I recently received an ‘IT Insights’ mailer from a placement company I once worked for.  Included in that letter was a section on Developer Skills and what to focus on over the next 5 years.  I thought I’d take this opportunity to point out, comment on, and add my own two cents to the topics in this article.

The main topics of this article were:

• The big three languages
• People/soft skills
• Web development and services
• RIA (Rich Internet Applications)
• Mobile

Let me review these topics, but in a slightly different order…

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Left brain verses right, numbers versus pictures. What happens when numerical data exceeds the ability to provide useful information, not because it’s unsolvable, but because the amount of data is expanding so fast that meaning cannot be derived? Sure there is automation to help with the processing, but eventually that data has to be refined to into palatable representations. As marketing becomes more data driven it’s also important to remember it’s marketing’s goal to create emotional reactions.

Think of the Twitter cloud. While an extremely simple example, the Twitter cloud easily displays the biggest topics by increasing the size of the words relative to the number of times a particular word / phrase is mentioned. The data could have easily been presented in numerical results, “245,000 mentions of ice cream,” lifeless. Instead, we “feel” the importance of Ice Cream simply by visualizing its size relative to the other words. We are able to instantly compare the significance of the data based upon feeling, supported by raw numbers. Simple right? What about the fact that data is the fastest growing thing on this planet and its grown rate is actually beginning to exceed the performance abilities of the mediums it’s stored on.

Between the years 2000-2003, two economists at Berkley, Varian and Lyman, estimated that the total production of new information in the year 2000 alone reached 1.5 exabytes. They explain that is about 37,000 times as much information as is in the entire holdings Library of Congress. For one year! Three years later the annual total yielded 3.5 exabytes. That yields a 66% rate of growth in information per year between 2000 and 2003. This is pre-facebook, twitter and MySpace, and look at the amounts of data in those three arenas alone.

Data visualization is crucial to connecting emotional depth with an increased understanding of numbers, especially as we begin to tackle staggering amounts of data. It provides the bridge to communicate the meaning and emotion of the data. It can even bridge the communication gaps that exist between data analysts (left brain) and creative marketing leaders (right brain). The future of marketing relies on both, equally.

Interactive Data Visualization: The following image is a snapshot from Fidg’t, a Java-based desktop application that visualizes a user’s social network using Flickr and LastFM tags. More than just a simple data visualization tool, it allows you to interact with the visual elements and create dynamic relationships from complex data sets and meta-tagging. Simply put, it provides emotional meaning to the data.

Culture is defined as - the art and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. Technology is changing the recording and dissemination of collective information. There is no better representation of this than the online Enterprise Content Management System. Because of the collaborative nature of these systems it is much easier to update content and keep your message current and valid; but it is also much easier to have conflicting content and incorrect versions of your content.

As a project manager I orchestrate the implementation of Enterprise Content Management Systems for a living. I have managed builds from the ground up and I have managed implementations of third party solutions. Every system out there is unique and each have strengths and weaknesses but there are certain issues that run across all of them. These issues aren’t necessarily flaws in the application but rather, they have to do with the intricacies of deploying information about an organization on a company-wide scale.

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In a recent project we had done in CQ5.2, I was trying to hook into the built in logging configuration that exists in Apache Felix.

What I wanted was 1 log file for each of our sub projects.  This meant I needed one Logger and one Log Writer.

For example: I have an emg-commons bundle and an emg-components bundle and I would like to have a different log file for each.  I’m able to create this using the configuration section of the Felix console by creating two Sling Logging Writer Configurations and two Sling Logging Logger configurations.

The disadvantages here are the the different elements are unreadable when I want to come back in and change the logging levels.  They have a pId in the name when created, so i have to remember the one I want looks like this:

org.apache.sling.commons.log.LogManager.factory.writer.0117ef34-092e-4a71-9211-7b1d8591c3ad

In addition, any time I create a new local instance for testing … I have to go in and re-create these with the screen interface.  (An interface that doesn’t clear form values but does reset drop down menus leading to a headache when trying to add and edit logging configuration).

