Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending most of the day with BlueGrass Mailing in Lexington Kentucky. Why would a lettershop in Kentucky be interested in Corporate Blogging Software?
Hat's off to Josh Bernoff, Forrester Analyst and co-author of Groundswell for an insightful new report: "Time To Rethink Your Corporate Blogging Ideas""Blog about the customer's problem. Don't blog about your products; blog about something your customers care about. Rubbermaid blogs about getting organized, for example. Emerson Process Experts blogs about factory automation. If you can bring value to your customers around their problems, they'll remain interested in you. Blogging about your customers' problems makes it far more likely that bloggers in your space will link to your blog, which increases both traffic and search relevance."The greatest marketing tactic in the history of mankind is the similar situation. Nobody cares about you. They care about solutions to problems. Blogs give you the ability to tell stories (as Seth says) about customers who have had similar problems that have been solved by you. Talk about problems and solutions in the real world.
"For B2B companies, get your employees in on the act. In companies that sell to other businesses, corporate communications typically sponsors the corporate blog.9 This is a mistake because product executives, product managers, and field marketing or sales support people better understand audience needs. When these staffers speak, B2B audiences recognize their expertise, trust their messages, and engage in the conversation. This is how dozens or hundreds of corporate-sanctioned bloggers at companies like HP, Microsoft, and Sun develop product connections with their particular customer groups."
Although not a client, I talk about Home Depot a lot. Who better to tell me stories about customer situations that might be similar to mine or educate me on the classes in my local store than the people who actually work in the store? Home Depot has 2400 stores and nearly 250,000 employees. There have to be at least several hundred that would be terrific (and trustworthy) bloggers. These are real peole, they live in my community. Their kids go to school with my kids, they support the same local causes I support...Let them Blog!
Tempted by the promise of seeing test results, breakdowns by type of question and images of their children's answers, many parents found that when they tried to create their required accounts, the system froze. They were unable to access anything.The article is vague about the cause of the problem, but it suggests that the problem was localized to a subset of users:
"We were sitting at home wondering, 'Is it just us or is it everybody?' " said Stan Brown, a Noblesville parent who tried to access the system twice Thursday and again early Friday morning. "I think they didn't do a very good job with it. It's laughable."
State officials worked throughout Thursday and Friday with vendors to resolve the problem, which affected about 15 percent of the hundreds of thousands of parents whose children took the exams, said Jason Bearce, spokesman for the Indiana Department of Education.
The site works, he said, but the process to create an account sometimes doesn't.
"It's been up and running the entire time. It's just been that not everyone's been getting through."
My guess the problem resides in one of the following areas:
DELETE statements) to a table. It is very important for the script's author to have an understanding not only of the table being modified but also any quirks in the semantics of column entries.
At first glance, my work experience might not be a perfect match, but I have a track record for adaptability and the ability to learn new things. I also believe that the skills you're looking for constitute a career direction that I would like to pursue, especially with respect to web technology and agile software development. I also happen to be local to Indianapolis.That was the start of a conversation that would lead to two interviews and eventually a job offer. As you might have guessed, I gladly accepted and have been here since.
Given two flat arrays A and B, each of which contain strings as elements, write a function f(A, B) that returns true if an element in A also appears in B. Otherwise, return false.Fortunately, I was working in PHP, which has a very rich set of functions for working with arrays. Here is what I wound up implementing:
function hasCommonElement($a, $b)Here at Compendium, the engineering team has code review meetings every other week, usually focusing on a major feature that shipped in the past week's release. The above function was part of the most recent review, and one of the team members asked me why I went to the trouble of implementing a function when I could have just used
{
if ( !is_array($a) || !is_array($b) )
throw new BadFunctionCallException('Non-array value supplied as argument.');
/*
* Iterate over the shorter array. Convert longer array
* into associative array to get O(1) lookup.
*/
if ( count($a) < count($b) ) {
$iteration_array = $a;
$query_array = array_fill_keys($b, null);
}
else {
$iteration_array = $b;
$query_array = array_fill_keys($a, null);
}
foreach ($iteration_array as $query_key) {
if ( !is_string($query_key) )
throw new BadFunctionCallException('Array must contain only strings.');
if ( array_key_exists($query_key, $query_array) )
return true;
}
return false;
}
array_intersect() and gotten away with a lot less coding.array_intersect()was designed to solve a more general problem and was much more expensive computationally. In our case, we were interested only in the existence of the intersection, not the elements of the intersection themselves. Once one element was found in common, the function could return rather than proceeding with the more exhaustive search-and-list operation.array_intersect().hasCommonElement() answers the question adequately in O(N) operations, and most of that is spent converting the larger set into an associative array so that we can enjoy the cheapness of doing O(1) lookups.
