Seeping Matter

A very early memory of mine is walking with my mom to the church down the street on a Saturday morning before Easter Sunday to participate in an Easter Egg hunt.  Way back then the local church would put on quite a hunt with certainly hundreds of eggs placed around in the rather expansive gardens outside the church.

I was probably only maybe four years old at the time.  All the kids would line up and go look for eggs together on the “Go” signal.  Mom helped me find a neighbor boy, a friend of mine who was a couple of years older than me, to stand by and feel more comfortable while we waited to start.

On “Go,” we all headed off to search for eggs.  I followed my friend around, just a few paces behind him as we did the hunt.  Everywhere he went, I followed.  He would look under a bush, I would look under the bush.  He would look next to the wall, I would look next to the wall.

Mom observed all of this, going on for maybe 20 minutes, as I searched everywhere my friend searched right after he’d searched there.  It was no surprise at the end that my friend’s basket was overflowing with eggs while I’d found only three or four.

Mom put on her sympathetic face and probably gave me a hug or something.  She said, “Matt, you can’t expect to find a lot of eggs if you search where everyone else is searching.”

I remembered that well.  The next year, I didn’t follow my friend.  I searched where nobody else was searching.  At the end my basket was overflowing; I seem to recall counting 20 eggs.

The next year, they had budget cuts and they canceled the Easter Egg hunt, and they’ve never done it again.

Still, I’ve remembered that lesson my whole life.  I’ve used it in pretty benign situations, like trying to find a parking spot at the mall during the holidays.  But lately I’ve been using it a lot more for more significant things, like my career.

There’s a really interesting part in the book “Linchpin” where he addresses the desire of readers to have explicit instructions on how to become a great leader.  I can relate to this desire also.  Seth Godin makes a great point in the book:  If you are trying to become a linchpin, and part of being a linchpin is being a leader, how can you possibly expect someone to give you instructions on how to get there?  If there are instructions to follow, this implies you are a FOLLOWER, not a LEADER!

It’s unfortunate that it’s taken me such a long time to internalize a lesson I was taught when I was so little, but I’m kinda pleased that I seem to be getting it now.  But in case you don’t believe me or Seth Godin, maybe you’ll believe Robert Frost.  He also taught us this lesson using different words:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the road less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Despite what some might think, not every moment I worked at Novell was torment.  In fact, most of my time there was pretty good.  But I admit there was a time when I got pretty discouraged.

It was some time after we’d shipped Novell Forge.  Multiple attempts to expand the scope and vision of Novell Forge had been thwarted when I’d repeatedly failed to make a good enough case to invest further in it.  The Developer Services organization was growing smaller and smaller, through layoff and attrition — Novell, sadly, never really did understand the need to invest in their developer community.  I’d been reassigned to a new team from a boss I really liked, and had been given what seemed like a busywork assignment.

I used to joke back then that I could prove I was the least important employee at Novell.  First, organizationally:  Developer Services was surely the most underappreciated and least important organization in all of Novell, and of all the assignments in our organization, mine was the lowest priority assignment.  This part I’d actually confirmed with my management, who had presented a slide deck with our ongoing objectives listed on one slide and those we’d rejected on a subsequent slide.  I’d verified that the first slide listed the accepted objectives in priority order, and my assignment was last.

Second, geographically:  You could (jokingly, of course) judge an employee’s importance by a) how close their building was to campus center, b) what floor they were on (higher floors being more important), and c) how close their office was to the corners and edges of the building (corners, then outside walls, being more important).  Since my office was the ONLY office not on an outside wall on the bottom floor of the building farthest from campus center, I’d joke that this also proved I was the least important person at Novell.

So I joked about it, but also wondered most days whether it really mattered if I came to work at all.  Did anyone care if I showed up?  Did anyone care if I left early?  Did anyone care if I actually accomplished anything during the day?  Did my assignment really matter at all?

I kinda wallowed around in this mire for some time, still coming to work and going through the motions, but wallowing anyway.  I thought about leaving Novell but nothing really materialized.  I’d heard all my life that you should love your job; shouldn’t I be finding a place to work that I loved?

