My Internet Notebook

If you are a small enterprise software company, what benefits would you get by having a developer program.

• Increase adoption/awareness of your technology in the market
• Leverage your limited internal resources
• Reduce sales cycles

Of course, all this assumes that you have something valuable to offer to developers who can either use your ware to satisfy their needs or add value to your ware on a reseller basis.

How to setup your program then? There are already a lot of tools out there that can help you get started cheap. For a started, you can run a forum with open source phpBB. Other options include portals, wikis, blogs etc.

Good software engineering is hard, but good software engineering management is much harder.

Ask anyone who has been on a software project where more than one person was involved, you will be told the same: one person coding is easy but team-based software engineering is hard. I would say it is often not because there are no best practices in existence that people can follow. But instead, it’s because people don’t follow them.

How to get Engineers to follow the best practices? It takes good Software Engineering Managers. A good Software Engineering Manager will instill a culture of deliverying quality engineering work in the team; a good Software Engineering Manager will establish a good SDLC process and stick to it; a good Software Engineering Manager knows how to motivate his team; and a good Software Engineering Manager knows the importance of effective communications and encourages / facilitates them.

Unfortunately, these good Software Engineering Managers are hard to come by these days …

So the ‘hammer’ finally hits today. People’s Bank of China annouced that it will revalue the Yuan (a.k.a RMB) immediately against US dollars by a 2.1% increase. The annoucement came quietly in the backdrop of noisy national security talks surrounding CNOOC’s takeover bit of Unocal. No leaks, smart moves!

Although some US congressmen labeled this as a ‘good start’. In my view, this is a significant development. Once you start loosen the grip, there is no way back!

Why do I care? Simple: because I have a lot of friends and relatives in China, and my family and I travel often to China. Now with this currency revaluation, my US income doesn’t afford me the purchasing power I used to have. I know 2% is small, but what if that number becomes 40% as the market seems to think so …

An article at the SF Chronicle enumerates the crises effects of baby-boomer retirement that is going to happen in the next decade or so (www.sfgate.com/jobs). Is it time to panic? As the old chinese saying goes, wherever there is danger, there is opportunity.

But it is always to be prepared. Resources to get yourself prepared: Boomer Crisis Update from the Hyde Group, The Aging of Aquarius: The Baby Boom Generation Matures from the Segal Company, the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Ken Norton talks about how to hire a great product manager. In the process, he pointed to a number of important issues in shipping great products, with or without a Product Manager:-)

Personally I think the role of Product Manager is too essential to not have in a product organization. But if you happen to be in a company that does not currently have such a person, you should definitely step up to the challenge and play the role of Product Manager.