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• PASS Summit 2011 &ndash; Part I

  - by Tara Kizer

  What an amazing week I had at PASS Summit 2011 in Seattle, WA!  I hadn’t attended a PASS conference since September of 2005 when it was in Grapevine, Texas.  It has grown so much since then.  I am not sure how many people attended back then, but I’d guesstimate about 1500.  They announced that at this year’s conference there were 4000 attendees.  WOW! Here are my favorite aspects of this conference: Networking! – Not only did I meet a lot of new people, but I also got to meet people in person that I’ve known on the Internet for years like Mladen Prajdic (blog|twitter) and Rob Volk (blog|twitter).  I even met someone that I’d recently helped out in the SQLTeam forums.  Learning – I took a lot of notes during the sessions I attended and plan on blogging very soon about them.  It is amazing the amount of things you learn and the things that you unlearn.  Yes I said unlearn.  Some of the stuff that I thought I knew was either out-dated or just plain wrong.  Fun, fun, fun – To say that this conference was fun would be an understatement.  I had a blast!  I attended the “Welcome Reception and Quizbowl” on Tuesday night, the “Exhibitor Reception” on Wednesday night, and the “Community Appreciation Party” at GameWorks on Thursday night.  There were many other after-hours events to attend, but I had to make my kids a priority at night so I had to get back to my hotel room before 9pm so that I could Skype with them.   It was very entertaining reading and posting with #sqlpass on Twitter.  Twitter has changed the conference experience for the better.  I will definitely be able to do my job better due to attending this conference.  The return on investment is HUGE!

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• Who should be the architect in an agile project?

  - by woni

  We are developing the agile way for a few months now and I have some troubles understanding the agile manifesto as interpreted by my colleagues. The project we are developing is a framework for future projects and will be reused many times in the next years. Code is only written to fulfill the needs of the current user story. The product owner tells us what to do, but not how to do it. What would be right, in my opinion, because he is not implicitly a programmer. The project advanced and in my eyes it messed up a little bit. After I recognized an assembly that was responsible for 3 concerns (IoC-Container, communication layer and project internal things), I tried to address this to my colleagues. They answered that this would be the result of applying YAGNI, because know one told them to respect that functionalities have to be split up in different assemblies for further use. In my opinion no one has to tell us that we should respect the Separation of Concerns principle. On the other side, they mentioned to prefer YAGNI over SoC because it is less effort to implement and therefore faster and cheaper. We had changing requirements a lot at the beginning of the project and ended up in endless refactoring sessions, because to much has to be adapted. Is it better to make such rather simple design decisions up front, even there is no need in the current situation, or do we have to change a lot in the later progress of the project?

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• Unexpected network traffic?

  - by robwalker

  My internet connection is via a fixed wireless connection using a 900MHz Motorola Canopy module. The router reports a fairly consistent 32-64Kbps of incoming traffic on the WAN port. When I attached a PC directly to the port and run Wireshark, I get a dump showing a lot of chatter from other machines that I presume are connected to the same tower. This didn't include end-to-end traffic, but was there were a lot of ARP requests, SSDP traffic, ICMP and other network discovery type stuff. Is this 'normal' or does it suggest a misconfiguration somewhere? As far as I can tell there is no need for my modem to be receiving any of this traffic (other than wanting to know what the names of my neighbours machines and printers are!) Since the internet connection is slow at the best of time, having this amount of background noise seems very wasteful.

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• Web application design with distributed servers

  - by Bonn

  I want to build a web application/server with this structure: main-server sub-server transaction-server (create, update, delete) view-server (view, search) authentication-server documents-server reporting-server library-server e-learning-server The main-server acts as host server for sub-server. I can add many sub-servers and connect it to main-server (via plug-play interface maybe), then it can begin querying data from another sub-servers (which has been connected to the main-server). The sub-servers can be anywhere as long as connected to internet. The main-server can manage all sub-servers which are connected to it (query data, setting permission between sub-servers, etc). The purpose is simple, the web application will be huge as the company grows, so I want to distribute it into small connected plug-able servers. My question is, does the structure above already have a standardized method? or are there any different views? what are the technologies needed? I need a lot of researches before the execution plan begin. thanks a lot.

