Writing Daily...Keeping Committments

Long ago I blogged about writing daily, and committed to do so. That lasted about four days, and then some squirrel must have come along and I followed it down the squirrel hole. So, I'm here to try again.

Happiness

Is there anything more important in our lives than being happy with who we are? In my opinion, this is fundamental to everything else we do. There's no way we can be successful, or lead a successful life, without being happy with ourselves (dare I say loving ourselves?).

And happiness is an attitude. And let's be honest, brutally honest: we control our attitudes. We may not have control over much in our lives, but how we look at our lives and how we react to what happens to us, that we most definitely do control.

I stumbled on this article when reading through my Zite app today, and found it to be a great "checklist" of not-to-do's. I hope you find it helpful.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/18-ways-your-thinking-destroying-your-happiness.html

Software Development

I work in the Information Systems group for State Department's Office of U.S. Foreign Assistance Resources. On a yearly basis the entire office gets together for a three-day learning and planning session. New team members get to learn about how the office works and what it does, and we set about improving our implementation plans and processes. 

Listening to today's session I was struck by one major theme: the people doing the actual work of the office (performing the mission of "ensur[ing] the strategic and effective allocation, management, and use of foreign assistance resources" have really hectic, process, data, and bureaucratic-filled jobs. 

They use the software products from the Information Systems group to collect data and plan and inform their decisions. If that software product is at all annoying to them, their lives are just that much more hectic and harried.

So, the thought: the people who use your software are NOT paid to use your software; that's not their job. Their job is to do whatever it is they get paid to do. 

As software developers, development leads, and yes, project management folks, we need to constantly remember that as we make the little decisions about how much care we put into the code we write. About how flippant we are with the "little annoyances" we allow to surface to the user.

Until Tomorrow

That's all for today. I promise to be back tomorrow, even if I have to take a shotgun to the squirrels!