Our discussion though was around the mobile web and what financial services companies are doing in that space. For the most part, the answer is “nothing”, but there are some companies blazing a trail.

Mobile web for financial services is a lot like the regular web in the 90s. Companies are starting to create mobile-friendly versions of their legacy websites for the same reasons they created websites in the 90s: it is becoming an assumed price-of-entry for 21st century business. I doubt anyone is seeing a sales or customer satisfaction uptick from mobile-enabling their current web presence, but instead are doing it because everyone else is doing it.

The companies that are going to nail their mobile strategies are going to do so as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy which will include social media, mobile web and content marketing efforts. The perfect example of this is Quicken Loans, who are the technology leaders in this area for financial services.

While the B2C mobile strategies will be driven by marketing, the real value for financial service companies will be in the B2E space. I’m at a mid-sized company, and nearly every senior manager has an iPad. Most also have iPhones. The real value-add for a mobile strategy will be in maximizing the efficiency of these senior managers when they’re away from their desks through mobile-optimized reporting, dashboard and workflow applications. For example, every organization more than a few layers deep has approval processes for everything from purchases, to new hires, to contracts. Providing easy ways for managers to view and approve these via mobiles devices will be a huge timesaver.

The other growth area for mobile strategies in a financial services world is the sales forces. I had proposed doing a mobile web version of our site for our customers last summer, but after the business thought about it, they decided the biggest lift for the organization would be to provide mobile access to our backend systems for the sales force in the field. For example, an agent visiting a brokerage shop could get a lot of value around an application that provided location-based mapping of customers in an area, reporting around the volume and type or orders generated by that customer, and even be able to view the details on specific orders to answer questions while in the field.

Unfortunately, we never built the application due to other priorities, but this is definitely an area where a smart mobile strategy can add a lot of value.

One thing I see keeping companies from getting mobile efforts off the ground is a skillset gap. Financial services companies are heavily invested in Java and .NET, but the skill for building a good mobile presence are either web standards based (CSS3/HTML5/Javascript) or device-specific (Android, iOS/Objective-C). These are more specialized skills that are hard to justify staffing for, and are even harder to retain as the technology job market continues to heat up.

I expect to see a hot spot for boutique software consulting companies that specialize in mobile development which will sell their talents to financial service companies to build these presences. These companies will be able to combine the design and programming skills necessary to build the applications and mobile web sites that organizations cannot produce in house.

Usability (UX) is also a critical skill gap for financial services companies. Most internal development is built around a “good enough” mindset for user interface design. This is not scalable to the consumer-facing mobile world, where the quality of the user experience is a critical success factor for applications. And even the B2E users will have higher expectations for what they see on their smartphones over what they get on their desktops.

Finally, there is the whole “application vs mobile web” decision. Building a native application currently allows for the most seamless user experience, but it also introduces the same distribution hassle we saw with thick client applications. And there is also a data security question. Even in financial services, the world is turning to BYOD for mobile devices. Installing a company application on personal devices opens up the mobile device management can-of-worms, which is still the wild west.

Mobile web applications used to lag native applications in usability and performance, but thanks to Moore’s Law, and improved tooling, mobile web applications are more than up to the task for the majority of the applications being written, and will continue to improve rapidly. Just take a look at where state-of-the-art toolsets like Sencha Touch 2 are going, and the native advantage quickly disappears unless you’re writing 3D games.

I think mobile strategies for financial services companies are at the start of a growth curve that will climb quickly. While most B2C mobile presences will be more a “me too” strategy, there will be a few smart companies that maximize a comprehensive marketing strategy, hitting the right demographics, which will allow them to increase market share. This will be a rich area for disruption.

The real value in financial services for a good mobile strategy will be in productivity improvement in the B2E space. They just need to be prepared to pay someone else to write those applications, since they are probably severely lacking internally in the skillsets necessary to execute a successful strategy.

I was a dyed-in-the-wool film user for a long time. My favorite camera was the Nikon FM3A, an all-manual classic. I had the suite of Nikon glass to go with it. That all changed around 2003 with the introduction of the Canon 10D. I was floored by the quality, and being a computer geek, I was blown away by what was possible in the retouching world with Photoshop. I sold my entire Nikon kit and picked up a Canon 10D with good zoom lens and never looked back at film.

My photography, and photography in general, are going through another revolution now. But rather than film-to-digital, the new transformation is camera-to-smartphone. I picked up an iPhone 4S in October last year. While only an incremental overall jump from my 3GS, the integrated camera was an incredible leap. In a world of Facebook, Instagram and blogs, the 4S is capable of taking better pictures than a dedicated pocket digital camera from a few years ago.

This has really had a huge impact on me as a photographer. I’m taking more pictures now, because my phone is always in my pocket. And while I still use Photoshop for some things, there is now a whole suite of easy-to-use image improvement tools available that produce outstanding results. The experience is as revolutionary as my jump to digital eight years ago.

