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About Me
I'm Michael Koby, and I love technology. I'm also a programmer, currently doing Ruby on Rails development for a small Houston startup. Here I talk about technology, programming, politics, movies, music, and anything else I feel I need to talk about. If you would like to know more, you can check out the About page.Popular Series
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Consulting Consultants: Personal Branding
Making a name for yourself is probably one of the hardest things a person can do in life. Everyone wants to have some form of legacy, but that’s something that can take decades to build (and a lot of money). Personal branding is somewhat the same thing but on a much smaller (and usually local or niche) scale. Personal branding can bring you into a whole new class of consulting but one must be careful when building their personal brand.
What is Personal Branding
Personal branding is sort of like your own personal advertisement . It is name recognition on some level. It is people knowing who you are and what you do just by the very mention of your name. It is someone saying they want you because they know about you. Personal branding is also an extension of your reputation. If you have a reputation for doing quality work and delivery products/solutions to your client on time then you will most likely have a good reputation. When you are a consultant (either solo contractor or working for a firm) your personal brand can make you or break you in many ways.
Why is Your Personal Brand Important
Building your personal brand requires work but the benefits will almost always pay for themselves during the long tail. Building up your brand can bring you recognition, promotions/bonuses, and most importantly, more work. It gets you known so people know what you can do which can make you first choice when it comes time for new projects and jobs. Being on the forefront of peoples minds is important when you want to get new projects at old clients. It can even assist and acquiring new ones through some of the methods we will be discussing more thoroughly in this series.
Building Your Personal Brand
Who are you? What do you do? How do you contribute? These are all questions you should ask yourself. If you can’t answer them yourself, how can you expect someone else to answer them for you. Over the next few weeks on Consulting Consultants, I will look at various ways that you can help build your personal brand. We will look at ways to this both from an individual contracting perspective as well as for when you work inside a consulting firm. Many of the methods I will discuss will help you regardless of the context you’re in.
Next Week
Next week I’ll kick this series off into full swing with a look at how blogging can help you build a personal brand with a quickness.
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Buying a HDTV: Introduction
Last week I finally took the dive and purchased an HDTV. What did I end up with? Well I personally went with the Samsung PN50A460 for a variety of reasons (one of which was availability in my area). How did I come to the conclusion that this was the television for me? Well that’s a story that starts with lots of research. A lot of which I plan to put on this blog for everyone’s betterment.
There is a lot of information out there floating around about high definition televisions. It can be extremely confusing for the average consumer to go through and figure out what will work for them and what won’t. There are some many things to consider when buying a HDTV that one can easily get lost in the process (I know I did).
What I hope to offer you, the reader, is an easy to understand series on what to not only consider when purchasing a high definition television but the things to look for and avoid. Hopefully you can avoid the long and countless hours of research that I had to do.
Some thing we’ll be discussing are: 1080p vs. 720p, LCD vs. Plasma, viewing distance, connectivity (cables), and some more related topics.
Check back next week when we dive right in my looking at what exactly 1080p is and why you may or may not need it.
Dev Process is Another Tool
Since I stopped blogging regularly I’ve become somewhat involved in a community of programmers called Alt.NET (Alt Dot Net). Without going into a long diatribe about what Alt.NET is specifically, it’s main goal is to find a better way to program via processes, ideologies, and overall betterment of the software development craft as it relates to Microsoft’s Dot Net platform.
Chad Myers has written up a nice article on Professionalism that I think everyone should read if only for the call to continue to better ourselves and our processes as software developers. This article has sparked much of what follows. If you don’t understand what some of these phrases, and ideologies are exactly, I recommend Wikipedia to help you get at least an overview of them.
There seems to be a mission to find the holy grail of software development processes and ideologies. There’s Agile, Lean, RUP, Waterfall, Object Oriented Programming, and about a hundred other methods, ideologies, design, and architectural methods and ideals. Some will tell you that Agile the best process while others will argue for a more waterfall like approach to the process. Others will swear up and down that Lean is the only way to go. The problem with these kinds of arguments is that as we work to find new and better ways to do things, we have a tendency to force them to work in the environment we’re in. We do this rather than try to find the solution that works best for the environment we’re in.
Sure some of these process methodologies can be adapted easily and inserted into the environment we’re in and the ones that can should be looked to first because they can be easily changed to work in the environment we’re in. However it has been my experience that some people will toss out an idea, practice, or process just because it isn’t “alternative” enough for their liking. I think people that think like this are doing a disservice to their team, their potential client, and even themselves.
The idea to find a better way is a noble mission. It is one that will challenge a person and group constantly. But to toss out ideas, processes, or a practice simply because it’s “old school” is like saying why use a wench with a socket wrench is so much more efficient. This might be true in some instances but sometimes that plain old wrench can get into places that socket wrench can’t.
Instead of looking at each new process, practice, methodology, or ideology in the realm of software development as a better way to do things overall, why not instead look at it as another tool in your tool box? Why look for a holy grail that doesn’t really exist? Not every process is going to work for every situation. For those times, why not look at the other tools in the toolbox?
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Tagged development, methodologies, processes, programming
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Michael Koby 
Watermarking DRM-Free Music Files
A couple of weeks back I talked about the advantages of iTunes going DRM-Free and why this was important for the whole realm of online media distribution. It has been brought to our attention that these DRM-Free files that you purchase from the iTunes store have your personal information in them, thus watermarking them to know who they were sold to.
There is much debate over on Slashdot about whether or not this is "okay" or not. I have discussed the idea of watermarking digital files on this blog in the past, but for those that missed it, I’ll quickly rehash my basic thoughts here. I’m for watermarking digitally purchased files with the username and/or email address of the purchaser if it means that content creators will move towards more DRM-Free solutions for consumers.
While most of the more intelligent people on Slashdot are also in favor of this line of thinking you’ll find others that are not so receptive. And I have to ask, why? If you want to purchase content electronically, especially digital media like music and movies, you are going to have to make concessions. Previously it was having to deal with digital rights management on music files. With this idea pretty much gone, there has to be another concession. The content makers do not want their stuff to be easily made available on peer-to-peer sites (ie BitTorrent sites). And with the removal of digital rights it becomes much easier to put those songs up on the internet to share, so there has to be some form of deterrents to stop you from doing so.
This is the tradeoff. If you want to be able to do what you want with the files, then they need to be marked as you having purchased them so that should they show up on the net, the appropriate rights holders can sue the proper offenders. This also cuts back on the random litigation that the RIAA likes so much and instead forces them to go after people that have actually done something wrong as opposed to people the think might have done something wrong.
So, just to reiterate. Digital rights management is bad, watermarking is okay. Sharing files online is bad, period (it’s theft), using proper deterrents to discourage participating is said behavior is okay.