tl;dr;

On January 6, 1997, I launched my career in enterprise software with PeopleSoft. I spent my early days traveling around the US, Canada, and Australia as a PeopleSoft consultant, implementing PeopleSoft HR/Benefits/Payroll. I even wrote some COBOL, however, you won’t find that on my LinkedIn profile. After a few years as a nomad, I landed in various product development roles. I led a team that built a royalties and billing system for several major franchises, created a module for PeopleSoft HR/Payroll that allowed companies to terminate mass amounts of people (not one of my proudest projects… although most customers use(d) it for terminating seasonal workers), and helped build and ship the first versions of PeopleSoft’s EPM and Workforce Analytics products.

After helping build several products, I moved to an internally focused job and managed PeopleSoft’s internal web properties along with a team of talented web developers. Together we worked with the PeopleTools team to bring to life PeopleSoft’s Enterprise Portal. We ate our dog food (which turned out to be rather good). The success of our portal implementation landed me a job in our Sales Support team. My primary responsibility was to make PeopleSoft’s products demo **really** well. We did that by making our products work well and look **really** good so that customers can imagine how a real PeopleSoft implementation can function inside their organization. We were quite successful.

About a year after Oracle acquired PeopleSoft, Paul Pedrazzi approached me about starting up an innovation lab within Oracle. At the time, it seemed like a pipe dream. I was skeptical, but deep inside I had ideas burning holes in my brain that needed to be pursued. So, I agreed to do it. With that, the AppsLab was born. And from then until now, I’ve had the best time in my professional career.

The last 4+ years in the AppsLab was an amazing ride. We built highly successful products grown organically out of desire. Oracle Connect (Oracle’s internal social network) grew as rapidly as it was written. It was a great lesson for how to grow a community and how to connect a diverse set of people within an 80k+ employee company. Oracle Mix was also an excellent project that proved that it’s possible to bootstrap a top level web app within 5 weeks without hardware, support, and many other things — a major accomplishment within the confines of Oracle. I only wish we could have finished building out the vision of Mix before we had to hand it off.

The AppsLab is what every large company needs. Take a few passionate people who have a burning desire to build products that people love to use everyday, put them together, and see what comes out. Prior to the AppsLab, most of the software I wrote never got used by me or my friends (except for the PeopleSoft Portal). It’s difficult to build software you don’t build for yourself. It’s difficult to fall in love with software you don’t use. So, if you write software, make sure you can fall in love with it, otherwise, don’t write software. The ‘Lab will continue it’s marching orders and will continue to rock within Oracle. Jake runs a great team of dudes that still have that burning passion. Their latest product will again satisfy many users within (and possibly outside) of Oracle… stay tuned for that.

So, after 14+ awesome years, it’s time for me to end this chapter of my career. I’ve met hundreds of wonderful people over those years and will likely work with many of you again someday — it is a small community we’re in.

As for the next chapter — on September 6th, I start my new gig at Atlassian as a Developer Advocate — you may have heard of them through their awesome products, JIRA, Confluence, and a few others. I’ll be playing a role similar to what I did in my sales engineering days mashed up with what I did in the lab.

Atlassian is a small software company headquartered in Sydney, Australia and driven by two wildly amazing dudes who have that passion I wrote about above. I’m extremely excited to be joining them.

As for keeping in touch, you can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+. Please do keep in touch.

UPDATE: Just in case you didn’t see the name below the title above, I, Rich Manalang, am the one leaving, not Jake. Also, several people have asked if I’m relocating to Sydney. Nope. I’ll be working in Atlassian’s San Francisco office.Possibly Related Posts:

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Those of you who know me well know that I have an obsession to being “in the know.” A lot of people like to be up-to-date with information, but the difference with me is that I’m obsessed with gathering information to the point that the precious time I have to get stuff done suffers. I’ve been aware of my obsession for a while now and have even tried experiments to help, but none have worked well enough for me.

Here’s my real problem… with all of the “noise” available on the web and in “meat” life, I’m constantly in consumption mode. All day long, I’m on Google Reader, Twitter, email, my phone, and the web mining information. Most people who use these apps don’t have an issue with shutting them down to get work done. For me, I have to force myself to do it and it’s a very difficult internal battle. I have an obsession to keeping my Google Reader read count to zero, making sure I’ve read all the tweets in my timeline and lists since I last viewed it, make sure I’ve read all my emails/im, updated all of my android/ios apps, updated my OS and other software, and basically respond to every notification that is vying for my attention.