Then one day it finally hit me:  Instead, shouldn’t I be loving the job I have?

I realized that, regardless of the importance of my work to the company, I could make it important to myself.  I vowed that I would take a lot more pride in my work, that I would try to deliver software of high quality and craftsmanship regardless of the assignment I was given, and that I would find other ways to get involved.  I started delivering better on my project.  I created a new technology.  I worked with some great guys at Red Hat to start a new Eclipse subproject.  I got involved with Novell’s Software Development Community of Practice and eventually became one of the practice leaders and one of Novell’s primary thought-leaders and bloggers around agile development methodologies.  I enjoyed my job much more and got an opportunity to move to a different team, a product development team, comprised of some great individuals whom I would never have gotten to know otherwise.

I’ve just finished reading Hugh MacLeod’s book “Evil Plans.”  One of the key phrases in that book is:  ”Life is too short not to do something that matters.”

I’ve been thinking about this and about me and my past and about tidbits I get from conversations with friends and things I pick up on Twitter and Facebook.  How many of us wake up every day with the sole goal of getting to the end of the day?  Every day?

What is it you are looking forward to?

When you wake up in the morning, are you most looking forward to about 16 hours from now, when you can go back to bed?  Or the time when the kids are finally asleep?

When you head in to work, are you most looking forward to noon, when you can take a break from work for an hour?  Or five o’clock, when it is time to go home?  Or the weekend?  Or summer vacation?

Isn’t that a waste, to spend so many hours of the day waiting for them to be past?

I realize that not all of us have our dream job.  But, as I learned, instead of yearning for your dream job and lamenting all the ways that your current job isn’t your dream job, you can also decide to love the job you currently have.  You can give more than you are currently giving — not more time, necessarily, but more heart, more care, more passion.  If you are a schoolteacher, you can yearn for summer vacation and lament those kids you have to put up with for such a low salary until then, or you can ignore the voices telling you how poorly you are paid and decide to make a difference in the lives of as many of your students as possible, a real difference, and find fulfillment in being the best in your profession.

And if you can do that with your job, if you can choose to love your current job instead of waiting until your dream job finds you, can’t you also do that with your life?  Can’t you also take the approach of choosing to give more heart and passion and care and love to the life you have instead of waiting for the life you want to come and find you?

The funny thing is, in my experience I found that as I gave more to my job, it started to become more like the job I wanted.  Things started to happen in my favor.  Opportunities came up that weren’t coming up before.

I’ve found this on other occasions as well.  At times when my career wasn’t heading quite where I wanted, choosing to care more and give more seems to get things moving again.  Things just start happening when you do that, somehow.

The best part, however, is that you have more days that are meaningful.  Each day is a day to give and add value and feel important.  You find meaning in your life every day when you stop worrying about all the things that aren’t working out for you and start finding ways to give.

Enjoy your job more by giving more of yourself at work.  Gain better friends by seeking opportunities to be a better friend.  Take time to read a book to your child, or play with the trains or Polly Pockets, or watch “Tangled” again even though you watched it yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, because they will not be little for long.

Make your days meaningful and live every day.  Don’t spend your days waiting for your dream life to happen to you.  You deserve better than that.

I hinted at this before, but I’ve started a new open source project called Zoomulus.  It’s a fun little project to product tools and libraries to help us normal people leverage the power of cloud computing more quickly.  I wrote a blog post today explaining why I started the project.

For most, it is just another open source project, but for me, it is a part of me.  There’s not much there yet, but I’m pretty pleased with it anyway.  If you are interested, take a look or even get involved; I’d love to have you onboard.

Last week this was on Dilbert.com:

Proactivity might be one of the most misunderstood and abused terms in business today and over the past decade.  As it is described in Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, it is a powerful principle that enables a person to realize they are truly in control of their own life and that it is up to them to make their life what they want of it.  As it is used in business, however, it is a catch-all used by management to lay blame at the feet of individual contributors.  For as much as business people use the term, it is surprising to see how poorly they really understand it.

