When wrapping up the VIm talk @trevmex mentioned that people share their dotFiles on github. This blew my mind. I can sit in front of anyones desk and start using their eclipse and immediately be productive. The secret to VIm is the years of refactoring the configuration and shortcuts, known as the dotFiles. You probably couldn’t even execute a mapped command on my machine since I map the leader based on my keyboard. ...
I’ve been reading about India’s concept of Jugaad, possibly poised to enter our buzzword vocabulary since it came up in the context of what Obama can learn from that country. Where the Agile Manifesto starts with “Individuals and Interactions” the Harvard Business Review kicks off Jugaad with “Thrift not Waste”. All too often I’ve seen Agile work because a scarcity of resources (money, time or knowledge) pushed an otherwise waterfall loving group into giving Agile a shot. The tenants of Jugaad resonate with me as a more general philosophy about how to get things accomplished then Agile’s focus on “working software”. ...
Sometimes the answer really isn’t that hard. We were recently having a lunch conversation and talking about how to get involved in the local tech community. Kevin simply stated “Just show up”. It was a stunningly simple answer. To people that have had the great experience of being involved in the Philly tech scene this seems obvious. As a Gen ‘X’er that moved around the east coast during the dotCom days let me say this is an unual and fantastic community. Back in the day there was some feeling of elitism and you had to demonstrate some effort to be included in a ‘community’. Its true that a ’noob (great word, best contribution of the ‘millenials’ so far ;) could show up at the local Linux install day and get some help setting up slackware on left over office equipment, but they were not taken seriously in the ‘real’ meetings. ...
The BarCamp happened yesterday and Philly’s brightest and most enthusiastic ‘interative media’ professionals came out in force. Barcamp is a type of grass roots conference setup by the people bottom up rather then by a company top down. I talked a lot, learned a lot, drank a lot and made some friends in the process. Each session exceeded my expectations in different ways. My talk on the how we build and operate http://www.comcast.net was very well received and it was very telling to step up from the weeds and view this creation with my peers. As much as we need to move forward sometimes we at CIM forget how far we have come. Since this was an untelevised, ego and marketecture free event we openly discussed what we did right and wrong. Having this talk with people that live through this grind every day is very different then having it with people that learned the ‘right way to build websites’ from books or blogs. ...