Leadership Tulsa

I was accepted to Leadership Tulsa Class 42 in June.

It’s a great program designed to develop community leaders. They are attempting to groom/prepare people for volunteering and operating programs that help or enrich the Tulsa community. Last month was “Government Day” where we heard from Tulsa’s (then) mayoral candidates and learned the role local, state, and federal goverment plays in community development. This month was “Education Day” we toured several community schools in the Tulsa area and learned about the challenges facing the Tulsa area education system.

Tulsa has some really great educational institutions. I always assumed that the Oklahoma public education system was broken. These schools are really taking steps to ensure that kids actually learn. The state of education is leaps and bounds above what it was five years ago.

There are so many inovative programs that I wish had been available to me when I was in grade school.Some of the schools we toured where KIPP Middle School, Kendall-Whittier, and Carver Middle School. Each of these schools has something unique and interesting to offer the students.

I don’t have children, but I think the fear surrounding the Tulsa Public Schools system is largely unfounded. Based on what I heard today from various sources TPS and general education will see some very drastic changes over the next 10 years.

This is only the 4 month of this 9 month program, but I already recommend it to anyone living in or around the Tulsa area. It’s fascinating to learn and understand the systems and institutions that drive a city.

As a developer I’m always trying to find ways to encapsulate functionality. For years I’ve tried to encapsulate UI code so that I could “quickly and easily” build user interfaces. However, I’m starting to understand that this type of thinking can get me into trouble.

Don’t misunderstand me, there are some great UI libraries like sebForm/sebField.

These libraries are great for creating full blown web applications in which you want a consistent look and feel across 100’s if not thousands of pages.

However, these libraries just don’t provide the type of layout flexibility that is needed for your standard every day website. Each website I create has it’s own look and feel and creating a standard UI library for this type of development would be impossible.

So I find myself sort of “recreating the wheel” on each project and I think that’s ok.

On each new site I implement the UI consistently across the site, but a little bit different from the last site I created.

Since I’m so lazy I really try to reuse code when and where I can, but I think there is a minimum amount of uniqueness to each project that requires me to make a new wheel.

Is it just me or does everyone with a blog feel the need to report the exact same news?

For instance today I must have seen over 30 blog posts about the Sun/MySQL aquisition. (I’m sure that’s a conservative number.)

After running this blog for almost a year I fully understand how hard it is to come up with blog topics. So I can see how these authors are compelled to pounce on ANY news just so they can have a blog post for the day.

Let me take this time to say that I’m as guilty as anyone. I’ve used news stories to help fill out my blog a bit. I vow NEVER to do that again.

Some of these stories deserve the attention they receive, especially if the author has an opinion or unique insight. However, I don’t need to see 30 blog posts that have been cut and paste from CNN or some other news source. I already have RSS subscriptions for that.

Leave the news to the reporters that get paid to report it and start providing some original content.

I’m all for recycling, just not when it comes to the news.

My little blog has been neglected lately. With the busy holiday season and a recent period of illness I haven’t had much time to think about a good topic. Honestly, I still don’t have one, but I thought it was time to get back to updating this thing.