Dear Reader,

Pop Quiz: How many of your developers wake up in the morning excited to work on your project? If the answer is not “all of them”, you probably need to look at how open source projects attract developers and motivate them to write code for free.

Put yourself in your developer’s shoes for a moment.
You are a professional developer, you work on a project all day at work but you live to get home and start working on your passion, an open source project. Suddenly, instead of slogging through the day, you are actively engaged in a project that may be much more complex than the one you are working on at work. Worse yet, you may actually have more responsibility, more input, more voice on your open source team than you do at work. You wish your day job excited you as much as your open source project. You wish you could be as engaged in it.

Ok, back to the real world, you are a manager again; you lead a team or a project. Don’t you wish, your developers could get as excited about what they do at work? Have you ever wondered why they don’t?

A good place to start is to look at how your project and team is structured. Good Open Source projects master four key meta attributes that few corporate development teams seem to be able to grasp, let alone implement.

• A meritocracy
• Transparent in decision making
• Location Independent and flexible on timeframes
• Open Lines of Communication

These four meta attributes are essential for an open source project to succeed. Without all four, most projects don’t get off the ground. However, when it comes to corporate development teams, we see an almost 180 degree turn. Corporate teams are, for the most part:

• Top down driven
• Opaque in decision making
• Rigid in location and time frames
• Hierarchal in lines of communications

Even with these meta attributes not all open source projects succeed. Implementing them in your corporate environment won’t guarantee that your next project will succeed. However, it will give you an edge that other teams don’t have. With open source projects, nobody is forced to join. Only a few very lucky people are paid to contribute to them. Developers join because they want to. Wouldn’t it be great if you could say the same about the project on which your team is working? Wouldn’t it be great to say that all your developers are there because they want to be? Have them eager to be at work? Have them blog about how great their project at work is? You can but you have to turn your project into a project they want to work on.

I guarantee you that if you can’t get your developers excited about your project, don’t get excited about your project, they will find one that excites them. Hopefully for you, it will just be an open source project.

[Update: This is the opening monologue to a presentation I did recently for MIH titled "Open Teams:What corporate IT can learn from open source projects". (PDF warning)

This is also the talk I gave at PHP Benelux 2010.

While I get the most enthusiastic responses from developers when I present this talk, I would love to present it to management as well. If you are interested in me presenting this to your company's IT management, drop me an email and lets make it happen.]

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

“Failing doesn’t bother me as much as failing to act does.”
– Cal Evans

It’s not a unique thought, others have written about it as well. However, this simple thought was driven home to me recently.

I got a call one day in December from a good friend of mine. He started talking about an exciting opportunity he had and that he was considering myself or one other person to help him with it. I knew deep down inside that if I did it, it would push me way out of my comfort zone. I also knew that if I did it, the project would have had a much higher ROI for my friend because I was best suited to help him promote it. Foolishly however, I passed on the opportunity giving a lame excuse because I was just too afraid to act. I failed. I failed my friend but more importantly, I failed myself.

I passed on an opportunity when I could have simply stepped up and stepped out of my comfort zone. Yes, there is a possibility I could have failed miserably. However I will never know if I could have done the job or not. I don’t regret many actions in my life, I do regret a lot of my in-actions, like this one.

As I sit here in the new year and write this, it’s not to whine or complain about a missed opportunity. I’ve learned from my mistake and moved on. This blog post is just a reminder to myself to seize opportunities that push me out of my comfort zone. Yes, I will fail at some of them. However, I’d rather be known as the guy who failed than the guy who didn’t try.

Until Next Time,

I <3 |<
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After several years in the PHP Community I’ve come to realize that there are 4 major events on the PHP social calendar, tek, DPC, ZendCon and MSWDS. (Microsoft Web Development Summit) There were 3 MSWDS that took place while I was at Zend and try as I might I could not score an invite to this private party. However, last year my number came up and I was luck enough to be invited. (My thought from MSWDS08 can be found here.) While I had a good time last year, this year was an order of magnitude more interesting, fun and productive for me personally.

I met some new people

This year wasn’t just about the PHP core community, we had attendees that represented the Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress communities. I don’t think any of them were official representatives of those communities but they were developers who worked in and around those projects. It was great to meet these guys and I look forward to growing the friendships that started there.

I reconnected with old friends

There are a lot of people in the PHP community that interact with each other almost daily but we only get to see each other in person a few times a year. It was great seeing all my old friends and just hanging with them.

I was co-host this year

Those that know me well know that I’m an attention whore. I love being up in front of a crowd. So I was honored and happy this year when Karri asked me to help host the event. I got a lot more credit for the success of the event than I deserved but was happy to play my small part.