If you add up the time that I’ve spent doing all of that in a day, you’d be surprised.

The other day, I thought of a solution. It consists of using smart filters and disabling the notifications — a simple solution really. The solution came about when Jake was commenting on my side project onlythelinks.com (I’ll save the details of that for another post) about how it needs a real-time notifier/updater. After a quick thought I realized that I really don’t like real-time apps that much and I hate getting notified that I have new stuff to consume or do.

Think about it… on your computer or mobile phone, you probably have something that notifies you every time you get an email, get new tweets, have new software to update, have IMs to respond to, have text messages, etc. Each notification is like a person poking you trying to divert your attention. Think about your iPhone/iPad (if you have one), don’t you hate it when the App Store icon on the home screen has a red badge notifying you that you have updates to deal with? Updating software is the last thing I want to do when I use an iPhone/iPad.

For all the great things Apple has contributed to the design experience, I have to say that I’m not a fan of the things they’ve done to capture my attention (for you Apple Fundamentalists, bring it on!). As much as I love looking at beautiful interfaces and having great digital experience, more thought needs to go into what parts of the experience should capture attention and which should not. The App Store badge notification is a prime example of where Apple got that wrong, IMO.

As I write this, my attention is getting diverted to something else… crap. I’ll have to finish my thought later. Say something below…Possibly Related Posts:

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As much as I like dedicated Twitter clients, it seems wrong to me.  I would much prefer a better experience on twitter.com, but since that hasn’t happened and is likely not going to happen (at least in the near future), @anthonyslai and I decided to take things into our own hands and bring some much needed goodness to twitter.com.

@theappslabers are primarily Chrome users, with the exception of @ppedrazi… for some reason, he’s still a Firefox bunny.  So, for those of you who use Chrome and are Twitter users, check out Twome, our new Chrome extension for making Twitter better.  With this extension, you no longer need to click on the “more” button to fetch more tweets, instead, we’ll fetch them for you as you scroll down.  Another useful feature we “added” (through Pratham Kumar‘s work) is the ability to see Nested Twitter Replies which makes seeing conversations easier.

We’re also looking to add more features like short url expansion and inline display of images and video similar to how Brizzly does it.  If you’ve got some ideas for how to make it better, sound off below or fork the code.

Possibly Related Posts:

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Sorry for the lame title.  This is just a quick note about Swype, the much hyped slide-your-finger-to-type keyboard that got a lot of buzz in 2008 at the TC50. Since I saw the demo a few years ago, I’ve always been intrigued by how awesome it would be to be able to type fast on a mobile/smart phone.  If you’ve travelled to any Asian or European country where texting is the norm, you would’ve noticed that most people text faster (on a T9 keypad) than I can type on a regular keyboard. I’ve always wanted to be able to have my fingers keep up with my thoughts when using a keypad on a mobile/smartphone.  I remember back in the Palm Pilot days when users had to learn and remember a shorthand called Graffiti — which I actually got pretty good at. Good news, Swype isn’t like Graffiti.  It’s actually quite awesome.  I didn’t think I’d like it at first, but after using it for a few hours, I love it.  Of course, there is a tutorial and some nice tips and tricks you’ll have to learn, but it’s all very intuitive.

Anyway, the point of the post is… if you have an Android phone, head over to http://beta.swype.com and get a beta copy.  It’s available only for a limited time.  Test it out and let us know what you think.  I’m still waiting for @anthonyslai and @jkuramot’s feedback.  If you’ve tried it, what do you think… thumbs up or down?Possibly Related Posts:

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Building a bookmarklet is pretty simple.  The basic idea is that a user clicks on the bookmark to execute some javascript to do what you want.  Creating a sharing bookmarklet can be a bit of a challenge depending on the implementation path you take. You can take a look at the various approaches by testing out a service called Shareaholic, a service that aggregates a bunch of sharing tools together as a Chrome extension or Firefox addon.  The simplest strategy for a sharing bookmarklet is to launch a new window/tab like Facebook or Digg, but personally, I’m not a fan of launching new windows so I decided to take a different approach.  Other sharing bookmarklets are “inserted” inside of the page you’re currently browsing.  Google Reader‘s and Posterous‘ bookmarklets are good examples of this. There are a few simple tricks necessary in order to build a bookmarklet like this.  Let’s use the following diagram for reference:

