Jun 9 2017
The Unrivaled Leader : Part 6 – Stop Scheduling @!&#!** Meetings!

The title should be enough guidance on this topic.  This is as bad as sending too many emails.  Just stop.  STOP!

Literally, using the correct definition of the word literally, I can say that too many of my workdays are non-stop meetings from the moment I walk into the moment I leave for the day.  If I hadn’t blocked off some time for lunch, I would be meeting through lunch.   And in fact, sometimes people put meetings through my lunch.  And when I’m out of the office (on business or PTO), meetings are scheduled that I am asked to dial into.  There’s no escaping meetings!

The result of so many meetings?

  • I’m unprepared for meetings.
  • Meetings run over so I’m late to meeting+1 all the way to meeting+n.  People in these meetings are irritated at me for being late.
  • I end the day exhausted and feeling like I haven’t accomplished anything.
  • I end up taking real work home so that I can complete my deliverables, in preparation for the next day of meetings.
  • My PTO is ruined because I have to tell my family to head out on their own while I take this 30 min call, which ends up being an hour or more.
  • My business trip or training is ruined because I have to duck out at some very crucial session time to take a 30-minute meeting.

And if you think having an agenda ready for each meeting will decrease the number of meetings that are scheduled, you’re wrong.  Agenda’s don’t take much to pull together.

And maybe you think that challenging people on meetings will cause them to reschedule or cancel them?  No.  Often the challenge is responded to with a name drop:  “Well, VP Mr/s. Smith needs this meeting and this is the only week they are available and you’re not available this other time so…”.  And then, often, VP Mr/s. Smith doesn’t even show up for the meeting, or shows up and is unprepared.

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When I See My Calendar

This is a problem all the way up the chain, and frankly, I’ve found that while everyone complains about this, rarely does anyone do anything about it.  Oh sure, they might schedule meetings to deal with the plethora (would you say we have a plethora of meetings?) of meetings.

And worse yet, the trend now is to not even check if your calendar is free for a meeting. Often I receive meetings on top of (or overlapping) existing meetings on top of…  I had one day where I had four meetings at the exact same time.  Professional courtesy is gone, I suppose, but this is just regular human courtesy, or perhaps laziness.

Has no one any workable advice on how to avoid meetings?
I care about you, and so I’m going to help you reduce the number of meetings you are invited to.   And I don’t want anything in return!  I’m the Buddha of “better work habits”! I’m the Jesus of “just giving you more time”.  I’m the Mohammed of “making your work life easier”.  I’m the…eh, Jim and Tammy Bakker of … not sure where I was going with that.

Below are some of the things that have worked for me.  Some are obvious, and maybe some are not.  Try out different ones at different times.