I learned a few new things

To be brief:

• Even if you don’t like installing plugins, Bing Maps makes Silverlight worth installing. It’s not a game changer but they are doing some things that Google isn’t and competition is always good.
• WebPI is continuing to grow and get better. Each time I look at this tool they have either added something new and cool or sanded down a lot of the rough edges to make it more useful.
• WordPress will run on Azure. I seriously had no idea. I can’t afford Azure just to run my blog but if they adjust the pricing a bit, this could be a serious game changer for small-time bloggers like myself.
• The more people I get to know at Microsoft, the less I’m able to despise the company. Oh sure, they patented sudo and nobody at the conference was able to do anything about those “special kind of stupid” decisions that big companies make. As long as they keep hiring people like Josh, Peter, and Karri though, it’s hard to just paint them with one big evil brush.
• Blocking irc on your “guest network” is an exercise in futility. It does no good and 30 minutes after we’ve all connected and found ways around it, we just laugh at you.

fClose()

Again, I can’t seem to say thank you enough to Karri and Tanya for all the work they did to put this summit together. Y’all were awesome hosts and we are all in your debt.

I want to say a special thanks to all the attendees. This year’s summit was great because only a few people just sat there and listened, almost everyone participated at some point. A special thanks to Keith for standing up and getting righteously pissed off because it was the right thing to do.

Most of all though, thank you Microsoft in general for asking my opinion and listening to it. Be warned though, I’m watching you. I want to see if you actually listened.

Until next time,
I <3 |<
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Recently my son, who is a senior in high school, asked me the following question. (In typical Evans family tradition, it came via instant message)

This may sound weird but it’s for a bible project. I need you to answer the following question:

What three qualities do you think that an effective leader must possess, and why?

I do a lot of writing on leadership and management and how they relate to software development; that background taints my answer. I first want to point out that leadership and management are not the same thing. A person can be an effective manager without being a leader. Problems in business arise however, when people who are not leaders – who do not possess these three qualities – are thrust into a leadership role.

Son, as I see it, the three qualities that every leader must possess are as follows.

Confidence

People will not long follow someone who is always staring at the roadmap. An effective leader has to be confident that they know where they are leading their group. Only in this way can the followers be confident in the leader.

Courage

An effective leader must have the courage to go where they have not been before and to face problems that scare them. An effective leader will show those who are following that the task at hand important enough to overcome fears and face tough obstacles. Mark Twain said it best when he said:

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. “

Humility

A leader must have great humility. An effective leader will recognize greatness in others, not themselves. An effective leader will help others to rise to their full potential, regardless of personal gain. An effective leader understands that the task at hand has to remain the focus of the group, not the one leading the group.

Notably absent from the list of qualities of an effective leaders are things like:

• Being the smartest person in the group
• Always being right
• Being the most popular person

Effective leaders look to surround themselves with council that is smarter than themselves. They understand when they are wrong and admit it so that their followers can help them correct course and get back to the task at hand. Effective leaders know that leaders have to make decisions that are not popular. Some of the worst leaders throughout history have been the most popular ones. Because their power is based on being popular, they base their decisions solely on what will keep or increase their popularity, ignoring the true needs of the group.

The problem with these three qualities is that they have to remain in balance for the leader to be effective. Too much confidence leads to situations where a leader begins to believe that they are the focus of the group they are leading. Too much courage will cause a leader to make reckless decisions, putting the group or its mission in jeopardy. Too much humility and the leader will not be respected by the group they are attempting to lead.

Conclusion

It is impossible to say that one of these qualities is more important than the other two. All three have to be present and all three have to be in balance for a leader to be effective.

The presence, in equal measure, of Confidence, Courage, and Humility, is what separates a manager from a leader.

Until next time,
I <3 |<
=C=

That is how I started a blog post to my Ibuildings friends yesterday announcing that I will be leaving the company in December. It has been a great time for me – and I hope for them as well – but my time there is drawing to a close.

As I prepare to exit one opportunity, I am looking around for my next one. I’ve done a lot of reflection in the past few weeks about where I want to go next in my career and what I want to do. The problem is, in my career I’ve done three things that I truly loved doing.

• Programming
• Building and managing development teams
• Working with the PHP community

It has always been very difficult for me to choose between those three. However, of the three, building and managing development teams is truly my passion; anyone who reads my blog on a regular basis knows that.

So instead of continuing down the path I have been traveling, I’m going to seek opportunities that allow me to help companies make their development teams the best they can be.

If you know of someone looking for my unique blend of skills, please make sure and pass their name on to me, I would love to talk to them. My resume can be found at the link in the toolbar marked “Resume” or click on this link “Resume of Cal Evans“. Thank you in advance for any help you can give me in my search.

Sincerely,
=C=

This is the last of my CodeWorks 09 posts. For those of you looking for the slides from my talks, I just wanted to point you to my new Talks page. It is where I will archive my slides for all conferences, starting with CodeWorks.

