This job was a dream come true for me and to be honest, accepting it turned my life upside down. I canceled my plans to move to Dallas and start my SharePoint consulting firm. I canceled my SharePoint certification tests. I ceased all work on Flipism. And most surprisingly, I bought a house. I decided to fully invest in this new opportunity, and I accepted all the risks that came along with it.

We are developing the application in C# 3.0 and WPF. I decided to build the application in WPF because I believed it offered us the most flexible platform for future opportunities and growth. It was a risky gambit, partly because nobody on the team knew WPF. I had a limited exposure to it from my days at HP, but I was hardly an expert. But my team pulled it together and we took the plunge into WPF. While I acknowledge that developing the product in WinForms would be “easier,” I don’t think that it would make our product better. WPF has given us many gains, and the architecture lends itself well to our future plans.

I’ve learned so much since I started on August 31. While the company has been around for several years, my team is brand-new, and the product we’re working on is brand-new. We’ve all had to learn how to work together. We come from different corporate cultures and technical backgrounds. I’ve had to draw on the entirety of my experience in order to lead this team, but I love it. Love love love it. I feel like every decision I’ve ever made in my life and career has led to this. It’s hard for me to feel regret about bad choices I made when I was younger because I might not have been led to where I am now. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true.

Obviously I have a lot of hope about the future and the change it brings. And to that point, the focus of this blog has to change as well. Pretty soon I will relaunch this blog to focus on my experiences as a leader in a software company. Hopefully what I share with you here will be of interest, or at least entertainment value.

So tell me: do you want to come along for the ride of your life?

Seeing that Visual Basic window minimized to my desktop brought back a wave of emotion and memories. About 14 years ago, I started working at a crappy mortgage services company. I was 20 years old, futureless, prospectless, but not hopeless. I was making $6 an hour as an administrative technician (I created WordPerfect and Lotus documents). I had heard about this thing called Visual Basic, which allowed you to easily create programs for Windows. I had written BASIC code a lot in high school, and I knew a lot about computers, so Visual Basic sounded very appealing to me. It was my chance to actually enter a career, and I was quite passionate about computers and technology.

I went to the mall and bought Visual Basic for Dummies. It was so Dummied that it didn’t show how to do some important things (for example, showing a form; for a while, I used form1.Visible = True and form1.Visible = False to show and hide a form, but I eventually discovered form1.Show and form1.Hide) but I didn’t know any better. My wife and I were quite poor, so we didn’t own a computer. But I was determined to learn Visual Basic and get a job as a computer programmer. I read that book over and over, at least five times, cover to cover. I memorized every little detail, wrote code on paper to practice my style, and dreamed daily about my chance to be a programmer. I would even hide out in the bathroom at my job and read the book, imagining myself writing code for something important.

Someday.

It’s weird to romanticize computer programming, but that’s how big it was to me. After I left the mortgage company in January 1995, I went to work at a utility company in Austin, where I was responsible for creating an Excel workbook that tracked all the materials ordered for building substations (exotic, I know). It was then that I got my first chance to code in Visual Basic, writing macros for this huge spreadsheet.

And here I am, almost 15 years later, realizing the success that I started with that Dummies book so long ago. I could be a pessimist and say I haven’t gotten anywhere, but truthfully, I’ve accomplished all of my career goals. I’ve been promoted all the way to architect, I’ve published books, I’ve led teams, I’ve shipped products, I’ve traveled, I’ve been offered speaking engagements, and best of all, I’ve helped other young people get started in this business.

I’ve had my fair share of failures, too. Internet companies, technologies (OS/2? What was I thinking?), missed opportunities, and I’ve learned from them all.

So now when I look at that little minimized window, I feel appreciative for what I have, and the opportunities I’ve been given. Now, I want to do something truly great.

This is an entirely different role, encompassing more software development and architecture than the enterprise focus I had previously, but if you read some of my past posts, you’ll see that this is where I want to be. I’m working with the Microsoft stack for my current customer, and I plan to post about my experiences with this project. There are many challenges ahead.

Most ideas and plans work out that way, don’t they? Something swims around in your head and you know it’s awesome, but when it comes time to make it happen, it’s just not there. This happens to me all the time. In fact, that very issue is what led me to the tablet PC in the first place.