Top 10 Ways to Reduce the Number of Meetings

  1. Decline meetings.  Yes, just decline them. You have work to do that’s more important than that meeting. Just hit the “Decline” option and provide a comment that says you have some deliverables to work on.  Your declining (or declination? dejection? ) will often lead to other meeting invitees seeing this and declining the meetings themselves and being able to use you as an excuse why:  “well, Bill can’t make it so we need him there and I’ll wait until he’s available”.  Remember, you can use this technique, too.   But, this is especially easy if you have some reasonable rank in the organization.  If you’re a layperson and decline the CEO’s meeting request, you could have a lot of time in your future with no meetings.
  2. Decline but propose a new time. This is the kinder version of #1 above.  If the meeting has some merit, but you are otherwise indisposed, propose a time that works better for you.
  3. Set a cap on meetings, and then follow #1 or #2 above.   45-hour workweek.  Two hours of meetings a day is 10 hours.  10 hours of meetings per week is almost a quarter (that’s 25%!) of your week.  That’s a lot of time in meetings.  So put a cap at 2 meetings per day, or 10 meetings per week, and stick to it.  If someone places a meeting on your calendar and you’re over your limit, decide which other meetings should be declined.
  4. Have a no-meeting day.  Just take a day off every week and block off that time as “Busy”.  Decline meetings that are placed on that day.  This doesn’t eliminate people who just drop meetings haphazardly on your calendar, but it does help.
  5. Add random fake meetings to your calendar. Yes.  Take the time, or have your admin take the time to create a spate of fake meetings with realistic-sounding names.  One time my admin created such a realistic name that I thought it was a real meeting and started stressing.  Imagine my relief when it turned out to be a fake meeting.  We high-fives! Just plop a couple of hour meetings each day across the week.
  6. Fake PTO.  Alright, maybe not fake, but go ahead and block off time in the future to take a vacation from work.  If you’re like me, you have to do this so far in advance anyway because you’re already booked up for the next two months.  Put “Hold for PTO” out on your calendar, mark the day off and wait.  If you end up taking the day off, then that’s a good thing because you get some time to relax and regenerate.  If you end up not taking the day off (but you really should, people!), then you have a reasonably unfettered day to complete your work.  Note that if you overuse this, people will ignore these blockages and put meetings on your calendar anyway.
  7. Setup no-meeting mornings. As an alternative to marking a whole day off, mark off your mornings only (9 am to noon).  Studies show that you’re most alert in the morning so use that time to do difficult or important work.  You want to be a hero, and you are a manager (or above)? Create a policy for your department that is “no meeting mornings”.  That positive energy will carry long after you have to stop doing this because some other department complains because their manager won’t do the same, wah.
  8. Convert your meetings to stand-ups. Take a page our of agile development and host stand up meetings in place of using a room or going off-site.  This does a couple of things:  1) these meetings are usually shorter because no one wants to stand up for long, 2) thus these meetings are more curt and specific, 3) you and your team look trendy and high-tech. Look at you with your team doing that stand up thing!
  9. Let your admin control your calendar and tell her #1 – 8 above.  The only thing attending to many meetings is stressing over how to manage all these meetings and decide which ones to decline.  If you’re the lucky person who has an assistant, as that person to follow my rules above.  First, you’ll relieve your stress because you’re not having to do this.  Second, usually, your admin will care just a little less about hurting other people’s feelings and will end up declining a heck of a lot of meetings.  A good assistant is one that will stand up to others on your behalf.  But you have to stand up for them as well.
  10. Work from home. If you’re lucky enough to be afforded this option, do it.  It’s difficult to set up meetings with people who telecommute.  Yes, you can Skype or Hangout it, but that’s not usually used for real meetings.  And yes, often you have to come in for real meetings, but out of sight is out of mind, and just by being out of the office you’ll not be invited to so many meetings.

I understand some of the above is a bit extreme.  You need to decide what will work best for your organization.  Maybe you soften some of them up.  For example, you don’t want a reputation for adding fake meetings to your calendars: “Oh look, here comes Mr. I’m so busy I have to lie about my meetings guy!” But if you call them “work times” rather than “fake”, then you’re just being more productive with the valuable time your organization provides!  That is so nice of you and should earn you an award.

Alright, give it a shot. Help address this blight on productivity right away!  Have any other ideas that worked for you?  Let me know in the comments!

willrwills 0 Comments
Jun 9 2017
Apple WWDC 2017 Quick Take – Day 4 and Wrap Up

Well, sadly the day came when this whole WWDC thing wrapped up for me.  While WWDC continues on Friday (Day 5) until the early afternoon, I had to catch a flight back to the east coast (6 am flight!).

Day 4

After the first few days, things sort of fell into a routine, as oft things do – or as they are oft to do? Breakfast in the hotel, more snacks after arriving (oh how tight those jeans feel!) and then sessions in the morning, followed by lunch with 2,000 people staring at their Macs, and then afternoon sessions followed by an evening event.  Interspersed were labs with face-to-face meetings with smart and friendly Apple engineers.

On the final night, the Apple Big Bash event was a walk to a nearby park that was filled with Cornhole games, food, drinks, and…. a private concert by Fallout Boy.

Before Fallout boy came on stage, a DJ pumped out an odd mix of dance music, including Head on the Door by the Cure, which was released before nearly all of these kids were born.  One thing that shocked me was the loudness of the music.  120 decibels right in front of the stage.  I’ve been to some loud concerts (Van Halen! Billy Squier! ) but this was jarringly loud.  A quick search showed that 120 decibels is the sound level of a jackhammer and can cause hearing damage after about 30 seconds.  But these kids stood in front of the speakers, dancing away.

I asked an audio guy for some spare earplugs from a “jug” of them he had.  He obliged, adding “yep, it’s louder’n shit”.

The food was good.  Scanning the crowd, there were a large number of loners, sitting quietly and balancing their drinks on their lap.  That is one odd take for this conference – there didn’t seem to be any “team-building” or “get to know someone” event.  Some companies were lucky to have two or three people attending, who knew each other.  But there was a large number of people who clearly didn’t know anyone (that group included me).  I did notice on the way out that bioluminescent  Cornhole (glow in the dark, likely not “bio”) did attract people playing together.