(I believe Scott Adams would agree with me; hence the cartoon above.)

I’ve been told countless times in a business context that I need to be “more proactive.”  One of the champions of this was IBM.  I was hired by IBM in April of 1998 to port a server application from a mainframe to an RS6000 UNIX platform.  Funny thing was, once I started I found out something kinda funny:  My team didn’t have access to a UNIX machine for me to program on, and didn’t have budget to buy one.  I spent the better part of that year prototyping the code on my Windows laptop, hoping it would work on a UNIX machine, along with searching throughout the site for groups with unused UNIX workstations that I could repurpose for my needs.  It took several months before I finally found a refurbished RS6000 machine that we could afford and was able to arrange to have it shipped to Boulder where I worked.  Finally I had the right equipment to do the job I had been hired for many months before.

At my annual review, I was a bit surprised to hear in my feedback that the company was disappointed in the work I’d done.  Given the constraints on budget and purchasing, and given my organization’s complete lack of any knowledge whatsoever as to how to even acquire the hardware I needed, I felt I’d done a pretty good job of finding what we needed to move forward.  Instead, my feedback was that I hadn’t made nearly the progress on the code that they had hoped for.

When I pointed out to them, “But, you failed to provide me the equipment I needed to produce this code,” their response was, “Well, you need to be more proactive.”

I heard it then and I’ve heard it a lot since.

Last week after we exited the freeway where there was no exit ramp, I thought about this a lot for a good 24 hours or so.  I felt horrible about what had happened.  I felt bad for what had happened to the car, bad for frightening my son, bad for nearly having a serious accident.  I thought over and over about all the things I could have done differently.  Most dominant in my mind was this:  I could have assumed that the driver of the other car would suddenly move over into my lane and cut me off and force me off the road.  I could have assumed that he would not see me there.  I could have passed at a different spot on the freeway.  I could have …, I could have …, I could have …

Then I suddenly realized:  No, Matt.  No.  When a person is driving, it is THEIR responsibility to make a safe lane change.  I was established in my lane.  The other driver did not make a safe lane change.  It was his fault.  Not mine.  His.

I realized that I’ve been trained to feel responsible for things that are not my fault.  I’ve been trained to feel guilty when something I’m associated with goes poorly, as though I am automatically responsible for the success or failure of anything with which I have any association.

Fact is, this is just simply not true.  Proactivity means to accept responsibility for those things which are your responsibility, and to take it upon yourself to take action, make the best of things, and improve your life and those around you, true.  But it doesn’t mean that you accept blame or feel guilty for things you are not responsible for.

If, heaven forbid, one of my children were to start using drugs, I would feel terribly about that.  I would examine the situation and do everything in my power to help change the situation, to support their attempts to quit, to get them the help they need, whatever.  That is being proactive.  But I would not take the blame for their choice.  My children know that it is wrong to use drugs.  They’ve been taught.  They ultimately have a right to choose, and I don’t have to accept full responsibility for their choices in order to be a proactive person.

The driver of the red car made an unsafe lane change.  Can I drive more defensively in the future?  Sure.  Can I do a better job of assuming the person I’m passing doesn’t know I’m there?  Yes.  Is my accident last year my fault?  No.  No it is not.  And I’m not going to waste another second of my life feeling guilty about something that isn’t my fault.

I’ve raved before about “7 Habits” and, without question, I’m a Covey disciple.  Proactivity is a key guiding principle of my life.  But sometimes, it isn’t my fault.

So I’m riding in the Seattle Airport Shuttle back from the Hyatt Olive 8 to SeaTac yesterday afternoon.  It’s just me and the shuttle driver who appears to be maybe in his early to mid 50s.  The conversation leads to careers, and he happens to mention, “Yeah, I used to do computer work for Boeing.”

“What kind of computer work did you do?” I asked.

He replied, “Oh, I worked for Boeing for 24 years writing COBOL software.  Then they laid me off, and I couldn’t find another job.  So now I drive an airport shuttle for minimum wage plus tips.”

I’ll be 16 years into my career this  year.

