Darren Rowse, the Problogger is conducting a nice little exercise in “Speed Posting” where he takes a question from Twitter, and answers it in a post. The catch is he has to write the response in 3 minutes or less. It is proving to be a very informative exercise if you are reading them. Below I link to a couple of them:
How Much Traffic Should a Blog Have Before Running Advertising
9 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself Before Posting to Your Blog
About to leave for a friends wedding. (The munchkin sneaked into the photo)
At the office…
I was informed this morning that some folks were having issues with commenting on my blog. Some even thought that comments were disabled.
This is probably due to the fact that I am using Disqus to handle the comments on my blog. There was a recent posting on the Disqus blog about some growning pains they’ve been experiencing lately.
So if you do not see the comment section on a post, trying doing a refresh on the page. This usually resolves the problem and you can comment.
A little sidenote though, I was informed of the issues through Twitter and I replied to the peple point out the problem and told them I was using Disqus and that it was probably due to their growning pains. Right after sending that message I got a reply from Daniel Ha asking if I was having trouble. Daniel Ha is one of the founders of Disqus. So points for the customer service.
Over the past couple of weeks, the subject of specialization with reference to consulting has come up among my colleagues. It is a subject of much debate so I figured that now might be a good time to look at specializing and explain my points of view on the matter. I am of the opinion that specialization as a consultant will do more long term damage to your career than not specializing.
Sure, specializing looks like a great road to go down especially on a technology that doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere soon. However, for the sake of this argument lets consider the Microsoft .Net product stack. How many .Net developers do you know? How many really good ones do you know? If I was to venture a guess, I’d say you know a lot of .Net developers. This makes the .Net developer a commodity of sorts. The more people that can do what you do, the worse off you are. Especially if those other folks can do it better than you.
This can be extremely harmful if that single technology or technology stack is all you know. You are so deep in it that it’s crazy. But if you are are asked to look at something else you couldn’t do it with confidence and value. However, specializing can make you easily billable on a technology (stack) that is in high demand but once that technology becomes outdated or something better comes along you are stuck being non-billable until you can learn something else.
Another reason that specialization hurts is that it makes it really easy to fall into the “one solution for all problems” trap. You start to think about ways to make your current specialization fix a problem it has no business fixing. You end up trying to fit the square peg into the round hole. It just doesn’t work and it really doesn’t actually solve the problem.
So how do we avoid specialization? Well, it can be hard to and I’m not saying that you should never specialize in anything. I actually thing specializing on a programming language is a sound idea. Especially if it’s object oriented based and compiles in some way. Doing so makes it easy to learn other languages when you need to in a pinch making it easy for you to jump around. But I think that getting your hands on whatever technology you can is only going to benefit you long term. If you can play around and get to understand different technologies at least at a surface level, it helps you to understand different ways to solve problems and gives you a better understanding of what tools work best for what kinds of jobs.
Surface knowledge helps a lot. It can help you to understand how different technologies can connect together to create a solution. It can help you understand a lot more technologies overall because you understand so many, at least a little bit. So keep this in mind as you sit down to learn new things. Think about something you don’t understand and attempt to understand it. The more technologies that you have a surface understanding of, the easier it will be for you to dive deeper if you need to, because you’ll already have the ground work laid.
Michael Koby 
Digg Loses the News, AllTop Takes Over
I don’t know about anyone else out there, but lately I find myself using Digg less and AllTop more. It just seems that I find more real news and commentary on AllTop than I do on Digg these days.
Digg seems to have become more like the Farks of the world with who can submit the silliest and wildest links rather than focusing more on the news. Also, since it’s an election year, I’ve had my fill of the “republicans suck” and “Obama Rules” stories getting on the front page of Digg. But maybe that’s just me. I’m okay with the occasional humorous post on Digg. But it used to be about the news and really cool things the internet has to offer. I think that much of this drastic change in focus on Digg can be traced to the point when Digg started allowing the submission of photos and videos. When you could only submit articles of a textual nature, you had to really have something of value. Now if you can jump on the latest meme before anyone else, you’ll hit the front page.
So what about AllTop? It’s not like Digg in that you vote for the best content. The AllTop folks scoure the internet in search of it. They only take the best sites, catagorize them, and lay them out in a nice easy to navigate manner. The sites at the top of a section update more frequently than those at the bottom and you can quickly scan a section and find articles that interest you. Only interested in linux specific technology then you have a section. Interested in reading more on personal finace? You have a section too. Sure you could use Google Reader for some of this, but then you’d have to search for the best content. I’d rather have someone do that part for me. Saves me the trouble of digging through the internet.
If you haven’t tried AllTop.com yet, you really should give it a try. Especially if you are looking for some new way to find the latest and greatest content. There is a lot of great content aggregated to AllTop so you’ll never really be at a loss for stuff to read.
What about you? Have you moved on from Digg to something else? If so what did you move to? Leave a comment, tell us about your new favorite site for finding the best stuff on the net.