Fallout Boy ran out on stage around 8:15 pm and played “louder’n shit” as well.  I recognized a few songs, including their most recent Uma Thurman song, that lifts the catchy riff from the Munster’s TV show.   They also reminded the audience that they provided the main theme for Big Hero 6.  Another pretty good tune was American Beauty (American Psycho).  Patrick Stump on lead vocals certainly can belt out a tune.  It’s a four man group that’s more punk/dance than rock.
Walking back to my car, I could still hear Fallout Boy five blocks away.  I’m flying back home in time to see Hall and Oates (with Tears for Fears).  I’m hoping they don’t play at 120 dB.

Conference Wrap Up

I’ll keep this in the quick-take genre, and avoiding the information I’ve already provided in previous end-of-day wrap-ups.

The conference was best when engineers were available face-to-face.  As noted, all of the sessions are/will be online so you won’t miss much by not going to them personally.  For the first few days, I took an insane amount of notes and then realized that all I needed were some reminders to re-check out the video online.  If I’m lucky enough to go next year, I’ll spend more time in the labs.

There were some interesting lunchtime sessions, including the woman (and the dancers) that came up with the iLuminate product that’s been seen on America’s Got Talent and off-broadway shows.  She discussed how she used Apple’s platform and some pretty cool wearable hardware configurations for her dancers.    And another session by Todd Stabelfeldt, founder of C4 Consulting, who has lived with quadriplegia since the age of 8.  He explained how he uses technology to make his life easier.  There was a lunch session by Dr. Christine Darden, who started her career in 1967 at NASA’s Langley Research Center as one of a pool of African-American female mathematicians whose talent earned them the nickname of ‘human computers’.  The movie ‘Hidden Figures is based on her and her female co-workers’ NASA research.

The Tim Cook experience was good, but having seen videos of Steve Jobs doing the same, ol’ Jobs had a better knack for generating excitement.  The iPad, Mac laptop, and iMac updates were all reasonably impressive.  The HomePod announcement was a bit of a head-scratcher when you look at the features, but under Tim Cook, Apple is good at planting products out there that initially underwhelm but that ultimately form a key part of their ecosystem.  When I was gifted an Apple Watch two years ago, at first it was just a watch.  Now I find it almost indispensable and feel like I’m in manual mode when I don’t have it.

I’ve not been to a comparable Microsoft event in over a decade, and I’ve never been to a Google one so I can’t tell if they are similar.  I suppose I can check out their online videos.  For Apple, it was oddly reassuring to hear them having spent time reworking some of their core platforms and being “all in” with Swift.  It’s making me consider rewriting my pet-project (BandStar) server from C++ to Swift (like my iOS app).  And Xcode seems to rival the heydays of my Visual Studio 6 experience.  It certainly runs circles around NetBeans and Eclipse in terms of features, but mostly speed.
It also never occurred to me (until a UX engineer pointed out) that an iPhone 7 in landscape mode is the same width as the larger iPad Pro in portrait.  When you line up all the platforms and sizes, they make sense.  There’s thought put into the overall Apple product line and technical specs.  For Android, it appears that it’s just every platform provider creating the size and density devices they feel are useful to them, or that outdo the competition, without considering the bevy of other devices that a developer has to support.

Some final notes about WWDC –

  1. Make sure you attend the labs and talk to engineers.
  2. Make sure you sit through the lunch presentations rather than sit in Hall 1 by yourself, staring at your computer while you eat a cold sandwich.
  3. Find time to go outside on sunny days and enjoy the fantastic weather.

I hope this series has provided some useful information should you find yourself selected to attend WWDC ’18.

willrwills 0 Comments
Jun 8 2017
Apple WWDC 2017 – Quick Take Day 3

I’m actually in the middle of Day 4 but didn’t get a chance to update this last night.  I’m sitting at lunch with 1,200 of my closest friends, enjoying a chipotle chicken wrap and a Coke.
Some useful information about WWDC:

  1. Food is supplied.  There’s breakfast, which includes donuts, coffee, fruit juices, and fruit.  There’s coffee intermittently throughout the day.  There’s lunch that usually is a few sandwiches, chips, a cookie, and a drink.   Each night there’s an optional evening event that provides entertainment and at least finger foods.
  2. San Jose at this time of year is either bright, cool, and sunny or overcast, cool, and rainy.
  3. If you can’t stay in the city itself (which is very walkable), stay North of the city so that in the morning when you drive in, you’re not heading toward SFO (where all the other traffic is heading) and in the evening the exact opposite is true, which is good, too.  Also note that there’s parking right at the San Jose Convention Center, which maxes out at $20/day – but is very convenient.
  4. Bring a backpack to carry your materials around.
  5. Note that ALL of the sessions are available online afterward to all Apple developers.  While there’s excitement about seeing the presentations, you should pick and choose the ones that you really want to interact with.
  6. The Labs (by appointment or walk-in) are the most useful as you get to discuss ideas and issues with Apple engineers.
  7. You are free to go and come as you please, just wear your badge.
  8. The wristband that you are required to keep on, and that apparently cannot be taken off without destroying it (I haven’t tried), gets pretty dirty after sleeping and showering with it for a few days.