There are a few pieces to that make this bookmarklet possible:

• Javascript to execute on the foreign page (bookmarklet.js) — this is injected by the bookmarklet itself through a script tag insertion.
• Content iframe originating from the domain you’re sharing to (bookmarklet.html, #3 in the diagram above) – this is necessary because our bookmarklet needs to interact with a REST API on the domain where the user will be sharing to (in this case, the host/domain where WebCenter).
• Proxy iframe (#4 in the diagram above) — this iframe is hidden off of the screen and is used simply to trigger events that happen on the parent.  I’ll go into more detail as to why this is needed later.

Here’s the flow:

1. User triggers the bookmarklet (an inline javascript in an anchor link that a user adds to their bookmarks bar).  Upon execution, a new script tag is inserted into the foreign page and does the following:
   1. Inserts a stylesheet to the page defining the style of the dialog box we’re going to create (#2).
   2. Defines a div container for us to insert our DOM elements into which makes it easier for cleanup when after the bookmarklet is used.
   3. Inserts the content iframe (#3) which points to bookmarklet.html on the WebCenter host.
   4. Inserts the proxy iframe (#4) which points to proxy_frame.html on the WebCenter host.
2. At this point, the sharing dialog window has been initialized and the iframes have been rendered.  Our bookmarklet communicates with the WebCenter REST API directly (#3).  Before presenting the user with the “publisher” (sharing textarea), we need to determine if the user can access the REST API.  Since our bookmarklet app is hosted on the same domain as the WebCenter app, we don’t can trigger the SSO system to authenticate the user if it’s needed (no fancy OAuth needed — good thing because WebCenter doesn’t support OAuth yet).  Upon a successful SSO authentication, the iframe in #3 is reloaded and the REST API is called in order to paint the rest of the form.
3. The only interaction left is when the user clicks the “Share” button.  The Share button is purposefully inserted on the host page (not the iframe in #3).  The reason for this is the share button will need to be able to trigger the dialog to close and also clean up all of the HTML that was inserted onto the page.  You can’t do that if the button is inside the #3 iframe.  However, this causes us another issue.  How do we trigger the form submission in iFrame #3?  Because of cross domain rules, you can’t trigger an event in another frame that’s from a separate domain.  Enter iFrame #4, the proxy_frame.html.  Before I explain how this works, go read Michael Mahemoff‘s excellent article about Cross-Domain Communication with iFrames — the technique I use is the “Window Size Monitoring” hack.  The hack works like this…
   1. The main page (i.e., main parent) creates two iframes (#3 and #4), both of which reside on the same domain, but not necessarily the same domain as its parent.
   2. The first iframe contains the actual iframe you want the user to interact with (#3).  The second iframe is the “proxy” iframe (#4).  The proxy iframe’s purpose is to respond to events that the main parent triggers.
   3. When these trigger is executed, the proxy iframe will execute some javascript in it’s sibling iframe (#3).  But how does the main parent trigger an event on the proxy iframe which resides on a different domain, you ask?  iframes are like little windows within a larger window.  They can be resized.  One of the events a window can respond to is a “resize” event.  So, the trick is to hide this proxy iframe out of view from the user (position:absolute;top:-9999px;width:0;height:0). In the proxy_frame.html page, add an event listener on the window that listens for “resize” events:

So, that’s the gist of it.  Questions… ask below.Possibly Related Posts:

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• FriendFeed Brings the Firehose to IM
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• Programming Notes
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• Respect My Authority!

My online activities can be broken down to about 95% consumption and only 5% contribution. I know… I should give back more. If I were a “Jake”, I would. The thing is, I get more value from the intertubes by consuming it. I have no real excuse for not giving back as much as I consume. Reciprocity is something I need to practice more in general.