To say that was a bit of a wake up call is an understatement.  It said to me, “Matt, you are 2/3 of the way to irrelevancy.”  Time to get things into gear before it is too late.

Let’s just start out by saying that I’m really glad 2010 is in the past.

I started off 2010 with some enthusiasm and even determination, you might recall.  My intentions were good, but apparently karma didn’t like it.  Maybe I came across too arrogant, I don’t know.

All I know is that in 2010 it seemed like the blows just kept coming, one right after another.  You know in those Rocky movies (just pick one, they are pretty much all the same after Rocky 1) where, at some point during the fight, he just stands there and keeps getting hit over and over and over again?  Yeah, like that.  $12000 of car repairs in a single year alone can do that to you, even if you aren’t trying to do the Dave Ramsey dance.  If you ARE trying to do the dance, that makes it worse, because it compounds the feeling of failure.  Combine with that a major misunderstanding at work plus missing a coding deadline right around the same time my daughter came down with a serious life-threatening illness causing me to miss a week of work with her in the hospital right at the time year-end evaluations were due…

It was not a very good year.

So it was early last fall when a friend of mine suggested I read Seth Godin’s book “The Dip,” which I immediately followed with “Linchpin.”  Reading these two books in that sequence changed my entire outlook on my career.

The premise of “The Dip” is very simple.  Think of a time when it has seemed to you like things just aren’t working out, when they seem harder than they should be and not nearly as fun or fulfilling as you had hoped when you began.  Maybe it is in a job or a career.  Maybe you are trying to learn to play an instrument or you are training for a marathon.  ”The Dip” that Godin is speaking of is this time — the time past the beginning, when things were new and exciting, but before the time when it becomes fun again because you are really good.  In “The Dip” he explains how to tell whether the low point is really a dip or just the beginning of the end.

To me, however, the biggest lesson was this:  If you try hard enough, you can envision what the dip will be like for any new endeavor you think of starting, and you can decide early whether you think you are interested in going through the dip.

I think it is a natural law that anything worth doing or having has a dip associated with it, where the size of the dip is proportional in depth to the value of the thing worth doing or having.  Learning Spanish was like this for me.  At first, it was interesting and novel (“Hey, check me out!  I can say an entire sentence in Spanish!”).  But then there was the long arduous time period where it just was not happening.  I’d hear people speak in Spanish but I couldn’t translate what they were saying fast enough to understand them; I’d try to reply but I couldn’t translate my thoughts to Spanish fast enough to keep their interest.  But I pushed and pushed, and suddenly one day it happened:  I was suddenly thinking in Spanish.  I could understand and speak without any problem.  I was truly bilingual, and it was fun again.

Learning to write computer software was like that.  So was learning to play the piano, and a host of other things.

Since I know that anything worth doing has a dip, and since I also believe that the size of the dip is proportional to the pursuit, I should be able to objectively analyze a new endeavor at the beginning.  I should be able to imagine how it will be to achieve excellence in this endeavor, and I should be able to envision at least some of that which will constitute the dip.  Then I can analyze up front whether I think it is worth the effort.  Then, if I so choose, I can move forward with a bit more awareness and less surprise when the dip hits.

However, there’s another perfectly good alternative:  I might be honest with myself and realize that I’m not willing to see it through.  In this case, I’m better off to focus my energy in other areas where I AM willing to make the investment.

(There is a point to all of this, really.  I’m getting there.)

For a good 15 years of my career, almost since my career began, I’ve thought about starting my own software company.  I’ve had numerous ideas for products that might be monetizable over that timeframe and have conducted various levels of research for many of them.  Eventually, every one of these ideas got shelved or abandoned.  And suddenly, after having first read “The Dip” and then “Linchpin,” with the context of the Money Flow Principle, I knew what I had been doing wrong.

See, all this time one main reason I’ve wanted to have my own company was because I’ve wanted to work on what I wanted the way I want to do it.  So I’ve had all these ideas for possible software companies.  And every time I’ve had an idea, one of the first things I start to think about is, “How can I make a business out of this?  How can this idea make money?”

