Posted by Justin McDowell on June 14, 2009 under Admin | 
An American in Paris
My execution wedding date is today and as such I will be blogging even less over the next 2-3 weeks. Don’t worry, the shop won’t be closed though… just consider us on a work schedule similar to our friends in Paris….
While I am blogging, I’d like to note that USD -> EUR exchange rate sucks… it’s one thing to read about it in the WSJ, but it is an entirely different matter when you see it happen right before your eyes. However Bank of America made my life a whole lot easier with their Foreign Currency Service. I placed an order on Wednesday for Euros and they were overnighted to my local bank where I could pick them up Thursday afternoon. BOA’s rate was 0.08133575 more than the wholesale exchange rate. Talk about fast service and a very good price!!
Ok folks, Mikal will keep the lights on…. Au Revoir
- Justin McDowell
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Posted by Justin McDowell on June 9, 2009 under Self Realization |
While taking a mental break this morning to read my new favorite blog Coding Horror, I came across Jeff’s post about UNIX turning 40 years old. While I digested his points about the different closed source, open source and mixed source flavors of *NIX, I was pleasantly surprised when a quote from Joel Spolsky in Jeff’s post resonated with me so deeply in a completely different direction than it’s original intent. Let’s take a look:
What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers. This is, of course, a major simplification, but really, that’s the big difference: are we programming for programmers or end users? Everything else is commentary.
So when I read this quote my mind immediately went elsewhere… I began to grapple with a more fundamental question. Are we programming working for programmers work’s sake or end users to help someone else? I mean, not just making a product or a service that helps someone do something, but really helping people grow, transform, and enable them for success while getting the job done every day.
How does thinking about the people you’re helping – change how you work or what decisions you make? Think about it, if you’re a consultant hired by another company, your client isn’t just the company that hired you, but it’s the people impacted by your clients business and that interface with the client.
This train of thought was initially started by taking several managerial assessments and discovering among other things that my Social/Altruistic aspect of my natural style is almost off the charts when compared to the national average. Continuing on that train, I think one of my favorite quotes is in order.
“Every person must decide, at some point, whether they will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive
selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ’What are you doing for others?’” -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., August 11, 1957
I’d love to hear your comments on how this alternative view impacts your outlook on work, I’m still contemplating the impact on my own.
By the way, Happy Birthday UNIX.
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