Anyway, the big reason I’m doing this is that since last Tuesday, I’ve sunk a lot of time into futzing with Google Buzz. That’s time I’ll never get back. Meanwhile, I have yet to see the real value of Google Buzz. Before Buzz, conversations and information sharing were already fragmented. Between Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., it has become increasingly difficult to consume information — especially for someone who spends 95% of their online time doing it.

The goal of my experiment is to figure out if I’ll miss using these social tools as a way to find new and interesting content — and, more importantly, if I’ll miss out on something I might find important. I didn’t include Google Reader in the list because out of all the tools I use online Reader is actually one that brings order to chaos… even if I have 1000+ unread postings.  In the end, I’m hoping to filter out some of the noise out of my day.  I spend 9-12 hours staring at a screen and would love it if there was less clutter that distracted me from actually getting things done.  If I happen to miss one of these channels at the end of this experiment, I’m going to figure out what I miss and why, then I’m going to try to improve my process in order to bring order to it all.  This all started because Paul sent out a link on OraTweet (Oracle’s internal version of Twitter) pointing to the “Side effects of developing for yourself” — a post about the positive consequences from solving a problem for yourself by the creator of Instapaper.  Well, this is my problem… and this is the start of how I’m planning to solve it.

Am I the only one with this problem?Possibly Related Posts:

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Day one

It was a lonely experience — akin to showing up to a party you knew was going to be fun, but you ended being one of the first ones there. After a few hours more people started to show up and I started to engage more by following more people since hardly any of my Gmail contacts have showed up.  I broke out of my usual shell and started following people I’ve never met in meat and virtual life.  I felt sort of strange, but it felt good to engage with “outsiders.”  I remember feeling, “wow, Buzz is cool… it’s what I’ve been waiting for, etc.”  Just like feelings I get with shinny new things, I felt “buzzed” by the thought of it all.  I tried to get more friends into it as well… not sure they felt the same way I did when they joined the party.

Day two

Day two was when most people started showing up.  I noticed that some of the people I started following — big names like Scoble and Rose — started to take over my stream.  All of the sudden the people I was more interested in hearing from started getting dominated by those with larger voices and larger crowds hovering over them.  This sucked.  I don’t want to be forced into a crowd of people having a convo about stuff I didn’t care about.  This is when I discovered the “mute” feature.  I knew about the mute feature with Gmail and it’s cool that Buzz takes advantage of that.  However, one of the things I expected Google would be good at is extracting signal from noise, Sergey claims this himself.  I’ve gotten so used to Twitter’s simple pattern of showing you the most recent posts and showing trends to let users keep track of the conversations that are happening.  I guess I expected something similar with Buzz, but instead Buzz forces you to pay attention to the larger conversations happening inside your circle.  Google Buzz team: I don’t always want to be forced into a conversation I may or may not care about.  So, I think the sorting and filtering of buzz items need to be worked out.  Otherwise, my finger’s always going to be hovering over the “m” key waiting to mute items — that’s not a good pattern to encourage.  By the way, the “mute” feature doesn’t work.  Every time I “mute” Scoble’s postings it pops back up a few minutes later.

Day three (today)

Today, I’m starting to see real friends buzzing about.  Most of them are confused — like they were forced to be a part of something they didn’t want to be a part of.  Some are finding it useful.  And others are just going with it, but aren’t sure what to do.

If it were me calling the shots, here’s what I’d do:

1. Don’t require GMail for Buzz. It should have launched as a stand-alone app with close links to Gmail and the ability to launch inside Gmail (as it does today).  I find it confusing that you can use Buzz from your mobile devise in a stand-alone app, but you can’t from your desktop.  One of my Google buddies did tell me to be patient when I told him about this, so maybe that’s in the works.  Either way, it should have launched as a stand-alone app.  The motivation for doing so means that you can capture people who don’t have and want GMail accounts, but maybe it was Google’s intention to require GMail.  Also, for those that don’t think your social network should start with your inbox (I’m not one of them BTW), this would have been a good way to separate the two.
2. Fix the signal-to-noise algorithms. I ended up sinking lots of valuable time avoiding and muting items I was being forced to see over and over again.  This is not something I expect from Google.  Fix it.
3. All the usual patterns we’ve come to know and love from Twitter would be nice: hashtag support, search, trending, and a solid API out the gate are keys to success.
4. Better profile pages. I appreciate Google’s sense and discipline for spartan user interfaces, but when you give me my own page to allow me to share a piece of me to the world, I’d love it if you can allow me to add my own flair and dress it with my own unique style.  It doesn’t need to be fancy… just allow me to change the background and colors around and use a better looking font.  Google profiles remind me of profiles you’d see in a company directory, bleh.

