1. Intro
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We started when we realized that we are still very much in the middle of a transition from traditional jobs to jobs in a new economy. Many people do not feel comfortable transitioning from their current job to another one.
We wanted to create something that would help people transition, whether they wanted to leave their current job or move into another one. Monitor provides a platform for professionals who want to find out what they can do with their skills, whether they want full-time work or part-time work, and how they can make money while they are doing it.
2. Definition of Monitor
Have you ever had a Sunday morning with your boss who always asks what you did the day before? Is there a proper way to refer to it?
You know, for us, it is: “I did XYZ on XYZ.” But for some people, it is more than that. It could be: “I worked on XYZ from Monday to Tuesday.” Or perhaps even: “I worked on XYZ from Monday until Thursday.” Well, you know what I think? I think we should have a new verb (or maybe a new noun) that we use instead of the old one: “Monitor”. Why monitor? What does “monitor” mean in this context?
Because if we say something like “I monitored YYZ last week” we are implying two things: that the product I worked on last week was YYZ and that I monitored YYZ last week (because I need to know what happened). If we use a verb version of the same idea then it becomes much simpler and its meaning gets closer to the original intent:
"I monitored XYZ last week."
This also makes sense in terms of its meaning in other contexts — just imagine if instead of saying "Sunday morning" you said "Sunday morning with my boss." So, here is "Monitor":
What do you think? Let me know in comments below!
3. The monitor work
I’m talking about a new technology that you are going to use in your company. This technology may be a new way of doing something that is already done, or it may be a new way of doing something entirely different (or more than one thing).
The term monitor refers to the part of the computer where everything happens: it’s the area where you install software (if you’re running Windows), and it’s what acts as an interface between your computer and the outside world (if you’re running MacOS X, or Linux, or Android/iOS).
The monitor is where any product software is installed. If you have an external display connected to that monitor, then the monitor can be thought of as your “screen.” Software installed on your hard drive is called software “packages.”
In this context, we are talking about installation software. It might look like installers for web browsers, for example. Alternatively it could look like software for managing email accounts and calendars. It might even look like software to set up your company website and social media accounts.
For our purposes here, though, we are going to focus on installations of software other than applications — such as hardware drivers and operating systems updates. Our goal here is to teach you how to install those things efficiently; so that when something goes wrong with one of them (i.e., a piece of hardware stops working) we can quickly tell you how to fix it without having to spend hours in troubleshooting mode with your IT department.
In other words: we want monitors that provide real-time feedback on their interactions with their environment; monitors which aren’t just good at telling us what went wrong but good at finding out why things went wrong; monitors which can tell us if something has worked properly — and if not, help us determine whether we should try again or take action ourselves (given our knowledge and skill level). The ultimate goal here is self-service monitoring — where once everything goes right there is no need for IT support at all!
4. The monitor market
In a recent interview with Neowin, Neil Schillebeeckx (and his colleague, Jason Quey) presented an analogy between the monitor market and the computing market. The monitor market is like a car with very few users who buy it. They use it for basic functionality. They don’t care about performance or features. They also don’t care about fuel efficiency or how well it compares to other vehicles in their price bracket on the road.
The computing market is like a car with many more users who buy it and care about performance and features. They also care about fuel efficiency and they do want to drive more efficiently, but are willing to pay more for that because they want to get more out of their computer than they did before they bought it (the software they use evolves over time).
This is where we are found in the monitor space: we aren’t selling monitors that work well enough because we can’t change them (though this is true of most hardware hardware too — modern CPUs have become so complex and powerful that some people won’t upgrade). Our goal isn’t to sell monitors that work well enough, but rather something newer: monitors that make us look smarter or better looking; monitors that make us feel smarter or better looking; monitors that make us feel smarter or better looking; monitors that make us feel smarter or better looking (and so on).
5. How to choose a monitor?
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Monitoring is a pretty simple concept: you want to know what’s going on in your application and where it’s going wrong so you can intervene and fix it. But as with much of software development, the way we think about monitoring has changed over the years. It’s not just about different types of tools like wireshark, tcpdump or even browser-based monitors such as Firebug.
If you browse the monitor-related sites or read books on the subject, you will find many different ways to define “monitor”. Some people talk about “a web page that reports back changes to its output on screen every few seconds”, others talk about “a resource that takes in a stream of data and makes it available on screen every few seconds, but changes whenever a new resource is created or removed from the system”, others talk about “a meter (dashboard) that lists total usage of all resources across all browsers, websites and other applications running against your machine on any given day. It shows total usage for each resource type (such as RAM vs CPU) for each individual window for each application running on your machine and any associated server side processing."
The difference between these definitions is fairly small at first glance and doesn’t really matter much for our purposes here — but before we go into details let me mention some key differences between them:
• Web pages have limited lives: They are created by some custom code (usually JavaScript), they live only in memory until they get killed by a user action such as pressing Ctrl+F5 or killing the browser (or by other means). This life is often defined simply as “the time it takes to load up" instead of a real number (which would be more realistic). So if we want to say something has changed ever 1 sec., then this is the definition you will hear.
• Windows UI applications have limited lives: They are composed of relatively small parts; sometimes there are only two or three windows attached to a single process. These parts have very short lifetimes because they don't do much useful work at once. When they do something useful, they bring notifications to the UI thread without waiting for background processes to finish their work. Windows doesn't actually wait for things to finish; rather it passes stuff along immediately so that background processes don't block each other doing their thing while waiting for Windows' stuff to finish. This ensures.