edward spurlock

I’ve been reading Joel Spolsky’s blog recently, going back through the archives, and I found this gem of a post from about a year ago:

How to be a program manager

What does a program manager do?

1. Design UIs
2. Write functional specs
3. Coordinate teams
4. Serve as the customer advocate, and
5. Wear Banana Republic chinos

…

It is possible to be an effective program manager without being a coder, but the burden of earning the respect of the programming team will be higher.

…
How do you learn to be a Program Manager?

Mostly, becoming a program manager is about learning: learning about technology, learning about people, and learning how to be effective in a political organization. A good program manager combines an engineer’s approach to designing technology with a politician’s ability to build consensus and bring people together. While you’re working on that, though, there are a few books you should read:

As far as I can tell, Scott Berkun’s book Making Things Happen is the only book that’s been written that pretty much covers exactly what a program manager has to do, so start with that. Scott was a program manager on the Internet Explorer team for many years.

Another big part of the program manager’s job is user interface design. Read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, then my own book User Interface Design for Programmers.

Finally, and I know it sounds cheesy, but Dale Carnegie’s 1937 book How to Win Friends & Influence People is actually a fantastic introduction to interpersonal skills. It’s the first book I make all the management trainees at Fog Creek read, before anything else, and they always snicker when I tell them to read it, and love it when they’re done.

Huh.

I’ve been having a big pity party over the past year and a half.

I’m too old.
I don’t have a degree.
I’ve got a crappy dead-end job.
I can’t get a real job without a degree.
I can’t afford to get a degree.

Anyway, what the hell could I do? In my 30 years of working for a living, I’ve not seen anything I really wanted to do. I’ve gotten involved in things like technical writing, involved to the point of forgetting to go home at the end of my work day — but I’d need a four-year degree to go anywhere with that. Back in college, I got involved like that with computer programming - but I’d need a four-year degree to go anywhere with that, too.

But that list — design UIs, write functional specs, coordinate teams, serve as a customer advocate - I could DO that! I could even wear Banana Republic chinos (although I usually buy Dockers).

I may look into becoming a software Program Manager. I’ve got “month-end” coming up next week at work, but after that, I’m going to pick up Scott Berkun’s book and see if being a Program Manager still seems like a good idea after reading that.

TIME Magazine: 10 Truths About Weight Loss

TIME Magazine: Fast Food: Would You Like 1,000 Calories with That?

TIME Magazine: Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

NY Times: Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch (Pollan writes about Julia Child)

Slate Magazine: Fix Your Terrible, Insecure Passwords in Five Minutes

Slate Magazine: Minicows

Swan Song:

First he was very famous, now he’s very rich. But Nassim Taleb is still wrong.

…In noncatastrophic times, the Niederhoffers and AIGs make money consistently and quietly and then end up losing it conspicuously and painfully. The Talebs make money rarely, amaze everyone because they do it when everybody else is getting killed—and so make it easy to forget about years of steady losses. Over the long run, the anti-catastrophists often do fairly well (if they don’t get too greedy and make bets that cost them all their money in even a small market drop). But it is the catastrophists, a la Taleb, who look smarter.

An acquaintance of mine is doing a model of a network she works with. She thought about doing it in software, but has decided to go with Styrofoam balls connected with wires.

If you want a picture of a network, and you’re not really into Styrofoam, you might want to consider a couple of Open-Source options:

• Graphviz: Graphviz uses a fairly simple language to draw 2-d diagrams. From what I’ve seen, it’s a batch processing language, rather than an interactive drawing environment.
• Processing: Processing is built using Java and uses a more involved programming language. Unlike Graphviz, Processing is both a language and an interactive environment, and allows one to build some seriously cool graphical interactive Java applets.

BTW, the Processing page also includes links to a number of other graphics-related Open Source packages, such as Blender, GEM, (which is NOT Digital Research’s old Graphics Environment Manager, as ported to the Atari ST many years ago), and vvvv. Some really cool stuff — of course, Processing looks pretty cool all by itself.

I’ve really been enjoying The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams (no, not that Robin Williams), which is one of the textbooks for my “Graphics For the Design-Challenged” class at ACC. One of the great things about the book is her explanation of the basics of designing with type (fonts).

My second assignment for class is to design a business card for myself. I decided I wanted a picture of an old-fashioned Underwood typewriter, like the one I learned my typing skills on (no, it wasn’t a new typewriter then, it was my Mom’s, and I think she bought it used, so I’m not as old as all that). While Googling, I found Richard Polt’s Classic Typewriter Page.

As a typewriter expert, Richard Polt got drawn into the Killian documents controversy, which were the documents supposedly proving that George W. Bush disobeyed orders during his Viet Nam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Polt gives his analysis, and also provides a letter from Fred Woodworth, “…an Arizona printer who despises computers and still produces several periodicals on a Varityper.” In a postscript to his letter, Wordworth offers his speculation that the memos were designed to be exposed as phony. However, since CBS News didn’t do their homework, they wound up with egg on their faces and Dan Rather got “dumped down the credibility hole,” as Woodworth puts it.

Incidentally, we’ve just weathered Hurricane Ike here in Texas. The high winds and rain turned north before they ever reached Austin. We were predicted to get 50-mph winds and several inches of rain — instead, we got cloudy skies, a small breeze, and pictures of TV newsmen reporting from the coast in hurricane winds and rain. As it happens, Dan Rather’s original claim to fame was as a TV anchorman who did a live report from the Galveston Seawall during Hurricane Carla in 1961.