I was happy to see some great press today from my friend Dustin Sapp, managing partner for data-driven voice messaging software company Vontoo. Dustin&Vontoo have a soft spot in my heart, because the were the first customer ever for Compendium Blogware.
Writing programs that the computer can understand is challenging, to be sure. That's why so few people, in the big scheme of things, become competent programmers. But writing paragraphs and sentences that your fellow humans can understand -- well, that's even more difficult. The longer you write programs and the older you get, eventually you come to realize that in order to truly succeed, you have to write programs that can be understood by both the computer and your fellow programmers.
Of all the cruel tricks in software engineering, this has to be the cruelest. Most of us entered this field because the machines are so much more logical than people. And yet, even when you're writing code explicitly intended for the machine, you're still writing. For other people. Fallible, flawed, distracted human beings just like you. And that's the truly difficult part.
I concur with Atwood and Devlin that there is a strong link between coding and writing.
I did my undergraduate study at Rose-Hulman which specializes in science and engineering, and although it does not offer degrees in the humanities, the leadership at the school strongly encouraged a respect for language, literature, and the arts. Indeed the president of the school at the time, Sam Hulbert, exhorted the student body to be "Renaissance Men" (it was an all-male school at the time :-) ). I took this advice to heart, working hard to hone my skills as a writer.
I had two additional influences during my years as a student. As a junior and senior in college, I took classes taught by Prof. Stuart Leipziger, who whose eloquence as a lecturer was profound. I don't think my understanding of heat transfer and thermodynamics would have been as enriched without his ability to illustrate and enlighten.
In graduate school, I had the good fortune to take a class by the late Prof. J.J. Carberry, who was not only a distinguished scholar in the field of reaction engineering, but also a very gifted writer. His textbook, Chemical and Catalytic Reaction Engineering, uses a writing style seen rarely in the field, rich in its choice of adjectives and elegant in its flow.
These experiences shaped my outlook towards communication, helping me to realize how much of a difference could be made by channeling energy in that direction. By thinking through the process of expression, the weak points of a position could be identified, thereby giving guidance on how to refine the ideas that comprised them.
Back in the mid-90s, when I was trying to make a transition from FORTRAN to C programming, I picked up a cheap book titled C Programming Proverbs and Quick Reference. The author, Ron Wodaski, put lots of emphasis on being a conscientious programmer, someone who was not only coding to solve the problem of the moment, but also solutions that could be reused and maintained by others.
Early on in the book, Wodaski borrows the notion of a "Reader Over Your Shoulder" from the book by that name, written by Robert Graves and Alan Hodges, to instill a sense of self awareness about one's own code.
Calling this awareness the "Programmer Over Your Shoulder" (or POYS, for short), Wodaski pictured him or her as being an intelligent, friendly, yet uncompromising software developer who sits with you as you write code. He even goes so far as to give the metaphorical awareness a name. He called his POYS "Clarence".
One of the goals of having the POYS was to catch yourself when you were about to cut corners on coding. While it is hard to see your own mistakes as you write code, it isn't hard to feel it in your gut when you're about to do something half baked. Maybe it's deciding not to write some comments about some code that's less than obvious, lying to yourself that you'll get back to it later, or perhaps it's deciding that throwing in sanity checks to protect against an error condition would be just too much trouble, given the deadlines that must be met.
The POYS fusses about the things you'd rather ignore, but you know deep down that you shouldn't. It can take some self discipline and brutal honesty to develop a helpful POYS. I believe that Wodaski's writings, published in 1992, presaged the onset of pair programming, which attempts to do code review in real-time. Instead of trusting yourself, you get a real-life POYS to help keep you honest.
At the heart of Atwood's paradox is the central truth that meaningful computation seldom occurs in a vacuum. Time, talent, and treasure are devoted to programming because it is believed that computer applications can satisfy a human goal, be that to inform, to engage in commerce, to facilitate logistics, to forecast future conditions, or even to provide amusement.
These applications operate within the context of an imperfect world. Network hardware fails, people overdraw their bank accounts, bad weather strikes, models get created with faulty assumptions, and people try to circumvent security infrastructure. Useful code has to take into account these and many other edge cases. The firm logic of a programming language must be molded around this imperfect surface of reality.
Careful communication helps mitigate the turbulence of confusion. Agreeing on precise use of terminology helps avoid misunderstanding between product owner and development team. Regular status meetings with meaningful commitments and accountability help keep things on pace. Well documented specifications help developers blaze the trail, and accurate comments help the maintenance programmer follow along. Relevant documentation helps the end user assault the learning curve.
The gift of expressiveness both in code and prose makes a software engineer more valuable because he or she must bridge the worlds of the flawed but forgiving human and the logically rigid, unforgiving, yet incredibly stupid machine.
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