Goals for 2012 Part 2
My goals for this year are somewhat similar to last year, with a few notable changes.
- Rehab.  The “incident” was a grand mal seizure that gave me two dislocated shoulders, both of which caused fractures, which need surgery.  I’m on seizure medication, and I’m not supposed to drive a car until April.  I have already gotten through one surgery, the other will be coming up in February.  If all goes well, I’ll be about 80% by April, and hopefully 100% by July.  This goal is much lower on Maslow’s hierarchy than any of my other goals, and thus is automatically the most important.
- Certification. Â I’m already scheduled to take an MCTS exam to help my employer remain in good standing with Microsoft, as well as to improve my knowledge of Microsoft products. Â I’m not overly concerned with certification(s) this year. Â If I have the opportunity to take more Microsoft exams or pick up some PDUs, I’ll take them, but I’m not going to be worried if I don’t.
- Android apps. Â I will get a handful more of apps into the store this year, whether they be Mono for Android or native Java. Â I already have one in the works, and ideas for several more. I’m also going to get some Windows Phone apps in the marketplace.
- Conferences/sessions. Â With the exception of CodeMash, I don’t have any plans for conferences, until–at earliest–after April. Â I’d be open to doing local presentations if I’m needed, but that’s about it. Â It will be enough of a challenge just to attend CONDG group meetings in the first half of the year. Â I would like to definitely make it to GiveCamp this year!
- Blogging. Â I’ve created another blog, one with a much narrower focus than mgroves.com. Â It’s called Cross Cutting Concerns, and it’s all about AOP news and information.
- Business. Â Our MonthlySauce.com business really needs to pick up this year. Â I will be exploring some creative ways to get exposure on our limited budget.
- Personal/Internal.  As before, I have a number of personal and internal-to-my-employer goals that I won’t state here.  And I may have another surprise or two up my sleeve this year if all goes well.
That’s it.
Goals for 2012 Part 1: Goals for 2011 recap
It’s a little disappointing to me that my Goals for 2011 post is still on the home page of mgroves.com. But que sera.
First, a review of my 2011 goals, and how well I did:
- Read books. Â Bender’s TDD book, yes. Â DDD, not so much (it’s a long book!). F# book, no. Beautiful Code, yes a little. Â I’ve pretty much abandoned the old dev lunchtime book club due to dailys with my employer at that time, but I’ve managed to sneak in a couple other books too: One on PHP5, reread of Don’t Make Me Think, ASP.NET MVC 3 from Wrox, Lauren Ipsum, and a few fiction titles here and there. Â With my new Kindle, I’m able to read a lot more conveniently, though code-heavy books could be an issue.
- Certification: I think I got a few PDUs from going to the Cincinnati Day of Agile last year, but I’m really slacking in PDUs. Â I will take an MCTS exam (70-515) in a couple weeks.
- Android apps: I exceeded my goals here for sure. Â I have 5 apps in the store: 1 free, 1 paid. Â One of them (Yeah Dog!) has sold well over 150 copies. Â My free one has been downloaded over 1000 times.
- Conferences & presentations: I also exceeded my goals here, speaking in Pittsburgh (twice), Findlay, Codestock, Devlink, Columbus, Louisville, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Richmond, Stir Trek, New York, and probably one or two more that I’ve forgotten. Â The travel has been a bit of a strain on family and finances, so I was already planning to reduce my speaking, even before the “incident”, which I’ll get to later.
- User groups: Â I regretfully didn’t participate in GiveCamp (because of Richmond) in any capacity, but I did help to organize Central Ohio Day of .NET, and I performed okay on the board of CONDG. Â I chose not to pursue re-election though (mainly because of the “incident”).
- Project Euler: I definitely dropped the ball here. Â I ended up spending more time preparing and presenting on Euler than I did doing new problems.
- Blogging: Another fail. Â I spend more time on Twitter than blogging, that’s for sure.
- Surprises: My wife and I successfully launched our first small business, MonthlySauce.com. Â Business isn’t exactly rushing in, but we did launch it on schedule.
Stay tuned for my 2012 goals and details on the “incident”.