Today I felt pretty frustrated with my decision. I began to find reasons to dislike my new tablet PC. It’s too heavy. The screen is glossy. There’s too much silver. I wanted to lay the blame for returning the computer on something that was wrong with it and not me.

I relayed these concerns to a good friend and colleague, who happens to be a tablet PC owner (a different model). He showed me how to use my tablet PC. He relayed its strengths, situations where it could prove valuable, things I hadn’t thought of. He helped me understand its value and reinforced my original reasons for getting the tablet PC. He told me about some great software. His opinions and assistance allowed me to accept the computer’s shortcomings (which I admittedly knew about before I bought it) and embrace its real potential.

Every innovator needs a validator, someone who can tell you when you’re wrong and when you’re right. Someone who can help you mold an idea into something real. Someone who is honest and forthcoming with opinions. If you look back on some of history’s great innovations, you’ll see a lot of partnerships (Brin and Page, Gates and Allen) and a lot of adversarial relationships (Edison and Tesla, Microsoft and Google). That’s the balance that allows us to trumpet our accomplishments, defend our decisions, and change our approaches. It forces innovation while celebrating it.

I’m writing this post on my tablet and after finding some really good applications for it, I am in love. I look forward to taking advantage of its full potential and using it to unleash some of my most persistent and longstanding ideas.

Oh boy do I have a lot of things on my plate. Let’s see:

• Studying for my CAPM certification
• Studying for my ITIL v3 Foundation certification
• Mastering Windows Workflow so I can accurately present it
• MCSD.NET by the end of the year
• More posts on this blog

It’s good to have a lot of things to do!

I return to the office on Monday after a nice week’s vacation. I stayed at home and did some things I had been meaning to do for quite some time, like wash my car and organize my study. I know it’s not much of a vacation but it’s important to step back once in a while and manage your own personal life processes.

I have some good ideas for future posts that I will turn into reality in the coming days. I hope you check back often!

Fast forward to eight years later, and we’re in the midst of Web 2.0. Google is the undisputed king of search, and Microsoft does a lot more than just make Office these days. The people who work for companies like Google and the cadre of Web 2.0 startups are typically highly educated and highly skilled. This is a stark contrast with the previous boom of internet companies.

The disturbing aspect of this second boom is the evaluation of potential employees, both in the measurable (advanced degrees) and immeasurable (intelligence). There is almost a clique-like mentality emerging from these companies, all of which want to hire the best. FogCreek, Google, and Xobni are just a few of the companies who go on about how they’re looking for the best and the brightest.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting smart and highly educated people to work in your company. There’s nothing wrong with spending your time and money seeking out these people. The problem is the sanctimonious attitudes of the people who work for these companies.

Let me single out Steve Yegge, whose pompous post entitled “Done, and Get Things Smart” (a riff on Joel Spolsky’s “Smart, and Gets Things Done” mantra) is so full of self-righteous wank that it’s nearly impossible to wade through the whole thing.

Steve spends 5022 words telling us how we should only hire the best (superheroes, he says).

Ok Steve, we get it. Google hires smart people. Everyone wants smart people. Nobody wants to hire an incompetent and inexperienced person to do a job that requires significant skill and innovative thinking. But listen: you’re a search engine company. You’re not NASA. You’re not working on a cure for cancer. You’re not trying to find a way to end world poverty. You’re not trying to find a way to detect catastrophic weather in east Asia.

You make a search engine. It’s a damn fine search engine, but it’s still just a piece of software. Get over yourself.

One thing I do have to concede to, however, is Steve’s citation of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which proves Darwin’s assertion (and the conventional wisdom) that the people who know the least think they know the most. This is true in every industry, every society, every community, everywhere. Does anyone truly want to admit to himself that he’s incompetent, when we’re constantly told that we’re all special in our own way?

I don’t know if the Dunning-Kruger effect applies to me. I think I’m smart, but should I not? Am I actually incompetent because I think I’m smart? Or am I actually smart because I know what I’m not good at?

At the end of the day, I just try to do the best job I can for my company and my customer, and I derive personal pleasure from that success. And that, in my humble opinion, defines competence.