Slavo Ingilizov

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!

Microsoft recently announced that Windows 7 beta is available for download. There were so many people trying to download it, that they had to disable the link for a while while upgrading the hardware. A lot has been said about its predecessor – Vista. After all the complaints and attempts from Microsoft to actually conceal the low performance and mistakes they had done, they finally admitted Vista’s problems and decided to release the next version.

But even if it is called the next version, is it actually that? Here’s what Microsoft say on the Windows 7 website:

"Windows 7 was built around your feedback, so you’ll see a lot of things you’ve asked for. You asked us to make everyday tasks faster and easier, make your PC work the way you want it to, and make new things possible. And that’s exactly what we’re doing."

Read the rest of this entry »

The costs of giving up something you desire are underestimated.

Probably 95 out of 100 times we do more harm to ourselves than good. This is because when you give up, you not only lose the battle, but also change your attitude and behavior in the future. For the next battle, you’re more likely to give up early and save some nerve, than to actually fight and come up with better tactics, think out of the box and win.

Making thinks easy is a world trend. Every invention tries to do exactly this – automate or replace the need for a human to work. Dishwashing machines replace the need to wash dishes by hand; cars replace the need to walk (don’t think large distances – most of us drive cars in towns for short trips); credit cards replace the need to care about cash and losing and handling it. This seemingly saves money and time. But in the long run, it makes you weak. You lose the opportunity to advance a skill by just not exercising it. Up to a few years ago every grown-up man driver in Bulgaria could fix minor defects in his car. However useless this skill may seem, nowadays we don’t have it, and we don’t have a substitute for it – we just have to pay to someone to do the work.

This world trend gives us incentive to give up. We feel it’s natural for things to be easy to do. It’s not – every goal no matter how minor, is hard to achieve and if you actually do it yourself and try hard, you gain much more than the time and money saved by giving up. People start to realize this now – startups do non-technical things themselves, they acquire new skills, they don’t give up.

I’m not saying you should always be stubborn about doing what you’ve started. You should see other peoples’ viewpoint and know when you’re going in the wrong direction. But if you consider to stop because the investment would be too big or you would save time by not doing something or you would rather rest and do nothing, don’t give up. You never know before you try it, and in all cases it’s worth it.

I just recently discovered how cool last.fm is. One of the Super-Duper features they have is a widget you can put on your blog. I Just did that, so you may listen to my last.fm personal radio station if you click play on the widget in the sidebar. That would play songs by artists that I like – the ones I often listen to at home and last.fm scobbles. Check it out.

I was reading "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie the other day. That book has a chapter on why not to criticise people and show them respect. Here’s a passage I will allow myself to cite:

Bob Hoover, a famous test pilot and frequent per-former at air
shows, was returning to his home in Los Angeles from an air show in
San Diego. As described in the magazine Flight Operations, at three
hundred feet in the air, both engines suddenly stopped. By deft
maneuvering he managed to land the plane, but it was badly
damaged although nobody was hurt.

Hoover’s first act after the emergency landing was to inspect the
airplane’s fuel. Just as he suspected, the World War II propeller
plane he had been flying had been fueled with jet fuel rather than
gasoline.

Upon returning to the airport, he asked to see the mechanic who had
serviced his airplane. The young man was sick with the agony of his
mistake. Tears streamed down his face as Hoover approached. He
had just caused the loss of a very expensive plane and could have
caused the loss of three lives as well.

You can imagine Hoover’s anger. One could anticipate the tonguelashing
that this proud and precise pilot would unleash for that
carelessness. But Hoover didn’t scold the mechanic; he didn’t even
criticize him. Instead, he put his big arm around the man’s shoulder
and said, "To show you I’m sure that you’ll never do this again, I
want you to service my F-51 tomorrow."

So next time you’re not happy with someone and want to express your anger, think about what would change if you do and what if you don’t. This book is a golden mine, read it!

I can’t believe how much insight Nike’s slogan contains – I always thought about it as a casual teen saying. Reading Seth Godin’s post today I once again realized how lazy, undecisive, foolish and blind I am. So, are you wondering about something? Do it!