February 2008 Archives

Cool 3D panorama of [Airbus A380 flight deck]

Getting rich

If you want to make a lot of money, don't make money your goal. Make serving a lot of people your goal. If you hit that target enough times, you'll get your reward. That reward will be money, and you can do whatever you choose with that money. But remember that money is only the reward for hitting your target - it's not the target itself. Always keep your priorities straight.

You have to understand these things to do front office programming:

• connecting to database
• real-time data feeds
• order execution platforms
• quant libraries
• optimization engines
• charting software
• report generation engines
• legacy technologies
• Excel Need to understand
• event-driven architecture
• concurrency
• connectivity and interoperability objects, SQL, multithreading, interoperability, messaging, order selection algorithms, order management techniques

[Snopes cartoon]
[LISP cartoon]
[US senator & science cartoon]
[Long walks on the beach cartoon]
[Someone is wrong on the internet]

[US presidents]

Why aren't just, moral men attracting judicious voters? Historically, the parties tried for plurality by listing jobs, growth, honest government as candidates' highest concerns. More recently, though, White House campaigns have refined their election knowhow: Just need Fox channel running biased coverage -- Bingo!

A mnemonic for remembering the last names of the American presidents.

A product vision model helps team members pass the elevator test -- the ability to explain the project to someone within two minutes. It comes from Geoffrey Moore's book Crossing the Chasm. It follows the form:

for (target customer)
who (statement of need or opportunity)
the (product name)
is a (product category)
that (key benefit, compelling reason to buy)
unlike (primary competitive alternative)
our product (statement of primary differentiation)

Creating a product vision statement helps teams remain focused on the critical aspects of the product, even when details are changing rapidly. It is very easy to get focused on the short-term issues associated with a 2-4 week development iteration and lose track of the overall product vision.