Start with those.  With that, here’s what I do love:

1. Media handling. I love that when I put a URL in, it extracts images from the site, very cool.
2. Longer postings. I love that I can post more than 140 characters, but the UI serves as a subtle suggestion that this isn’t a place for posting essays.
3. Private postings. I’m not sure why I’d post a private message that only I could see, but I do love that I can share privately to a group of people.
4. Shortcut keys. I love that Buzz has some of it’s siblings DNA and allows me to wade through posts using the same shortcut keys.
5. Aggregation of other sites. I love that Buzz follows FriendFeed’s lead on allowing users to share more than just messages but also twitter posts, blog posts, reader items, flickr images, etc.  I just wish we had the ability to cross post to Twitter/Facebook… highly unlikely this will happen though and I understand.

Overall, I think Buzz is cool.  The “buzz” I had on day one is gone, but I still think it’s got potential.  Great job Google!  Next time, however, please leave it in the oven a little longer.

Possibly Related Posts:

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Anyway, just a few thoughts from last week’s craziness known as #oow…

• Congrats to Raimonds Simanovskis for winning the coveted Oracle Developer of the Year award.  Raimonds’ is known in the Ruby and Rails world for building and maintaining the Ruby Oracle adapters (oracle-enhanced, ruby-plsql, and the Oracle adapter for DataMapper).  I wish I had more time to contribute to Raimonds’ work.  Sounds like he’s got a few new projects planned… Ruby client for Coherence.
• WebCenter sessions — I learned quite a bit about WebCenter this week.  I’m particularly excited about the REST based support that WebCenter will be offering with this month’s release.
• It was great to meetup (in real life) with the folks I frequently twitter/im/email with… too many to list here.

I’m not sure how this came about, but Jake and I were discussing how CS students should be required (or highly motivated) to work on open source projects as part of their coursework in college.  Then I read Raimonds’ Oracle Magazine interview where he said:

“It would be good if there were more sharing,” says Simanovskis. “A lot of very good developers have created a lot of good components that could be reused, but too often they stay inside the corporate firewall.”

Too often, I work with developers who have no desire to share their work (even internally).  I believe having developers participate in open source communities before starting their careers would greatly help out commercial software vendors foster an openness that can promote innovation and creativity.Possibly Related Posts:

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After Google I/O (where Google Wave had it’s coming out party), I got a chance to kick the tires in the Google Wave sandbox.  Boy was that rough — it should have been called a “wave pool” instead of a sandbox.  The product was unusable after 5-10 minutes of use.  With that said, I was cool with it because the Google engineers behind it are rock stars and it’ll get cleaned up… and hell, it was basically alphaware.

Fast forward to last week when Google opened up Wave to ~100k users.  I thought great… it’s almost ready and most issues should be ironed out by now.  Hmmm… after using it for a week, I’d say it’s got a long way to go.  Yes, most of the bugs I’ve seen in the past are gone.  However, there are still several things that make this product very unusable as an email alternative.  First of all, whenever I use it, it spikes my browser’s memory usage by about 300-500mb on top of what was already there.  So, it’s not unlikely to have Safari or Chrome (on OS X Snow Leopard) consuming ~1gb of memory.  After using Google Wave, I had to cycle my browser just to free up the memory.  Ok… so the browsers have to improve because of Google Wave… that’s a good thing.  Nothing pushes innovation faster than an innovative product that relies on it, right?

Aside from technical issues, Google Wave’s largest hurdle is to convince people that this platform really is better.  I get that Google released Wave to hackers early to crowdsource the innovation that could help propel its use.  However, it’s going to be a while before most common folks really “get it.”  It’s also going to require some innovative applications (extensions, robots, etc) and use patterns to push it forward.  Right now, the general consensus among my circle of wave friends is that they “don’t get it.”

