595 Calories of Goodness

I admit it ... I love Milk Duds. I can't really explain why; I just do.



Maybe it's the sinfully-gooey caramel that covers my teeth after the duds themselves are gone. Maybe it's the fact that they are so perfectly sized. Maybe it's the way the candy shakes in the box with its hollow thud sounds.

All I know is today they saved me. I ended up working through lunch and didn't have anything at the office to beat back my upset stomach ... except a 5 OZ box of Milk Duds. So today I'm happy to admit that I'm thankful for those delicious, sticky, yummy bites of chocolate-covered caramel. And for those of you out there who agree with me (you know who you are), I stand with each of you expressing my shared love for the candy.

Does the past ever fade?

I sometimes find myself trapped in the most inexplicably vivid flashbacks from my youth. Teenage years in Europe -- if you didn't live it, you wouldn't understand it. And I often want to spend time with those who've lived the life but have nobody local with whom I can relate. For example, if you don't know where this picture was taken, then not to be rude, but I'm probably not interested in a discussion of the good ol' days:



Alpine-rich camping in Kandersteg, Switzerland; sport-centered winters in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany; crazy-long train rides to Warsaw, Poland; pseudo-educational experiences in The Hague, Netherlands; late-night clubbing in Frankfurt, Germany; randomly-fun shopping in London, England ...

... is it wrong for me to wish that I could forget it all?

I've Tasted Summer ...

... and boy was it sweet!



For those of you in the audience who have been living on another planet, Chick-fil-A has their new peach milkshake available for your own guilty enjoyment. I'm sure it's loaded with calories and generally bad for you, me, and the rest of America's overweight population, but really ... the taste of summer is sometimes just too sweet to resist.

On a side note, Chick-fil-A is one of those good ol' southern companies that originated in Georgia in the early 1960s and still sticks to its guns by closing their stores on Sundays so employees can have their "day of rest." So peach milkshakes aside, I am also an ardent supporter of their respect for the Sabbath.

Ingenuity at Work

Here's my beautiful wife cutting onions on Thanksgiving morning and using her noggin' to cut down on the tears. Yes ... those are swimming goggles. I have to admit, I just LOVE her ingenuity!

Accountability?

That about sums up the so-called current economic crisis.

Stop and Smell the Beans

My friend and I stopped by Central Market today after lunch to get some bread and butter for the office. While we were walking through the store, I couldn't help but notice all of the unique offerings that were literally staring at me from the crammed shelf space. Finding items like Frostie sodas and U-bet flavored syrups always makes me happy. Maybe it's because seeing those offerings reaffirms the fact that there's always room for the "little guy."



Anyways, as we were walking toward the bread section, my nose caught scent of coffee beans in whole-bean format. While I don't drink coffee (you can read why here), I absolutely love the smell of coffee beans. And today one bean, in particular, drew me in for the sniff -- a Texas pecan blend. Incredible smell!

So there I was, haunched over the barrel of beans with my head inside and my nose within prime smelling distance of 6 inches or less, when my friend alerts me to the fact that I look rather silly. Oh really? Oh well.

Review : Smart & Gets Things Done

I just finished a quick read titled, "Smart and Gets Things Done" that reaffirmed many of the things I currently believe and introduced a few new points to ponder as I move forward in my pursuit to make the future better -- wherever I end up. After sharing my CliffsNotes version with a trusted co-worker, he pressured me to share my review via this platform. In fact, he went so far as to say that I wouldn't be "hard-core" if I didn't, so, to avoid being viewed as soft, here it is ... enjoy:

1. The process of hiring great technical talent is an elimination course (p. Introduction X).

2. From the very beginning, we were always totally convinced that our number one priority was hiring great people, even before we knew what kind of software we would make. (p. Introduction XIV).

3. The common belief is that when you're building a software company, the goal is to find a neat idea that solves some problem which hasn't been solved before, implement it, and make a fortune. We'll call this the build-a-better-mousetrap belief. But the real goal for software companies should be converting capital into software that works (p. 1).

4. ... design adds value faster than it adds cost (p. 4).

5. Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later (p. 10).

6. You can't afford to be number two, or to have a "good enough" product. It has to be remarkably good, by which I mean so good that people remark about it (p. 17).

7. THE PLAN: Best Working Conditions --> Best Programmers --> Best Software --> Profit!

8. The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market (p. 20).

9. Think about where the people you want to hire are hanging out (p. 23).

10. One good way to snag the great people who are never on the job market is to get them before they even realize there is a job market: when they're in college (p. 25).

11. There's a strong culture in Silicon Valley that requires you to jam a lot of programmers into a big open space, despite a preponderance of evidence that giving them private offices is far more productive (p. 43).

12. You're not going to get great developers if you don't respect them (p. 52).

13. Who wants to work at a company where jerks are tolerated (p. 53)?

14. Basically, if you're going to hire smart people, you're going to have to let them apply their skills to their work. Managers can advise, which they're welcome to do, but they must be extremely careful to avoid having their "advice" interpreted as a command, since on any given technical issue it's likely that management knows less than workers in the trenches, especially, as I said, if you're hiring good people. Developers want to be hired for their skills, and treated as experts, and allowed to make decisions within their own realm of expertise (p. 54-55).

15. [Programmers] don't care about money, actually, unless you're screwing up on other things. If you start to hear complaints about salaries where you never heard them before, that's usually a sign that people aren't really loving their job (p. 63).

16. It is really, really important to remember that these categories – Passion, Pickiness, English, Brains, Selectivity, Hard-Core, and Diversity – are not hiring criteria (p. 74).

17. For someone who is basically a good software developer, learning another programming language is just not going to be a big deal. In two weeks, they'll be pretty productive (p. 80).

18. People who are Smart but don't Get Things Done often have PhDs and work in big companies where nobody listens to them because they are completely impractical. They would rather mull over something academic about a problem than ship on time. These people can be identified because they love to point out the theoretical similarity between two widely divergent concepts (p. 97).

19. People who Get Things Done but are not Smart will do stupid things, seemingly without thinking about them, and somebody else will have to come clean up their mess later. This makes them net liabilities to the company because not only do they fail to contribute, but they soak up good people's time (p. 98).

20. How do you detect Smart in an interview? The first good sign is that you don't have to explain things over and over again. The conversation just flows (p. 98).

21. The second worst kind of interviewer is the Quiz Show Interviewer. This is the kind of person who thinks smart means "knows a lot of facts." They just ask a bunch of trivia questions about programming and give points for correct answers (p. 99).

22. ... software teams want to hire people with aptitude, not a particular skill set (p. 99).

23. You see, if you can't whiz through the easy stuff at 100 mph, you're never gonna get the advanced stuff (p. 108).

24. I want my ER doctor to understand anatomy, even if all she has to do is put the computerized defibrillator nodes on my chest and push the big red button, and I want programmers to know programming down to the CPU level, even if Ruby on Rails does read your mind and build a complete Web 2.0 social collaborative networking site for you with just three clicks of the mouse (p. 111).

25. In the past, I've used "impossible questions," also known as "back of the envelope questions." A classic example of this is "How many piano tuners are there in Seattle?" The candidate won't know the answer, but smart candidates won't give up, and they'll be happy to try and estimate a reasonable number for you (p. 115).