Caffeinated Soap
No, we’re not making this up. http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/giftsunder10/5a65/ 
Between end-of-year project deadlines, gift shopping, and other holiday preparations, a coder can get really squeezed for time. And you don’t want to back a programmer into a corner where they have to choose between sufficient caffeination and personal hygiene. This should avoid any such unpleasantness.

A Blunt Instrument
http://www.harborfreight.com/4-lb-neon-orange-dead-blow-hammer-41800.html
There are situations in which you simply cannot improve upon a large hammer.  This is the reason that the B-52 has had such a long lifespan. This orange beauty will allow your beloved techie to vent frustration upon keyboards, desks, recalcitrant Solaris machines, etc without the risk of forehead or hand injury.

A “Come home for dinner late” card
It’s surprising how many bugs are found just after the “I’ll be home by 6:15 for dinner” phone call. Your programmer is now torn between a promise to loved ones and a dedication to hunting down that crash before calling it a day. Give them a Monopoly-style “Get out of dinner, free” card so that at least once this year week, they can arrive late without guilt.

A USB-chargeable flashlight
http://www.berettausa.com/products/jolt-usb-flash-light-b2c-only-blue/
A USB flashlight is insidious in its irresistible blend of techie-seducing features. First off, it’s a USB device. *Anything* USB (and to a lesser extent FireWire) is worthy of investigation. Secondly, it’s the size and shape of most trade show trinkets, which programmers are wired at birth to hoard. Thirdly, it has a genuinely useful function, which all but ensures your coder will make every effort to rationalize this gadget’s place in the laptop bag for years to come.

Carpal Tunnel Therapy
http://www.amazon.com/Roleo-Therapeutic-Carpal-Therapy-Massager/dp/B005CP4GDA/
Because sometimes you gotta play hurt.
(Not yet verified, but I think this thing can also make homemade ravioli…)

Yoga Gear
http://www.amazon.com/Office-Yoga-Simple-Stretches-People/dp/0811826856
Not only is this great for relieving the tension of long hours frozen at the keyboard, it appears to also be a crafty way of furthering ones career.

Look at this. It’s worthless – ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless. Men will kill for it. Men like you and me.
- René Belloq, Raiders of the Lost Ark

Whether it be changing jobs, moving to a new house or office, or simply cleaning out clutter, every so often I find myself sorting through the bits of technology-related junk I’ve accumulated over the years. There’s a fair amount of trade show goodies, some of them entirely too cool or valuable to part with. The bulk of it is reluctantly thrown away, including stress-relief squeezy things, can coolers, light up pens that no longer light, and the like. But there are items that always survive the cut, ones that have some sentimentality attached to them.

Professional Developers Conference 2000 pen

I cannot believe this thing still writes after 11 years. It has lived in the glove box of the three different cars I’ve owned since 2000. This was the PDC where Microsoft formally introduced the .NET platform to the masses. I vividly recall the stunned looks on thousands of keynote attendees as they realized all their Win32 mastery was just rendered obsolete. The pen has actually outlasted several .NET technologies introduced at the conference. I’ve got one from the 2003 PDC ready to go once this one runs out of ink.

Cyrix x86 processor

A leftover from my system building days. It was the first real ultra-cheap x86 alternative, and prompted Intel to develop the Celeron line. I placed this in a slapped-together spare parts budget computer (running Windows 95) that I assembled for my wife’s grandparents. Cyrix as a company didn’t last long, but this chip powered that system for over a decade. Now that the grandparents are gone, I can’t bear to toss this hunk of silicon junk.

NeXT Step poster

I got this gem in a trade with my wife’s uncle, a sysadmin, for a Windows Server 2000 license. It’s a panorama of the first generation NeXT system, replete with all black computer, keyboard, monitor, and printer. I’ve been meaning to put it up on my office wall, but I can’t bring myself to stick pins through it, and I can’t justify the cash it would take to frame it.

Do you have anything like this that you can’t seem to part with? Please share by leaving a reply!

I think most technology companies understand there are only two real dangers to a market-leading product’s lifespan: self-inflicted wounds or a failure to evolve. The introduction of a new competitor does not foretell an impending winner-take-all contest.

While Apple has been churning out hit after hit for the past five years, Final Cut Pro is in danger of dealing itself a knockout combination of radical UI redesign and reduced functionality. Facebook may indeed need to be wary of Google+ as the most recent barbarian at the gate, but they also need to make sure they don’t turn themselves into MySpace.