It is at this point where I start exploring financial models and business plans.  I spend time thinking about how to deliver the product and how much to charge, whether it is a rich client or a web application, whether it is a product or a service, whether it is a subscription model or a license model.  I think about the customer I want to target.  I run the numbers to see if it can make money.

And I either can’t figure out how to make any money, or I simply get bored and quit.

When I read “The Dip” and thought about my career, I had a major epiphany:  I’m not sure I am actually willing to see my business through the dip.  I think I understand a little about what needs to be done.  While I don’t claim that I’ve thought of everything, I think I’ve got a fairly representative picture.  And I’m not convinced that I am interested in seeing it through.

However, I AM still interested in working on what I want to do, the way I want to do it.  But now that I realize that I may not be interested in doing it as a business, I feel relieved.  Suddenly I’m not compelled to monetize whatever I choose to do, because I’m not sure that is really what I want.  I’m free instead to just pursue something interesting and try to give society a valuable gift, and trust that if I do, the money will eventually flow in my direction.

I don’t think I can clearly express how liberating this was to me.  At a time where I was feeling somewhat trapped and beaten down, I realized I could start creating fulfillment for myself, with no obligations other than just those I make to myself, to create something that is enjoyable and satisfying and interesting to me, the way I want to do it.

So I did.  I created an open source software project, called Zoomulus.  I’ve been working on it ever since, and it has been great.  There’s not much there yet, and I’m not even sure yet what it will actually be.  But it is mine, interesting to me, done my way, and it is making a big difference in my life.

For some time now I’ve been telling friends about this concept I have which I refer to as “The Money Flow Principle.”  Despite the risk of it sounding a lot like hero-worship, I’ll let you in on the secret.

It was in 2003, when I was at Novell and was vigorously championing an open source strategy, that Novell acquired Ximian.  Since I worked in Developer Services it wasn’t long before we engaged in conversations with Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of Ximian and the driving force behind the Mono project, the premier open-source C#/.NET implementation.  Since that time Miguel and I have kept somewhat in touch, or at least we have some vague awareness of each other.  It isn’t like we hang out or anything, but we have a friendlike relationship.

Since that time when we first met, I’ve given a lot of thought to Miguel and the career he’s created for himself.  I noticed, for example, that when Novell acquired Ximian (or sometime thereafter), Miguel was given a vice-president role — specifically, a role that did not exist within Novell at all prior to the acquisition.  I marveled how, due to his affiliation with Mono, Miguel was virtually un-fireable.  Even if he were to get “fired,” he would continue to be affiliated with Mono, would continue to lead the project, and would without doubt soon find employment elsewhere, still leading the Mono project.  I’ve found it interesting to think that, if Miguel and I were to both attend Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference, he would be having lunch with Microsoft executive VPs (I know this because I know he has done so in the past), while I would be sitting anonymously at some table in the cafeteria.  Yet I’m the one who works for Microsoft, not Miguel.

This is all the more interesting since it appears that Miguel didn’t strategically set out to put himself into this position.  Rather, it seems that he simply set out to do interesting and valuable work and trusted to karma to see what would come of it.  It seemed that, over time, the effort he made to create value caused money and opportunity to naturally gravitate toward him.

This leads us to the “Money Flow Principle,” which is simply this:  Money eventually flows toward he who creates value.

The premise is sound and seems to hint of truth, and Miguel’s example of this principle in action is noteworthy.  Perhaps you, like me, have come up with any of a number of ways that you could contribute to society, but you’ve withheld your contributions because you couldn’t figure out how you would be fairly compensated for what you might choose to contribute.  Perhaps you, and I, need to internalize this concept a bit more.

This, by the way, is one of the messages of “Linchpin”, the book by Seth Godin which I wrote about previously.  What gifts do you have to give?  What talents do you have to share?  What contributions do you have to make?  What if you knew you would be well compensated for offering your gift to the world?

Maybe it’s time you stop worrying about whether you will get paid and start worrying about making contributions that are highly valuable, contributions that give you intrinsic fulfillment and help you feel pleased with your place in life.  If my so-called Money Flow Principle holds true, eventually the money will flow towards you.

