Fun online game that helps improve your typing skills.

 http://play.typeracer.com/

This is a pretty cool website that can automatically create a timeline based on an RSS feed. Or manually.

I am in the process of identifying a network of trusted freelancers that I can count on for helping me develop some future software projects. I need designers, coders and database architects.

Ideally, I prefer local freelancer’s so I can have the periodic face to face check-in sessions, and support the local economy here in Vermont. We have a lot of talent in this state. However, I had a successful experience outsourcing a small 6 hour task that needed to be coded in .ASP to a talented guy in Ohio. After that, I have always been curious about the possibilities of managing an entire project with various trusted freelancers in various parts of the world. My only fear is that I have seen a lot of poorly done code from “outsourcing” websites.

So I am thinking about doing a test run, by trying to outsource a non-critical project that I can afford to have fail should things not work out as planned.

I am thinking about using either:

•  www.getacoder.com

• www.assembla.com

• www.odesk.com

• www.elance.com

“Intuitive Analysis” is the art of making better decisions with less time, less information and less resources then traditional analysis.

The above, is a term and definition I made up. (I’m sure it already exists as another term and slightly different definition as it is an art that many people do every day) I have been thinking a lot about information analysis lately. The company I work for provides context for renewable energy data. I remember feeling our software provides too much information when I first joined the organization, and lately we have started to take the proper steps to focus our product on a specific market. Now I am thinking about how to strip our software down even more to provide our customer with what they really need, and avoid wasting time on the wants… which always vary and distract us.

I recently read the book Blink: The power of thinking without thinking by Malcom Gladwell , and later re-read Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application by 37signals.com. They are both very powerful books… and filled with wonderful insights into how we both make and influence decisions. Two chapters in Blink were very fascinating to me. One chapter was about a war game exercise the US military conducted in 2002, and the other was about 4 police officers making a series of poor judgments in the killing of an innocent man.

The chapter about the war game reminded me of my own experiences during war game exercises in the army. I remember learning and utilizing the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) as an intelligence officer, and thinking that the process  took too long and produced too much material. During training exercises we would fight battles, usually loose to smaller and unpredictable enemies, and try and measure ourselves based on our execution of the MDMP. Later, I developed my own type of “intuitive analysis” methods too actually conduct real-world missions and intelligence analysis. The bottom line was there was never enough information and never enough time to make complete assessments with MDMP. So the best I could do was learn how to make snap decisions based on my intuition. In Blink, the author shares the perspectives and methodologies of the opposition commander in the war game, who was able to make better decisions with less information, vs. the US military who had all the information they needed yet was not as successful.  This is called “thin-slicing”, and there is great arguments why less is truly more.

 The other chapter I found interesting, was about 4 police officers killing an innocent man. After I returned from Iraq, I wrote an essay that I never published. I finally have a name for it. Its ironically titled “the danger of naming”. The military has terms like “civilians on the battlefield”, and the “Iraq War”. Well, just in the very nature of calling it “War” and “Battlefield”… we already subconsciously prep our soldiers for perceiving situations through a particular type of mental lens that distorts reality. I remember talking with a sergeant after he shot and killed a man and wounded a kid. He said they approached our position, probably to gather information about us. When he fired a warning shot they turned and started running versus staying still to be approached and identified. He thought the man had a gun, so he took him out. As I listened to him, it occurred to me that his entire mental perception was that of a “battlefield” and “war” environment. He could not see the situation for what it was… it was just a man and his family walking in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was never a gun on the dead man.  When I read the story of the 4 police officer’s patrolling for criminal activity, it reminded me of that situation.  They were looking for something, and so they perceived their situation in the context of a crime zone.  Just like the sergeant in Iraq who reacted to a situation in the context of a war zone.  In both cases the “names” of what they called the area’s of operation led to an improper perception of what was really happening.

It is very important to be able to keep a clear and objective frame of mind in order to make good split second decisions.

So now back to the book Getting Real. Guess what the key factors are for making better web applications according to 37signals?

Answer:   Less.

I couldn’t agree more.By creating a web application that has less, you concentrate on what is really important. Filter out all the unnecessary “noise” which hinders true decisions and good analysis. Furthermore, ensure the software does not have anything that may create a “false lens” of perception for the user. It may seam counter to reason that providing less information enables better analysis… but I think it is true, with the right combination of a clear and uncluttered mind allowing the subconscious to guide and make good intuitive insights.

So for the next software I build, I am hoping it can assist people in the art of “Intuitive Analysis”.

feedmyapp has been a great reference for me over the last 9 months or so.

A few months ago I was looking into all sorts of various php frameworks, hoping to find something with the same mvc architecture and conventions as the rails framework. After some searching, I decided to just build my own. Well… today I ended up going back and started re-coding a little finance application I have been working on from my MVC framework to the CodeIgniter framework… in order to re-evaluate it for another project. (It had been about 4 or 5 months since I first had dabbled in it)

Well after about 8 hours of coding today… I have to say codeIgniter does it better. So this is my official detachment from my own MVC framework, and humble acceptance that codeigniter wins!

Over the last few months my original design for a company portal aplication has had a bit of use and feedback from the employees at Draker Labs.

The biggest thing I learned is to continually find ways to make it simpler and simpler. So far this next version is promising to do more by doing less

Login Screen:

Dashboard Screen ( draker’s data is shaded out… )

An article written up on Draker Labs by Vermont Business People Magazine

http://www.vermontguides.com/2007/11-nov/draker.html

Sarah and I got married in June… here is a link to some of our wedding pics

www.sarahadam.info

I got the chance to work on a fun side project at work. I have used Basecamp and/or ActiveCollab as a project management tool for a while and always thought it was nice, but every organization is different, and ‘Out of the Box’ software tools don’t always work for a company.

So I built (and continually improving) a web application designed specifically for our companies business processes. Here is a few screen shots (with the info blacked out)