The public perception nightmare of Windows Vista did more damage to the Windows brand than any Linux distro could ever hope to inflict. Personally I found Vista to be a fine upgrade from XP, and never understood the reason for such vitriol pointed its way. But nevertheless the criticism was loud and frequent.

Quick! What killed the Palm Pilot? Was it some hot new portable? Plenty of Windows Mobile touchscreen devices certainly wanted to take a swing at the champ. (Like my Viewsonic V35, which I finally got around to recycling last year). But no single device spelled the demise of the Pilot. Rather the entire PDA segment was washed away in a tide of irrelevance and redundancy as cell phones acquired this functionality. At least the 3-pack of replacement styli I bought for the V35 comes in handy when my son misplaces his Nintendo DS stylus.

So while the bloodthirsty tech media may attempt to paint the competitive landscape as a gladiatorial arena, I believe most tech products leave the battle under their own declining power, and not in a body bag.

The let down happened when I started thinking about the content of what I’m reading now versus what I was reading about 5-10 years ago.  Blog content is great, but it’s like reading a newspaper that’s nothing but a big editorial section.  Most posts are packed with unfiltered content that often falls into one of two categories; “You know what I think?” and “This is cool, check this out!”.   Both types of blog post are great and I’ve spent many, many hours reading these.  When I really thought about the content I’m reading though, I realized that I’m actually learning a lot less than I used to.  That wasn’t the only problem either.  Reading primarily in the browser has turned me into a skimmer, something I rarely used to do.  There’s so much pure bloggage out there that you have to skim and filter what’s worth reading and what’s not.  While that’s not awful in itself, I’ve noticed that I tend to retain a lot less when I read this way.  I also found that reading the blogs was only half of the reading I was doing.  The rest was reading people’s comments about what I had just read.  I can easily spend more time reading that than reading actual blog content.

At some point in your life, you say things or do things that make you think to yourself, “I’m really getting old.”  Everything is turning digital now.  Do I sound old yet?  In addition to programming, I’ve been a photographer for a long time, almost thirty years.  I started back in high school doing black and white film and eventually built a darkroom in my house.  About three years ago, I realized that buying film, paper and chemicals and spending countless hours in that darkroom could be replaced by spending a fraction of the time, at no cost, in front of my computer with Photoshop.  It was a sad realization, but I moved on to a digital SLR and turned the darkroom back into the original walk-in closet.  The only thing missing from Photoshop is actually feeling the film and the paper.  It may not sound like much, but after so many years I can say that those things are significant.  There’s something about handling the materials that puts you in touch with the process, and I haven’t found a replacement for that yet when I “develop” my photos the computer.

Reading is the same way.  There’s something about sitting down with a book that puts you in the mode of committing to read.  I can’t browse away from what I’m reading in a book with the click of a mouse.  Actually opening the book, holding it in my lap and turning the pages makes me feel like I’m ready to learning something new.  This is all about the experience of reading, and retaining what you read, without distraction.  It’s the same reason I wasn’t allowed to do my homework with the TV on when I was in school.  I can say for sure that I retain more when I read a book than when I read a blog at the computer.

Most computer books are also directed at actually teaching something.  Whether it’s a book about a programming language, a way of approaching design, or how to see a development project through to completion, most books teach.  However, it’s a rare occasion when a blog post really teaches you something.  Opinion pieces are great and have their place, but when the scale tips from spending time reading books to reading blog posts, you’re also tipping the the scale of how much you’re learning.

So now you’ve read a blog post about why you should try to read less blog posts.  You should probably eat more green vegetables and get eight hours of sleep each night, but I’ll save that for another post.  I’m going to try to make a change in my blogging, and do more writing that leaves readers with something more useful than a simple conversation piece.  Until then, try turning off the browser and go pick up a book… the trees will forgive you.

After three years of use it had developed its own unique personality.  It had the perfect background with cool sounds to match.  The fonts were just right.  All of the desktop icons were where I wanted them and I knew exactly where everything was off the Start menu.  I had scripts, shortcuts and bindings to do all the common stuff I need to quickly.  I’d gotten to know all of its quirks, traits, flaws and mannerisms over those few years.