(By the way, I previously contacted Miguel to let him know I was thinking of writing this blog post.  He was quite gracious and seemed pleased that I would consider it.  Miguel, if you should happen to read this, I simply wish to express thanks for your friendship and example, and I hope the post doesn’t embarrass you.)

This is a very painful and sad post, so by definition it should be hilarious.

It looks like my 1998 Kawasaki KX 250 will belong to someone else tomorrow.  I bought that bike, worn and beaten, six years ago.  I brought it into my garage, took it apart, cleaned it, painted it, put new graphics and a new seat cover on it, gave it a new rear race tire, had the forks rebuilt by Pro-Action, and gave it a new Renthal rear sprocket.

This, my friends, is how you show your motorcycle just how much you love it.

I’ve loved every minute I’ve ridden it.  I love that rush of adrenaline I feel when you kick the engine to life and you feel the motor revving beneath you.  I love the awesome power as you launch off the line and the pull you feel in your arms as you climb through the gears and that amazing 250cc two-stroke powerband.  I love that feeling of soaring high above the ground (where “high” means “a multitude of inches”).  I even forgive my bike for that time I was trying to learn to double-jump and instead I broke my collarbone.

If any girls read my blog they probably think this is so dumb.  And to that, I say this:  I had a fair number of girlfriends when I was single, but when I found one that I felt this strongly about, I married her.  And if that doesn’t show you up, well, I don’t even know what I meant by that.

Seriously, I really wish I could keep it.  Maybe someday, when my career doesn’t require every spare minute of my time and investments of large sums of money in laptops, maybe then I can have another one.

Until then, there’s a part of me that will be dead.  There’s a part of me that will ache every time I watch motocross or supercross racing live or on TV.  There’s a part of me that will feel like I sold my soul in order to try to move my career forward, and that part will let me know how disappointed it is with me for the rest of my life, especially if I fail.

It will definitely be a bittersweet memory.  Like the CRX, I’ll love it forever.  And I don’t care if you think that is stupid.

So, for posterity’s sake, here’s some pictures to remember my baby by:

Catching tons of air at Bunker Hill Raceway in Delta, 2004-ish.

I love this picture.

When a mommy and a daddy love each other very very much, like my wife and I, sometimes they have a life-changing event which starts with a very simple conversation, like, “Honey, do you think we should get a new MacBook Pro?”

At least, that’s what happened in our family.

One night, we were just laying there together in bed.  All the kids were asleep.  I turned toward my wife and softly said, “What would you think if we got a new MacBook Pro?”

She got a bit of a twinkle in her eye as she turned and snuggled in toward me.  ”Why do you want one?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking, pretty much it is time for me to get a decent laptop.  Even though I don’t want to spend the money, and even though we are trying to do the Dave Ramsey Dance, I think it is holding my career back.  I don’t think it is wise to continue without one.  I think it is an investment that we need to make in my career,” I said in the most romantic way possible.

She kind of bit her lower lip, then said, “Well, why are you thinking of a MacBook Pro?”

“Their laptops are simply the best hardware available,” I explained seductively.  ”I would dual-boot it with Boot Camp so it ran Snow Leopard in one partition and Windows 7 Ultimate in the other partition.  Then I could create a domain-joined account in the Windows 7 partition with a separate virtual drive that holds all of the company data that I can protect with BitLocker.  That way I can use my laptop to work remotely and also have excellent Mac hardware.  I’m getting excited just thinking about it.”

“Oooooh, baby, I love it when you talk to me like that.  Let’s do it!” she said.  So with that, we turned off the lights and went to sleep.

Some time later, the long-awaited day came.  I was at work when my wife called.  ”Honey, it is time,” she said.  ”The MacBook Pro is here.”

I rushed home to this:

They are prettier after they are born.

I must admit it didn’t look like much. But I know that true beauty lies within. Within the box, I mean.

Sure enough, we didn’t have to wait long before the laptop started making its way out.

It's crowning!

When they first come out they have this weird whitish covering on them.