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• SVN - Migrate to new server

  - by Jeff Bilbro

  We recently acquired another company that brought with them some crufty old linux servers. One of them is their SVN server - which died last night. I don't know a lot about Subversion, but I have reading up on it this morning - as you can imagine. We do have backups, but their just the whole directory tree for the subversion, not individual dumps. Since the server is now dead, I cannot do any dumps. How do I migrate that Subversion directory to a new server and get it up and running again? I'm not seeing a lot of examples. The new server is a VM running RHEL5. Thanks, Jeff

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• Publishing a game -- any way to target both WP7 and Win8 Store?

  - by Rei Miyasaka

  I'm at a dilemma which seems should soon become an important issue for a lot of developers. If I build a game in XNA, I won't be able to publish it on the Windows 8 Store, as it would be a classic application -- and classic applications can't be sold on the store. If I build a game in Metro DirectX, I would be able to sell it on the Store, but porting it to Windows Phone would involve porting it to Reach XNA, which in fact would likely involve more effort even than porting to OS X or Android -- both of which support C++. Of all the WinRT API that is supported on C++/JS/.NET, DirectX can only be programmed from C++. It's also unlikely that Microsoft will update Windows 7 or Vista to support the new DirectX features, although that would make the Metro DirectX the first new version of DirectX to stop supporting the immediate predecessor OS. If I build a game in Pre-Win8 DirectX 9/10/11, I won't be able to sell it on the Windows Store or Windows Phone, but I could sell it on something like Steam. It would also involve the most amount of manual plumbing. In fact, DirectWrite, despite being part of DirectX 11, doesn't talk to Direct3D. I'm getting really tired of all these restrictions -- artificial and otherwise -- and I'm coming to a point where I'm considering switching to a platform with a less fragmented API, like Android or Mac/iOS. As far as bringing a game into market goes, excluding the actual market share of any platforms that I might consider, what other factors would help me in making a decision? Just a few years ago this question was a lot easier to answer: if you were primarily concerned with Windows platforms, all you had to answer was whether you wanted DirectX, XNA, or something like SlimDX. If you made the wrong decision, no biggie -- all you really would have lost is XBox and the fairly small Windows Phone market.

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• Recommendations for a web-based help system

  - by ggkmath

  Hi Experts, I'm putting together a fairly large GUI. I'm a tech person, but more on the hardware side, not software. I'm wondering what software package would be best suited to enable me to generate a web-based help-system. Preferably it takes care of a lot of coding, allowing me to focus on the content. For example, the user would click on a link in the GUI when they have a question, that brings them to a web-based Help Guide, for example, providing an overview of how to use the GUI, perhaps a searchable index (key-word based index), table of contents, etc, for navigating through the Help Guide. My first thought was to program everything in XHTML using Dreamweaver, but my layout requirements are fairly modest (just figures and text, maybe a few equations), and I'd prefer not to spend a lot of time concentrating on the programming. Was wondering if any software existed that made generating web-based navigatable pages easy to create/publish. Again, I'm not really a programmer, so if there's something obvious out there, I'm probably not aware of it. Any advice much appreciated! Thanks in advance.