However, like many computers, after installing several versions of many large apps, it wasn’t the playful, energetic puppy that it was back when I started using it.  It was in no rush when rebooting, and I could hear it let out a sigh whenever started Outlook or Visual Studio.  What were once speedy builds turned into mandatory coffee breaks.  Still, I loved that computer… we knew each other and wrote software together every day.

Then, early one morning, our sys admin came over to my office.  “It seems like your computer’s been trying to send out emails directly on port 25 during the middle of the night, any idea what that could be?”  I didn’t know.  We looked up the address where they were being sent, somewhere I’d never heard of before.  “Alright, I’ll bring over the Vista DVD,” he said.

And that’s when it sunk in.  An infection… a virus… the Vista DVD… I was going to have to reformat my machine.  I was going to have to shoot Old Yeller.

[From the movie... Old Yeller's gone rabid and Mama's holding a shotgun]
Travis: No mama!
Mama: There’s no hope for him now. He’s sufferin’. You know we gotta do it.
Travis: I know Mama… But he was my dog… I’ll do it.

I sat quietly for a while after he left, realizing that this was the end.  I spent the next few hours backing up all of my important files and exporting all of my preferences.  “There are automatic updates ready to install, reboot now?” it prompted innocently.  The poor thing had no clue.  I missed him already, and I wondered if a better place awaited him after fdisk.  A place without disk fragmentation, bloated installations, useless polling auto-update tray apps and frozen taskbars.  I said goodbye and shut down one last time before booting from the Vista DVD.

I’m still sitting at the same desk, but everything feels new and a little unknown now.  It’s like working again with that energetic puppy I began with.  He’s eager to start up and get to work, builds are a snap and the desktop is clutter-free.  I’m still getting to know it, and soon he’ll develop his own personality.  I still miss Old Yeller, though.

Visual Basic 1.0

Sitting in between Turbo Tax ’99 and Mavis Beacon’s Typing Tutor was this gem….  Visual Basic 1.0.  I almost couldn’t believe my eyes.  To me, this was on par with finding the missing link.  As a programmer, this was archeological gold, and it was on sale for fifty cents.  My kids saw the excitement on my face and must have thought that I’d found an XBox 360.  For them, Visual Basic was a major let down.

A lot of people think that VB is soft and if you program in it, you’re automatically a drooling hack developer who couldn’t program their alarm clock.  I cut my teeth on VB 4.0 in my first job, and learned that when combined with COM in C++, VB was a fantastic language for the job of making a user interface. That being said, VB still has some special memories for me.

The contents of the box were practically undisturbed.  The disks were all still in their original plastic wrap and the manual didn’t seem to have ever been opened.  Immediately, there are certain clues that tell you just how old it is (even though the box is copyrighted 1991).  First, the box contains two forms of media; 3.5″ and 5.25″ floppies.  To actually take a 5.25″ floppy out of its sleeve and hold it brought me back to the days of floppy doors and the red LED that told you the disk was being read.  The system requirements for VB 1.0 were Windows 3.0, a 286 processor and 1MB of memory.  Somewhat of a far cry from the Visual Basic of today.

I also loved the included “Companion Products and Services Directory”.  The third party marketing rush had already begun back then.  Most of the components in the catalog, though, are for connecting to a VAX server or to a dBase or Btrieve database.  There are a handful of charting components and widgets such as tree controls (not yet standard in 1991) and grids.  The reminiscing continues.

This box goes right up on my bookshelf at home next to the most revered books in my collection. Say what you will about Visual Basic, but it may be one of the most important developments in programming over the last 20 years for the simple reason that it allowed any non-programmer to write a Windows program.  If you think that’s not a valid reason for such importance, let me repeat… it allowed any non-programmer to write a Windows program.  It was Prometheus, stealing fire from Zeus and giving it to mere mortals for their use.

You no longer had to know C, and wade through Petzold, to write “Hello World” in a window.  Employees from any company with core business knowledge, but no degree in programming, could now quickly write customized applications.  Of course, the debate of whether this was a good thing for programming or not still goes on today.  However, regardless of which side you’re on, you can’t deny that VB was a major victory for bringing the PC to the business market.  Without VB, we may not even have a Microsoft today.

So thank you very much, guy from two streets down, who decided that Visual Basic 1.0 wasn’t important enough to keep, but too important to just throw away.  One man’s junk is another man’s gold, and I really struck it rich that weekend.