Now THAT'S a good looking laptop! He (she) is so handsome (pretty)!

It's a boy (I guess)!

We decided to name him Steve, for obvious reasons.

I attended LaunchUp, a monthly meet-up for people interested in tech startups, last Thursday.  My friend Josh Coates, Mozy founder, spoke first, where among other things he described the two types of people at the event:  people who have done, are doing, or are planning to do a startup, and people who like to talk about it but are too chicken to do it.

I’m definitely in the second category.

Of course, Josh’s talk was the most interesting, in case he reads my blog.  But the second talk, DJ Waldow’s talk on community management, was interesting too, particularly to me as someone who’s tried (and failed) to start an effective online business.  It wasn’t so much that there was any one particular point that Waldow made that really stood out to me; rather, the more he spoke, the more I realized how important what he was saying really is:  In order to compete today, businesses have to be active in managing their online reputation and in creating awareness of themselves among their customer base.  The ultimate?  When your presence in the community and the industry is so prevalent that when they think of your business area, they think of your business.

Since I don’t have my own business, I am my own business.  So this made me wonder, how well am I doing?  How synonymous is my  name with the software engineering industry, or other things?

Since I know how incredibly interested you are, here’s a detailed table of my findings.  For each term, I conducted a search on both Google and Bing.

Search Term:  ”Matt Ryan”: Searching for just my name is pretty disheartening.  No results relating to me in the first twenty pages on either site.  It doesn’t help when you have the same name as a pro football player and a musician.  I don’t even show up on Wikipedia’s Matthew Ryan disambiguation page.  Hrrmm.

Search Term:  ”Matt Ryan blog”: Not much better.  No results for me in the first ten pages on either site.

Search Term:  ”Matt Ryan homepage”: Finally, a result.  Google gave me a result for www.mvryan.org, my homepage, on page 9 result 9; Bing, oddly, gave their first result for me for my user profile page on Novell’s developer website, from back in my days working for Novell’s developer services team.

Search Term:  ”Matt Ryan software”: Now we’re honing in.  Google’s fifth result on their first page was for my developer.novell.com profile page; Bing gave two results for me on their first page; the third for my LinkedIn profile, the eighth result on that page for my user profile on SourceForge.net.

Search Term:  ”Matt Ryan software engineer”: Google showed me love twice on page one, results three and seven, but Bing really showered down their devotion by giving me five results on the first page.  I got top billing with the first result on the first page, along with results four, six, seven, and ten.

Bing really seems to be favoring me more than Google, but surely that’s not because I work for Microsoft; it must just be a coincidence.  Anyway, it seems I’m fairly well associated with my profession, but there’s definitely still some work to be done.

Some other searches:

“Matt Ryan Microsoft”: Google, page 1 result 2; Bing, page 1 result 2

“Matt Ryan Mozy”: Google, page 1 results 2-6 (oddly, the first result is for a Matt Ryan on the mozy.com blog but that isn’t me, even though I worked for Mozy for a year); Bing, page 1 results 1,2,3,5,6,9

“Matt Ryan Novell”: Google, page 1 results 1-6, 8-10; Bing, page 1 results 1,2,4,5,8-10

“Matt Ryan Eclipse”: Google, page 1 results 1,3,5,7; Bing, page 1 results 1,4,6,8,9

“Matt Ryan IBM”: Google, page 1 result 2; Bing, page 1 results 1,10

“Matt Ryan Spillman”: Google, page 1 results 1,2; Bing, page 1 result 1

“Matt Ryan utah”: Google, page 2 result 2; Bing, page 1 result 1

“Matt Ryan 350z”: Google, page 1 result 2; Bing, page 1 result 3

“Matt Ryan world superbike”: Google, page 1 result 1 (and 2, and 3); Bing, page 1 result 5

“Matt Ryan supercross”: Google page 1 result 9; Bing, page 1 result 9

“Seeping Matter”: Google page 1 results 1-4,6,8; Bing, page 1 results 1-4

“Coding Frogs”: Google page 1 results 1,2; Bing, page 1 results 1,2