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• Almost time to hit the road again

  - by Chris Williams

  I’ve had a few months of not much traveling, but now that the weather is improving… conference season is starting up again. That means it’s time for me to start hitting the road. In June, I have Tech Ed 2010 in New Orleans, LA. I lived in New Orleans for several years, both as military and civilian and I have a few friends still down there. I haven’t been there since before Hurricane Katrina, so I have mixed feelings about returning… but I am still looking forward to it. Also in June, I have Codestock in Knoxville, TN. Codestock is one of my favorite events, primarily because of the excellent people that speak there and also attend sessions. It’s a great mix of people and technologies. Sometime in July or August, I’m headed to Austin, TX for a couple days. I don’t know the exact date yet, but if you have an event down there in that timeframe, let me know and maybe we can sort something out. In September, I’m heading to Seattle for my first PAX (Penny Arcade Expo.)  I’m going strictly as an attendee and it looks like a LOT of fun. Really excited to check it out. Also in September, I’m headed to Omaha for the Heartland Developers Conference. This is a FANTASTIC event, and certainly one of my local favorites. (I guess local is relative, it’s about a 6 hour drive.) In addition to speaking on WP7, I’ll be doing a series of hands on labs on XNA they day before the conference starts, so that should be a lot of fun as well.   In addition to all this stuff, I have my own XNA User Group to take care of. In August, Andy “The Z-Man” Dunn is coming to speak and check out the various food on a stick offerings at the Minnesota State Fair!

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• Why do I need a framework?

  - by lvictorino

  First of all I know my question may sounds idiot but I am no "beginner". In fact I work as game developer for several years now and I know some things about code :) But as this is no related to game development I am a bit lost. I am writing a big script (something about GIS) in Python, using a lot of data stored in a database. I made a first version of my script, and now, I'd like to re-design the whole thing. I read some advice about using a framework (like Django) for database queries. But as my script only "SELECT" informations I was wondering about the real benefits to use a framework. It seems that it adds a lot of complexity and useless embedded features (useless for my specific script) for the benefits that it will bring. Am I wrong? EDIT: few spec of this "script". Its purpose is to get GIS data on an enormous database (if you ever worked with openstreetmap you know what I mean ~= 200Go) and to manipulate this data in order to produce nice map images. Queries are not numerous (select streets, select avenues, select waterways, select forests... and so on for a specific area) but query results may be more than 10.000 rows. I'd like to sell this script as a service, so yes it's meant to stay.

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• Where to look for challenging jobs with a relaxed atmosphere?

  - by RBTree

  I'm a dev at one of the big-name tech companies. I like the job for many reasons: I do interesting work on a cool product I solve challenging problems and use a lot of high-level skills (quantitative, creative, writing, presenting) It pays well The problem is that I feel I need a more relaxed atmosphere (shorter hours, less performance pressure, and more flexibility), in order to free up time for other pursuits and reduce stress. The ideal would be a job that's around 30-35 hours a week, where there is flexibility to work more or less in a given week. Can anyone suggest where to look for a job like this, where I wouldn't have to sacrifice too much on the above points? (Obviously I would have to sacrifice pay.) My employer does not generally offer part-time employment. The closest thing I can think of is when I did summer internships at my university's CS department. The work was very intellectually challenging, but if I needed to go home a couple hours early or get flexibility on a due date, nobody batted an eyelash. However, I'd like to find out if there are alternatives to academia since from what I've seen the pay there is a gigantic drop from what I'm currently making. I've done freelance development before, but I do like that as an employee of a large company I have a lot of things taken care of for me (e.g. benefits and guaranteed stable employment).

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• The Importance of Fully Specifying a Problem

  - by Alan

  I had a customer call this week where we were provided a forced crashdump and asked to determine why the system was hung. Normally when you are looking at a hung system, you will find a lot of threads blocked on various locks, and most likely very little actually running on the system (unless it's threads spinning on busy wait type locks). This vmcore showed none of that. In fact we were seeing hundreds of threads actively on cpu in the second before the dump was forced. This prompted the question back to the customer: What exactly were you seeing that made you believe that the system was hung? It took a few days to get a response, but the response that I got back was that they were not able to ssh into the system and when they tried to login to the console, they got the login prompt, but after typing "root" and hitting return, the console was no longer responsive. This description puts a whole new light on the "hang". You immediately start thinking "name services". Looking at the crashdump, yes the sshds are all in door calls to nscd, and nscd is idle waiting on responses from the network. Looking at the connections I see a lot of connections to the secure ldap port in CLOSE_WAIT, but more interestingly I am seeing a few connections over the non-secure ldap port to a different LDAP server just sitting open. My feeling at this point is that we have an either non-responding LDAP server, or one that is responding slowly, the resolution being to investigate that server. Moral When you log a service ticket for a "system hang", it's great to get the forced crashdump first up, but it's even better to get a description of what you observed to make to believe that the system was hung.

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• Architecture a for a central renderer rather than self-rendering

  - by The Communist Duck

  For the architectural side of rendering, there's two main ways: having each object render itself, and having a single renderer which renders everything. I'm currently aiming for the second idea, for the following reasons: The list can be sorted to only use shaders once. Else each object would have to bind the shader, because it's not sure if it's active. The objects could be sorted and grouped. Easier to swap APIs. With a few macro lines, it can be easy to swap between a DirectX renderer and an OpenGL renderer (not a reason for my project, but still a good point) Easier to manage rendering code Of course, if anyone has strong recommendations for the first method, I will listen to them. But I was wondering how make this work. First idea The renderer has a list of pointers to the renderable components of each entity, which register themselves on RenderCompoent creation. However, I'm worrying that this may end up as a lot of extra pointer weight. But I can sort the list of pointers every so often. Second idea The entire list of entities is passed to the renderer each render call. The renderer then sorts the list (each call, or maybe once?) and gets what it wants. That's a lot of passing and/or sorting, however. Other ideas ??? PROFIT Anyone got ideas? Thank you.

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• Major permission repair needed on Mac Os

  - by Luke1111

  I made the fatal error of copying and pasting a sudo command into my terminal without double checking it, here it is. sudo -R mysql / What this does (for those that don't know) is recursively change the owner every file from the root down to mysql!! obviously not what i was intending This has of course played havoc with my system, the first thing i did was the apple permission repair but that only works for files that it has an idea of though it has changed a lot of file ownerships back to root. It seems that many library files are still owned incorrectly, as a lot of problems don't work. What i propose doing as a temporary fix until i can reinstall mountain lion is to recursively set all ownerships that are mysql to Luke. I'm not sure what they should precisely but this is still better than nothing. Is this possible using a shell script? I realise that this won't fix the problem properly and i will have to reformat but i need the machine in a workable state just for this week.

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• Custom Windows AMI for Amazon EC2

  - by cutyMiffy

  Hello: I am new to the Amazon EC2 services and I am planning to host a Windows based vm on Amazon. I have lot of fuzziness about AMIs on Amazon. So my first question would be, am I be able to install softwares and frameworks(e.g. Silverlight, .NET, etc) on a existing Windows instance that I select? And if not, how can I create a custom AMI so that I can install these softwares that I need before I submit it to Amamzon and launch? Thanks a lot for your help :) Deeply appriciated

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• Caption Competition 2: The Captioning

  - by Simple-Talk Editorial Team

  Caption competition time again! What’s going on here then?   Some suggestions to get your comedy juices flowing: “So long chaps, hope you can continue to cope without a written disaster plan!” – said the only DBA “These shoes cost a lot of money, I’m not muddying them in the SAN Admin waters!” “Down Devs, down. Stay away from my database.” It had taken a lot of time and work, but finally Trevor’s out of office setup had the sense of occasion he needed. “Could you just add one small feature?” shouted upper management, hurtling by. Add your suggestion in the comments for a chance to win $50 in Amazon vouchers. Anything computer-related will help, but feel free to suggest anything. The competition runs until 5 p.m. (BST) on Friday the 16th of May.

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• Entity system in Lua, communication with C++ and level editor. Need advice.