With that said, I’m confident that Google will pull it off.  Not very many companies can do it, but they can.  Everything gets reinvented at some point and email is a prime target.  So, I’m sure that in another few months, my current feelings toward Wave will be different.  In the meantime, if you happen to get a Wave invite, send me a wave.Possibly Related Posts:

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Update: All my (Jake’s) invitations are gone, not sure where Rich is with his batch. Also, the Wave script seems to be borked. It’s try to render at the bottom of the page and failing. Oh well, it’s definitely a “Preview” release. More to come as we experiment with it.

Update 2: Removed the embedded Sudoku Wave because for some reason it stopped working correctly and was trying to load at the bottom of the page. Possibly Related Posts:

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Like it?  Think it sucks a**? Tell us (the truth) below.Possibly Related Posts:

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_why is the creator of some of the most widely used Ruby tools and resources like, The Poignant Guide to Ruby, Hpricot, Markaby, RedCloth, Shoes, Camping, and Try Ruby.  He’s a man who lived in the Ruby community known only under the persona he created — he’s never disclosed his real name.

I’ve only been in the Ruby community since 2006, but I’ve been a consumer of _why’s work from the time I started.  I found his Poignant Guide to Ruby a great introduction to the language — a fresh, artistic, and eccentric approach to teaching people how to program in Ruby.  _why was passionate about teaching Ruby to others through his work.

No one really knows yet why he dropped off.  Initially, a few thought his accounts were hacked and sites deleted, but now the general consensus is that he did this deliberately. No one seems to really know why, but Hacker News user fizx quoted a recent tweet before _why deleted his account:

Programming is a rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year.  unable to run at all in a few more.

For any artist who takes pride in his work, seeing his work replaced is pretty discouraging.  Regardless of the reason, he will be missed.  The body of work he created for the Ruby community is impressive.  John Resig (creator of jQuery) wrote a great post about _why today that is worth reading.Possibly Related Posts:

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This is exactly what I’m envisioning happening with Google Wave in the enterprise.  It will become the “glue code” for the user experience.  It won’t replace existing back-end apps, but provide a much cleaner, nicer, and more productive interface for interacting with them.  The biggest problem most enterprise apps pose is the lack of focus on the user experience.  Google Wave provides a framework for improving that experience.Possibly Related Posts:

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Google Wave as it stands is a collaboration app.  It ties together all forms of communication and collaboration in a nice browser based app.  The biggest features of Google Wave are those that haven’t been built yet.  Google Wave’s underlying platform was built for extensibility — for features that haven’t yet been thought up.  Most of the features that were demonstrated are cool techie-whizzbang features that web devs and web aficionados appreciate — features like live concurrent editing.  However, for average consumers, I’d argue that live concurrent editing isn’t that big a deal.  Think about it… most people are so accustomed to delayed communication patterns (email and snail mail) rather than the real-time, instant feedback style of communication that we get when using instant messaging or sms.  I suspect that’s not going to change for most consumers.  Regardless, I love the live concurrent editing feature, but I think the Enterprise is where a feature like that will be very useful.  Collaborating on documents in real-time is a great feature and one we’ve used in the past with Google Docs.  Since Google Wave will allow developers to build on top of this technology, think of what type of apps you can build that utilize live concurrent editing.  What if you can build a Bespin type of app inside Google Wave and make writing code a collaborative task.  Those of us who practice agile development and TDD do this already, but what if we could do it in one application that allows us to easily mashup other commonly related tasks — like automatically creating bug reports and user stories in external apps, etc?

Google Wave’s extensions consist of robots and gadgets.  Robots are basically participants that you can add to your wave that allow you to automate certain tasks within a wave.  A robot can read the contents of a wave and then perform an action.  There’s a myriad of robots you could create that will allow an enterprise worker to be more productive. Here are a few:“Expensie”

One common example that pops up whenever someone is talking about some enterprisey thing are expense reports.  We could build a robot that can be used to create or append to an expense report out of web receipts you receive.  All you have to do is add “Expensie” to the receipts you receive.

