OOooooh what does that do?!

this is a test izea izea izea IZEA Izea this is an Izea test izea

What makes a good leader? There have been many different people throughout history who have worn that label. There’s many different reasons and all of them apply to the situation they were in. There’s certainly moments of great leadership but what makes a good leader in the long term?

There are two perspectives of good leaders. Those from the outside and those from within. It’s easy to judge a leader as good because he gets results. But how he leads his team is important.

A very wise man once told me on any given project there are three things to be achieved, speed, quality, and price. Idealistically when a product is delivered it’s cheap, fast, and good. However in all real world situations you can usually only pick two.

The same can be held true about a team. You can push your team to be fast and good but it’s going to come at a high price. You can take time with your team giving them space to work and relieving pressure by letting them take the time to properly research the project and their individual goals. Allowing them to invent new and innovative solutions that are much cheaper than purchasing some off the shelf solution. But you are going to take a huge hit on time. Or you can hire a lot of cheap offshore consoltants and push them at a project faster and faster. But the end result can be a mess.

Finding a balance to achieve your goals is one of the hardest things to do as an effective leader.

The other is people management. Everyone who works in a particular field takes pride in their work (if they are worth anything). How do you get the results you want while coaching and mentoring your staff as well as providing constructive criticism as needed without bruising egos. A difficult task to be sure. You can brute force your way through it but admiration from your team is important. You need their support when you’re the leader and have to make a request like working longer hours or pushing harder on a project. However you can’t be a push over. People need someone they can respect and rally behind. Finding a balance here is also a difficult thing.

It’s true what they say that great leaders aren’t born but made. You need to have some kind of natural ability, charisma, and drive. But it’s also important to have a certain level of skill in the area you are managing. A lot of organizations are made up of top level execs with little to no experience in the field they are leading. They are simply leading it because they have executive experience. Being able to talk competently with your staff is extremely important. Most professionals can sniff out someone who’s “faking it”, and it does little for respect. Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know” or “Show me” and take the time to listen and really understand the solution. That way should you need to give criticism you can do so with a level of knowledge instead of just saying “It won’t work”.

Leadership roles aren’t for anyone. If you are happier in the trenches working and creating an executive position is very limiting. You have to spend your time doing the above mentioned things and unfortunately your time to be involved is limited. I was CTO of a company once and enjoyed the experience of leading a team but soon found  it difficult because I wanted to be in it, creating the cool technologies, writing the code, solving the problems. Not managing the ones who were doing it. I made the conscious choice when I moved to Izea, not to take a step down as I don’t see it that way, but to take a step sideways and move into a role that has been one of the most fulfilling I’ve ever been in.

I love the team I work with and I love being able to create and am much happier where I am. Was I a bad leader? I don’t think so, I learned a lot and accomplished some pretty cool things. But I’m happier in the trenches and am more effective there. Being a good leader means also being able to judge yourself and allocate your own resources to where they are best used. Communication is key, but comprehension is paramount.

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I got tagged for this by Courtney. I was hesitant to do it because I don’t know 8 people I’d inflict this upon. So I’ll just do it and that final list will be short.

8 Things I’m Passionate About

1. My wife, Mary.
2. Technology
3. Programming(yes it’s different)
4. Gaming(hrmmm a theme)
5. Music
6. My Friends
7. Disney
8. Theme Parks

8 Things I Want to Do Before I Die

1. Visit every Disney theme park in the world.
2. Create some kind of legacy
3. Open a comic / gaming shop
4. Go to Ireland
5. Create some kind of ride for a theme park
6. Find Waldo
7. Meet Christopher Lloyd
8. Have kids

8 Things I Say Often

1. What the fuck?
2. Haim? Who said anything about Haim?!
3. Uhhhhh
4. Neat.
5. I can prove these shoes are fireproof!!!
6. Hrmmm
7. HAAAAAI EVERYBOOOOODY!!!
8. Oooh, what does that do?

8 Books I’ve Read Recently

Boring programming books. And it’s not really reading all of them cover to cover it’s mostly just picking through parts.8 Songs I Could Listen to Over and Over

1. Cowboy Mouth, Jenny Says
2. TMBG, Istanbul Not Constantinople
3. TMBG, Ana Ang
4. Cowboy Mouth, I Don’t Want to be Friends
5. Coldplay, Fix You
6. The Eels, Last Stop to this Town
7. Daft Punk, Anything
8. Queen, Somebody to Love

8 Things That Attract Me to My Best Friends

1. Sense of Humor
2. Sense of Humor
3. See point 2
4. They don’t take themselves too seriously
5. Accept me for who I am.
6. ***
7. ***
8. See point 1.