So I did what any responsible developer would do.  I took an undocumented, fly-by-testing-it-out, shortcut.

More undocumented fun after the jump

The standards and best practices in creating HTML Email are different compared to creating HTML for a web design. Instead of checking for cross-browser compatibility, it’s necessary to test to check how different email client types render HTML and CSS.

The Email Standards Project [www.email-standards.org] is an organization leading the way to improve the web standards and accessibility in email. They are working with both the designers and email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. Currently, acid test is conducted on several of the email clients to determine the level of support. Based on the acid test, they’ve determined which commonly used CSS are supported.

For example, in Google Gmail, there is partial or no support in following high priority styles:

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I’m not a UI designer, nor any kind of authority on UI design.  A Liger like hybrid of linux, java, and Ada 95 my idea of a good user interface is a giant text box with a run button and a solid –help command.  That having been said, one of the more enlightening articles I have ever tripped over comes from the archives at Joel on Software.  It provided me with the following quote:

UI is important because it affects the feelings, the emotions, and the mood of your users. If the UI is wrong and the user feels like they can’t control your software, they literally won’t be happy and they’ll blame it on your software.

So some time ago a service I use almost every day changed their login dialog on the web interface.  When I went to sign in, by selecting a link titled “sign in”, I was presented with the following box.

Can you spot any potential problems ?

We discuss after the jump …

One thing that web developers don’t always appreciate is the simplicity of today’s programming languages over their predecessors. We take for granted how modern programming languages save us in the amount keystrokes we have to type and the amount of time we have to spend debugging. It isn’t until we are forced to type/code in an old programming language that we truly forget how far we’ve come.

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Here on the EMG blog pages there will likely be information about Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. What about optimization from the other side of that equation? The painful side of the equation where you have been typing in different various combinations of search terms only to toggle between 0 results and 100,000 pages of mail archives none of which have what you are looking for.

Your suffering does not need to be completely in vain. And, more importantly, there is no reason other members of your tech team need to go through it also.

There are several customizable search engines out there, and the following could certainly be adapted for each. I’m going to look at a feature of one of the most popular monopolies search engines in the digital ether … Google customized search.

Specifics on the B-side …

I was fascinated by Virtualization and how it actually worked. After I understood how virtualization works and how I can make an impact on the environment and produce ROI I was sold. Next I wanted to know how I can leverage this technology and make it work for me.

First thought was on reducing old servers and consolidating 4 servers down to one server. When I do this I would be saving my company money on energy costs in respect to powering only one server and reducing the amount of heat generated therefore reducing the cooling costs to keep the server room cool. When I implemented virtualization I used VMware.

VMware is free and was no cost to EMG. Great, no cost for the software and no cost for licensing, does it get any better than this. As I thought of new ways to utilize VMware I found the VM appliance this appliance is a fully functioning OS that drops into VMware and starts right up without having to install an operating system. This means not having to install an OS resulting in hours of time saved. After you have your operating systems in a library you can easily deploy any operating system by copying the VMDK files to the destination

VMware directory. I have successfully deployed virtualization here at Earthbound Media Group. One way I used virtualization was to create development environments for my developers. I cut down my deployment time from 8-12 hours to 3-6 hours to install and configure an development box. Traditionally EMG’s process to create development and staging environments were to purchase new hardware and build the development environment. Now when a development environment needs to be created I copy over the operating system and install additional add-ins that the developer has requested. Doing this has reduced our hardware costs and again our cooling costs that the additional hardware brings. With that said virtualization has been a great tool for me and for my company, if you have the opportunity to use it I think you will like it. Want to find out how to use virtualization and more ways Earthbound Media Group has used virtualization just ask me.

I met a lot of interesting people at Mixergy and had some great conversations. I couldn’t believe how many people turned out for the first event like this in Orange County. Mixergy was also the first event that we’ve thrown here at our headquarters since I started and it was great to hear how cool people thought our office was and to see how many people we can fit in this space. I can’t wait for the next big event here.

Big thanks to Andrew from Mixergy, the Tia Juana’s staff, and the EMG team for making this so successful.