Here are a few recent pictures with my 4S. The first is a shot of my daughter at Starbucks.

This is from an event at the Park Place Jaguar dealer this month.

Here’s a low-light shot from our company “Vegas Night” party.

And finally here is one from today at the Shops at Willow Bend.

None of these were retouched in Photoshop. While a bit soft compared to “pro” standards, they are all more than acceptable for any online use. The iPhone 4S is an extremely capable camera, even in low light conditions.

So instead of lugging around a DSLR with a big honking zoom lens, my kit now consists of an iPhone 4S and a Olloclip clip-on lens. This gives me everything from the relatively normal perspective of the stock iPhone 4S all the way to a Fisheye view.

For image manipulation on the iPhone, I use Instagram, which not only allows me to apply good lookinging effects to my photos, it is also an excellent way to share my pictures with the world.

Thanks to Photostream in iOS 5, I can also easily edit pictures on my Mac and iPad. On the iPad, Snapseed is my preferred tool. And on my Mac, I use Aperture 3 and Flare. Snapseed was just released for Mac, so I’ll be checking that out too.

None of these have the sophistication of Photoshop, but they are all very easy to use and make it possible for the casual photographer to produce outstanding results.

Photography is going through another major transformation. I expect the market for point-and-shoot digital cameras to evaporate as the cameras in smartphones continue to improve. DSLRs will still have their niche, and I’ll still lust for a Nikon D800, but few people need 20MP+ images to satisfy their photography requirements. The biggest transformation for me is the fun factor. I haven’t had this much fun with my photography in years, and I’m taking more pictures than ever.

Rather than diving in to SQL, I opted work through the documentation and various blog posts to find the “GORM Way” of doing things. I also documented what I found. The result is this rather extensive article on GitHub called GORM Recipes.

The text was way too large for this blog, so I opted to put it on GitHub. This thread is for feedback and questions about the GitHub article.

A couple weeks ago, Guy posted a link to an infographic from RezScore showing how to create the perfect one page resume. I thought the concept was pretty cool, and my resume was sitting at around four pages, so I decided to put it on a diet.

After some effort, I managed to get it down to a single page, following the format from the infographic. I even fished it a bit on Dice to see what happened. In early December I fished my four-page resume on Dice for one day and had to turn off my phone and delete the resume to keep the phone from ringing. I had eight calls in a matter of hours.

So how did the one-pager do? Crickets. While the one-page resume is great, conceptually, it is not sufficient for a programmer. The one-pager will only work for two groups of people.

The first group is people without any experience, i.e. new college graduates or people with less than a couple years of experience. Their resumes shouldn’t be filling more than a page, and if it does, it is probably indicative of a job hopping problem.

The second group is people who don’t need resumes and can get work based on reputation alone. DHH, Paul Irish and James Gosling all probably have one-page resumes, if that. For them, a Moo MiniCard with a QR Code to their LinkedIn profile is more than enough.

For a technical person with years of experience, a one-page resume won’t cut it. After I compared my one-page resume to my four-page resume, it was obvious I needed to put the larger document on a diet. I ended up with a sharp two-page resume that adequately demonstrates the breadth and depth of my experience without writing a novel or leaving a recruiter guessing.

I validated my newfound ideas on resume length against the technical recruiter at my company. Her response was interesting: she said it didn’t matter, since everything was driven by keyword searches via enterprise “suckware” like Taleo. But her resume was a two-pager.

So my recommendation for a seasoned software professional is to try for a two-page resume, with three pages being the most. But the resume has to solve two objectives. You need to ensure it has all the right keywords to get you past the first automated filter, but it has to be concise and interesting enough that a hiring manager will want to read it. Two pages fits the bill.

• Google to kick Oracle’s ass over Android: this turned in to a total stalemate, although I could say Google “won” based on the number of Android activations and the butt-kicking Oracle’s stock is getting. I’m actually pretty ambivalent a year later over who wins. I don’t foresee ever buying a Android device, so the whole battle is orthogonal to my interests.
• Someone to finally build a good Windows notebook: nothing but a lump of coal for me. Lenovo is probably the closest, but none of the PC makers have hit on a Windows 7 equivalent of the Macbook Pro.
• ActiveState to push out ActiveRuby: another lump of coal. I’m not too disappointed though. I was expecting Ruby to go more mainstream, but instead it had all the thunder sucked out of it by NodeJS. Ruby is becoming the new Java, without the Java part.
• Google to buy Sencha (ExtJS): more coal. I’ve actually given up on someone buying Sencha. I’m suspecting they have bigger plans than a simple exit. Unfortunately, the market is getting a lot tougher and they may have missed their sweet spot. Sencha Touch is the best tool going in the mobile JavaScript widget space, but it is only a matter of time before JQuery Mobile, Dojo and KendoUI catch up.
• World Peace: a whole truckload of coal, along with a story that would take more than a few beers to cover.

