The piece comes across a little “woe is me.” Which I find strange. The tech industry that I know and love isn’t hurting at all. However, as the article states, the mediocre development jobs and the grunt work is being shipped overseas. That’s good for America and American developers.

This particular paragraph in the article kind of sums it up (I think):

Ms. Mann said, that an employer has sent her job abroad since she received her master’s in computer science more than two decades ago; the last time was in 2001. This week she starts a yearlong program to upgrade her programming skills, paid for by a federal program that assists workers who have been displaced by international trade.

The tech industry is so wide open for positions right now. Companies are scrambling to find the best talent and it’s incredibly difficult to find excellent developers. Software development also has vastly greater resources available to the self starter than many other industries.

All it takes to become an excellent developer is to decide on something to learn, and go learn it. You probably don’t even have to buy a book. In general, the communities are very supportive of “newbs” and there are tons of open source projects that you could work on to provide you with “something real.”

In any industry, if you “show up for your job, work a little, and then leave” you will probably be out of a job. There are hungry, passionate people all over the world that want your job. The good news is that if you care about what you do, constantly learn, and adapt then it will be impossible to ship your job overseas.

All it takes is to love your job. Do that – and I bet you keep it.

Also: read Linchpin

Meetings are for brain storming and/or getting to know someone (or a group of people).

Anything else and you should strongly consider why you just spent all that money to have a meeting.

Anyone else have any other ideas for good meetings? In this context I’m not considering a conference or a talk a meeting.

However, if your immediate team is bigger than 10-15 people and/or doesn’t involve UI and business people, or you use gantt charts, or you don’t actively work with people from all disciplines…

You’re probably doing it wrong.

Unless of course your company only involves yourself.

UPDATE:
If you are seeing a repeating error in Safari and Chrome – it’s ok. It’s an ignorable error. If you can’t use login or prompt for permissions – it’s probably because (as stated above) those have to come from a click, double click, etc… some sort of user interaction.

I love the *looks* of the new Facebook javascript API. It’s got one major flaw though. It doesn’t work in Safari or Chrome. I have an app setup to use http://localhost:7000/ as the connect url and everything works *great* in Firefox. Things even work mostly ok in safari or chrome… but as soon as you try to launch the permissions dialog box you get the browser cycling through “unsafe javascript attempt to access frame with URL.”

Best part about this whole thing is: the facebook developer forums throw the *same* error.

Also, when I try to create an account on the forums (not using facebook connect) I get a “cannot connect to socket” error.

I guess I go back to their older clunkier API? Seems to be a number of complaints but no answers from Facebook.

http://croonmytune.com

or read about it here: http://jumpcanopy.com/?p=21

Then I came across this article: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1249282/set-method-to-put-in-rails-xml-requests

So... if you're using prototype your "put" methods look something like this:

You can skip the last 10 minutes or so when he dives into this odd crazy future... but the beginning part really makes you think about how you can add game theory to any business you're in. I really like the idea of experience points and leveling up for class. That's something any event-based business could really get into.

h/t Andrew Holz. via fury.com

Being able to make the necessary tradeoffs between conflicting constraints takes skill. I’ve always viewed constraints as my friends. They make me more creative. By thoroughly understanding the limitations that constrain a design solution, I can make the right tradeoffs and come up with the best design solution possible under those constraints. Plus, balancing different constraints often forces me to think outside the box, so inspires innovative design solutions.

Excellent and long article talking about various user-time-wasting or user-annoying things to avoid in your UI.

I think these are perhaps the tenth and eleventh questions you should ask, not the first two. Here's my list of difficult and important questions you have to answer before you spend a nickel: