You can't do your job all by yourself. As Gretchen Rubin says, one of the secrets of adulthood is "It's okay to ask for help".
Twice a year, folks from our offices around the world (collectively, 'the field') come to Seattle for TechReady. It's an internal conference that the product groups use to help folks in the field do their jobs better.
On Tuesday, I gave my 'Why Ruby?' talk at TechReady. It tried to answer a few questions:
- Why should you care?
- Why is Ruby interesting?
- Who is using it and were they successful?
- What is my team doing about it?
- What is our roadmap and how will we get there?
- Why is Open Source important to our future?
To some folks who read my blog, the answers to these things are obvious. But remember, not everybody is you. Not everybody cares about the same things that you do. Reaching out to folks who don't share your world view is a big part of how you can change the way things are today. And that's a big part of what I do around here.
I got the most value from giving my talk when I spent some time hanging out with folks from my talk. Over some beers I had a chance to learn what folks in the field care about, how they get measured, and how we can help each other. Next time I give this talk, I'll know exactly what to say. Talks are for your audience, and understanding what your audience cares about is the key to success.
Thanks to the good folks from DPE (our Developer and Platform Evangelism Team) for your company and picking up the check for dinner :)
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I recently started re-reading Jeff Hawkins' most excellent book, On Intelligence. This is easily one of the best books that I've ever read. In it, he presents his model for human intelligence, which is based on what he calls a memory-predictive framework. Human brains can do complex things (like catching a ball) in about half a second. In that time, given the fact that a neuron takes 5ms to fire, your computation path is at best 100 steps long. His theory is that you don't compute the solution, but instead you recall the solution. Jeff also has a company called Numenta, which implements this algorithm in software today, and there's an SDK!