“Recruitie”

How about a robot that streamlines the whole recruiting process.  An applicant applies for a job through some standard web based form, that form gets sent to the recruiter and a new wave is created.  Now the applicant and recruiter can collaborate within the wave.  But, to automate the process, the “Recruitie” (recruiting assistant) robot is added to the wave by the recruiter.  This robot’s job is to schedule the candidate’s interviews with interviewers and make sure the candidate is well informed of the process.  It’s also responsible for making sure that the interviewer is well informed of who the candidate is by packaging up a “file” (resume, cover letter, and automated background search results facilitated by Google search) for the interviewer to review prior to the interview.  Once the interviews have taken place, the robot can solicit an evaluation and vote from each interviewer then notify the hiring manager and the recruiter of the results.  Once the hiring manager makes a decision to hire or not, the “Recruitie” robot carries out the appropriate tasks.  If hired, the appropriate notifications are sent to the candidate and then a new robot (“Onboardie”) is added to the wave to begin the on-boarding process for the candidate.

This may seem like a standard recruiting workflow found in other systems (including ours), however, the big difference is in where this process takes place.  In this case, the wave becomes the central source of truth from beginning to end with all participants interacting within the same system.  The user experience is simple, clean and very intuitive.  It’s not a series of web based forms but more like a checklist that different participants engage with.

There are so many interesting examples that can be applied using the Google Wave paradigm.  My head is still spinning with ideas.  One thing’s for sure, we’re definitely going to kick the tires and build some of these ideas out.  Let us know if you’d like to participate.  Google Wave is ripe for enterprises.Possibly Related Posts:

• My Thoughts on Wave
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I was once a user of those other browsers, but today, I’m back to using the king of all browsers, IE6.  Screw all the bigots out there who keep tearing down IE’s glory.  I used to be one… and feel awful about it.  Today, I take everything I ever said about IE back.  It’s the only browser that should ever exist.

Join me in the SaveIE6 campaign!  Take back the browser!Possibly Related Posts:

• A Bit More on Our IE6 Stance
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How can you apply Getting Real-ish ideas inside a big company? Here’s an idea: Go rogue. Pick something and do it under the radar. Create something in a few weeks that normally takes a few months. Do something in a way that works better than the status quo (or shows the promise of working better), Then you won’t need to convince anyone with words — the results will speak for themselves.

This is exactly how we accomplished building Mix and Connect at Oracle.  Think of how much can be improved if those with a passion to change something actually did it.
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This morning’s NYTimes has an article about Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu.  For those of you who follow Ubuntu and Shuttleworth, the article is nothing new… just talks about Shuttleworth’s desire to displace Microsoft in the OS war.  However, it did get me thinking about my history with OSes.  When I started tinkering around with computers it was all about what was available.  Today, there are lots of choices.  Which brings to question, which OS would you impart on your children?

Most kids today will have to learn how to use a computer.  Some have a natural curiosity to learn, others don’t.  Either way, as a computer junkie, I have a desire impart my preferences to my kids.  My kids are only 4 years old, so, they’re not at an age (in my opinion) to be tinkering with a keyboard yet.  However, when the time comes, I feel a need to show them the way.  Is that good or bad?

To me, choosing an OS is a very personal choice.  A choice chock full of feelings about what that OS means and the people behind it.  In a sense, it’s a moral choice.  We make choices like this all the time.  How many people do you know who have/had a preference in always “buying American”?  My choice in an operating system is loaded with the same fuzzy logic.

Microsoft made close to $17B in sales off of Windows last year. My choice in avoiding Windows (where I can) isn’t because I can’t stand to see Microsoft make so much money — it’s because I can’t stand to see Microsoft make so much money on mediocre software that takes 10,000 developers over 5 years to make (Vista).  Choosing Windows today is like choosing to buy an American SUV (in today’s market conditions).  In my very opinionated opinion, it’s a bad choice — certainly not a choice I would allow my kids to make (well… I suppose I should be open minded enough).

Apple, the worlds latest “darling” computer/gadget company, also makes a lot of money on their operating system.  However, the passion in the craft of creating something beautiful and functional shows through in their products.  Apple’s OS (and other products) leave users inspired and push them to learn and become better.  I don’t care what my kids end up doing in life as long as they have a passion for learning.  As long as Apple continues to inspire and show their passion for their creations, I will continue to use their OS (and other products) and, hopefully, my kids will choose Apple for the same reasons.

