Tom's blog

There was an interesting article on ClickZ announcing Razorfish's formation of an agile practice.

He who fails to plan, plans to fail

A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. But if you don't plan properly you may end up 2,000 miles from where you wanted to go.

Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.

The book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is about the importance of intrinsic motivation. The foundation of the book is that there are three levels of human motivation:

1. Basic needs – survival, food, sex, etc.
2. External rewards and punishment
3. Internal interest and purpose

LevelTen recently launched a series of SEO modules for Drupal with two primary goals: to continue Drupal's leadership as the premier SEO platform, and to make higher search engine rankings accessible for everyone.

Background

Anyone who has built a complex website with a modern content management system (CMS), and one without, knows what wonderful marvels CMS's are. A good CMS provides a development team with thousands of developer hours (that’s my PC way of not saying man hours) of code that has been tested and burned-in on a multitude of websites. The prevailing wisdom is that a good CMS greatly reduces the cost and time to deliver a website, particularly for advanced sites.

Last Tuesday Accretive Solutions gave me the opportunity to present a social media 101 to a room full of about 250 to 300 CPAs. I have been getting some questions about the presentation so I thought I would do a quick post to complement the deck uploaded to SlideShare.

I recently went through Mike Cohn’s Scrum Product Owner training. I was a little worried I wouldn’t learn too many new things since we have already read all three of Cohn’s books. Mike, however, did not disappoint.

I originally listed several take aways from the training in this post. Then realized it was too long and that many of the take aways were a post unto themselves. So my plan is to cover each one as a separately.

1. 21st century Product Owners are now pigs

The Web industry is broken. Web development and online marketing services are wrought with mediocrity and failure. A self perpetuating cycle of misaligned and missed expectations have become the norm. We can do better...we MUST do better. The very survival of the art of professional grade Web services depends on it.

One of the reasons Drupal is so powerful and will continue to grow is the vision. The vision manifests itself in two primary ways: the code and the community. While I have worked with many open source projects, I have never seen one where the community drives the code and the code drives the community as much as it does with Drupal.