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Yesterday Bill Gates announced his intention to leave all of his day to day activities at Microsoft within two years. The media heralded the news as the end of an era. The changing of the guard metaphor was used in numerous articles. The stock market reacted by pushing Microsoft stock up a grand total of $0.03. That’s three cents as in pennies. This left the media with no story. There was no reaction. The world yawned.

Late last year I stumbled over a podcast entitled Manager Tools. I listened to the first few podcasts and then for lack of time I stopped listening. Time passed and for reasons I don’t fully understand I remember Mark (one of the two podcasters) stating how poorly most managers manage their time. I realized he was right. I also realized that while I dedicated a tremendous learning effort into my technical skills, I put almost no effort into my management skills. After some reflection, I noticed that I used my management skills more often then I used my technical skills. I am not sure why I had not realized it prior to that, but sometime over my career I changed from a developer to a manager. I still needed my technical skills, but I needed my management skills more. This was like an epiphany to me. I decided to reallocate some of my time towards improving my management skills.

For years we have scoured the deserts of Iraq for WMD’s to no avail. Then from out of nowhere a WMD is unleashed on American soil. Since 9/11 the government has told us that they had a plan. If we just trust in them and let them spend money to fund this plan, they would keep the WMD’s off our shores. They also said that a WMD being loosed on a major American city was inevitable, so they created the Department of Homeland Security with the mandate of preventing the WMD in the first place and minimizing the damage when it finally happened. As we can now see, they have failed.

Recently, one of the developers that work for me got highly animated while pointing out an issue with the C++ code of another developer on the team. Without all the emotional buildup, it can be summarized as a class is allocated using new with a reference to a containing class passed into the constructor. The constructor adds itself (this) to the collection class and exits. The containers destructor contains all the logic to actually delete the elements it contains. This code works. There are no memory leaks. Some readers may already know. It was all about scope.

May 19th at 12:01 am was a long awaited moment. It was the moment that Star Wars: Return of the Sith was to start. I sat in the movie theatre with friends and family, an island of something closer to reality than the many Jedi’s, Wookies, Vaders and even a few Ewoks that surrounded us. At least, I really want to hope that we are closer to reality than they.