I like the generic term, “change request” for all changes in a system. But it’s very important to know whether it is a defect or a feature request. In my lexicon, a “defect” is something that doesn’t work as spec’ed; a feature request is a request to alter the intended behavior. Overall, I prefer the word “defect” to “bug”. “Bug” sounds kind of cute. “Defect” is a harsh, painful word, which is exactly what I want associated with any part of the product that doesn’t work properly.

Depending on who you are talking to, they either don’t care about this distinction or they care greatly.

Customers generally don’t really care which it is. They just want the behavior changed. To them, it is a defect as in “defective”, and they don’t care whether it was spec’ed wrong or implemented wrong—it’s just wrong and they want it changed. Am I any different about the products I use?

As a product manager, I care greatly about this distinction because they tend to address different groups. Defects are typically the chief cause for dissatisfaction with a given product. Generally, customers wouldn’t have bought the product if it didn’t have the features they wanted, but key defects are sometimes discovered only after you’ve purchased. Certainly, if you have many obvious defects they will prevent new customers from favorably evaluating your product. Further, defects in a program add to the burden of development, slowing work on related capabilities.

Feature requests add new capabilities to the system. Though these are beneficial to existing users, they primarily want the existing set of capabilities to work as well as possible. New features are a means to broaden the product’s appeal. They can also provide incentives for customers to upgrade or participate in maintenance programs that include free updates.

Developers are also passionate about this distinction, but for a different reason. For them, the concern seems to be that a defect is considered a personal affront to their ability. I’ve spent more time arguing with some developers whether a change request was a defect or a feature request than it would actually take them to fix the problem (though, not at SlickEdit, of course!)

Balancing priorities for defects versus feature requests is one of the most challenging tasks a product manager faces. There are different voices pulling you in different directions: sales, marketing, customers, and developers. All have different things they want to accomplish in the next release.

At SlickEdit, we try to strike a balance that gives as much as we can to each group. Each major release contains new features that we think can improve how you write code. We also try to knock out as many defects as we possibly can.

“I don’t care if you suck at writing. I don’t care if nobody reads your blog. I don’t care if you have nothing interesting to say. If you can demonstrate a willingness to write, and a desire to keep continually improving your writing, you will eventually be successful.”

How this applies to us

We began blogging at SlickEdit a little over a year ago. Not written by a single person, the blog is a group effort authored by the dev and support teams. Our goal for the blog was to better connect with the developer community at large and to become an active participant in online discussions . The ‘Hello World’ blog gave us the perfect platform to share our thoughts, opinions, and expertise on a myriad of technical issues.

From software management and best practices to managing the first days on the job, the SlickEdit team has shared their thoughts, tips, real world experiences, and genuine joy of coding with the online community. I am very happy to say that the blog has been a huge success. With hundreds of thousands of visitors from over 176 countries and territories, the SlickEdit blog has outperformed our wildest expectations.

What has been really exciting are the hundreds of comments we have received on the blog, as well as link backs, that have really allowed us to connect and interact with the online community – the whole purpose of the blog to begin with. On the social media side, we have been Dugg, Reditted, StumbledUpon, Dzoned, DotNetKicked, Delicioused, Hacker Newsed, etc… more times than I can count. Exciting stuff and we can’t thank you enough.

Just in case you have missed any posts, here are a samples from each month since we began the blog.

Visit the blog archives for a complete list of all posts :

April 2007

Is Your Editor Working Hard Enough?

May 2007

Top Ten Reasons NOT to use SlickEdit

June 2007

Learning to Fly: The Musings of a New SlickEdit Employee

July 2007

Programming Language Wars

August 2007

SlickEdit 2007 For Windows Development

September 2007

Creating a PHP 5 Extension with Visual C++ 2005

October 2007

Comfort, Habits and Ruts in Software Development

November 2007

C# with SlickEdit : No Visual Studio Required

December 2007

Classical in a Digital Age

January 2008

My Programming New Year’s Resolution

February 2008

Plug-in Extensibility Through Reflection in .Net and Java

March 2008

Software Schedules and the Parable of the Loaf of Bread

April 2008

BASIC and the Rubik’s Cube

May 2008

Tutorial: Adding Language Support to SlickEdit

June 2008

“Management” is a Dirty Word

 All

Complete list of all posts for SlickEdit