Not only does Nu make it super simple to add existing libraries to your project, but it’s also a great resource for finding existing open source projects out there.

I just happened to be building a brand new system so I’ll go through the steps I took to get Nu up and running.

1. Installed Ruby for Windows using the latest Ruby Installer
2. Opened a command prompt and ran the following commands:
   
   c:\gem update --system
   c:\gem update
   c:\gem install activesupport
   c:\gem install nu

3. Next I navigated to a new project folder and typed the following commands to add NHibernate and FluentNHibernate:
   
nu install nhibernate
nu install fluentnhibernate


That’s it – super simple!

From what I’ve seen so far, many of these issues will be resolved with SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010.  I’m looking forward to digging into a real project so I can find out where the “gotchas” are (and I’m sure there will be plenty), but so far I’m optimistic.  I am hopeful that as a developer, I will be able to bring professional development techniques to all areas of a SharePoint project.

In my opinion this is critical if Microsoft wants to make SharePoint a true application development platform.

Taking this one step further, we might say that the quick save in a video game is like a commit in source control. Saving your game with a specific name is like creating a branch.

Let’s say I just finish taking out a whole horde of zombies (Left 4 Dead anticipation is infiltrating my blog).  I’ll probably do a quick-save to make sure I don’t have to re-play the same encounter again.  This is just like committing some code you just finished.  You’re saving your current progress to make sure you don’t have to re-write the same code twice.

Now, back to my game, what if I come to a fork in the road.  I can go left through the ominous looking sewer, or I can go right through the abandoned city.  Well at this point I’ll go and save my game with some sort of name like “Taking the sewer”.  That way I can continue playing, quick-saving as I go, but I can always get back to that fork if it turns out I made a mistake.

This is very similar to creating a branch in source control. You want to start working on something new, or something experimental, and you need to be able to save your progress as you go, but you always may need to go back to that original point.

I find that many developers wait too long to commit their changes.  The more frequently you commit, and the more organized you are about it, the less you have to worry about keeping track of every change you make.  This means you have left cruft floating around in your mind to remember and you can concentrate on writing good code.  I think if developers think about source control the same way they think about saving their game progress, it would help them get into the habit of committing frequently and branching appropriately.

So far the library if pretty small – although it does include a nice little module for workign with stsadm commands.  I’ll be adding to it as necessary.  I’ve decided that although adding custom stsadm extensions is nice and does fit into the “way to do things in SharePoint”, it’s just too much overhead when you want to do something simple.  So at this point when things come up that need automation, I’ll be adding new sp.py scripts.

In addition to the sp.py library I’ve added three scripts:

• applytheme.py – apply a theme to all webs in a web application
• backupsites.py – backup all site collections in a web application
• setprofileprop.py – set a property on all user profiles based on a dynamic pattern

So where can you get this awesomeness?  Well, actually you can get it on github.  Github???  You mean that totally web 2.0 site for hosting Git repositories?  Yeah – that’s the place.  If you’re wondering why I’m using git for source control, well I guess Subversion just wasn’t “edge” enough anymore.  Git’s actually pretty cool – and if you need to use Windows you can download a Windows version here.

At some point I’ll figure out how to post it as a zip or something instead of a tarball.  But until that point, you can grab the tarball here.

On the Mac, TextMate does a great job of code folding based on syntax.  I’m doing a fair amount of work with Ruby these days and TextMate is an excellent tool.  Unfortunately for me however all folding is based on the syntax of the code, and not extra non-code markers like #region.  Luckily TextMate’s bundle system is completely extensible and customizable.  Folding is based on regular expressions so with a fairly simple change I was able to get #region folding in TextMate.

The first step is to figure out the regular expression.  The core regex for #region folding would be this:

^\s*\#region
^\s*\#endregion

Next open up TextMate’s Bundle editor, open the Ruby language, and locate  the foldingStartMarker and foldingStopMarker sections.  Below is the entire contents of my foldingStartMarker and foldingStopMarker sections.

foldingStartMarker = '(?x)^
(\s*+
(module|class|def
|unless|if
|case
|begin
|for|while|until
|(  "(\\.|[^"])*+"          # eat a double quoted string
| ''(\\.|[^''])*+''        # eat a single quoted string
|   [^#"'']                # eat all but comments and strings
)*
(                 \s   (do|begin|case)
| [-+=&|*/~%^<>~] \s*+ (if|unless)
)
)\b
(?! [^;]*+ ; .*? \bend\b )
|(  "(\\.|[^"])*+"              # eat a double quoted string
| ''(\\.|[^''])*+''            # eat a single quoted string
|   [^#"'']                    # eat all but comments and strings
)*
( \{ (?!  [^}]*+ \} )
| \[ (?! [^\]]*+ \] )
)
).*$
|   [#] .*? \(fold\) \s*+ $         # Sune’s special marker
|    ^\s*\#region
';
foldingStopMarker = '(?x)
(   (^|;) \s*+ end   \s*+ ([#].*)? $
|   ^     \s*+ [}\]] \s*+ ([#].*)? $
|   [#] .*? \(end\) \s*+ $    # Sune’s special marker
|   ^\s*\#endregion
)';

You can see where my two regular expressions were added near the end of each section.