8 People I Think Should Do Crazy 8s

1. Pete
2. Eric
3. Jamie
4. Mary
5. Jenn
6. Sean

Joined a gym yesterday and started doing it today. Going to go 3 days a week. 20 minute weight training, 20 minute cardio. Feel like ass right now. UGH.

So I’m testing a new blogging client on my n810. It’s kinda cool. I’m all snug in my bed and blogging from my tablet. I think this is going to help me write more. Im going to try to do this every night before I go to bed. If this works right there should be an image of me on the right taken with my tabletcam. I dont tnink it is working right though as it lost connection to the wireless. The connection is kinda bad here in the bedroom.
Anywa, work is going well. We are plowing ahead with socialspark and I’m doing a variety of tasks. Tomorrow night is our ‘holiday party’. If it’s anything like last years it should be interesting. I’ve been with the company a year now and look forward to a few more. It’s been great. Well thats about it for tonight. I’ll try to write something of substance tomorrow night.

As I lie here in bed moblogging from my wireless linux tablet that syncs to my Mac laptop and controls my Windows media server, I started thinking about the various “religeous” debates nerds sometimes get in to.Whether it be operating system or programming language, game console or cellphone, nerds are pretty opinionated when it comes to their tech.

I’ve been guilty meself, in the heat of the moment to say one thing or another sucked, but for the most part, I’m a “right tool for the job” kind of guy. I try to incorporate all resources when an opportunity presents itself.

However, I’ve noticed a trend that’s quickly becoming a problem. A lot of technology is going out of it’s way to be all things to all people. Look at cellphones for instance. The basic purpose is for the user to make phone calls. But today’s cellphones are trying to organize your life, take pictures, listen to music, watch tv, blog, read email etc. Now I’m all for multi-functionality. The swiss army knife was a great idea. But right tool for the job. Having a device that “magically” does all those things begins to have trouble performing it’s core competency, which is making calls. Do you want a computer or a phone?

I have yet to see a device that does both propefly(although I’ll admit, the iPhone comes damned close). I know what you are saying “I don’t want to carry around multiple devices around.” I can understand that but with the size of things shrinking every day, there’s no reason not to. the more moving parts a thing has, the higher likelihood that it will fail.

I could go on with this subject (and probably will in future posts) but I will some up what a good engineer friend of mine once said, “Good, fast, and cheap, pick any two, you can’t have all three”.

Right now I’m in the middle of like 5 games. Assasins Creed, Mass Effect, Warhawks, Halo 3, and of course WoW. And this Friday, Rockband comes out! I want to game but I also want to code. I’ve been doing a lot of coding for work so it’s left me like NO free time. Hopefully now that the amount of work has backed off a bit, I can get things balanced out where I have my 2 nights a week for coding on my personal projects 2 nights for work projects and one night for gaming. We’ll see if that works out in the coming weeks. I have a lot of free time during the next few days so I’m going to get my gaming fix, then this weekend maybe I’ll start working on HiveMInd again

Blogged with Flock

This is going to be my first Thanksgiving in my new house so I decided I’m going to do all the cooking. Here’s the menu:

Turkey (Duh)
Corn Chowder
Real Mashed Potatoes
Creamed Spinach
Salad
Home made bread
Stuffing
Sweet Potato Casserole
Cranberry Sauce
Green Bean Casserole
Should be pretty yummy!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: thanksgiving, food, cooking

After going to Postiecon and meeting all the great bloggers there, and after my recent foray back into twittering. I’ve been inspired to start writing again. I’m going to try to do a post every day but you’ll forgive me if I don’t manage it ;).

Where to begin,

Well right now I’m a developer for paype….er Izea. I am the core developer on the RSSBrief project and the senior developer in charge of R&D. Which basically is a corporate way of saying, I get to play with all the cool toys and try to make them break. I love the team I am working with. I’ve never met a more creative, talented, driven bunch in my entire career. These guys plainly put, kick ass. We are led by our lovable yet dorky British leader Pete, who is a veteran in his own right after publishing 14(I think…I can never remember the number and for some reason it seems to get higher) books on programming and is a pretty damned good mentor.

I live in Orlando, actually the Apopka area and am a huge themepark nut. I usually go 2 or 3 times a month to either Universal Studios or Disney. I play video games in my spare time as well as make attempts at building robotics. One of my cooler projects is my home theater which I’ll post details on later. I guess that’s it for now. I’ll try to write more later.

T

Peter Wright is a technical writer who has published many books on subjects ranging from Visual Basic to GTK/Gnome development. He often writes a lot of technical articles on his blog describing his adventures learning different things as a developer. In this article he gives a very simple explanation on the use of lambdas and closures in Ruby.

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