  - by Notbad

  Hi!, I know this is a really difficult subject. I have been reading a lot this days about Entity systems, etc... And now I'm ready to ask some questions (if you don't mind answering them) because I'm really messed. First of all, I have a 2D basic editor written in Qt, and I'm in the process of adding entitiy edition. I want the editor to be able to receive RTTI information from entities to change properties, create some logic being able to link published events to published actions (Ex:A level activate event throws a door open action), etc... Because all of this I guess my entity system should be written in scripting, in my case Lua. In the other hand I want to use a component based design for my entities, and here starts my questions: 1) Should I define my componentes en C++? If I do this en C++ won't I loose all the RTTI information I want for my editor?. In the other hand, I use box2d for physics, if I define all my components in script won't it be a lot of work to expose third party libs to lua? 2) Where should I place the messa system for my game engine? Lua? C++?. I'm tempted to just have C++ object to behave as servers, offering services to lua business logic. Things like physics system, rendering system, input system, World class, etc... And for all the other things, lua. Creation/Composition of entities based on components, game logic, etc... Could anyone give any insight on how to accomplish this? And what aproach is better?. Thanks in advance, HexDump.

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• guidline for promoting a web forum or portal

  - by Hafiz

  I am a web application developer, have developed a lot of sites, portal and apps for clients. Now I want to have own such sites that with which I can do business. But I don't know what are steps to do so. What I know is make a site or portal. But what after that? There are lot of people having so much traffic on sites built with some simple open source. Many of them are forums. I also wanted to start a forum and a web portal. I can develop that or can have open source. But what after that? Content entry and SEO? Is it all to promote a portal or site? Do SEO nowadays work ? or it is all about marketing and advertising? I have no idea about that so please tell what you guys suggest. thanks for every one's opinion in advance.

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• Making a class pseudo-immutable by setting a flag

  - by scott_fakename

  I have a java project that involves building some pretty complex objects. There are quite a lot (dozens) of different ones and some of them have a HUGE number of parameters. They also need to be immutable. So I was thinking the builder pattern would work, but it ends up require a lot of boilerplate. Another potential solution I thought of was to make a mutable class, but give it a "frozen" flag, a-la ruby. Here is a simple example: public class EqualRule extends Rule { private boolean frozen; private int target; public EqualRule() { frozen = false; } public void setTarget(int i) { if (frozen) throw new IllegalStateException( "Can't change frozen rule."); target = i; } public int getTarget() { return target; } public void freeze() { frozen = true; } @Override public boolean checkRule(int i) { return (target == i); } } and "Rule" is just an abstract class that has an abstract "checkRule" method. This cuts way down on the number of objects I need to write, while also giving me an object that becomes immutable for all intents and purposes. This kind of act like the object was its own Builder... But not quite. I'm not too excited, however, about having an immutable being disguised as a bean however. So I had two questions: 1. Before I go too far down this path, are there any huge problems that anyone sees right off the bat? For what it's worth, it is planned that this behavior will be well documented... 2. If so, is there a better solution? Thanks

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• As a developer, how do I learn sales? [closed]

  - by Dan Abramov

  I quit the company I was working for to pursuit an opportunity as a startup, and I believe in our product. I'm sure it's going to be great if we attract some customers first to keep going. (I don't want funding.) Our product is targeted at private schools and courses, and helps organize the mess other LMSs introduce. The problem is, our team is basically just me and I have very little idea about sales and marketing. I can do reasonably good copywriting but I'm sure I can do better—and being nervous or too techy in a real world conversation with the client doesn't help. I want to get better, in fact, a lot better at negotiating with clients and pitching my product. I did look for some “sales articles” on the web, and a lot of what I found is plain bullshit on SEO-engineered websites promoting books or $5000 courses. What I need instead is a developer's perspective on how to sale a product you think is great. What are typical programmer's mistakes and misconceptions about sales, and how to avoid them? How do you evolve into a reasonably great salesman? I can't believe it's in the mindset and unlearnable. Your own experience, combined with great articles available on the web is most welcome. To Future Readers The question got closed because it is not a good fit for this site. I found some helpful tips in a similar question asked on a sister StackExchange site about startups: I'm a terrible salesperson. What can I do about it?

