Unlearn, Young Programmer

This is a great post by industry guru Ted Neward.

http://blogs.tedneward.com/2012/03/21/Unlearn+Young+Programmer.aspx

He paints a very accurate picture of how team leaders (and lead developers) can make assumptions when assigning work to junior developers. Something that seems simple and straightforward to us can be a bit more daunting to someone with less experience. Sometimes it's hard for us "veterans" to remember all the stumbling blocks and hard lessons we learned when we were young and freshly out of school. I looked back at some of the tasks I've assigned over the last few weeks and wonder how anyone was able to complete them. I need to make more of an effort to be thorough with my assignments and to have the junior developers walk me through their approach to solving the task.

It's not what you read, it's what you ignore

Another great post by Scott Hanselman. This time on productivity.

It's not what you read, it's what you ignore - Video of Scott Hanselman's Personal Productivity Tips

I've followed most of his recommendations. I unsubscribed from 75% of the blogs I read and tomorrow I plan on unfollowing 75% of the people I follow on Twitter.

The User Experience:

One of the blogs that I read religiously is Scott Hanselman's. He has a great post related to user experience on the web:

Good UX in the Wild: Dropbox's attention to detail on their download page 

Pinterest

Back in the dark ages of the internet, when I saw something beautiful or inspirational on the web, I would drag the image onto the "pretty things" folder on my desktop, only to have a giant unorganized folder, full of pretty pictures. But now, my world has changed with the development of Pinterest. Pinterest is currently in it's beta stage, and open by invitation only, but you can request an invite on their home page.

Created in Palo Alto, California, by a group of successful entrepreneurs and investors, Pinterest converges the worlds of technology with online shopping. With Pinterest, you can create different boards, ranging anywhere from home decor to graphic design to collect the images that inspire you in your daily browsing. At the same time, it acts as a social networking tool where you can see the things your friends find, that inspires them. This site is great for decorating your home, planning your wedding, or even organizing recipes.

Pinterest may be new, but it's already experienced its share of controversy in the social media world when Myspace "redesigned" their homepage, by essentially ripping off Pinterest's layout. Their redesign was an attempt to regain some of the traffic they lost to facebook, as it is said they have lost close to 40 million users in February of 2011 alone. Myspace has since done another redesign to their homepage.

You can't necessarily start a business page with pinterest, as its intention is for "sharing" instead of selling, but I can see this being the next big step in internet marketing. Instead of creating a page for the company as you would on facebook, you can create your own personal page, but feature alot of your own products to gain awareness to them and your brand. You could even feature a "pin-it" button to products on your e-commerce site. Pinterest could be the next big thing for retailers. 

While facebook has "like it", Google has "+1", and twitter has "tweet it", it seems the new slang in the social media world may be to "pin-it"

I'm Spoiled...My new Bold 9900