Once you do that, close the editor, reload your bundles, and you’re good to go.

Now the bad news: having motivated employees is your responsibility – yours and yours alone. It’s not the responsibility of the HR department or some disconnected “Chief Culture Officer”. It is your responsibility. And it gets worse – if you want to motivate your employees, you have to mean it.

So, before you read any further you need to ask yourself a question: do you feel motivated? Do you want to motivate your employees? Do you want to motivate your employees because you want them to feel the same commitment and passion you do? Or because you want to squeeze a few more hours out of their already long work day?

Motivation is all about communication and vision. It’s about transferring your own motivation and drive to your employees. If you don’t believe in the vision, then no amount of “employee retreats” or “team building exercises” are going to make a difference.

So again, ask yourself if you really feel it. If you don’t, it might be a good idea to step aside so someone who is truly motivated can take the reins. On the other hand, if you are motivated and are looking for some tools to help you transfer that motivation to your team, please keep reading.

Still here? Okay well either you’re lying to yourself, you’re really bored and are reading anyway, or you really do feel enthusiastic and want to pass some of that along. Hopefully it’s the latter, but I’m not going to be picky.

I’ve broken this article into four parts:

1. Being Available
2. Empathize, to a point
3. Commitments
4. General conduct

Part 1 (Being Available) is ready to go now. The other 3 parts will be posted as my time allows.

As I said up front, motivation has a lot to do with transferring your enthusiasm to your employees. But in order to do this effectively you have to be genuine about it. If you aren’t feeling it, you’ll end up doing more harm than good. Employees only need a few “fake” ra ra sessions to start seeing everything you do in that light. So the best thing to do if you aren’t feeling the enthusiasm is to do nothing. Doing nothing is much better than doing something in this case because that something is likely to cause damage that is very difficult to undo.

On the other hand, when you really are feeling it, you want to share it right then and there. When an employee has done great work, praise that work immediately. When the company just landed an awesome new opportunity, tell everyone right then and there.

I’ve always felt that transferring your enthusiasm is much more effective when done in a casual and spontaneous way. When employees see you being enthusiastic in non-orchestrated settings, it comes across as much more genuine. This is why I says be available – walk around a lot – maximize your in person time with your employees. The more time you have with them, the more opportunities you will have to communicate new ideas, be exposed to their great work, and generally check in on how they are doing.

This is such a small and easy thing it’s amazing to me how many people don’t do it. They think that managing people is sitting at their desk, reviewing reports, answering emails, and conducting one on ones. Why should you have to wait two weeks to have your appointed one on one when you can walk over to their desk and do it right now?

A few words on employee praise. Employees want to feel good about the work they are doing. When they feel like they are doing great work, they want to be recognized for that. However, many employees aren’t necessarily into the whole self-promotion thing and thus feel somewhat uncomfortable tooting their own horn. By walking around a lot and being generally available you put yourself in a position to see their great work first hand.

The most effective praise is tied directly to an individual accomplishment. Being able to walk up to someone and say “hey – what you’re doing right now is great” is so much more effective than a disconnected “you’re doing a great job here” comment. I think this is partially because the latter doesn’t really have any insight into what the employee is doing. It fosters comments and thoughts like “he doesn’t really know what I do” or “she has no idea how challenging this is”. When you praise an employee immediately for a specific accomplishment you have witnessed, it tells the employee you know exactly what they’re doing, have seen the great work, and think it’s great. It’s a much more genuine form of praise. And being genuine is what it’s all about.

Another extremely valuable insight you gain from walking around and being available is the pulse of the organization. Are people heads down working with little or no communication? Not necessarily a healthy organization. Are they whispering in groups? Lookout for turnover. Are they happy and joking around but generally focused? Hooray for you! This is the kind of insight that is impossible to discern from reports, company meetings, etc. These insights require your intuition as a manager who knows his or her organization and knows when it’s running smooth on all 8 cylinders.

There is some risk here and you need to be aware of it. Employees should not see your presence as a signal to get back to work. “Uh oh, here comes the boss. If he sees us talking he’s gonna be pissed!” To a certain extent there will always be an element of that – it’s inevitable. But there are some things you can do to minimize this.

1. Don’t publicly call people out when you see behavior you think should be addressed. Of course if you see something that is clearly wrong or unethical you must address it immediately. But for minor things like surfing the web, joking around the water cooler with colleagues, etc, let it slide. If you pick up a pattern and think it needs to be addressed, talk to people in private later. It is important to disassociate any criticism from your presence in the office. It is also important to avoid giving employees who are performing well the impression that they’re in the same boat with the slackers.
2. Join in the conversation. Not all manager/employee conversation needs to be about work. If you join in a non-work related conversation, or better yet initiate one yourself, you come off as non-threatening.

