What is my Purpose?

Purpose
Promote the use of a "Purpose" section in blogs.

Introduction
In the movie "City Slickers" , Curly Washburn who was played by the late great actor Jack Palance asks Billy Crystal who plays Mitch Robins, "Do you know what the secret to life is?" Mitch replies, "No, what?" Curly raises one finger, "One thing, just one thing, stick to that and the rest don't mean (anything)." Mitch confusing asked, "What's that one thing?" Curly responded, "That's what you got to figure out." In the end of the movie, Mitch found his one thing. His family is his one purpose in life.

Almost anything written needs a purpose for existing. A procedure needs a purpose for using it. A functional specification needs a purpose for implementing it. A blog needs a purpose for reading it.

Difficulty writing
Growing up, I was never a strong writer. While attending a university, I took a few sophomore English writing intensive classes. I was always amazed how others students could easily write their assignment papers in a week. For myself, it took me three times as long. Eventually, I would turn it in the assignments late earning a letter grade of either "D" or "C". Difficulty writing is a big reason why I majored in Mathematics.

Inspiration
One semester, I took a writing intensive course from Mr. DeRyke. One thing that he asked everyone in class to always do is to always have a purpose section for every document or presentation. Initially, it seemed very odd and worthless to have. I asked Mr. DeRyke for reasons for using the purpose section. He replied he would sometimes read some entire documents and not have a clear clue why he is reading it or what the purpose of it was. Eventually, he would simply ignore and not read any document without a purpose section. Some web pages are like that with huge big blocks of text that ramble on and on with no identifiable single purpose. By having a purpose section at the very beginning, the writer can help the reader focus on a clear topic. Another advantage, let the reader decide very quickly is this going to be worthwhile read.

Others who promote it
In The Principles of Project Management by Meri Williams, she also writes that you need to be clear on three issues below when presenting information.
1. Purpose
2. Structure
3. Outcomes
The first Purpose is "What are you trying to achieve?" Other project management books also suggest using some kind of purpose section in presenting information.

A Blog with a purpose
Having a purpose in a blog is good idea and helps to present the information clearly. It does look odd, but helps the reader understand by having a short description at the very beginning. It's similar to coding a function, would you tell a developer to just read function body to find out what's going on? No, you put a nice Javadoc at the beginning of the function with one sentence that tells you the purpose of the function. Blogging is no different. Do I recommend everyone start using a purpose section? If you think it will help the reader understand the document, then why not include a purpose section.

Show you an example
Okay, look back at the very document you are reading. Assuming you would read top to bottom and are not skimming, where is the main topic of the document. If you say the first sentence in the purpose section, then I have written the document correctly. If not, the document had diverged away from the main topic and needs to be rethinked. Some would argue that the title is enough, but that is usually used to lure the reader (ie clever newspaper titles). Other forms of a purpose section are objectives, abstracts, and overviews. They all try to give a clear purpose for reading the document.

Summary
Using a purpose section has improved me as a writer by focusing on a single sentence. What was once a task that I dreaded doing, it is now becoming something that I actually enjoy. The purpose section is unconventional and somewhat odd to put into a blog, but it works really well for me. Writing for the world is great audience to strive for and using a purpose section will help those readers. If the world comes to visit and likes it, that is also cool.

References
City Slickers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k1uOqRb0HU&feature=related

If this blog is still not a convincing reason to have a purpose section, then I will not write the purpose section for any future blogs to satisfy the requirements and avoid being penalized.

Review of stackoverflow.com

Purpose
Show results of review for stackoverflow.com

Introduction
stackoverflow.com is a questions and answers site. It is vote driven. Users of the site would vote for question and/or answers that they like. The voting will then rate them, moving higher voted items up the list which improves visibility. The registered voters would then be rewarded with points and badges which improves their reputation on the site. The site was supposed to be mainly for programming questions (see FAQ), but it seemed to have included others types of questions as well.

Review

Experiences
I had posted a question on the site that I was not able to search for a reasonable answer for awhile. The link below is the posted question.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/141498/what-open-source-c-static-analysis-tools-are-available

Almost immediately, the posting got responses with reasonable answers which were much better than searching on Google.