Hitchhiker’s guide to hitchhiking
I was listening to the Freakonomics podcast recently. Specifically, an episode about hitchhiking. They speculate about the various reasons that hitchhiking has largely gone away. It’s a great episode; check it out. But an important detail was brought up: many people drive around in mostly empty cars. That is, a typical car has capacity for 4 passengers, but only usually carries 1. This means that there’s a lot of wasted capacity.
On the day I write this, I am currently recovering from a medical issue that prevents me from driving. I’m sure there are many others in a similar situation: they have no car, no license, a medical condition, etc, that prevents them from driving themselves. Compare this to all the wasted capacity, and you have a market inefficiency (or a market opportunity, depending on how you look at it).
One of the problems with hitchhiking your person around is unreliability. Maybe I can hitch a ride to Chipotle, but will I be able to hitch back, all within a reasonable time?  But what if my burrito could hitch a ride instead of me?  There are many food delivery services in Columbus, but few are suitable or affordable for a single person’s meal.  So, I posed my idea to Twitter.
I soon received a response that there’s a service called Zaarly, that could act very much like a service that I imagined. Â I placed a somewhat silly order: $10 to deliver me a Chipotle burrito. Â I say silly because Zaarly looks like a new service, has very few participants, not to mention I was asking for someone to deliver a burrito to me for about $3 in profit. Â However, if there were a critical mass of Zaarly users, then there’s gotta be at least one user already going to be driving near both a Chipotle and my house anyway, then the $3 is almost free money for someone with a mostly empty car. Â And this could work not just for food, but for anything that needs delivery: documents, groceries, anything. Â Or maybe there’s some sort of crediting that could (hypothetically) happen: you deliver to me today, and you’ll get one free delivery credit to use later, or something like that. Â This is similar to the concept of “slugging“, or ad-hoc carpooling, as mentioned in the Freakonomics podcast episode, except it’s stuff instead of people.
Realistically, Zaarly hasn’t reached this level of critical mass, at least not in Columbus.  I shouldn’t have gotten my burrito.  Some smart aleck placed a $40 bid to make this point.
Fortunately for me, the CEO of Zaarly Columbus decided to make his own point: that Zaarly is a business that cares about and needs customers (like me) to be successful, and he accepted and delivered my $10 Chipotle burrito offer. Â I’m not saying he’s going to be your personal Chipotle delivery man for $3 a pop (I tipped him a little more, by the way 
, but I’m saying in cities bursting with commuters (like Columbus), let’s put our wasted capacity to work, and start using Zaarly!
Goals for 2011
I set a bunch of goals for myself last year, publicly, and while I didn’t meet them all exactly, I think it was a worthwhile exercise, and really helped to focus me throughout the year. Â One of the activities that Brian H. Prince suggests in his “Driving Your Career” series is very similar: sit down every year and figure out what your goals are, because they may change from time to time.
I’ll have a number of personal and internal-to-my-employer goals that I won’t list here, so what follows is only a subset of my overall goals set:
- Read books. Â I’ve already purchased way more books than I need to. Â Attending the book club that I helped organize last year is practically out of the question due to schedule changes, but among the books I plan to read on my own include: Domain Driven Design, at least one F# book, Beautiful Code, James Bender’s new TDD book, among other non-dev books like Soul of the Lion and Atlas Shrugs.
- I don’t really have any certification goals, but to keep my PMP I probably need to get some PDUs this year. Â Attend PMP user group meetings and sessions, that sort of thing.
- I will put at least one app into an Android Marketplace, hopefully one free app and one pay app.
- Conferences and presentations a-go-go: I’ve already got speaking engagements scheduled at two conferences in Louisville and Detroit, not to mention a remote speaking engagement for a college, and probably other events as the year goes on. Â I also intend to attend the normal array of events, including Stir Trek, Central Ohio Day of .NET, GiveCamp, etc. Â My goal last year was 3 speaking engagements. Â At this rate, I’ll quadruple that in this year.
- User group involvement: as an officer of the local .NET group now, I will definitely be involved in a major way for regular meetings and special events. Â I doubt this will involve much speaking, as it will a lot of behinds-the-scenes work, which is totally fine. Â I will do my best to help this community grow and improve as much as I can, not only in CONDG, but the community as a whole.
