Microsoft’s Jeff Sandquist on Evangelism and other links…
Microspotting.com: “Evangelism is not cheerleading. It’s not about raising your arms up and saying ‘This is awesome!’ Evangelists know where the warts are —they know the strengths and the limitations. The right evangelist understands what competitors are doing better…” I have downloaded hundreds of videos from technology evangelists—and I have the folio full DVD-R discs to prove it—and there are less than a handful of “right” evangelists. Number one on my list is Mike Taulty, check out his MSDN UK archive. Next is Scott Guthrie—his consistent Blog writing for Microsoft has no superior—this is a raw, real supremacy rarely seen among managers in corporations. The ASP.NET team seems to have broken away from the Channel 9 umbrella (once led by Jeff Sandquist) and have very interesting videos—in fact, this Chris Pels video, “How Do I: Determine Whether to Use a Web Site or a Web Application Project,” is one of the few videos I have ever seen that evaluates Microsoft products in a historical, comparative context.
Most evangelism seals the new, “cool” functionality in a vacuum and does not cover the very hard topic of transition from legacy in a “brown field.” It is easier to talk about the “green field” for elite programmers who have the luxury of working on brand new projects—and for the beginning programmers who have little experience (and legacy baggage). It takes command and mastery to actually place a product in historical context very quickly. Adding a historical dimension often adds human faces to technology which makes the details of the technology easier to remember.
“Vulnerabilities Could Expose Broad Range of Java Apps”
Dark Reading: “Researchers today revealed two new security vulnerabilities in the Spring Framework—a commonly used, open-source environment for developing Java applications. …The vulnerabilities could affect ‘countless’ enterprises and applications that use Spring, according to researchers at Ounce Labs, which makes source-code-analysis tools. The design flaws may eventually be found in other Java development environments as well, the Ounce researchers say.”
“Cuil’s 3 big mistakes”
Valleywag.com: “The launchpad implosion of Cuil on Monday is a lesson for startup founders. Cuil had a solid hook: A search engine with more pages than Google, built at a fraction of the cost. But by Tuesday, Cuil was The Little Search Engine that Couldn’t. What did they do wrong?” Back in 2006, we came out with “The Dunn Phraser Gun: Ed Dunn of Fooky.com.” Many of the complaints mentioned in that interview in 2006 are still going on in 2008.