peterpascale

SOA Facts Top 10

Looking at my (small) domain names portfolio recently I was reminded that I own SOA Facts. Had kinda forgotten about it. Curating these submissions was some of the highest fun-to-effort ratio I've had. My top ten favorites:

SOA has lost favor, in part to greater pragmatism in the enterprise, but certainly to the Open API / REST movement as well.

For the record - SOA Facts was born at the evening session where the Colorado Software Summit jumped the shark. It later included submissions from luminaries like Don Box (co-creator of SOAP) who admitted disappointment with where WS-* went after his initial contribution. I like to think his submissions (which were good) were part of a cathartic healing process.

Mobile Trends Brainstorm - Mobile Twin Cities Meeting Next Week

The tradition of crowd-sourcing Mobile Trends content continues at next week's Mobile Twin Cities, with yours truly again facilitating a trends brainstorm/workshop. Last year this very well-attended event generated a volume of great ideas, research, and content that made it into the creative commons / ready-for-remix Mobile Revolution presentation.

This was a huge success, resulting in a very popular presentation (25,000+ views on slideshare) and multiple instances of reuse. To make this work well, we need participation. No specific prep is necessary, but here's an overview that should give you a sense of how the brainstorm runs.

I'll put up a number of topical areas (examples: Entertainment, Retail, Education...) and the group refines that list, votes the top items of interest, and breaks into groups to tackle a topic accordingly. The bulk of the brainstorm is spent in small group talking about trends in that topical area, pulling up interesting links, references, or stories, and deciding if themes exist for those areas.

This year we're trying to expand the set of use cases and mobile usage stories we generate, and evolve to a more story-driven and less facts and figures presentation. So if you have a killer use case, story, video about mobile - bring it to share.

For specific details on this year's event and to register, see the Mobile Twin Cities site. The meeting is next Tuesday, January 17th at 7pm. Food and drink will be provided, thanks to Pearson VUE who is graciously sponsoring the event.

Mobile March - Twin Cities Mobile Conference

The Twin Cities plays host to an expanded Mobile March conference in March. The conference has developer and product tracks, with a commitment this year to add more intermediate and advanced technical content, and have a longer schedule. Call for presenters now open. I would expect this to be a reasonably priced event and a great way to get mobile exposure at low cost.

If you have some mobile expertise or want a milestone to force you to polish up a presentation, you can submit a proposal to present here:

http://mobilemarchtc.com/2012-speaker-application/

Event details here:

http://mobilemarchtc.com/

The event includes a friday 'demo night' which has a great MinneDemo feel, and last year brought a strong field of start-ups, and clever side-projects with no duds. I'll be doing the Mobile Trends 2012 overview, with crowdsourced input from the Mobile Twin Cities user group.

Brighty Whitey is Coming Along

A pic to show where I'm heading. A friend's Pee Wee comparison made me think of this. For better or worse (I can't tell yet) Brighty Whitey is sticking as the name for this bike.

Bridgestone MB-3 Renovation Project - Teardown and Paint

I ride the greatest all-purpose mountain-format frame ever made - the early 90s Bridgestone MB. Mine is a purple MB-3, although a little worse for wear after 19 years. I absolutely love this bike, have from the day I compared it to the Treks, Cannondales, and Specialized that felt stretched, squashed, and squirrely. It has an incredibly comfortable stance, but feels nimble and sure-footed underneath.

My interest in biking renewed*, it is time to refresh. The plan is to get the bike powdercoated in white, and rebuild mostly with original components, but with new wheels and rubber in a white, black, red color scheme. One could easily sink the cost of a new bike into a project like this, but I've got a few good constraints.

First, then I couldn't get a new bike. In honor of a major birthday milestone coming up, family has conspired to help me get a new bike - more on that later. Second - bike tech has changed a LOT in 19 years. Disc brakes, 8+ speed cassettes... There aren't a lot of options outside of low-end parts for the parts I need. So I'm mostly re-installing existing parts, with a few strategic changes. 

Teardown Crew

Taking apart a bike is fun, so it was easy to convince my sons to do the work help. We made short work of this, and you can see the bike's original state in the teardown photos. Through most of the last 19 years, I've had a 'B' bike for winter riding and commuting, so the Bridgestone is in pretty good shape. We pulled everything off, bagged up related parts, and brought the frame to the painter.