- Project Euler: while I definitely overachieved on this last year, the amount of time I’ve spent on it in the last quarter has dropped drastically. Â I’d like to get at least another 25-30 of these problems knocked out this year.
- Blogging: I’m nowhere near the volume I used to do in the pre-MBA, pre-children days, but my blog posts are rising back up, in volume certainly, but also in quality (I hope). Â This is in major part due to the much more interesting and fulfilling work I’m doing full-time these days.
I have some other surprises up my sleeve too, which I won’t reveal until the appropriate time. Â Suffice it to say, I’m very, very busy, but this could really be a red-letter year for me (and my family, of course).
So: keep me honest. Â If you see me slacking, or haven’t heard from me in a while, beat me over the head on Twitter, or in a comment here, or in person for that matter.
The Answer to mobile phone development
I attended the CINNUNG Mobile Development Firestarter event today. I learned a great deal, as I always do from these kinds of events, and I had a lot of fun.
But as each platform was discussed—first Android, then iPhone, and finally Windows Mobile/Windows Phone—it occurred to me that the most important question is: which platform do I use (assuming you’ve already answered ‘yes’ to the question: do I need to write a mobile phone app?). This is a very important question, because there really isn’t a way to develop the same app (or, at least, the same code) for all three platforms. Android is Java, iPhone is Objective-C, and Windows is .NET. So, besides all the technical goodness, this was one of my primary objectives for this Firestarter: which platform do I use? And I think I have the answer:
Develop for all three.
Wait a second. Didn’t you just say you couldn’t develop for all three? Well, yes. There is no way to build a native app for all three with the same source code. Ah, you see what I did there? Native app. There is one obvious way to build an app for all three platforms with the same code base. You don’t have to go through a costly/obstructive app store either. It’s called the World Wide Web. You see, I wasn’t actually asking the right question.
Web apps for mobile have been historically dubious because, well, mobile web browsers have been historically dubious. But with Safari for iPhone, Windows Phone 7 Internet Explorer, and the Android Web browser, we get three relatively good browsers (at least two of which are built with WebKit) that arguably rival their desktop brethren. Modern JavaScript can already provide a UI that is responsive enough for many situations, and heck, you can even get stuff like geolocation.
So really, what’s the point of possibly learning a new language, UI framework, API, app store requirements, rules and restrictions, not to mention a possible hefty fee for selling on an app store, when you already have a much more open channel already built in to every platform. Now, I’m not saying web apps are always the answer (see also: the last 20 years of SAAS vs desktop arguments, not to mention my previous post on RTRJ). But I do think there’s something of an app store “bubble”, and when that dust settles, a similar equilibrium (as on desktops) will be reached on mobile platforms, especially if all these new consumers in the smartphone market have a hard time transferring their purchased apps to their next phone or cell network.
Payday Lending
Ah, that pesky, meddlesome government is at it again!
A recent law was passed in Ohio that all but makes payday lending illegal.
In case you aren’t familiar with them, payday loans are short-term (15 days) loans. The way it works is that you go to one of the payday loan stores with a post-dated check for the amount you want plus a fee (around $10-$15 per $100 you want to borrow). They check your ID, ask for paycheck stubs to demonstrate that you are gainfully employed, and maybe some other things to verify your checking account and current address and such. They don’t check your credit. They then give you the amount you want in cash. If you don’t pay it back in 15 days, they will cash your check.
So what’s the big deal? Critics (or as I like to call them: meddlers) say that these loans are irresponsible and predatory. The fees amount to 391% APR and many loans result in a downward spiral of borrowing to pay off borrowing.
Wow, that sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Those poor, defenseless, stupid poor people who can’t make good decisions and pay 300% on their loans! We know what’s best for them! The government should do something! There oughta be a law! Yeah, that’s the ticket!
But wait. There’s already a law: it’s illegal to pay off a payday loan with another payday loan. Makes sense, doesn’t it? As so often is the case, why make new laws when you can just enforce the existing ones. But I digress…
Now we have a new law that restricts payday lending to 30% APR. Which means they can charge like $1.08 per $100. Which means they can’t stay in business, and they have to fire 6000 people, and 1600 landlords have to find new tenants (and that’s just one company).
