The Eric Wroolie Blog

Overpass Experiences

Just another Rat

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I’m back in London in another contract. This is the first time I’ve actually gone back to somewhere I already worked before. It seemed easy– I already know the people and I already know the apps. It’s actually a lot worse. It’s like stepping back in time. All growth that’s happened since leaving may not have even taken place.

I’m in the get-up, go-to-work, go-to-bed loop again. The only bright side this time is that I get to ride my motorcycle to the station. I’m still on the train.

A few weeks ago, I tried to ride all the way into London on the motorcycle. My hope was that it would be faster and easier than taking the train. After all, I don’t need to worry about traffic with the motorcycle. The ride was a disaster. London bikers are maniacs and will make use of the smallest gaps between cars. I tried to keep up and even squeezed between some cars with inches to spare, but it was too hairy for me. So, I’m sticking to the train.

For the next six months, I’m another rat in the rat race. I get to stand in the crowd at platform 2–indistinguishable in my suit and permanent frown.

Six months.

Do I trust Google?

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I spent last week moving my wroolie.co.uk domain over to Google Apps. I read about moving your “life into the cloud” in a Scott Hanselman post a few weeks ago and wanted to give it a try.

This is a great feature which will allow me to host all of my email, documents, calendar, etc for my business domain from the gMail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar application. I’m really impressed with how well it works and was planning on moving the really important Overpass.co.uk domain information over based on that success.

But then Click Online on BBC News did a story this weekend about why Google is storing so much information about us. I’ve always known about Google and privacy issues, but chose to ignore it. You can read the article here.

Then I also found “Master Plan”, a short movie about Google which lasts only a few minutes. It speculates about the deeper motives behind Google’s give away. Look at the Master Plan here: http://masterplanthemovie.com/.

I love the Google Apps functionality and would really like to have my email available to me wherever I go, but now I wonder: Is it worth it to give Google all my information?

Wikinomics

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One of the books I’ve read this Summer is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. I read this as I was helping a small company set themselves up for working in a distributed virtual team environment for their software development (the kind of stuff I’ve been using with Overpass), so I found the book to be very relevant to what I was working on at the time.

Wikinomics is the authors’ term for the new economy of Web 2.0. It centers around open source, open APIs, and collaboration between companies and customers. The book talks in great depth about the new trends and technologies that have been emerging in the last two or three years.

Web 2.0 is a strange term that I don’t really like very much. It’s something that marketing people and senior managers like to use to impress each other. But after reading this book, it is easy to see all the changes in thinking that have occurred in the past few years. It’s been gradual, but the world has changed significantly since 2004–at least as far as the internet is concerned.

I highly recommend the book. It’s not aimed at software developers, but it really opened my eyes to what other developers are doing out there. It’s definitely worth a look if you have the time.