Some Random Dude

Company Alignment, or why developers should be rewarded based on sales revenue

Over the years I’ve been involved in dozens of meetings, workshops and conference calls aimed at trying to achieve “alignment” between groups in a company. Piles of books have been written, conference sessions presented, seminars held at airport hotels, all aimed at helping companies get aligned.

Generally what this means is trying to get two or more groups that are dependent on each other to all pull in the same direction. When I was running development teams, it was often between sales and product development. Later it was sales and marketing alignment. Like a meditation practitioner seeking enlightenment, alignment is often spoken about as if it were some higher state of consciousness where multiple groups within an organisation move together in harmony like a school of fish avoiding predators.

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More Attributes in Delphi 2010

In my previous post on Attributes in Delphi 2010, I showed a basic view of the mechanics involved in creating, applying and querying Attributes. I didn’t really cover an example of why you might use them.

Probably the most common example given is for persistence, and indeed, someone over on the Wings of Wind website has posted an example along those lines. I’d like to show off a different use for them: Validation.

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No good deed goes unpunished: Nokia and Inbox management.

Awhile back I got converted. Not to a religious group (although, at times I wonder…) but I reached a point where my email and task management habits would no longer scale, and I was drowning in my inbox. I read a book and a couple of articles, made a few changes to my behaviour and since then have been very good at keeping my inbox down to zero at the end of each day. Travelling has been a test, but I’ve stuck at it and seen the benefit.

Also awhile back, my phone started playing up. I have a Nokia E71, and the feelings I have for this phone verge on the unnatural. It’s easily the best, most useful phone I’ve ever owned. Suddenly, it started rebooting itself every few minutes. This would happen for 5minutes or so every few hours, and then would go away. I uninstalled apps that I’d recently installed, searched for other people with the same issue, all to no avail.

Eventually I realised the two things were connected. Seems there is a bug in Mail for Exchange on Symbian. Whenever my inbox gets down to zero, this issue starts occurring. The fix is to send myself an email. As soon as that email hits my inbox, the phone goes back to being rock solid.

I guess there has to be some upside to bad email management.

Casting an Interface Reference to the Implementing Class in Delphi 2010

Not all the new features in Delphi 2010 are big. In fact, the team have spent a lot of time implementing many small features, fixes and tweaks. Some of these may not seem to amount to much individually, but they not only add up to significant impact, but greatly add to the polish of the product. I expect this will be one of those releases that keeps serving up little delights and surprises for a long time.

One of the features in Delphi 2010 that I expect will spawn much debate is the ability to cast an interface reference back to the type of class that implements it.

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