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• Need alternative to Accessibility's "Locate Pointer" to visually highlight the mouse.

  - by fred.bear

  Update: See end of quetion: A black-on-white cross-hair/I-bar mouse-pointer is soemtimes hard foe me to spot in amongst black-on-white text. I've tried "Accessibility / Mouse Accessibility / Locate Pointer" .. which will: Show pointer position when Control is presssed It works (to a point), but it does have a notable problem, which renders it inpractical. It has the uncanny side-effect of disallowing all Control key navigation while editing a file/dir name in Nautilus (F2).. Just touching the Control key drops it out of edit mode, which means I can't keyboard paste, move-L/R word etc... So, I'm looking for an alternative. I've tried Compiz's Water Effect, but I need something which is sharper, faster, and localized to the pointer. Compiz's Show Mouse (with fire) is no suitable. I'm really lookingf for an analog of "Accessibility / Locate Pointer": * ie. I hit Control (only).. and it blips a quick visual pulse. UPDATE: I've just realized why I can't find my mouse so often! ... It's because it is isn't there !!! ... Two apps I use a lot, Gedit and Konsole (KDE Terminal; it renders unicode better), ... dissolve the mouse-pointer to invisible after the first key is typed ... and Konsole does it after a few seconds of idle-time... like a video-player option: "hide the mouse".. Well I don't use the mouse much, and I thought it was juse my eyesight (which does rely a lot on Compiz's zoom)... I discovered it when I installed a "novelty" app, called Geyes from gnome-applets ("A goofy set of eyes for the GNOME panel. They follow your mouse.") ... It could follow the mouse better than me! :)

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• Search ranking for important keywords has gone down drastically [duplicate]

  - by Vaivhav

  This question already has an answer here: How to diagnose a search engine ranking drop? 5 answers Firstly, we are a small entrepreneurial team of 3 persons and I am more like an amateur webmaster of the company's website as we cannot really afford a technical guy/department right now. A few weeks earlier, our website traffic and rankings for most keywords decreased overnight. I did a lot of reading henceforth and learned about Penguin 2.1 which people said is the reason for the drop. Something like this had never happened before. Now, I have gone through the entire Google webmaster help section. It says there that if a manual penalty is taken against us, we would notice a message in Manual Actions page. So far, we haven't received any notice from Google for web spam. Some SEO guys I contacted said they found spam links in our backlink profile. I do believe I had mistakenly purchased a cheap link/SEO scheme when I was yet very new to SEO. This was more than a year back but since then we have been legitimate. Moreover, how do I find out which is a spam link and which is not? Our content is all original, refreshing and the best you will find in our niche. We also have a blog but on a different domain (wordpress.com) from where we send out anchored links to our business website. Is this a good thing to do? Now, how should we proceed and recover our traffic/rankings. I tried searching in webmasters for a way to reach google and ask them why the traffic has decreased suddenly, but I couldn't find a contact form or something. Can someone please go through our website and help in making things more clear regarding the reason for the drop, along with a solution. Will really appreciate this as I can't get to figure this out and its taking a lot of time. Vaivhav

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• How can I make permanent death in a MUD seem acceptable and fair to players?

  - by Luke Laupheimer

  I have considered writing a MUD for years, and I have a lot of ideas my friends think are really cool (and that's how I'd hope to get anywhere -- word of mouth). Thing is, there's one thing I have always wanted, that my friends and strangers hated: permanent death. Now, the emotional response I get to this is visceral revulsion, every time. I'm pretty sure I am the only person that wants this, or if I'm not, I'm a tiny minority. Now, the reason I want it is because I want the actions of the players to matter. Unlike a lot of other MUDs, which have a set of static city-states and social institutions etc, I want the things my players do, should I get any, to actually change the situation. And that includes killing people. If you kill someone, you didn't send them to time out, you killed them. What happens when you kill people? They go away. They don't come back in half an hour to smack talk you some more. They're gone. Forever. By making death non-permanent, you make death not matter. It would be similar if a climax to a character's arc is getting a speeding ticket. It cheapens it. Non-permanent death cheapens death. How can I: 1) Convince my players (and random people!) that this is actually a good idea?, or 2) Find some other way to make death and violence matter as much as it does in real life (except within the game, of course) sans character deletion? What alternatives are there out there?

