---
title: Short notes
date: "2009-05-20T05:15:32Z"
categories:
  - links
wp_id: 2376
description: I share notes on focusing on employee strengths rather than weaknesses, using the Google Analytics API for tracking events and error logs, and the proliferation of sandbox environments within Google’s developer ecosystem.
keywords: [google analytics api, sandbox environments, performance management, web metrics, event tracking, javascript error logging, google checkout]
---

I'm quite busy on a project right now, and don't get time to write long articles. So for a while, I'm going to stick to short notes on interesting stuff.

1. Peter Bregman has a very interesting piece on [Why You Should Encourage Weakness](http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bregman/2009/05/why-you-should-encourage-weakn.html). It boils down to a choice: **do you focus on on improving strengths or minimising weaknesses?** Conventional performance evaluations focus on the latter. I very strongly support Bregman’s view on this. **The weakness isn’t why you hired the person!** Unless it’s killing the organisation, just leave them to focus on their strengths.
2. [Google Analytics](http://www.google.com/analytics/) has a fairly interesting [API](http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/) that I hadn’t explored until recently. Picked up [Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics](http://www.s-anand.net/amazon-browser.html#advanced web metrics with google analytics) and learnt that you can track outbound clicks, page load times, Javascript events and error logs, almost anything at all using Google Analytics. You can also mirror the logging on your local server using pageTracker.\_setLocalRemoteServerMode()
3. The whole concept of a Sandbox environment seems to be picking up within Google. There’s a [Checkout sandbox](https://sandbox.google.com/checkout/), an [AJAX API playground](http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/), an [AdWords sandbox](http://adwordsapi.blogspot.com/2009/05/adwords-api-on-app-engine-python.html), an [AdSense API sandbox](http://code.google.com/apis/adsense/developer/adsense_api_sandbox.html), the [Mapstraction API sandbox](http://mapstraction.appspot.com/), even an event called [Developer Sandbox](http://code.google.com/events/io/sandbox.html). (After saying Sandbox 6 times, I feel a bit like Hobbes.)

![](http://picayune.uclick.com/comics/ch/1992/ch920623.gif)