Each time I give a talk, it changes a little so I will upload the new version and mark them with the conference name and year.

Until next time,
I <3 |<
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Well CodeWorks 09 is over and I’ve mostly recovered. (I still have a bit of a cold that I picked up in NYC but other than that, I’ve recovered) I did a total of 24 sessions across 7 cities and enjoyed every one of them. Each city was different and it’s impossible for me to pick one as my favorite. So I’m going to list my favorite memory from each city.

San Francisco
This one is easy, dinner and cigars with Marco Tabini. We had a great dinner at Houston’s, walked back, picked up a couple of good cigars and then wandered back t the hotel. We ended up around one of the hotel’s fire pits, talking till about 9:00. If we had waited about 15 more minutes, we could have roasted marshmallows with the A-Team.

Los Angeles
My favorite memory of LA should have been the OCPHP meetup. Unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling good so I stayed in the hotel. I understand from Elizabeth and Ben that I missed a great party. LA however, was our first traffic snafu and the cement mixer flipped over on the median of the Interstate has to be the strongest memory I have. Well, that and packing everyone and all of our luggage into the van.

Dallas
My Dallas memory is the Microsoft open bar party after the conference. More specifically, it is the after party’s after party that is my favorite memory. We sat around in the American Airlines fake airport drinking till about 9:30 PM or 10:00 PM. At one poin Josh Holmes was laughing so hard his entire head turned purple. it was a great time of just hanging out with the speakers like Jason Sweat and the locals like Tim Stiles.

Atlanta
Hands down, my favorite memory of Atlanta was seeing the lovely and talented Kathy’s car pull up in front of the hotel. My heart skipped a beat as I saw her get out of her car. It was the first time in 5 months I had seen her and she was more beautiful than I remembered.

Beyond my personal happy moment, Atlanta had a lot of great memories. Hanging with everyone at the after party at Jeff Jones’ eating boiled peanuts and drinking rum while everyone else tasted beers.

Miami
Another great personal memory, I was privileged to reconnect (I used to say “hook up with” but that sounds wrong) with an old friend and her husband, Nancy and Bruce Campbell. (No, not the one with the boomstick) We had a great dinner the night before the conference and then Bruce attended the conference while Nancy hung around with the likes of Lig, Liz and Kathy.

Outside of that, my Miami memory is a bit of an odd one. The conference room were actually freezing. to the point where my fingers were beginning to go numb, I’m talking cold here. Ok, it’s not a happy memory but it is what I remember the most.

DC
So many good memories in DC. Dinner with MWOP, Eli, Keith and the gang. Meeting Dawn Casey in person after talking with her on twitter for a year. Yet another great party thrown by Microsoft. All things considered, the hotel, the people, the sessions, etc. DC had to be my favorite. Not because of any one thing but the culmination of a lot of little things.

NYC
My favorite memory of NYC was the train ride over. I’d never ridden Amtrack before. Luckily, Ed Finkler was my train buddy. I would like to say that we had a in-depth conversation about technology however, by this point, both of us were pretty beat so we ended up cocooning in our respective seats with our ipods.

Dinner at Siggy’s with everyone was another great time in NYC. Many thanks to Chis Shiflett for being our guide. It was also great to see Paul M. Jones. He was working in the OmniTI, NYC office and stopped by to hang with us for a while.

Let’s do it again!

All in all, CodeWorks 09 was one of those great memories I will always look back on fondly. Yes, there were times when it wasn’t great but honestly, being in such great company made even the bad times bearable.

So to all my fellow speakers, to Microsoft, to the great crew for Team Awesome and to everyone on The A-Team, thank you. Thank you for making a great memory.

Until next time,
I <3 |<

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CodeWorks 09 Vital Stats

CodeWorks 09 day #: 14
Cities left: 0
Miles Traveled: 9,677
Cups of Coffee: 23
Current Current City: New York, NY

Random Statistic of the day

New friends made while on the Codeworks tour: hundreds

Conference Notes

Ben Ramsey’s Codeworks blog

Postcard Project

Until next time,
I love you, my dearest Kathy

=C=

CodeWorks 09 Vital Stats

CodeWorks 09 day #: 12
Cities left: 1
Miles Traveled: 9,472
Cups of Coffee: 18
Current Current City: Washington DC

Random Statistic of the day

Rude people from American Airlines: 1

Conference Notes

Postcard Project

Until next time,

T’estimo estimada Kathy

=C=

CodeWorks 09 Vital Stats

CodeWorks 09 day #: 10
Cities left: 2
Miles Traveled: 7,987
Cups of Coffee: 14
Current Current City: Miami

Random Statistic of the day

Number of times I’ve almost been killed in a taxi: 1

Conference Notes

Postcard Project

Until next time,
I love you moj najdražji Kathy.

=C=