Monday, May 12, 2008

On Over-estimation

The Anecdote blog tells of two engineers: an engineers who is 20 years in the business rates himself as "good" while a guy who is only two years in the business rates himself as a professional.
Makes you think, isn't it?
I'd been working on some document for several months, had to put it aside, and returned to it this week. This document - although far for being ready for delivery - is my pride. I love every word in it, and every GIF I patiently crafted from XLS, via Visio (no Photoshop for me, thanks :)
However, there's a lot that needs to be changed in this document. GIF to be improved, text to sharp and clarify, etc.
Why is that?
Because it's the nature of things: every living thing could be improved. Human creation - including documentation (not to mention the technology I'm documenting) - ought to be improved as well. Whatever I'm doing, I can do better.
This is why, if asked, I consider myself an expert. Not because "I don't know what I don't know", but because "I know what I know", I know how I got to know this, and know how to get new knlowledge in the future.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Managing Camtasia Projects


The following notes should help me unify the movies I produce:
Quick-start Movies:


  • U:\My Documents\Internal Documentation\Movies\Quick-start - Selecting Time Range

  • Movies starts and ends with 5 seconds of sterna_logo (same location)

  • Fonts for the movies: Calibri 18, 24, Black.

  • Output size: 800x600, maximum quality.

  • Size: 49 seconds are 3MB.

  • Movie took roughly 2 hours to produce.
I skip the explanation of why movies are better than user guides (more precisely, movies with user guides are better than user guides without movies :)
and goes directly to the problem I have these days: I don't have a template for my movies. They all look roughly the same.
Only roughly.
I would like to make sure they have an identical look and feel (and later: that the viewer will immdediately recognize that the movie was made by me, but this will take a while to achieve).
More posts to come.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Blog-like communication



Tom Johnson argues in favor of organization blogs. I blog myself (via MOSS infrastructure), but... no one reads me. Why is that?


My guess is that is for the very reason our occupation exists: people don't like to read (and write) more that they have to. So, I use my blog mainly for documentation release notes (posts like: GIFs for this manual are kept under this link).


But people on my organization do blog.


They post, and comment to other posts, sometimes as many as 10 posts a day, and numerous comments, as well.


Where so they blog?


Who's the lucky somain that get their attention?


Not at porn-for-the-developer-who-wouldnt-blog.com, of course.


They blog at the defect management application (say, TD/QC, and others).


They post defects, they fix defects, they contemplate on the right way to design and manifest new features, and they do it agily, on the spot, with remarkable results.




They don't call it a blog, so I don't interfere their work :)


As for me? I announce new publication there, as well.


As for my blog? It still contains (useful) lists of GIFs. (useful only for me)