Meanwhile, the banks can charge $30 for an overdraft fee, plus another amount every day the account is overdrawn, none of which is disclosed as “APR”. Credit card companies charge 30% APR, fine, but these helpless, mouthbreathing poor people who can’t be trusted to make their own decisions will, of course, only pay the minimum. On a $500 balance, they will pay $294 in interest over 3 years(*).
That’s assuming they can even get a credit card in the first place. If they are going to Checksmart, they probably don’t have very good credit.
So what are they supposed to do when it’s time to take their kid to the doctor or get their car fixed? I guess they could just pay a late fee on their bills instead (also not disclosed as APR, oddly enough), go to a pawn shop, steal the money, suffer the embarrassment and relational strain of borrowing from friends and family, go on a welfare program, or just skip the doctor’s appointment. Fantastic alternatives all.
Ohio politicians (both parties, now, this had very broad support) claim to want to bring jobs to Ohio and make it friendlier to business. So far, that’s only been lip service. Color me shocked.
Laws of Marketing 5: Focus
I’ve picked up a book called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries & Jack Trout, and I’m blogging a summary of each chapter.
Chapter 4. The Law of Focus
The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind.
“Owning” a word like Xerox owns “copy”, Kleenex owns “tissue”, and Volvo owns “safety”, is the most powerful concept in marketing. Just recently I linked to a site called Brand Tags (see also the Volvo and Xerox links) which might be a useful sort of word association tool to see if a brand has achieved the focus they are going for.
It should be a simple word, with a narrow focus. The word should also be benefit oriented.
Achieving this isn’t simply a matter of advertising. If a firm want to obtain this kind of obiquity, it should reduce the scope of its offering(s) to narrow their focus instead of chasing after everything.
Also, it helps if the word is an “opposing” word. It’s not a good idea to go after a word like “honesty” because no one is going after after “dishonesty”. Words like “honesty” and “quality” are merely table stakes.
Now that I’m at #5, what do you think about this book? Should I continue summarizing the remaining 17 chapters?
Laws of Marketing 4: Perception
I’ve picked up a book called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries & Jack Trout, and I’m blogging a summary of each chapter.
Chapter 4. The Law of Perception
Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perception.
This chapter is a bit existential, and at times it seemed rather silly to see in a marketing book. Points such as:
- There is no objective reality
- All truth is relative
- Most people think they are better perceivers than everyone else
- People project to cope with being alone in the universe
The basic point is this: purchasing decisions are not based entirely on objective facts. The reasons for this are rooted in psychology, but it boils down to people being unique, having unique opinions, and have unique perspectives. Slap different logos on the exact same product, and you won’t necessarily get a 50-50 spread in choices. Put the same logo on two different flavors of soda and people will tell you there’s a difference between the flavors.
But whether or not perception actually is reality, a marketer should behave as if it is.
Brand Tags
What does a brand mean to you?
Look at a brand logo and think of the first word that comes to mind. Now have a hundred other people do the same thing.
That is what brand tags is.
“The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.”
Each brand has its own tag cloud. This site has potential to be gamed, of course, but I think the idea is pretty cool, and it doesn’t really look like it’s being gamed too much. Here are some examples of the biggest words in a tag cloud.
- NPR: boring, liberal, news, radio, smart
- Coke: classic, coke, drink, red, refreshing, soda, sugar, sweet
- Pepsi: coke, cola, drink, not coke, refreshing, soda, sugar, sweet
- GE: electric, electricity, light, lightbulb, old
I don’t know about you, but I can see some validation for the laws of marketing in here.
Laws of Marketing 3: Mind
I’ve picked up a book called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries & Jack Trout, and I’m blogging a summary of each chapter.
Chapter 3. The Law of Mind
It’s better to be first in the mind than to be the first in the marketplace.
Being first to market doesn’t really matter if you aren’t first in the mind of the consumer. For instance, the Altair 8800 is largely considered the first mass market PC, but it was largely eclipsed by later PCs such as the Apple II.
The role of money in marketing is important, but this law shows that money isn’t necesarily everying. It’s hard to overcome first imprssions and well-formed opinions, no matter how much money is spent.
The law of leadership still matters, but only to the extent that it usually provides access to the mind of the consumer.
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