I just completed reading The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. Without a doubt, this was an excellent book. There are ten laws in the book and every one of them is worth the few minutes that it takes to read through each chapter.
It’s almost funny that I read the book in only a couple of hours (it’s under 100 pages) and I’ve spent the last day reading an installation document that tells me how to get ready to setup some software. Based on the first law and the tenth law, I think about 80% to 90% of my time could have been spared.
I just blogged about going to CodeMash yesterday. My abstract ended up getting accepted, so now I will be speaking at CodeMash. I’m going to be giving my “Beyond TDD: Exploring the benefits beyond testing” talk.
In addition to the great speakers that I outlined in the last post, Drew Robbins and Dave Donaldson will also be speaking. I’m looking forward to seeing the full list of sessions and speakers.
Can this event get any better 
Continuing on with the TIBs…
A while ago I was asked what the purpose of a business should be. After a lot of thinking and bouncing ideas off of various team members, we determined that the core purpose of a business was to make a profit. I’ve come back to that discussion in my mind many times and I’ve come to the conclusion that we were wrong. Business should be about more than profitability.
After we played around a little with our initial answer, we decided business was about more than profitability and we concluded that it was about creating customers (the Drucker answer). Based on my current thinking, we were still wrong.
The answer to the question obviously varies business-by-business and individual-by-individual. The most interesting part of this question has been to watch my answer change over time. My answer now is very different than it was two years ago. I would say the my current view is somewhere between the thinking of Guy Kawasaki and John Mackey.
I have started to ask this question at the companies that I have interviewed with. It’s very interesting how many different answers you can get based on this one question. The one thing that I’ve learned is that the answer to this question can let you see deep into the values and intentions of the individual (and likely the company) that you are speaking with.
Go ahead and mark your calendars for January 18th and 19th for CodeMash. What is CodeMash? Well, it’s a conference that’s blending a variety of technologies, methodologies, a great community, and a unique venue for a two-day event in Ohio.
How could you go wrong with a list of great speakers (Tom and Mary Poppendieck, Bruce Eckel, Scott Guthrie, Neal Ford), great tracks (Architecture, Desktop Development, Web Development, Methodologies, Mobility), and a variety of different languages (.Net, Java, Ruby, PHP, Python).
Oh yeah, it’s also at the Kalahari Resort. Can you think of a better way to spend $149 (or cheaper if you get in on the early-bird rate)?
I’ve been amazed by the quality of the individuals that are on my current project. There are some great and smart people here that are very passionate about what we are doing. I ran across this quote by Tom Peters that appeared very relevant…
If your company is having trouble attracting fabulous people, it is because your company sucks.
- Tom Peters
I don’t think it can be said much better than that.
