Yesterday, I had the pleasure of lunching with Marian Crkon of The Feature, as in “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”. Marian interviewed Paul and me over IM month ago, and he recently interviewed David “IC Unbalanced Journals” Haimes.
Marian is in Portland on a project, so we decided to have bite to eat. Incidentally, we met at a place recommended to me over Twitter.
Marian and I have a few small world ties. We have several mutual acquaintances from working with Oracle Applications for a decade, including a woman in development who worked with Marian as a translator for Oracle in Slovakia and Nancy Chung who worked with Marian on a project in Seattle and sometimes contributes to The Feature and who worked for both Tim and me in development.
This is an object lesson in how small the world really has become.
I found Marian’s reasons for starting The Feature interesting. After years of collecting tips, tricks, FAQs and experiences with the E-Business Suite that he was publishing to his personal website, he decided to engage the community, sharing his knowledge and collecting new information. A great reason to start blogging, plus as he said in his first post “nobody writes reviews about Oracle Applications”. Things have changed a lot in two years.
I’ve used this reasoning to encourage internal people like David to start blogging. If you have years of experience working with and building applications, you will find a readership of interested people, believe it or not. Plus, you may wander into a meeting with Google and find yourself suddenly a minor celebrity.
Another nugget Marian shared is that his blog has become a resume. As a consultant, he gets asked pretty basic questions by prospective clients, and he can point to his blog as a compendium of his knowledge, which is much more detailed than any acceptable resume could be.
This reminded of Paul’s post about free agency. What you say and post over the Interwebs becomes public record. While mistakes on MySpace and Facebook garner most of the coverage, success stories are probably more common. Just yesterday, I heard from a colleague who is leaving Oracle; I’m pretty sure the company poaching him did due diligence by researching his online activities, which undoubtedly contributed to his getting an offer.
Anyway, meeting Marian was a pleasure. He says he hopes to blog more this year, and I’m looking forward to reading.
It’s a busy week. Later today, I have lunch with Jason Harris, of the Download Squad.