There is a lot of exciting stuff coming in iOS 11, a major upgrade to the O/S.  The machine learning capabilities built into the platform is simple to leverage programmatically.  The ARKit for Augment Reality is shockingly powerful and usable across all platforms.  Some of the AR demos they did were jawdropping, and in fact, they wrote code on stage and executed it to show how easy it is to include AR support (and Machine Learning and…).  In fact, the “watch as I write the code right now” parts is the most engaging for me.

Apple is doing a nice job of laying the groundwork for future applications and making sure all of their platforms work seamlessly together.

It’s not lost on me that the major challenge of Android is the huge diversity of screen sizes and device capabilities.  It must make it difficult to write a common app for that platform.  Steve Cook reminded us that 83% of iOS users are already on the latest release of iOS.

This is a quick take, so that’s it for Day 3.  As noted, I’m in Day 4 so I’ll write that up tonight (or tomorrow morning) with overall notes about the conference.

willrwills 0 Comments
Jun 7 2017
Apple WWDC 2017 Quick Take – Day 2

As expected, Day 1 was followed by Day 2.  However, Day 2 was markedly different and very informative, not to mention exciting.

Michelle Obama

Day 2 started with “A Conversation with Michelle Obama”, where the former first lady was interviewed by Apple’s Lisa Jackson.  Without going into a lot of details, it was a very good interview. You may not like her husband’s politics, but her message is spot on.  Very encouraging about technology, especially female technologists.  Some funny comments on pictures of her and the former POTUS.  I live-tweeted the whole thing if you’re interested in hearing her (@willrwills).

Sessions and Labs

The rest of the day was comprised of sessions throughout the day at scheduled times, along with labs on various topics.

Speaking of labs, you have to request a reservation to attend a lab.  And you can’t acquire the reservation until the day of, starting at 7 am.  Well-hell, I logged in at 7 am and went searching for labs and they were all full within minutes! I was able to schedule one at noon with an Application Engineer.

From a session perspective, you have to pick and choose because they overlap.  For me, I attended:

  • What’s New in Cocoa Touch – which covered new UI elements in iOS 11, including drag and drop, changes to certain screen layouts, etc.
  • Introducing Drag and Drop – this will be an amazing feature for folks with iPads.  You can drag all sorts of things from app to app very easily.  Makes assembling documents and mix-media emails very easy.
  • What’s new in Swift 4.0 – a good overview of Swift 4.  Some cool things in there, including auto-refactoring and simplification of Strings.
  • Introducing MusicKit – Apple makes it easy for app developers to access people’s music libraries and Apple Music.
  • Updating your App for iOS 11 – a good rundown of layout changes and help functions that make programming that much easier.
  • Introducing ARKit – a run down and some amazing demos of built-in Augment Reality functionality

At 6:30 pm they screened a new movie called Planet of the Apps.  I did not stay for that as it was in a nearby theater and the line stretched around the block.  Finally, there was a “Music in the Plaza” starting at 8 pm.  I skipped that as well as it focused on live music (good!) and micro-brewery beers (ick, I don’t drink beer much) – PLUS, it started at 8 pm (11 pm circadian time), and didn’t want to stay that late.  Of course, it’s 1:20 am now, east-coast time,  and I’m writing this entry!  Fool!

Summary

The technical sessions were very very good.  They placed engineers on stage to describe the various new technologies.  These guys and gals were very smart, and amazingly effective presenters.  They also brought up Xcode and showed live how to code some of the new features.  They ran the new code live and it worked very well.

I was able to take pics of the screens and take notes.  The presentations were often interrupted by cheers and claps as they either introduced new functionality via API’s (Augmented Reality support, for example) or made certain programming aspects much much simpler (handling Unicode in Swift strings).

The engineer that I scheduled time with went way over our time as I asked him about various aspects of app development.  He was knowledgeable and patient.