Two quick pointes about item number two above. Like everything else we’ve talked about you must be genuine. Don’t try to be something you’re not. If you try and join in on a conversation that you have absolutely no background in, you’re going to come across phony. We’ve all seen The Office and it’s painful. You don’t want to be Steve Carrell in your own office. This can be tough when there is a significant age difference between you and your employees (oh please no stories about how it was in your day).

The second point is this. Keep it short and sweet. This is both for your sake and your employees. On your hand, you don’t want to foster a culture that regularly takes one hour digressions into the geo-political state of various 3rd world countries and the parallels between that and modern capitalist trends that will eventually result in our ultimate and utter demise.

And for your employees, remember that you are still their manager and to a certain extent they will feel compelled to participate with you in these discussions. They will feel obligated to laugh at your jokes, agree with your opinions, and continue the conversation until you indicate that it’s finished. From their point of view, there’s nothing worse than to have what used to be an interesting conversation crushed by some old guy who doesn’t “get it”, and then have that drag on for 20 agonizing minutes of hell. So like many things, this is a balancing act. Participate enough so as to be non-threatening, but don’t go overboard.

The funny thing about this is that too little of this will make people get back to work when they see you coming because they think you don’t want them socializing. Too much will have the same effect but because they want to avoid a 30 minute conversation about something they don’t care about .

So in summary, making yourself regularly and informally available to your employees is an extremely powerful tool for motivation. By maximizing your face time with your employees you ensure that you will have as many opportunities as possible to genuinely transfer your own enthusiasm. You put yourself in a position to regularly and naturally praise them for their accomplishments, and you gain valuable insights into the overall temperament of your organization.

And all of this can be achieved by simply getting up off your ass, putting away those damn reports, and walking around saying “how’s it going?”

Look, marketing is important – critically important to the success of your company. But if your blog is going to be a marketing tool, it’s got to be targeted at your potential customers. Your customers don’t care that you really liked some Joel on Software post. Your customers don’t care that you’re putting the finishing touches on some feature or that you contributed to some open source project over the weekend. Your customers want to read things they care about – not things you care about.

The key to a successful blog for a software company is one that truly provides value and connects with your customer base. If you are passionate about the subject of your software, then you have a good chance of writing a compelling blog which adds value on top of the software you sell. If you’re not that passionate, or if you suck at writing, a better approach would be to try and aggregate news articles or other industry/subject related blog postings.

At the end of the day, look at everything you do through the eyes of your customer. Is it valuable to them? If not, then you should stop and put that valuable time into something else.

Whenever you encounter an “idiot” user, think about this. What if you were asked to drive a forklift? What if you were asked to replace the spark plugs in your car (are there even spark plugs in a car)? What if you were asked to field strip a M-16?

I had an experience as a kid that sticks with me to this day. I was staying with a great uncle of mine and was hanging out downstairs. He had a fireplace and at some point the fire died down to basically nothing. I didn’t even notice it – I was probably playing with legos or something. Anyway, at one point he comes downstairs and exclaims “You let the fire go out!? Boy how you been raised?” I’d never started a fire in my life much less understood that it was expected that I should keep it going in someone else’s house. But from his point of view I was stupid for not realizing what was a basic, fundamental part of life. Me on the other hand, I was upset that his opinion of me was now colored by what was really an unfair expectation/assumption on his part.

The point is, there are plenty of things we don’t know. And it’s not because we’re stupid, it’s just because we haven’t been exposed to them. Or maybe we’ve been exposed to them at a very superficial level, but we don’t interact with them with enough regularity to be comfortable. This is how many “idiot” users are with computers. It’s not that they’re stupid, they just aren’t as comfortable with computers.

And it’s more than just knowing enough about browsers to know that “Google” isn’t the “Internet” (it’s just the page that shows up by default Dad). It’s a very fundamental difference in language. Have you ever used the term GUI to a non-technical user? While they’re sitting there politely nodding their head they’re thinking “uh, why did this guy just refer to his program as having a rich GOOEY AJAX (when did cleaning products enter into the picture) driven interface?” And how about the term “interface”? To us, this is a no-brainer. It’s so common that everyone should understand it. But you know what, when you look at the definition for the word interface, our version is number 6 on the list.

So cut those “idiot” users some slack. Try and remember that they are probably very far out of their element and their comfort zone. Try and remember what it feels like to be out of your comfort zone and having someone judge you based on their standards – not yours. Try and remember that while they might not get computers, they are probably extremely good at something you suck at.

Edited 2/4/07 – added Mr. Angry’s name and link.