The Retrospector

I recently read an article by The Curmudgeon Coder that kinda hit home for me in some respects. I can’t agree with everything said in the article, but the 5 reasons stated on why he’s a “Curmudgeon Coder” sort of made me laugh, so I suppose I can at least relate to a lot of what he said regardless of whether I agree entirely or not.

Here’s the 5 reasons he’s a curmudgeon coder:

1. Unnecessary meetings, i.e. SinkHoles of Evil
2. Coding is becoming simpler
3. XML
4. The coders aren’t in charge anymore
5. Fixing the affect of the defect, not the cause of the defect

The list itself isn’t very explanatory. The comments made to describe each one is where the meat of the article is. I thought I’d go ahead and share my thoughts on each topic anyway.

Meetings

I can relate to being forced to sit in unnecessary meetings quite well. I’ve been exposed to very large corporate environments where I simply couldn’t get around at least 1-2 meetings a day with people I hardly interacted with at all. The key is to only make time for the meetings where it really matters that you have something to add or gain from. If you’re not getting anything out of it, and you’re not really adding any value…don’t go. Easier said than done for some, but I’ve found my days far more productive when I simply stopped going to meetings that didn’t seem to add value to my workload or deadlines in any way.

Coding is becoming simpler

He’s referring to the fact that coding has left the arena of bit-shifting and pointer & memory management being part of programming and is moving more toward a framework-based and more automated environment where more and more people are able to make things work with less effort and training. I’ll certainly agree with this point almost entirely. I think it’s very easy for those that think they’ve got a handle on things to fall apart and make big mistakes if they don’t have the fundamentals down though. There’s something to say for the people that not only understand how to use the frameworks, but also know how the framework works under the covers in case something doesn’t go perfectly right the first time around.
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Problogger Darren Rowse posted today to give thanks to other blogs that send him traffic. I thought I’d comment a little bit about where my traffic was coming from and give a little credit where it’s due as well.

Starting out Traffic

It’s been kind of a neat experience to slowly watch my baseline traffic grow over time. (On weekends, I’m still getting 50+ hits a day) I get the weekly spike of traffic from the social bookmarking sites that are very deceiving on what my “real” traffic is, but I can tell by the logs that my base traffic is growing.

To give credit to the social sites, it does bring a lot of eyes to my content and opinions on what I have to say. I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum from those that love it and those that hate it. I don’t know how “sticky” social site visitors are over time, but 99% of them seem to go to just the single post page and leave right away. My main goal in using the social sites was to get general opinions of my content and style anyway. I have built up a small subscriber base from it though by looking at the feeds resulting from some of the posts that made it to social sites.

Other than the social sites, a little is coming in from search engines. I find it incredible how easy it is for people to find my links when searching for some of the words I figured would have thousands of results before my pages.

Blog Traffic Credits

These sources aside, the rest of my traffic comes from blogs. It’s not a very high %, but I’d say it’s between 5-10% of my overall traffic. Some praise the content, some don’t. Some are just from comments I placed on other blogs. Either way I’ll give traffic credit where it’s due:

• Problogger.net
• Anarchia.org
• Moshez.livejournal.com
• 10000birds.com
• ladyanneblunt.blogspot.com
• Chronosynclastic Infundibulum
  
• bjornhaug.com
• canimakebigmoneyonline.com
• rylowry.com
• thatedeguy.com

Conclusion

So there you have it. I thank everyone out there for linking to my site. The whole blogging experience is really maintaining its excitement. I look forward to doing this every so often to return a little link love to those that shared in the first place. Where are your traffic sources? Do you have a good number of referring blog sources feeding your site? What % of the traffic comes from other blogs?

Tags: traffic, sources, credit

Recently, I stumbled onto a couple of articles that really caught my curiosity. Steve Pavlina’s How to Become an Early Riser and How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off really made me read almost every word in each.

“Can I do that?” “I can do that.” *yawn* Hmmm. “Maybe I’ll try that tomorrow.”

I can totally relate to what he’s talking about there in both articles. So the last 2-3 weeks I’ve decided to give myself an honest test as to whether or not I can actually follow through with becoming a morning person.

Applying to my own schedule

A rule of thumb that I’ve known for a long time is that it only takes a few weeks to really kick a habit or make a new one. I don’t know where I picked up that piece of information, but it’s always held pretty true for me. I figured if I can get through a couple solid weeks of waking up really early on a schedule like Steve pointed out, I shouldn’t have any trouble sticking with it for the long run.

So every morning, between 5:00am and 6:00am, I’m up and at ‘em like releasing a coiled spring. For 3 weeks (not including a weekend out of town) I’ve been hopping out of bed and mosying down to the basement for some time on the computer, and the occasional workout on the home gym.

It’s actually working out much better and easier than I thought it would. I’ve been pretty skeptical about being able to switch from my good ol’ high-school and college-day schedule that’s been embedded in my subconscious somewhere for years. (I’m very much a night person and can stay up really late on a whim without any trouble.)

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Being a geek myself, I think this is a subject I think needs to penetrate all levels of management in every company that values their geeks. By no means is this a rant, but for the last 10 years I’ve seen what motivates us and what doesn’t. I’ve seen the managers that just don’t get it. I’ve seen those that understand completely and react accordingly. So, I thought I’d share my observations and see what everyone has to add as well.

1. Geeks are curious. Let them feed their desire to learn things

I don’t know how much emphasis I can place on this point. You can take the ultimate geek…give them a rockin’ compensation package…and give them “rubber-stamped” projects (same tasks over and over) for two years and they’ll probably quit anyway. This point is based on the notion that if a geek feels his ability to gain knowledge is hindered he’ll try to find it somewhere else. Let them satisfy their curiosities with the task of picking up the latest technologies and applying them as they see fit. (Even if it’s just for a prototype.)

2. Geeks like to be self-sustaining. Let them figure things out on their own.

I haven’t met a true geek yet that wants you to hold their hand through every step of an implementation. In fact I’ve seen quite the opposite. They want to do things their way. If you suggest something, odds are the solution is wrong in their mind because it’s not what they would have come up with first. There’s many ways to complete a task in the technical arena, why cram your solution down their throats? Don’t hinder their creativity, just let them figure it out. The exception to this is probably in design. You obviously have to define your interfaces between components and have your requirements for the implementation. Let the details get figured out by whoever’s doing the dirty work. You can optimize things later if they aren’t up to par.

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