“Personal branding” is just a fancy way of saying “marketing yourself”. Most geeks aren’t fans of marketing. They tend to prefer unambiguous technical specifications and logical arguments to the artificiality and cheap tricks they perceive as being used by too many marketers. So, “personal branding” to geeks basically means “creating an artificial impression you project […]
Neil Blakey-Milner
Neil is a technology generalist - which is a polite way of saying that while he can't explain what he does during introductions, his CV sure looks interesting. The more frequent themes are open source, doing development Right(TM), security, and scalability. But don't ask him about games if you don't have a spare few hours.
It wouldn't be right to have a bio in the South African blogging "scene" without words like "entrepreneur", "leading", "highly", "guru", or "Dalai Lama". So there they are.
Posted inGeneral
Geek respect
I’ve often heard it said by those who’ve had to manage geeks (or want to have positive interactions with them) that they find that geeks have little respect for those outside their field — in particular for management and for those that perform non-technical work like administration (e.g. accountants and office managers) and user support. […]
Posted inGeneral
What is a geek?
I started writing a post on how to understand how respect works with developers, that quickly expanded to cover other technology worker types as “passionate technology people”. Which is rather unwieldy a term to be throwing around throughout a post and not entirely encompassing of the people I mean anyway. “Geek” is the most accurate […]
Posted inGeneral
Be sure to wear a flower in your hair
It’s really hard to summarise the experience of a first visit to San Francisco, assuming you’re at least somewhat a technology geek. San Francisco (and by that, one generally means the San Francisco Bay Area) is modern technology’s birthplace and still its hometown. Xerox PARC (as in Palo Alto Research Centre) either created or popularised […]