In spite of a garage full of coal based on my visions of geek sugarplums for last year, I’ll brave speculating on a few things I would like to see happen this year.

• Grails will get hot: yes, I bashed the crap out of Grails earlier this year when I let my team give it a try on a project. But since then, Grails 2.0 has gone final, and excellent tooling support has arrived in the form of IntelliJ IDEA 11. I’ve been rocking the world doing some Grails work using Bootstrap and KendoUI, and I really appreciate Grails for providing a bit more structure than Rails without having to jump into the rigid world of Java/Spring. I’ll be doing all my personal projects in Grails this year.
• Kendo UI sneaks in: I originally wrote off Kendo UI as just an attempt by Telerik to clone ExtJS. It shares the same dual licensing model of ExtJS and plays in the same space. In reality, Kendo UI sits somewhere between JQuery UI and ExtJS. Kendo UI provides a good looking library which is easy to implement since it is based on JQuery. While ExtJS is much richer, it is also much harder to work with — there is no such thing as a casual ExtJS developer. Kendo UI also has excellent theming support, and I expect them to evolve it pretty rapidly throughout the year. Kendo UI is what JQuery UI should have been, and this will the framework to watch.
• NodeJS jumps the shark: NodeJS busted onto the scene this year and got a lot of people very excited about it. Like a new puppy, it was fast, light and a lot of fun to play with. But now that puppy is taking on weight and the peeing on the carpet is starting to get old. Things will only get worse now that NodeJS has sold their souls to Microsoft. I expect NodeJS to enjoy a record short 15 minutes of fame, at the expense of Ruby on Rails.
• Evil is the new Black: everyone should realize by now that every large technology company is evil. From Facebook and Google stealing your lives to pitch you advertising, to Apple and their walled garden, all these major companies are running with their own evil agendas and we’re just along for the ride. Even Twitter is jumping on the Evil bandwagon. 2012 will be the year you learn to get over it, and there will be good money to be made riding on Darth Vader’s cloak tails. Evil will be the new black.

Adam Hartung has an excellent write-up over at Forbes outlining how this is a major failure on the part of the AMR management team. I can sum up the failure in even fewer words: AMR was not playing to win, they were playing not to lose.

Playing not to lose is, unfortunately, the typical death spiral today of our corporate giants. Instead of wow’ing customers and delivering outstanding products customer want to pay for, they hunker down and try to squeeze as much cost savings as they can out of their current, failed strategies. They think they can survive until better times if they just save a few more pennies. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen. Cost cutting without innovation is a race to the bottom. You can’t out cost-cut your competitors, so you’re just racing to see who fails last. The game becomes about not losing, even though you really do lose.

Top companies play to win. I’m sure Apple controls costs, but their first priority is to delight their customers. You don’t see Apple trying to undercut Samsung and Dell to stay relavent. They build a product people want to buy, and as a consequence, can set the price point where they want, and not worry about the competitors.

Being in IT, it is incredibly easy to tell when a company isn’t playing to win. The first sign is usually having a bean counter in the IT management chain. Bean counters are usually 100% about not losing, instead of winning. Robert Crandall at AMR was a bean counter. He was proud he saved $700K for the company by not putting olives in the salad. Yet he was completely oblivious to how all those small cuts affected his company’s brand and destroyed customer loyalty, costing him 100x what he thought he saved.

The second sign you’re company is only playing not to lose is when you hear IT management start talking about “running IT like a business”. This means your senior managers failed to run the business like a business, and now they’re just looking to trim corners to stay alive. Unless you’re in the IT business, you can’t run IT like a business. IT is cost center. Can IT implement a chargeback model and increase billable hours to the business? Or increase rates? Maybe even increase production support costs and start charging per deployment to create extra revenue? Of course not! You would only be a paper profit center, robbing from Peter to pay Paul while having a zero-sum impact on the company’s bottom line.

So “running IT like a business,” when IT is a cost center, is a fancy way of saying “we’re going to cut costs in IT to try and hide our inability to run the business like a business.” It means they’re playing not to lose. But you can’t win by playing not to lose.

I spent 10 years in the United States Air Force, including 5+ years on flight status flying missions aboard various specialized reconnaissance aircraft as a Russian linguist. I enjoyed my time, but I also got to see things that no sane American would ever want to see for real.

After language and intel training, the next step to aircrew status was survival training in Spokane, Washington. I attended the basic wilderness and water survival courses, but also less pleasant courses including POW training and another classified survival course which no attendee will ever forget in their life.

There should be no aircrew member who has gone through the training at Spokane who should not say, unequivocally, that waterboarding is torture. Yet last night, nearly a stage full of men and women seeking this nation’s highest office failed this simple question.

