Larry Clarkin put up a post called “Technology should not make you more productive“.

When I first read this, I was stumped trying to figure out why one of the more progressive technologists that I know would say something that bizarre but as I read the post, it snapped into focus.

His opinion is that “Technology should not make you more productive, but it should totally change the way that you work”.

I couldn’t agree more. I think back on the way that I worked even a couple of years ago and how technology has transformed my outlook and way that I work. It’s no longer apples to apples comparisons. Tasks that used to take me hours or weeks to complete are either irrelevant or wrapped up in a single statement that I can delegate to something else. Think about the way that we write code these days verses yesteryear. I used to spend weeks and months writing data layer code, front end population of fields and the layout of the screens for even the simplest of applications. At this point, I wire up a fantastic ORM, such as NHibernate, SubSonic, ActiveRecord or any number of others, get the XAML form from a designer and wire the databinding in seconds. That allows me to largely ignore the “plumbing” code and focus on the business logic. I’m still writing the same number of lines of code a day, but it’s completely different code than I used to write.

I think about Cell Phones, SMS, Email, Twitter, TripIt, Dopplr, Plaxo and all the other technologies/applications that I use every single day of the year and it has completely transformed the way that I work. I used to be fanatical about getting someone’s email address. Now, I’m setting up most of the CodeToLive episodes through Twitter. At this point, if they are on Twitter, I often DM someone on twitter instead of trying to email them. At one point in time, that would have been over email. Prior to that, it was phone. Prior to that it was in person or not at all. 🙂

But if you think back to other truly disruptive technologies, such as the boat, train, car, plane, rocket, transporter (wait – not yet but I’m sure that it’s coming), each of these have completely transformed our society. There was a time when getting on a boat for the new world meant a zero probability that you were going to see your family again. Most people lived within miles of where they were born because travel and moving meant giving up everything. Now in an age of jets, good friends and family stay in contact over XBox Live or Skype or Twitter on a daily basis with complete and total location independence. This is an exciting time as technology is starting to bring people closer together rather than pushing them apart.

I’m looking forward to the next technology that really revolutionizes our technology rather than incrementally improve what we already have.

What do you think it will be?

Larry Clarkin – Technology should not make you more productive

Guitar Hero for adults is coming!!! I really don’t want to knock Guitar Hero and Rock Band but they are just not for me. Honestly, (and this is not bragging, it’s just a fact) I’ve never played either one. If I’m going to spend the time to learn an instrument, it’s not going to be a plastic one that is only useful in the context of my living room. I completely get the social aspect to it and think it’s a great game in a party situation. I just don’t have the patience to devote to it to get decent enough to enjoy it in that party scenario.

I’m just really amazed at stories like this 9 year old kid on YouTube that is a Guitar Hero rock star. And his parents are proud enough of this fact to put this on YouTube. If only they could channel all that talent for good! If he had just started learning a real instrument – he could be the next Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page or Frank Iero! He’s definitely got dexterity and focus to do it – if he could be channeled correctly. Seriously, how does a 9 year old kid get to be that good at a video game? Oh yeah, I’m forgetting that it’s usually the 9-12 year olds that hand me my tail on a platter in Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4. Complete side note (which is weird as this whole post is a side note), I had a thought that we should have an “over 25” segment of the XBox live network, not for “Adult Entertainment” but rather as a way to even the playing field for us that have jobs, families and only a couple of hours a week to devote to gameplay… Thoughts?

When I was talking to Jason Follas and Dustin Campbell over beers just after Guitar Hero was coming out and all the hype had started up I had the idea that I’d really rather have a way to hook up a real guitar to the XBox and/or computer and “Play” to learn. We had talked through some of the hookup options, like pro audio cards that can take a real 1/4 in jack and all the sound you can pump at it or the 1/4 jack to USB options that are out there. Dustin is actually a good enough musician (Plays in a pro-band and the like) and programmer (tech lead on CodeRush) that I was hoping that I could talk him into doing it because he’s got the chops to do so. Didn’t work. He didn’t bite.

