Niklas Hammarstr̦m РNews, Interest, CV

As I’ve previoused written I have a large team siting all around the globe working close together with me and the other in the team. At present there are 23 people to make sure the perform at the very best all time. And that’s not easy, but it’s easier now when they know eachother and the fact that I can benchmark them and send reports each week that shows there performance over the last couple of weeks.

I can then use this benchmark when we are negotiating contracts and fees, since I’m always paying for performance this kind of measuring numbers are important. I’m working on more keyfigures that can be used to measure the work they do.

Another thing that was and still sometimes is a problem for me is how you demo a new function in the system. I mostly use Skype, Msn, Yahoo IM, Gtalk and other instant messenger clients to chat with my personal. But sometimes you need to show them a demo as well, and I’ve been experimenting with shared desktops, video tutorials, text tutorials with images but still I haven’t found the best way.

What I’ve noticed is that programmers often tend to learn faster with text and images, and for other services we can use shared desktops. But I also have people working from places where 0.5 Mbps are considered high speed internet. For those people I’ve been unable to use shared desktop, so we have tried with video tutorials. All these different kinds of system take a lot of time, not to mention the fact that we are constantly changing things in our systems.

From the beginning I was uncertain that I could trust all the people in the team, I therefore didn’t not share contacts with them. I was the only person that had contact with the rest, but as some of them have worked with me for two years I now have no problem giving them access and the possibility to talk to each other. There’s a lot to win on this. Instead of them asking me things, they start by asking the other people in the team. And if they can’t solve it together they ask me.

All this sounds great, but I can still sometimes have the to much of there work are depending on me. We have therefore decided to hire a new person that will report to me and handle a lot of this work. I will be working more strategic. This will be great and it will also make it much easier to scale the team.

Google is everywhere!

There was a time when people thought Google was the solution for the Microsoft problem… Now I’m not so sure anymore. With the new browser Chrome, Google have soon assemled an entire operating system. They have there own browser, mail, spreedsheet. Will the next thing from Google be a OS?

Google also have there Android plattform for mobile phones, and the first phone is on it’s way out to the market. Would this plattform also work as an OS for computers? One thing is sure with all these data and usage of Google products they practically know everything about you.

Yesterday I first heard news about the new Google browser called Chrome. This morning I downloaded it for testing and after about one hour of testing I’m convinced, I will no longer need Firefox. The only problem so far is that I have a lot of great plugins for Firefox, and I hope these will show up for Chrome as soon as possible. 

The first thing I noticed is speed, both in rendering webpages and in handling the browser. Sites that normally is slow, is much faster in the new browser. And sites that alreday are super fast is even more faster. I also tested some secure locations, and there’s no problem with any thing. 

It seems that Chrome will be a big threath against Mozillas Firefox that for long have been an outstanding and great choose if you don’t want to use Microsofts browser. And I guess that the link Google have put on there first page, will give them a lot of new users of Chrome since people get it servered on a plate rather then have to seek for it. 

Perhaps this it’s time to buy Google stocks once again. Because Google is really everywhere, and will probably continue to dominate the web for years to come.