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• Setting up podcasting for a non-tech user

  - by Force Flow

  I have a user who wants to start making podcasts, but they only have basic skills when it comes to technology. So, I was trying to get a process together that would be easy for them to follow. To upload files (the mp3's and rss feed files), I have an explorer shortcut for their FTP space. To record the podcast, I was going to either use audacity or PodProducer. For the RSS feed, I was looking for a podcast RSS generator of some sort. In my search for this, I've come across a lot of dead links and a lot of paid tools, so I haven't come up with anything too useful. Is there a free, reliable webservice or windows-based tool available that folks like to use?

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• Programming habits, patterns, and standards that have developed out of appeal to tradition/by mistake? [closed]

  - by user828584

  Being self-taught, the vast majority of what I know about programming has come from reading other peoples' code on websites like this. I'm starting to wonder if I've developed bad or otherwise pointless habits from other people, or even just made invalid assumptions. For example, in javascript, void 0 is used in a lot of places, and until I saw this, I just assumed it was necessary and that 0 had some significance. Also, the http header, referer is misspelled but hasn't been changed because it would break a lot of applications. Also mentioned in Code Complete 2: The architecture should describe the motivations for all major decisions. Be wary of “we’ve always done it that way” justifications. One story goes that Beth wanted to cook a pot roast according to an award-winning pot roast recipe handed down in her husband’s family. Her husband, Abdul, said that his mother had taught him to sprinkle it with salt and pepper, cut both ends off, put it in the pan, cover it, and cook it. Beth asked, “Why do you cut both ends off?” Abdul said, “I don’t know. I’ve always done it that way. Let me ask my mother.” He called her, and she said, “I don’t know. I’ve always done it that way. Let me ask your grandmother.” She called his grandmother, who said, “I don’t know why you do it that way. I did it that way because it was too big to fit in my pan.” What are some other examples of this?

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• Companies and Ships

  - by TechnicalWriting

  I have worked for small, medium, large, and extra large companies and they have something in common with ships. These metaphors have been used before, I know, but I will have a go at them.The small company is like a speed boat, exciting and fast, and can turn on a dime, literally. Captain and crew share a lot of the work. A speed boat has a short range and needs to refuel a lot. It has difficulty getting through bad weather. (Small companies often live quarter to quarter. By the way, if a larger company is living quarter to quarter, it is taking on water.)The medium company is is like a battleship. It can maneuver, has a longer range, and the crew is focused on its mission. Its main concern are the other battleships trying to blow it out of the water, but it can respond quickly. Bad weather can jostle it, but it can get through most storms.The large company is like an aircraft carrier; a floating city. It is well-provisioned and can carry a specialized load for a very long range. Because of its size and complexity, it has to be well-organized to be effective and most of its functions are specialized (with little to no functional cross-over). There are many divisions and layers between Captain and crew. It is not very maneuverable; it has to set its course well in advance and have a plan of action.The extra large company is like a cruise liner. It also has to be well-organized and changes in direction are often slow. Some of the people are hard at work behind the scenes to run the ship; others can be along for the ride. They sail the same routes over and over again (often happily) with the occasional cosmetic face-lift to the ship and entertainment. It should stay in warm, friendly waters and avoid risky speed through fields of ice bergs.I have enjoyed my career on the various Ships of Technical Writing, but I get the most of my juice from the battleship where I am closer to the campaign and my contributions have the greater impact on success.Mark Metcalfewww.linkedin.com/in/MarkMetcalfe

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