Slavo Ingilizov

Blogging entered my world about two or three years ago. I remember looking through a book in the student library at AUBG, titled Essential Blogging. I had no idea what the book was about, but looked at what the authors had to say and developed an interest in the topic. I started reading blogs sporadically, not following any of them consistently. Then I found out about RSS and Google Reader. I started filling up the list of my subscriptions and have been reading continuously since then.

I entered the blogging world about a year ago. Blogging was so cool that there was just no way I wasn’t having a blog. So I started one on blogspot.com and posted some student life stuff that no one cared about, including me. This effort failed miserably and I stopped writing, deciding to be quiet until I have something meaningful to share with the world. The next step was when I started a Bulgarian blog with a friend of mine. The goal was to post only humorous and meaningless content, probably in order to be cool.

All this time I was trying to figure out what is the purpose of my blogging and what I want to achieve with it. I started using hosted solutions at first, then read some more about optimizations and interesting things you could do with a self-hosted blog. I did that for both Naliven Bozdugan and the one you are reading right now, changed the templates, included categorization features and bookmarking. But until recently, I had no idea where I’m going and only blogged because I liked it.

Yesterday, thinking about what is the next step that I should take (for this blog), I came to the conclusion I’d been searching. It might have been Seth Godin that brought this to my mind, it might have been Dimitar Nikolov, I’m not sure. But what I realized is that I want to take a stand on issues. I blog, because I need to express my opinion, my mood and my feelings. I need to know what my opinion is. The thing is, a lot less people are interested in me as a person than I wish. So the only thing that would make someone drop by and read what I have to say is my opinion. I saw in this an opportunity to find the person I want to become through writing. There is nothing wrong with blogging about a problem I’m not sure how to solve, just the opposite – I think that writing about uncertainty and controversy would be helpful in making a decision or finding an answer to a question.

The end result of all this would hopefully be a clearer mind for myself, and more interesting content for you. I don’t want to make predictions about how it will turn out, let’s just hope that I am right and everything goes as planned.

Oh, and I need a logo for this blog, but I don’t have any graphic design skills. I also don’t know what would be the general idea of the logo and I haven’t written enough content to be able to tell from that. Ideas are welcome.

Found a picture in Guy Kawasaki’s blog from the QlikView conference.

I wish we had more stations like this in public places. Could this be a viable business model, or is it worthless, having in mind the efforts put into standardizing mobile phone chargers?

I’m a bit of a control freak when it comes to how my computer is configured. I like to be aware of how things happen and why they do. Currently on a Windows system, the thing that irritates me the most is the Windows Registry. A nasty, unknown shared resource used by almost all applications and extremely hard to fix manually when corrupted. But it is a standard, so somehow I get along with it.

Anyway, installing programs has always been one of the worst experiences ever while setting up my work/fun environment, on any platform. Linux makes it easy for you to install distribution packages, but I still haven’t spend the time to figure out how to uninstall them. What happens to all dependencies that you didn’t note down when installing? Do they remain in the system?

Since program installation is usually the first impression that software makes in a user, I think every software developer should spend the time and make it as perfect as it can be. This is clearly not only my opinion, but in this post I wanted to mention two features of software installations in general that I find wonderful, and cannot figure out why there are people that miss to put them in.

1. “Don’t create a Start Menu folder” option

2. “Create a Desktop icon” and “Create a Quick Launch icon”

First, I have so many things in the Windows Start Menu, that I probably never open it. I don’t need more things there by default, and I need an option to control this when installing software. Second, I extensively use the Quick Launch toolbar, and if the installer puts an icon there for me, that would be great. Obviously the FeedDemon installer made me happy and the people from NewsGator did their job. Why don’t the others do it? Why don’t you do it every time?

Are you using Google Chrome? A while ago I talked about how this browser’s introduction into the market would affect the other players. I don’t know what’s the situation today, I only know they released a final 1.0 version and are out of beta. For me, the speed and user experience that I have in this new browser is unmatched. The only reason keeping me from making it my default are Firefox’s plugins. I guess once Chrome introduces a plugin system, they would have to sacrifice a lot of the performance benefits. Similar to what happened to Firefox. With one exception: we’re talking Google this time, not Mozilla. And probably most of you know that once Google decides to do something (another innovative way to try and rule the web), they don’t stop no matter what.

