Show the Whale!
Adam Keys and Geoffrey Grosenbach introduced the term for 2008 on the rails podcast: show the whale.
I think it's perfect, and in my lexicon already!
==> No, this is not the official fail whale logo! The real one was done by Yiying Lu, a young designer from China/Sydney, who now is world famous thanks to twitter's stability problems.
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24 Season ... 7?
| Props to Sophia for finding me the Jack Bauer quotes at 24 wikia. It's a curse to be reminded how long we've been waiting for Season 7, but great to find out that a two-hour Season 7 prequel, 24: Exile, will air in the US later this year on November 23rd. Hmmm ... time to break out the 1-6 box set again and go sleepless for a week. That will be the longest week of my life;-) |
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Heroku - Ruby in the Sky with Diamonds
I've been using Heroku since I heard about it on the Ruby on Rails podcast. It offers a hosted Rails development environment (all web-based), with instant deployment ... essentially you are running your dev, test and production environments 'in the cloud'. Heroku themselves use Amazon S3 I think.
It's worth checking out, even if you are not specifically interested in rails. A great example of how to operate 'up in the clouds'.
A couple of key things I've learned/noted in working with heroku..
Disabling the heroku toolbar
You probably don't want the heroku toolbar appearing for public users of your application (and I found it had some issues with IE). Disabling the toolbar is done by creating a file config/heroku.yml:
toolbar_collaborators: true
toolbar_public: false
request_timeout: 10
(picked this tip up from the mailing list)
Running with Rails 2.1
Rails 2.0.2 is the default, and 2.1 support took a while to arrive. It's here now. Simply update your config/environment.rb file to specify..
RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '2.1'
Distributed Version Control
Version control using git is rolled into heroku. And if you want to develop locally, there's a heroku gem that simplifies setting up your local clone. Once git and the heroku gem are installed, a typical session goes like this:
heroku create myapp
heroku clone myapp
cd myapp
ruby script/server
[..work locally for a while..]
git add .
git commit -m "some changes made locally"
git push
[..work on the server for a while and commit..]
git pull
Postscript Aug-09: heroku have since split their services in two: herokugarden.com, which includes the online, web-based editor, and heroku.com which is intended for high-performance production deployment (with no online editing)
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What Customers Really Want
| I was involved in a conference last week that left me painfully aware of the missing "voice of the customer". However it did bring to mind a great book I recently read - What Customers Really Want  by Scott McKain.Not to be confused with the product management text What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services  by Anthony Ulwick. Completely forgettable in my view, and arguably dangerous in the wrong hands ... particularly when it gets into the dangers of having customers actually involved in the process!.. well perhaps one good thing about "What the Customer Wants" is that when picking it out at the library I discovered "What the Customer Really Wants" only a shelf away. I still can't find "What the Customer Really ReallyWants". Back to "What the Customer Really Wants": in the first few pages I was skeptical, expecting the book to be yet another meaningless management ra-ra piece. Luckily Scott managed to catch my attention before too long and it soon became clear that the book is a gem. Scott McKain talks from the perspective of real experience, and his no-bullshit, folksy plain talk is a welcome relief from the "gurus". Importantly though, it is not just about experience, but also the fact that McKain has distilled and can share valuable insights as a result of that experience. Most are in the "bleeding obvious - but why haven't I thought of that before?" category. Even the book's organisation is refreshingly to the point. Six main chapters covering six key disconnects..
"Continuous improvement is the enemy of innovation". That got my attention. It's an interesting point of view: Kaizen - constant change - has its role. But innovation is anything but about being constant - its about seeking the dramatic step change. The problem is that most of us cannot cope with being completely focused on incremental change AND at the same time the search for shattering innovation. The customer is not always right .. but they are always the customer! |
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