The fantastic news is that he doesn’t have to. Today, Jason pointed out that there’s a startup called Guitar Rising that is creating that “game” for us! They are planning to release sometime in 2008 – and I’ll be among the first to buy one. I’m really stoked! I’ve been wanting to learn guitar but with my fairly severe ADD I haven’t had the patience to do so. I really hope that they pick songs from all over the spectrum from rock to blues. Besides just being able to play, I’d really like to get to a point where I can play camp side and at sing-alongs. Obviously, that’s not all hair bands, there’s a lot of Jimmy Buffet and the like that’s needed. There’s already been twitter conversations about how the hookups are going to work, what type of guitars we’re going to hook up and more. According to the article, you can hook up via a USB hookup or even just a Mic. I’m assuming that they are looking for pitch and notes and that’s all they care about. That’s pretty slick.

Looking forward to playing Guitar Rising at the next CodeMash!

Rocking: Guitar Rising for Real Guitar Heroes

I woke up this morning to a very interesting email from Steve Ballmer conveying the fact that we had made a public bid to buy Yahoo! As I picked my jaw up off the floor, I noticed all of my standard news sources had it listed at their top story as well. This is cool because I had been working on a blog post about some of the REALLY cool things that Yahoo! has been doing.

Yahoo has released the beta of their long anticipated Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista application. I’ve been looking forward to seeing this application in the wild since I heard about it. This was actually a partnership between the WPF team at Microsoft and Yahoo to get this out. There are a ton of cool features liked tabbed conversations, a Vista Gadget to track friends and much much more. It hasn’t tried to be feature parity with the original Yahoo messenger, it’s a being unto itself.

I’ve had the good fortune to know Eric Burke from Yahoo who happens to be the technical lead on the Vista Messenger project. It turns out he lives in Novi, MI and manages a team in Palo Alto, CA. Guess how they do the majority of their communication… 🙂 I met Eric on the plane to MIX last year. I was wearing a Visual Studio jacket and he was reading MSDN Mag so we recognized each other as fellow geeks. We hung out quite a bit at the conference and have stayed in good contact in Michigan since then. Eric was the guy that, when he saw the Silverlight 1.1 (now 2.0) keynote, said “Hey cool – I’m a mac programmer!”. At the conference, he was speaking about the challenges that they have faced with building one of the premier WPF applications and working with the design team from Frog Design.

Eric said that it was really rough in the early goings because nobody knew how this was supposed to go. Microsoft had a good story for designer/developer workflow but nobody had actually done it yet. The first couple of times they really couldn’t use what the designers had tossed over the wall or it required such drastic changes to their code that it was painful. As time went on, they figured out how to get along better and better so by the time that MIX rolled along, they were able to integrate changes often in as little as 3-5 minutes first thing in the morning. I’ve also had Eric come out to a couple of different events to speak about real world experiences working with WPF. One of the things that challenging right now is that there are not fantastic tools for looking at the XAML and seeing what the redundant layouts are or where the memory leaks are.

Since it’s gone public, it’s been interesting listening to people’s reactions to it. One of the common ones is a complaint that it doesn’t support all of the features of the mainstream Yahoo! messenger application and it’s add-in model. I actually like that about it. It’s refreshing to see a company take a line in the sand and not be 100% backwards compatible and feature complete with the legacy applications. This is something that Microsoft never seems to be able to do. There was a fantastic ad that showed VS.NET 2005 and it said “with 400 new features, the difference is clear” and right next to that add was an ad for Sugar CRM that said “Back with fewer features than ever, the difference is clear”. And it’s true, the IM clients that have been around forever are full of features that nobody uses or are used by a small enough percentage of the audience that they are more of a maintenance burden than useful features. Now, it takes a lot of moxy to say that “I’m willing to forgo some of the legacy customers upgrading to do the right thing for the future and the application.” I hope that Yahoo! sticks to it’s guns on not trying to make the Vista client feature parity with the old client as they go forward. Obviously there are things that they will need to add, like VOIP and some type of add-in model, but what form that takes is going to be interesting to see.

I don’t know if the deal is going to go through but I hope that it does just to get this type of edgy and exciting decision making into Microsoft. I know that Steve Ballmer and crew are looking at the advertising, search and social networking properties as well all of which are substantial. I was looking at my traffic searches on my blog and Yahoo! searches accounted for a really solid portion of my traffic. Obviously it wasn’t equal to Google but it was still substantial. We’ve offered them $44.6 Billion which is a decent premium on their stock price. According to the NY Times, Yahoo! turned down earlier merger offers so I’m also really hoping that this doesn’t turn into an ugly hostile style takeover.

Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista™

Microsoft Makes .6 Billion for Yahoo – Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds — DealBook – New York Times

Microsoft makes unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo – Feb. 1, 2008

CodeMash was, once again, a huge success. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a cross technology, cross platform, cross discipline that is help in January in Sandusky, OH at an indoor water park. The meme is that we are there to Mash not Bash. Everyone is expected and encouraged to go learn about new technologies and bring new and fresh ideas back to their own shops and technologies.

We had 375 people show including attendees, speakers, sponsors and so on. That’s a big growth over last year. It’s big enough that we are trying to figure out what to do next year with marketing because we’re not sure if we’d loose the vibe and the close contact that the 375 person conference affords.

It was a much more mature vibe this year than last year. In it’s inaugural year (2007), it was interesting hanging out at lunch, dinner and the bar at night meeting new people and making new friends. However, on the first night there was a lot of trepidation and anxiousness as people were really unsure as to how or if they should really talk to everyone else. By the end of the conference there were interesting conversations happening between the PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET and Java guys. Brian Prince and I even shaved our heads as an incentive to get people to blog about the conference.

This year, on the first night there was an established context for the conversations on the first night. By the end of the conference, people from all technologies and disciplines were exchanging email addresses, Twitter accounts, Facebook IDs and more. It’s truly amazing how this little conference has started a cultural brush fire. The only blocking issue is the UM/Ohio State rivalry… 🙂

Even new comers to the conference such as Scott Hanselman noticed the vibe of the conference –

‘It’s a cross-platform, cross-cultural, cross-language conference with a very positive vibe. The “vibe” or general feel of a conference matters more than you might think. I started out asking folks “are you a Ruby person or a .NET person?” but soon I got with the program and started asking folks “what are you working on?“‘

Steven Harmon described the conference well when he called it the “biggest-little-conference around’. The type of person that CodeMash attracts is that top developer who is fascinated by technology and is desperate to expand their horizons and learn more. It’s not surprising that great consulting companies like Quick Solutions and SRT Solutions are at the very center of the conference doing much of the heavy lifting organizing and running the conference.

Another big thanks goes out to Chris Woodruff who did a ton of podcasting from the event. He even interviewed me here. I haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast yet but I remember rambling on forever. I know – you’re shocked that I had a hard time shutting up…

In true CodeMash fashion, I did a talk on the DLR based on the great work by Jim Hugunin and John Lam. I covered a little bit of IronPython and even did demos with IronRuby. I ran out of time before I did all the demos that I wanted to do, like doing WPF with IronRuby, ASP.NET with IronPython and so on. It was great, however, to have Joe O’Brien in the room to help me with the semantics of Ruby and dynamic languages. Joe O’Brien is a guy that I met last year at CodeMash and we’ve since become really good friends and are working on getting together on eRubyCon (The Enterprise Ruby Conference). Hopefully I’ll see you there this year. It was a fun conference last year with a very CodeMashish type vibe. I’m really hoping that we get to do another fishbowl style talk at some point there.

 Oh and did I mention that they doubled the size of the water park? 🙂 My one regret this year was that I didn’t book over to Sunday with my family. the past two years my family has joined me on Friday evening and we’ve stayed until they kick us out on Saturday. Next year, I’m booking over to Sunday! I didn’t spend nearly enough time at the water park. Some of the guys (Yes, I’m talking about you James) went to the water park every day for multiple hours.

Plans for next year, I’m going to continue my work with the DLR and hope to have a much more advanced talk that includes Silverlight 2.0 and maybe even a demo on Moonlight. I’m also planning to spend more time at the water park on Day 0 and on the weekend. I have a hard time spending the conference time at the park because there are so many cool sessions and people to talk to.

I’m going to do more podcasting. I really missed an opportunity here and only caught one interview with Joe Brinkman  about DotNetNuke and working on an Open Source Project full time (check out http://www.codetolive.net soon).

I’m going to spend more time at the water park… 🙂

And hopefully, I’ll see you there!

CodeMash Conference – January 10-11, 2008