressive, the first quality of this model.
• Move recording : why by a camcorder??? really great movies.
• FAST,FAST and FAST
• Advance mode (ie video recording runs in background and it keeps 5s of film BEFORE your press the record button, you never miss this lovely baby smile…)
• Did I say it was FAST ?
• Flash is OK, not perfect…..
• Autofocus : correct … but FAST

So this is a great one! costs around 300 euros now, my father and three of my (pretty techy) friends had bought one, and are all quite happy. Bravo Casio, you’ve won an happy customer!

Thomas