Each posting would also track the number of views. It was so easy to use and fast that I decided to post 3 more. As with the first, the responses were quick and had some reasonable answers. My reputation on the site had increased to 153 points and I had earned 6 badges for questions that had been posted for only 3 days. It was cool.

Getting Expected Answers
Next, two java programming questions were posted that were already answered by Dr. Johnson.

The first question is "Why should the interface for a Java class be preferred?" .

The expected answer can be found at http://jnancheta.blogspot.com/2008/09/lessons-learned-from-stack.html

The second question is "Why is using a wild card with a java import statement bad?" .

For expected answer, see Elements of Java Style.

The response came back quickly and were the expected answers.

Some Positives

• Easy to use.
• Small amount of advertising.
• Nice simple site layout with little eye candy graphics.
• Good searching of questions and answers.
• Points system to make interesting questions and answers more visible.
• Able to use existing account on blogspot.com with site.
  

Some Negatives

• You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. If you don't vote positive for a user answer, the user won't vote positive for your question.
• No delete button for some responses.
• Potential flames.
• No delete button for self posted questions.
  

Lessons Learned

• Some of the questions, I had posted were already on the site. Should have searched and researched before posting.
• The first posted question was too long and wordy. Reeves had suggested trimming it down to make it easier to read.
  

Summary

Overall, using the site to find and get answers was easy. The initial experiences were pretty positive. It is a very good questions and answers site. Programmers will find stackoverflow.com very useful because questions are answered very quickly and reasonably.

GanttProject Evaluation

Purpose

Evaluate the open source GanttProject software with the "Three Prime Directives for Open Source Software Engineering" and report results.

Overview

The GanttProject <http://ganttproject.biz/> is a software tool for handling project management and scheduling with Gantt charts and resource load charts. A Gantt chart is a graphical display of the project schedule similar to using bar charts. The Gantt resource load chart graphically shows the amount of resources that are used for the project tasks. It is free open source alternative to commercial software Microsoft Project.

Three Prime Directives

The three prime directives are what open source projects should aspire to. It will determine if the system does useful tasks, if end users can successfully install it and if developers are able to enhance the system.

A. Prime Directive 1

GanttProject successfully accomplishes useful tasks for project management.

Here are some of the main features.

• A Gantt chart for displaying created tasks.


• Able to set tasks hierarchy and dependencies.


• A Gantt resource load chart for displaying who is assigned to a task.

• Able to import/export from Microsoft Project.
  

Prime Directive 1 is fully satisfied.

B. Prime Directive 2

Getting started with GanttProject was pretty easy.

1. Install Sun Java 1.4 or recent if not already installed.
2. Download the "Zip archive" from <http://ganttproject.biz/download.php>.
3. Extract the files.
4. Change into the ganntproject directory.
5. Run the script ./ganttproject.sh for unix shells or double click the ganttproject.bat file in windows.

GanttProject includes a "Manual" found in the "Help" menu. The help information is pretty decent, but could be more descriptive.

Using the software to create a gantt chart, set dependencies and assigning tasks to resources was easy to do (see image below). It did take awhile to click around and find the correct option to use.

The GanttProject includes sufficient user-level documentation to support download, installation, and use of the system without significant interaction with a system developer.

Prime Directive 2 is fully satisfied.

C. Prime Directive 3

The GanttProject does provide some developer's documentation.

The documentation includes procedure on how to build with ant, checkout code from the version control and developing ganttproject with eclipse. The documentation seems thorough providing step by step procedures with pictures. However, there are no API's or design documents that would enable an external developer ability to understand and enhance it.

A developer could enhance the system, but would need time to generate the javadoc files and diagrams for GanttProject.

The prime directive 3 is partially satisfied.

Summary

The GanttProject is a great open source application that should be included in any project's toolbox. Even though it does not fully satisfy all three prime directives, the software was easy to use and provides enough useful features to do project management. Although it is not as feature rich like Microsoft Project, it is has enough features to be a very good open source alternative. Since it is cross-platform software, it will run on any operating system that Java supports. But the best thing about GanttProject is the price. It's free!

References

GanttProject home page <http://ganttproject.biz/>
GanttProject Source Forge Project page<http://sourceforge.net/projects/ganttproject>
Wikipedia Gantt Chart Information page <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_char>
Microsoft Project page <http://office.microsoft.com/project>