It’s amazing to me the  number of problems that can be solved or avoided completely with communication. For example, the prevailing attitude of the day is that children should not be let out of an adult’s sight, in spite of an all-time low in the history of violent crime. Towards that end, and since tomorrow is the first day of school, my oldest boy is currently testing the range of our walkie-talkies to see if he and his younger brother can walk to school. The reason? Because I can communicate with him to know that they got to school OK. I need that communication so that I can continue to be paranoid while still letting him walk the half-mile to school.

Here’s another example: Recently at work there was a minor fracas when group A published their planned work based on group B’s input aka *implicit* buy-in, but without group B’s *explicit* buy-in. This made group B unhappy, because they felt that their input wasn’t been taken (even though it was). The solution? Group A set up a regular meeting to communicate on their various projects with group B, making sure to get everyone’s buy-in explicitly.

Here’s another one: My co-author on the VB version of my WinForms book has been working like a dog on his new job and his new baby and the VB port of my book. However, since most of his communications were with the publishing company directly, I didn’t see most of the work that he was doing and, because of our tight schedule, that caused me to worry that we wouldn’t make it. The solution? I asked him about it and he told me of the pile of work he’d done that I didn’t know about. He also volunteered to make sure to cc me on all of his email related to the book.

And here’s my favorite example: For a long, long time, MS was labeled (and is often still labeled) as an “evil” because of a perceived uncaring about developer’s hopes and dreams. Ironically, with a software engineer at the helm, all of Microsoft’s decisions are driven by that need to meet the needs of 3rd party developers. The issue was communication, both in letting internal folks make their intentions known to the external folks and in getting the hopes and dreams of external folks into the planning processes of internal folks. It’s my belief that the reason that Adam, Becky, Brad, Brian, Chris, Chris, Don, Duncan, Ed, Eric, Kent, Lutz, Martin, Sara, Scott, Tommy, and tons of other MS employees are not only not reprimanded for our blog posts, but encouraged, is so that our intentions can be known to external folks. And believe me, when someone external puts a substantive comment into their blog and one of the thousands of MS employees finds it, it makes its way into the inboxes of the internal MS employees that use that feedback. This need for bi-directional communication between internal and external folks at MS has driven all kinds of new ways of doing things and you’re going to see a whole lot more of that at the PDC.

I could keep going on for days about problems in my life that are solved with communication and could have been avoided with communication up front. In fact, I’m started to get a feel for it when I realize that my communication could have been better and what problem I’m going to have because it wasn’t. Also, I’ve recently started to try to really concentrate on what my friends and family are saying when they start conversations with me while I’m working. (Previously I would continue working, giving a grunt now and again, as necessary.) This little thing has made a big difference. Of course, lots of folks way smarter than I already know this stuff, but to a geek who only learned how to communicate with other humans relatively recently, this is deep thinking! BTW, don’t tell my sister-in-law with the Master’s degree in communications. We give each other crap all the time on any number of topics and the idea that she knows more about what’s really important in the world would give her all kinds of extra ammunition (which she rarely needs anyway… : )

Here. Sometimes I write something on my spout and it gets a ton of comments on my little homegrown message board (built by The .NET Guy himself [1]). More often, I hear almost nothing at all. But sometimes I get email and IMs from all corners of the globe from folks that want to give me feedback but don't want to post publicly for some reason. This last thing is what happened on my "The real goals of marketing?" piece [2]. I got some agreement w/ my friend ("Yep, marketing guys are scum. That's what they're paid for."), but mostly I got all kinds of folks, marketers and not, saying that my naive view is the favored one. John Porcaro was a rare one that actually put his feelings on the subject up for the public and sums up most of the feedback I got. Plus, he's a Group Manager @ MS's Home and Entertainment division, so hopefully he's so impressed with my posts that he'll want to send me an MCE PC. I can’t be bought, John, but I can be rented. : ) [1] http://dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com/archives/001071.shtml [2] http://www.sellsbrothers.com/spout/#The_real_goals_of_marketing

Here. My WinForms book for C# programmers should be on the shelves today. I've set up the site where you can download the source and report problems. The VB.NET version should be out at the PDC. Enjoy.

Here. What This Is Spinal Tap does for rock 'n' roll. The Man Behind the Motion does for "mo-cap".

Here. This code generator keeps the template right there with the generated source code. Pretty cool!

Here. Don's glad that the PDC conference tracks and breakout sessions have been posted so that he doesn't have to be the first to say "indigo" in public. I'm similarly happy about no longer worrying about whether I'll inadvertently say "avalon" where I'm not supposed to. : )

Here. ORA has posted the first chapter to their new book about Perl 6, which describes how and why the Perl community hit the reset button on Perl.

Here. The BBC is planning to open up "the best television library in the world," giving folks *free* access to radio and TV programs over the web. This is another step started by record albulms giving folks the ability to consume a/v content where and when they want. Next up is episodes of Friends, Gilmore Girls and The West Wing when and in the order I want.