Looking for answers

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: One: Those 20th century rewards those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive. The drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter. I also recommend this second video from Dan Pink. It is short with a really clever white board drawing. History: 11/4/09 : First publish 05/29/10:  Add RSA video

Six months ago, I felt like I needed to step back from my current activity. It was time for me to ask others what they felt were the basic and reference books about product management. The result of the thread I initiated showed two books. One for a newbie and one as reference which receptively are: The Phenomenal Product Manager The Product Manager's Desk Reference After opening the delivery carton, I pulled out the books and held one in each hand. Their respected weight confirmed to me the one, I would read first. After reading the third chapter of the Phenomenal Product Manager, I told myself: "My god this is another book about leadership". By reading this book, I was looking for product management knowledge but here I found something that described how to collaborate with people. But I continued up to the end, because it is well written and also because its end was not so far. Despite my disappointment, I was astonished by the quality of each tip and I ...

Watching Steve Levin's talk on Infoq about multiple mobile platform development, I asked myself the average time I concentrate on each product management skill. Refering to the 280group manifesto ,I understand this talk will help me to improve my market and the technology knowledge. About platforms, I recorded the following remarks. Each platform has something annoying: The Iphone's black-boxed application validation process, Android UI which needs to improved, Windows mobile and its API, badly implemented by manufacturers, Blackberry's OS which is based on an old one. If you want to know more about one subject, go to the video and click on the question that is stir your interest. The video will be set to the question to which you need an answer. From the distribution point of view, I really agree with his remarks about the Apple Store, that I would summarize thus: Apple has a built-in store system and nothing more has to be done by the end user (e.g. adding a...

Probably due to the predominant position of a few actors (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.), I often feel that all I used to learn about small size systems will soon be obsolete. The current fashionable IT word is noSQL. If you don't have a minimum of IT culture and only read the buzzy articles you could think the SQL thing is dead. After a short analysis, I collected a few answers and mainly understood, both old and new technologies will have a long life, but their opposition really makes us step back and reconsider. First, there is ACID for atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability, the properties implemented by the Database management system (DBMS) to make sure the transactions proceed reliably. Most of the time we use databases of this type in our indoor computing system. But when it comes to distributed ones (many nodes) you've got to understand that a choice has to be made. In 2000, Eric Brewer made a keynote speech at the ACM Symposium on the Principles of Distr...

2010, the browser is a platform. Step by step, HTML5 arrives. Three Googlers present their 20% project: a port of the Quake II engine to HTML5 using the Google Web Toolkit. For more information, please visit Quake2-gwt-port . In the projet page, you read: In the port, we use WebGL, the Canvas API, HTML 5 elements, the local storage API, and WebSockets to demonstrate the possibilities of pure web applications in modern browsers such as Safari and Chrome. The port is based on the Jake2 project, compiled to Javascript using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Jake 2 is a Java port of the original Quake II source code, which was open sourced by id software. To make the Jake 2 code work with GWT, we have Created a new WebGL based renderer Ported the network layer for multiplayer games from UDP to the WebSocket API Made all resource loading calls asynchronous Created a GWT implementation of Java nio buffers based on WebGL arrays (to be ported to ECMAScript Typed Arrays ) Implemen...

We are now living in the second decade of the 21st century and having data/services online is not an advantage anymore, but not having it is a disavantage. We used to deploy servers in data centers to make sure our customers have permanent access to our services or to give the sensation that we were always online. Our internal IT infrastructure was changing step by step and the recurrent question used to be: should we based everything around Microsoft to minimise the products' compatibility or should we take the best of every product and support their interaction ourselves? We were living with the philosophy of IT perimeters delimited by security devices even if users were spending their time collaborating with others, sharing their documents by emails located somewhere. Somewhere connected. Today, everything looks different due to our understanding of news trends and the near future: the soon to be soaring energy price, the unavoidable trend of collaboration pushed by social ne...

When you adopt an agile methodology, you first try to apply its recommendations and often you will prefer to make your own dish with these good practices. After a few weeks of practice, you won't get the expected result that the agile guru has predicated you should. Most of the time, you will be told to apply the methodology you choose without changing a thing. The Shu Ha Ri way coming from Aikido is often the concept which is proposed for learning an agile method: Shu : first phase, concentrate on all the recommendations and practices, Ha : second step, now you practice the methodology correctly and start to understand the underlying principles, Ri : you have sufficient experience to make your own decision and adapt the methodology to your specific context. You will also learn, the agile world has not suddenly erupted from the clever minds which produced its manifesto . Instead, these efficient practices have evolved over a century. Toyoda , Taiichi Ōno , Edwards Deming will be...