Linux or Ubuntu Linux (to be precise) is a great OS.  I’m a firm believer in open source.  And like Mark Shuttleworth, I too believe that the open source process produces better stuff.  This is true because the people who participate in open source projects have a passion for the products they work on — why else would you donate your free time?  As a parent, I want my kids to embrace volunteerism and participate in the common good.  The philosophy behind Linux and open source in general convey these principles well.

I know I over think these things compared to most people, but I think one’s choices are important — they define us. What OS would you have your kids use?  If you don’t have kids, pretend you do.Possibly Related Posts:

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Most (actually, all) of his talk was devoted to the consumer web.  My head is almost always focused on how to take the good stuff coming from the consumer web back into the enterprise web.  Bill’s ideas made me realize how little we (as enterprise web app developers) pay attention to the minute details that go into producing web apps that customers love.  Bill is currently the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix.  If you’re a Netflix customerfan, you’ll know that Netflix.com is a superb site.  Netflix’ business depends entirely on the success of its site.  Very small incremental changes could drastically affect their business.  All of the changes they make to the site go through rigorous testing with real users and are carefully measured.

With the enterprise products I’ve been a part of building, we’ve spent some time on usability tests.  However, they’re usually done before the product is even passed over to development.  They’re usually done during the visual design phase.  Once the UX teams have finalized their product designs, they’re approved and passed over to the developers to start building.  However, most of the time, the product doesn’t end up matching what was designed by UX.

This process wasn’t always this way.  I remember back in the PeopleSoft client-server days, most products didn’t go through any usability tests.  I suppose the reasoning is that back then, most of the “ERP” apps were focused on back-end users who were trained to use the software so usability wasn’t that big of an issue.  Today’s focus is in building apps that anyone can use without training. Aside from testing usability, I don’t know if we focus enough on learnability.  In order for software to be easy enough for anyone to use, it needs to provide enough queues for users to be able to learn how to use it.  Bill provides a lot of examples in his presentation above of how to do this.

The problem with the the visual design process in the enterprise today (as I see it) is that it doesn’t follow good software development practices like agile.  Once a visual design is finalized, it’s passed on and never really iterated for improvements.  Some enterprise software development cycles could take over a year or two from concept to design to build to release.  Over that time, new UI patterns could have emerged as well as totally new ways to solve the same problem that the software originally sought out to solve.  This is the reason why agile methodologies exists.

What Bill described as his overall process for building good looking web sites that work can be reduced down to an agile process for visual design.  It doesn’t make sense to design once then move on.  The process needs to be iterative.  Feedback from real users with real data need to be used as a way of testing ideas and measuring success rates iteratively.  I’m no expert with UX, but this process makes a lot of sense to me.

Anyone out there in Oracle UX land care to comment?  Are you guys already doing this?  If so, how’s it working?

BTW, Bill’s got a book coming out on this topic… added to my wishlist.Possibly Related Posts:

• Testing is Tough
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Anyway, I’ve been tinkering around a lot lately with some of the illustration tools.  I recently stumbled upon Xara Xone and found some awesome tutorials.  I decided to put a few of those techniques to work using the photo of the cup that Paul posted in the previous post.  Within 10 minutes, I had this:

It’s far from being exact, but it’s pretty easy to trace an existing photo and create a vector based illustration.  During OOW, I sat down with Anthony and showed him a few of these techniques.  In no time, he was able to create his own avatar pretty easily.

This begs the question… why aren’t more engineers interested in creative design — aside from the reason, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body”?  It’s a great way to stretch your brain if you primarily code all day.  I find that it’s a nice way to do something totally different but totally useful too.  I think everyone innately has some creative skills, but many people don’t bother nurturing those skills.  I’ve seen some amazing art work from the kids at my boys’ preschool.  If these kids (2-6 years old) can kick out amazing art, why can’t many adults do it?  Is it a skill that degrades over time?  Or are people just not interested in it?

Being a good developer requires creative skills. Writing beautiful code is akin to creating something that’s visually pleasing.  Engaging in your creative side helps you improve those skills.  Alright, enough of the preaching.  Do you practice your creative muscles?  If so, sound off and tell us why you like using the other side of your brain.

Possibly Related Posts:

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