Beta versions of applications and tools are now available.

It’s clear that Apple knows how to do these conferences.  Tomorrow, it’s more sessions and… I’m looking forward to them!  I’ve collected tons of notes and pics and will be writing this up for staff at work that could not be here.

Personal

I hadn’t been to a true technology conference like this in many years.  About 6 months ago I decided to learn how to write iOS apps.  I watched plenty of videos from MIT and Apple University until I was comfortable with the language.  And then most recently I created a free-standing app (in the App Store) with a unique angle for audience participation at live music shows.  This included writing both the client-side (Swift 3.1 and Xcode) and the server-side (Amazon EC2 Linux C++).

At this conference, I knew pretty much all the terminology and was able to spend time talking to some much younger developers than I about various coding and tool challenges.  It was invigorating.  My real-work had taken me so far in the direction of administration and management that I had forgotten how FUN it is to create something yourself from scratch.

I found myself smiling as Apple unveiled a bunch of incredible new features and API’s – and am looking forward to downloading the BETA tools and trying out the various new items – especially AR!

In my career, staying technical and being able to talk tech with my developers was the key to my success.  Recent developments may provide me this opportunity again.

willrwills 0 Comments
Jun 7 2017
Apple WWDC 2017 Quick Take – Day 1

I’m a day behind writing my quick takes.  I’ve tried to stay on east-coast time, without a lot of luck.  It’s going to be quite the adjustment to my circadian clock when I return home, not to mention my midichlorians. The drowsiness will be strong with this one.

Conference Logistics

The conference was moved to San Jose this year.  Usually, it’s over in SFO.  All presentations and sessions are in the San Jose Conference Center.  San Jose is just south of San Francisco.

In general, the conference is made up of presentations and labs.  Some of the presentations are keynotes and others are product updates.  The labs last the entire day.  You must enroll for each lab on the day of the lab, starting at 7 am.  However, as I found, they fill up insanely fast.

Each day you are provided pastries, fruit, and coffee for “breakfast”, and a lunch consisting of a wrap (or salad or sandwich), some chips, drinks, fruit, and a cookie or brownie.

Each night there are evening events, including food, music, and even a movie.  There’s a large bash on the “last” day, which happens to be Thursday despite the conference running to Friday.
Attendance I believe was estimated at around 6,000 people.

Sunday

I flew in Sunday night because the opening session was 10:00 am and it’s near impossible to fly East Coast to San Jose and get there in time for such an early session.  On the other hand, I left as late as possible Sunday so I effectively was in my hotel around 2 am (my local body time) when I hit the sack.

I found out very late that I was attending this conference so hotels were pretty much booked.  I’m staying out near the San Jose airport – which is fine because my flight out on Friday is like 5 am or something.  What did work out well is that I’m north of San Jose so driving to the conference I’m driving against traffic (i.e. no traffic) as most people in the morning are heading into SFO.  The same goes for the evening drive back to the hotel.
Thus far I’ve found a lot of great Asian food near the hotel (thanks Yelp!).
Registration is Sunday all day, which is important as you will read later.  Having arrived so late, I was unable to register until Monday.

Monday – Day 1

Monday was about calculating how early I needed to leave the room to get to the conference two hours before the 10 am the main session with Tim Cook.  It was a 22-minute drive from the hotel so I left around 7:30 am for the Convention Center.

Once I got there around 8 am I did find parking at the Convention Center ($20/day!).  I walked down and found a very long line into the WWDC already in place.  I then was told that I had to get into yet another comparably long line first to register.

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The line to get into WWDC
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Similarly Long Line to Registration

The good news is that the weather was nice and so waiting in line was not so bad.  Also, make sure you use the restroom before getting in line.  I did not and thus I had a grimace on my face the whole time.

My main worry is that I would not get in.  I later would find out that everyone basically gets in.  If you want to sit near the front and look Tim Cook in the face, you’re going to have to a) register on Sunday and b) arrive very very early Monday and wait.  But if you’re okay being farther back (and there are plenty of large displays with closeups of the stage), then you can arrive around 9:15 am.  Still, registering Sunday is probably a good idea – you will cut your line waiting in half.

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More waiting for registration…
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The goal!  Registration!

Registering provided me with a wrist band that the attendant said “do not remove it”, a nice black denim jacket, and some WWDC pins.

