October 2007

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i like monkeys gets a new home

October 26, 2007 in Monkeys | 10 comments

I hear this a lot: Hey, you’re the monkey guy, right? Indeed, I have gotten far too much mileage out of a simple text file that I got off the Internet in the mid-90s that I did not write. Nor do I know who originally wrote it. But there’s a new location for I Like Monkeys since I’m sure that Red Hat will eventually remove my people page.

I’m pretty sure this is not worth an entire web log entry, but hey. Here it is.

and now everything will be different

October 19, 2007 in Fedora, GNOME, Mozilla, Red Hat | 34 comments

Today is my last day working at Red Hat. I’ve been there for nearly nine years – most of my adult life – and I have a lot of fond memories. In some ways I would say that Red Hat and I grew up together. Working in three cities: Raleigh, Toronto and Boston, getting to work at the center of some very interesting projects and having the ability to work as people should: transparently and honestly with an amazing team. I couldn’t ask for much more than that.

As for what’s next, starting in mid-November I will be joining the Evangelism team at Mozilla Corporation. Working with Shaver, Deb, Eric, John and Mark to help tell the story of the Open Web. My role will be to work with other open source projects that are well aligned with Mozilla’s mission and help them take part in writing that story.

I’m incredibly excited about this opportunity. The people at Mozilla are fantastic and what they have done so far has been great for everyone who uses the Internet. I’m hoping that by joining them and working with them on a day to day basis that I can help accelerate the accomplishment of their mission.

It’s going to be a great time.

curious baby is curious

October 18, 2007 in Samantha | 3 comments

random links for 2007-10-18

October 18, 2007 in Design | 4 comments

  • Design is Arrogance. Design is Humility. Indeed, I feel that I fight this battle inside myself all the time. When do you assert? When do you listen? When do you draw out what people are feeling when you think they are hiding how they really feel? How do you see beyond what someone is telling you?
  • Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management. [ Part 2 ] [Part 3]. In particular I loved this line: A turnaround is a transformation tragically delayed. Sounds similar to a lot of questions that I had to ask myself when I first started managing people: How do you get the best from people? How do you effectively push ownership of execution and decision making as far down into an organization as possible? (Funny, considering I was managing individual contributors and not other managers – over-optimizing, possibly?) How do you make sure that ideas flow up instead of down? How do you make sure that organization-wide goals are properly transmitted, understood and made relevant to everyone? (Organization-wide goals are rarely directionally actionable, it seems.) How do you make sure that the best ideas get attention? How do you make your best people even better? Heavily related to the design questions, I think. There’s a common theme here but I can’t quite put my finger on it yet… In any case I will have to buy this book. I am always looking for more thoughts on transformation.
  • And just so that everyone out there doesn’t think I’m a total over-thinking loser: A cereal bowl that keeps your cereal crunchy while you eat your breakfast. It took me years to find the proper rice krispies / milk balance, along with the rush to eat it before everything turned to mush. I was looking at it the wrong way. Years I have been waiting for this product – Years.

random links for 2007-10-15

October 15, 2007 in Design, Mozilla | 1 comment

Lots of random stuff is showing on the Intertron today. A random sampling:

  • Lessons about failure. Talking about the importance of failing fast. Try and avoid the success bias if you can. Corollary is that the way to succeed is not based on intelligence but is based on how many times you try. Also, luck helps.
  • Wal-Mart driving product innovation and sustainability through their entire supply chain. Some interesting things here. I liked this quote from their CEO: We have simply started. We make no claims of being a green company. We’re not saying we’re better than anyone, we’re not saying we’re doing it right. What we’re saying is that we recognize an opportunity to make a difference in this world, make a difference for our customers, for our shareholders, for our associates, and it is worthwhile to do.
  • John Maeda talking about leadership and management. The difference between the two is a line that is often blurred and I think that most people fail to understand or explore. Leader and manager are both roles that are most effective when they are blended together in the same person. Not just showing people where to go and how to get there but also how to develop them as people and give them as much responsibility and decision making as they are willing to take and competent to handle. See above: failing faster.
  • Automation tools to advance Mozilla’s code base. These guys are crazy. Crazy good, I mean. Investing in static analysis and automation tools that will help move from a reference counting system to a GC system in a way that doesn’t require manual movement of that code, something that would take man-decades to approach. You invest a couple man-years of effort and you end up with tools that not only make it possible to make that move in a short amount of time, but also give you new views into the code that you have and more capabilities down the road in the area of analysis and measurement. This could be pretty damn awesome.

delight

October 10, 2007 in Freedom | No comments

I have no idea if this is a verbatim quote or not, but I loved this little snippit on boingboing about Yahoo! talking to record execs. (If nothing else it aligns with what little I know about how Yahoo! fanatically approaches users – something that they rarely get enough credit for.)

I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.