Reading energy

A new old friend of mine said “I’ve always enjoyed reading, but never enjoyed writing” I’m puzzling on that one, as she does seem to enjoy writing in chat windows. Let me write about reading that gave me energy:I was laughing out loud at an exchange between Mike Hill and Ron Jeffries in the extreme programming mailing list:

“But sanctifying Ron before his death is dishonoring the fundamental ethic of which he writes. Perhaps our early elevation of St. Kent contains a lesson: the human, however outstanding his contribution, is yet human. Honor Ron not by imagined, dare I say /wildly /imagined/, /encomiums of obituary extravavagance, but by action. /Change the world./ I’ll wear a red dress to Ron’s funeral, because I’m confident he’ll laugh, and confident that his funeral is irrelevant to what we have shared, to what I have learned from what we have shared.”

One day you’ll wake up, and you may find yourself strangely agreeing with with Ron Jeffries:

“what matters in our business and our lives is what we do. [...] Much more change, would be my preference. My recollection of the early days of XP and Agile were that we all wanted to kick some ass. I’d like to see a return to those days, quite frankly, and I prefer to hang out with folks who agree.”

Kathy Sierra in Dignity is Deadly, part II about start-up versus corporate culture (I’d almost quote the whole table she made in that post):

“You’ll be fired for: doing crap work, backstabbing, treating users badly versus Putting ‘WTF’ in an e-mail to the CEO .
Mission statement: We love what we’re doing. We need to make a profit so we can keep doing it versus Our mission is to deliver expert solutions to customers while maximizing shareholder value”

Business plan competitions puzzle me. This sheds some light on it. Business plan competitions make start-ups behave like large corporations. Big words and beating around the bush, instead of working from passion. I see start-ups like that every now and again. Stop. Doing. That.

I’ve been working on a product / service again, on and off for the past couple of weeks. The mission statement quote resonates with me. A place that inspires me in that respect: last.fm in case you are looking for new music, based on recommendations from peers that love the music you love. The service does seem to be down sometimes, but overall I’m enjoying it. A lot.
David Maister in The brutal Truth about other people :

“The second path, being optimistic, energetic, reaching out to people to form relationships, may not always work, but it’s the best shot you’ve got at eliciting the response you want and need to live an enjoyable and fulfilling work life.

Of course you don’t let yourself be exploited. If people don’t reciprocate, you walk. Life’s too short to work with or for idiots.”

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