There is no spoon

After looking at my blog for the last weeks, I realized that I like most of the entries. I am particularly proud of some of them (e.g. The essential difficulty of software development).

I have also realized that it covers the same topics like many other blogs; for example Martin Fowler's or Jeff Atwood's. Those are the people who understood that human factor is extremely important in software development and have stated once and again the same principles and practices that I did. Though repetition is important – maybe people will learn if they see the same things repeated in different contexts, by different people, on different sites – I'm not sure that I can do a better job than the people I nominated.

There's also the fact that the MyOpera community is limited. It's a great community, it's vibrant, the people that participate to it are more interesting than in most other communities, and I really like it. From the technical point of view, it has almost everything you might wish for, including an amazingly effective SEO (the number of views on my blog are much higher than I expected and than I would have been able to do on my own). The only drawback for me is that most of the members of the community are not from my natural target audience: technical persons from European countries or from U.S.

I am thus faced with a couple of issues I need to solve:

• to change the focus of my blog
  
• to find ways to reach my target audience
  

Regarding the first point, I will make a few changes. I believe that the most interesting part of any training, book or blog is the personal experience of the trainer or writer. I will put more of my experience on the line. There's a lot to tell, since I grew with the Romanian IT industry starting from the point where there was no project manager until I took part in the CMMI level 3 effort for appraisal and then started to work seriously with agile methodologies, since I worked abroad (in France, UK, Switzerland, Belgium) and in more than five different industries (notably printing, banking, advertising, energy), with different technologies. I've held different roles in the teams, including software developer, business analyst, technical lead, project manager, software architect and consultant.
The second change is that I will write less often but with more research. There's no point in restating the same things again and again, while letting the readers make their own research. The main point of this revamp is that I want to provide added value to my readers. I like a lot how Joel Spolsky writes his posts, but it will take some time for me to get there.

To the second point. Since I don't want to leave the MyOpera community, I have a few possibilities: publish my blog in multiple places on the web (which may prove difficult), to market my blog to my target audience(no idea how) or to create a technical-related group on MyOpera (if it doesn't exist yet – group search is rather cumbersome in MyOpera). I'm yet undecided, and any piece of advice is welcome.

With these being said, stay tuned for the next developments of There is no spoon! New posts are already in the pre-production phase and will be published in a few days.

---

Personal advertisement: I am PassionIT and I help teams develop high quality software. I train, I help improving and I work hands-on, depending on the needs. Contact me if you need help. Alexandru Bolboaca-Diaconu

---

 

I was about to write my blog as usual, when I read the latest of Jeff Atwood's posts. I can only agree with him, and I think that the issue he's talking about is very important. Therefore, I prefer to point you to his post today rather than do business as usual.

If you are interested in the subject, you may be interested in the book "The future of reputation". I haven't read it all yet, but the first two chapters show that it's promising.

---

Personal advertisement: I am PassionIT and I help teams develop high quality software. I train, I help improving and I work hands-on, depending on the needs. Contact me if you need help.
Alexandru Bolboaca-Diaconu

---