In short I’m saying Google have far more power and willingness to contribute to their browser than Mozilla had. But this is not why I started this post. I started it to share a really cool Javascript experience that these guys announced a while ago. They are exploring the nuts and bolts of the V8 framework used in Chrome to create wonderful applications. Here’s the site (make sure to open it with Chrome):

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

And then some people say Javascript was dead and the future would belong to rich applications (to read: Flash and Silverlight). I so disagree.

You’ve probably already heard about the new interest-based advertising Google is launching. If you haven’t, here’s a link to the ReadWriteWeb article. The funny thing is, as an AdSense subscriber, I got a message from them today, and they marked it as Spam in Gmail. See for yourself:

Now the question is, are Google really spamming people, or their Spam filters are just a bit more than good?

A stupid question, I know. Especially after you are already reading this. But I’m fascinated about the fact that so many people I know still don’t read blogs on a regular basis or don’t use RSS or Atom or some other publishing protocol reader. For me, blogs are the primary way to stay informed about what’s happening in my communities, and the main news channel. They are also the easiest way for me to chill out and relax for a minute between two tasks requiring high concentration. A personal opinion on a topic is much more valuable than the 20-times-edited newspage on cnn.com or any other mass news site.

So, since I’m so passionate about this, what blogs do I read? Well, this post is an attempt to summarize a fraction of my Google Reader subscriptions, with explanations of why I read them. Hopefully this would shed some light on the topics I’m mostly interested in nowadays, too. Here’s the list:

47 Hats – Bob Walsh’s advice for independent software vendors (MicroISVs) and startups. Digests of news about the community, events and nice articles from all around.

A Smart Bear – Tagline: Startups + Marketing + Geekery. Jason Cohen, an entrepreneur and his takes on small business

Erik Sink – The definitive guide to the Business of Software.

Hacker News – This is a site that Paul Graham set up to get together a community of developers and provoke discussion about the things shared in the dev community in general. Something like reddit.com/r/programming.

How to Change the World – Guy Kawasaki, former Apple evangelist, currently a venture capitalist, blogging about entrepreneurship, providing tips and tricks.

Joel on Software – One of THE bloggers in the software development community. Former Microsoftie, currently owner of Fog Creek Software, doesn’t write much lately. Launched a developer community site together with Atwood called Stackoverflow. Rare but quality material.

Paul Graham – An angel investor in Silicon Valley. Created the Y Combinator project, writing very valuable essays on investment, especially VC and Angel. See Hacker News.

Seth Godin – the marketing guy. Top marketing blog. Ever.

Friday Reflections – a new storyline and a new thought each Friday. Author is Anand Shah. Unbelievably inspirational.

Coding Horror – comparable to Joel in software development. Jeff Atwood, Joel’s partner in Stackoveflow, again writing for devs. See Joel on Software.

Scott Hanselman – another prominent software development blogger. Lots of info, primary Microsoft.

Scott Gu – The Gu, Scott Guthrie, running the following dev teams in Microsoft – CLR and core .NET libraries, ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, IIS 7, Visual Studio Tools for ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF and mobile. A must read for every Microsoft dev.

I can say I only listed the MUST ones. Except for those, I’m following about 97 more. Anyone who wants the full list, just drop a line. So what are you waiting for? Publish your list and let me know. What blogs are YOU reading?

I was reading somewhere about survivorship bias recently. It strikes me when I think about it, how often it is out there, in the articles you read, the statistics you view and in any written material that you rely on for information. The easiest way to avoid it would be to have doubt in anything you read, any author, no matter how credible and unbiased he may seem; no matter how hard he worked to win your trust. If you ask Jeff, that’s the way to go – be inquisitive and reinvent the wheel, think through every piece of information that is presented to you. But this is not the point.

The point is, every content provider, news agency or service you are using is entitled to bring you unbiased information. How often this happens in reality, you tell me. I think it takes time for one to actually understand that survivorship bias is everywhere. Our society, our culture is such that we always pay attention to successful people, and try to avoid failures.