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My Official WWDC17 Denim jacket!
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My “Permanent” Wrist Band
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WWDC 2017 Pins

Once registered, I went back into the original line, but by this time the front door had opened and a lot of people had been allowed in.  The entrance to the center had drug (bomb?) sniffing dogs and a modicum of security.  They scanned my bag quickly and I didn’t have to go through a metal detector.

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Old Scratch and Sniff sadly addicted to opiates…

By the way, the makeup of the crowd was interesting –

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The Crowd

Which I described as:
Makeup Tweet
Anyway, I made it past security and was put into a very long line, just inside.  It literally took another 40 minutes to be allowed to enter the main room.

Here’s a nice thing.  Since it was just me, I was able to wander up near the front where staffers with blue signs were pointing out single seats.  So despite arriving very late, I was able to get a decent seat.

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My View – not Bad!

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The Staffer with the Green “Seat Available” Sign

Opening Keynote

Cook’s keynote was as expected – lots of excitement and shouting as he entered the room. He speaks very well and really commands the crowd.  In his keynote, he said that there were 6 major announcements today.  I know that most in the crowd expected number 6 to be a new iPhone.

So we patiently waited as he described some top-to-bottom rewrites of major tools (Xcode), iOS 11 with a bunch of neat features, the new Max OS called High Sierra (followed by a giggle in the room), new iMacs (including a crazy-powerful, dark grey machine with like 1.21 gigawatts of something or rather), a new iPad Pro that sits between the large and small one, some amazing drag-and-drop that’s part of iOS 11 for iPad Pros and finally number 6, which was a new…

Home Pod?

There was a thud when he announced this, followed by murmurs that sounded like “how about the iPhone 8?” repeatedly whispered.
Home Pod is basically an Alexa, but for Apple.  On the plus side, it seems to have some kickass speaker technology that blows the doors off Alexa and Google Home.  It includes a Siri interface and can act in place of Apple TV for Apple Home Kit integration.  But it’s not a new iPhone and so a bit of excitement left the room at that point.

Platforms State of the Union

Once the opening session completed, there was a bit of a break, and then the second session which was the Platforms State of the Union.  This took us through all the various platforms, including ARKit, MusicKit, UIKit, Swift, Xcode, and all the core technologies.   This session lasted until about 4 pm, followed by “hands-on” time in various labs on the new devices and software and then an evening event (food and drinks in San Pedro square).

Bottom Line

An interestingly slow start to the conference.  Yes, some neat things were announced, but it looks like for the June Apple announcements, it’s all about shoring up their technologies. They took major tools like Xcode and rewrote them from the bottom up.  They introduced the latest in Apple’s open-source programming language Swift 4.0.

You can look up all the products and updates announced, I won’t include those here.

If this wasn’t Apple, I think I would have totally amazed.  As it was, I was impressed, but like others wasn’t sure why I felt let down.  I think after years of shocking us with new technology, this one was about streamlining and improving performance.  Frankly, it may actually be a good thing.  Running at 100mph can produce shocking innovations, but if you never take the time to go back and fill in the missing pieces, you’ll end up with flashy-unstable-garbage.

willrwills 0 Comments
Jun 4 2017
Apple’s 2017 World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) June 5th – 9th: Quick Takes

I am the lucky recipient of the opportunity to participate in 2017’s WWDC.  I have never been to this conference and am thrilled to be part of the show.  It was recently moved to San Jose from San Francisco and officially starts at 1 pm Monday, 6/5 with the famous Apple CEO’s Tim Cook keynote speech (made originally famous of course by Steve Jobs).

My plan is to post nightly updates on my experiences at the conference.  If you have any specific questions, please don’t hesitate to post them below.

About Me:
I have been writing applications since my first Atari-800 and the Deep Blue C software. At age 15, my mother purchased a Burroughs Mini Computer with a paper-tape interface!

Currently I work for AAA and lead a software development team that created the first custom (optional) software that was selected for use by the entire AAA Association.  It is the software that delivers Road Service to the 56M AAA members and is used in the US and Canada (CAA). This included designing, coding and implementing the original version of the software (along with a contractor who wrote the back-end) myself.  Over the source of my 23 years at AAA, I’ve assembled a team of amazing developers, UX/UI, deployment, business analysts, product managers and technology experts.

I am also an iOS developer, with both professional development experience and personal experience (I’m wrapping up development of an iOS app for performers).  I taught myself Swift in 6 months and wrote both the front end and back-end, hosted on Amazon AWS EC2.  I have a business partner who worked on the User Experience and Marketing.
I have installed Apple HomeKit and have been documenting the ups and down of that process so that I may post an article about it here.

willrwills 0 Comments