The Painter

Anthony of AP-Paints did the powdercoat. He was great to work with, reasonable, and the frame came back looking glossy and slick. I chose powdercoat over wet paint because it's inexpensive and extremely durable. You can see from the pics, I gave him the frame with nasty stickers in place. All that comes off in the sandblasting. For a reasonable charge he will even strip the parts off the frame for you (although I have a crew you can use).

And don't let his lack of recent content on his blog fool you, he is doing more bikes than ever, and more powdercoating, and just doesn't have time to post newer stuff. What is posted is beautiful.

Overall the paint looks great. Powdercoating a lugged frame can be difficult, and sometimes the coat thickness is compromised around the lugged parts. Not in my case - Anthony did a great job on coverage. There were a few small chips at the bottom of the head tube probably from racing/clean-out, but they are inconsequential, not all the way to the steel, and almost invisible when the headset is back on. 

I'll post more pics as the bike is built up!

* Special thanks to David Rain, for stopping by after a decade and gleefully agreeing to ride the 30 + miles round trip to the State Fair in August, igniting a bug for biking not felt since college days.

(download)

Click here to download:

bridgestone-mb-3-renovation-project-teardown-and-paint-vnlctuxIalJdIloakeCy.zip (255 KB)

What is Web 3.0?

Will Facebook and Google control our identity in a one-size-fits-all model? Or can we control our data (and online identity)? John Battelle - host of the Web 2.0 summit - picks this as the first theme of this year's summit to emphasize. His summary highlights three video shorts from Chris Poole, 4chan founder, Mitchell Baker from Mozzilla, and Jeremie Miller from Singly.

Baker suggests that we should each be the platform for our own data, determining how it’s used and in what context, depending on the kind of data (health, social, family, interests, etc).

Sounds great, but how do you operationalize such a concept? It sounds like a lot of work. That’s where Jeremie Miller comes in. His company, Singly, and associated Locker Project is an audacious attempt to “put the person at the center of the data.”

Singly, and the open source Lockerproject it is based on, a compelling alternative to a future in which our data is locked up in 1-3 major providers. That is web 3.0 in my mind - when our data and online lives are distributed, not locked up, but in our control, and discoverable, filterable, sharable.

What Google Can Learn from Amazon (and You from Yegge)

How to be a platform... ?

This is the story of Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and the decision to SOA-fy everything that led to Amazon's emergence as a platform for applications, big-data, retail... But you don't read this story in a book you can purchase from Amazon. You read the latest rant from ex-Amazoner and current Googler and long-time tech raconteur Steve Yegge. A rant he never meant for the public.

Steve Yegge has a reputation for long, amusing (and often thought-provoking) rants on technology and software. His 'great-granddaddy of all Reply-All screwups in tech history' paints an interesting contrast between Google and Amazon. One thing Amazon gets - what it means to be a platform and how to get there.

'the Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood [Amazon gets this]. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch'

It's a long and amusing read, hammering home a key point. If you want to be a platform, to be a required building block for other systems, traffic, and usage, you need extensive, robust APIs. And if you want to be that platform, you should think about how your own product development inherently supports that goal from the ground up. Because bolting on integration after the fact does not result in a platform.

I'm not advocating a top-down change to how you build everything (or even how your team builds its product). Not every product or initiative has to be a platform to be valuable. But when we identify platform goals for our products, we should seriously examine how we're constructing these products.

Has Yegge's rant influenced your thinking?

Mobile in Assessment and Certification - E-ATP 2011

Slides from my thirty minute talk given at the 2011 European Association of Test Publishers (E-ATP) in Prague are now available.

In this presentation I explore future mobile application use cases in the professional assessment and certification industry. Relevant characteristics of mobile and important experimental ideas trending in education form the background for a set of mobile application use cases, including test prep plus, observational testing, and e-portfolios. 

Mobile in Assessment - EATP 2011

Slideshare

PDF (Dropbox)

Previous / Related Presentations:

Mobile March 2011 - Mobile Revolution

See this post for links and background from my Mobile March 2011 presentation. This presentation is focused on trends and includes video. It is re-mixable under a creative commons license - see post and slide references for details.

ATP 2011 - Mobile Revolution and Assessment

My North American ATP presentation has been posted as well.

Slideshare

PDF (Dropbox)

Wanted: Good Home for Bad Build Trophy

Build Trophy seeks new home. Must have either iron-stomach sense of humor or culture of shame. Office-trained, but not good with kids.

Mobile Revolution Presentation - For Your (Re)Use