This should absolutely outrage any American, and every veteran, as it does me. Throughout history, there has never been a doubt waterboarding was torture. We prosecuted Nazi’s during the Nuremberg Trials for waterboarding. We hung Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American POWs. We prosecuted our own soldiers for waterboarding during the Vietnam War.

Yet when given the chance to demonstrate moral clarity, all but two of the Republican candidates failed the test. Even more appalling is that these same candidates have somehow deluded themselves into believing waterboarding is acceptable even though they profess to be good Christians. You cannot be a Christian and believe waterboarding is acceptable.

If a candidate cannot pass such a simple test of morality, they unworthy of our nation’s highest office and are a stain on the honor of America’s veterans and our forefathers.

The only good side is it slowed me down enough to get caught up on some reading. The big project was Neal Stephenson’s Readme. I killed all 1000+ pages in less than a week. Yes, I’m a fan. No, it wasn’t as good as Snowcrash or Diamond Age, but it was still a good romp from one of my favorite authors.

The other book I finally killed was Seth Godin’s Linchpin. I had been reading it during lunch for the prior month, and finally just sat down and wrapped it up. This is really a book more of my computer geek brethren should read. Seth points out what looks pretty obvious in hindsight: base a career on building “art”, not on building widgets.

Art in this context is doing something that amazes people. In our current economic climate, being a widget builder is the surest way to work yourself out of a job. Following directions and building widgets is a commodity, which means some dude in India or China will be happy to do it for a quarter of your salary and they won’t whine about the increasing costs of the company health benefits.

The guys who actually think outside the box and create things are the linchpins, the irreplaceable assets that separate the average from the exceptional. Jonathan Ive is a linchpin. Linchpin’s are the people every company wants to have because they are the ones with the ideas who take risks.

So I recommend reading Linchpin if you care about your career. If you’re passionate about what you do, the book should confirm you passion. If it is a blinding flash of revelation, you have a lot of catching up to do.

Java was a paradigm shift. But it also had a lot of warts. It was slow. Dog-ass slow. AWT was a nightmare. But everyone was attracted to it because of the cross-platform promise and the simple API. In the JDK 1.1.6 days, here is what the documentation looked like:

The API was pretty basic. It provided the essentials for network IO, file handling, collections and the object hierarchy. While others saw limitations, my team saw a unconquered world of possibilities. If was fun finding solutions to problems learning Java. But Java was a disruptive technology for a lot of people. As Ghandi said, “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” I went through every stage of it over the span of a decade with Java.

Now, fast forward to Java 7. Java is now the establishment. But Java picked up a lot of baggage along the way to earning that crown. Here’s what the current API documentation looks like:

A new developer does not see a world of possibilities, they see a world of hurt. Hell, even the old timers see a world of hurt. Nothing about this gives you the feel of Java’s original, nimble roots. Which is a shame, because what made Java great is all still there, just wrapped in a crap sandwich.

Which brings us to NodeJS. To the uninitiated, NodeJS is server-side javascript. It is on the tipping point between the “ignore you” and “laugh at you” phases, and it is progressing along faster than Java. So why would anyone be interested in a limited, single-threaded language? The documentation tells the story:

Compare this to the original JDK 1.1.6 API documentation at the top. One would dare say it’s a pretty close clone. And that is why people like it. They see a world of possibilities in that basic API, warts and all. I see in NodeJS the same spark I saw in Java a decade ago. Everyone jokes Java (and .NET) are the new Cobol — NodeJS makes them both look like the new PowerBuilder.

So I believe the original JDK perfectly nailed the API hackers want. It provided the essentials, but no more. It ran pretty much everywhere. And it was fast enough. NodeJS has perfectly replicated that, and there is no reason it won’t become as big a success. The only challenge will be keeping it lean. NodeJS has a higher chance of success than Java because Sun wanted to court the enterprise market, whereas as the NodeJS crowd, to steal a DHH-ism, doesn’t give a shit what the enterprise thinks about their language.

My normal daily companion is a Graphite Kindle DX. It is the Ultimate Reading Machine. I love it for the large screen. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, so I appreciate still being able to get a lot of text on the screen even if I jack up the font size. The Kindle Touch is just too small.

The Kindle Fire is really just a media player; a distraction. It’s like the iPad, just smaller! They will probably sell a billion of them at that price, which is going to force Apple to innovate, so there is a plus side.

@Amazon, if you really want to get my pulse up, here’s what I want to see: a new device with the Kindle DX screen size, but with the improved e-ink display and faster processor. Ditch the keyboard too, and go for touch controls, but keep the page flip buttons so I don’t have to keep poking the screen to turn a page. The whole package should be smaller, thinner and lighter than my DX but with the same screen size. The rumors are you’re going to build one for next summer. How about Christmas? Pretty please?