Take shelfari.com. It is a site brining social networking into the world of reading. People add books to their shelf, review them, rate them and answer to questions other people have about books. I’ve been a member for a while, and looking at my shelf, there’s no book with a bad review, no book I don’t like. Unconsciously, I’ve been adding only the books that I was impressed by, skipping everything else. Everything in my profile is biased. You cannot call it survivorship bias in this case, but maybe something like good impression bias. Same thing.

And when I think about it, it is normal for me to do this. I don’t remember the books I didn’t like. If I started using shelfari when I started reading and added each book as I finished it, it might be a different story. But the thing is, most social networking tools we use have been out there for a very short time. Does that mean all the information in them is biased? Yes. Does that mean we should care about it? Probably not. A social network in itself is subjective. It relates to one’s personal story and friends and does not serve as an institution providing opinion. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if most people on Facebook took every piece of information that is shared for granted; I wouldn’t be surprised if Shelfari reviews are taken seriously; I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter messages are considered news, although they might be completely untrue.

All I’m saying is – we should be wary. It is our nature to trust someone who is talking to us, but if we want unbiased information, we should look somewhere else, not in social networks.

Recently I’ve been uneasy about the way I behave. I considered myself a person who loves to learn new things and has deep interest in gaining new skills. While I was still studying in AUBG, this was true and I spent the time to make sure I lived up to these principles. For some reason, I’m not confident this is happening any more, at least not to the extent I want to. So having though about it, here are some resolutions and goals that I set for myself until the end of 2009:

1. I should spend time to fully understand and comprehend everything I start to work with. No trial-and-error approaches or just shots in the dark.
2. I should start writing. Be it blog posts, notebook entries or anything else, I should always pay attention to writing down any thoughts and elaborating on what I’ve written, including research to better develop and understand it.
3. I should invest a lot in learning Javascript and related client technologies. This may be in the form of at least two books and one side project.
4. I will dig out and finish at least one project I’ve started or ever thought about starting.
5. I will finish at least two books I’ve started and read at least 8 new.
6. I will try to understand other people’s point of view, and not condemn or criticize before thinking. I will read at least one book on psychology.
7. I should limit the drinking of coke, eating hamburgers and other foods in this category to at most once per week.

Right now these are enough, as it will be hard enough for me to get a good grade on any of them, but if I come up with something really interesting and worth noting as a goal, I will edit this post. Let’s see how I do on December 31, 2009.

I Recently came across Typealyzer. Decided to try it on my own blog and here are the results:

I was expecting this and don’t know if it is good or bad – you tell me

Reading Rob Conery’s post today, I started thinking about how often I read blogs of people having no ideas of their own, but instead writing and restating things they’ve enjoyed reading somewhere else. Now the question is – is this ok? To me it is.

After all, if we waited for everyone to have his own "Eureka!" before writing, then that would mean everyone would be a genius and we would be developing and growing on a much faster scale than we do today. The truth is that everyone shares his personal opinion through blogging, and it’s ok to comment on other people’s posts. It’s ok to just criticize and provoke discussion, and not just wait for a brilliant idea of yours to share. It’s even ok to do how-tos for things totally not your opinion and totally not invented by you.

Then the only problem left is actually doing it. Go! as in a joke a friend of mine told me once:

He was traveling from Istanbul to Sofia on a train, and they were just crossing the Bulgarian-Turkish border. Passport control people were passing through the train and making sure everyone was legal and things were in order. A French guy, obviously excited about his East European trip told the passport control officer: "I want to go to Budapest!" After a few seconds pause, the officer looked at each of the people sitting around the French guy, pointed his arm in (arguably) the direction of Budapest and said: "Go!"

With the risk of many people not understanding the East European context of this joke, I’m posting it. With the risk of many people not understanding the European style of drinking coffee, I’m saying that the Starbucks experience has been around for decades, if not centuries. And, Starbucks is just not fun in Europe – it’s just a normal American store trying to look European. This is like making some breakthrough of exciting Europeans to play baseball, establishing some behavior, and then trying to expand business in the States. But I guess it earns money, so it’s ok.

Hooray for people posting rants when they have nothing else to say. And hooray for me putting links to Instanbul, Sofia and Budapest. So stop wondering about what to do next and what excuse to make up and do what you’ve always waited to do. Write that post and launch that site. Go!