We recently bought new sofas for the lounge room and it started a round of getting rid of things we haven't used in a long time. Books were the main ones to go as one of the pieces of furniture that no longer fitted in was a very large bookcase. Any book we wouldn't reread we got rid of. And there was a few. We sold what we could of the furniture and gave the rest away via craigslist. Danny at simplify your life had a similar year;

I learned that we need to simplify, not only our possessions, but also our activities. I stopped being a member of certain groups that do not contribute to my life. I also deactivated/deleted my Facebook account and Twitter account.

I have deleted facebook and don't miss it at all. Never had a twitter account. The third one that is dubious whether it adds value or not is LinkedIn. It has raised suspicions from me before about its use and value. Worse, it has been getting more spammy and facebook like lately.

About the only thing that is of use is the recommendations, but I never give them out, partly because I don't think LinkedIn is that important. For vanities sake I will record them here since the upshot of this blog post is that I am going to delete my LinkedIn account. This recommendation is from John, a good mate and a very talented systems engineer;

Cameron is an expert in his field. He is very organized and self motivated. He takes his projects very personally and puts his full effort into each of them going well above and beyond what is required. He is detail oriented but at the same time does not get caught up in them, by laying proper ground work and "framing" the project before he starts in, he is able to develop software that is maintainable and understandable by other developers. Cameron is also a great team player who doesn't simply delegate work but enthusiastically jumps in with the team.

It was with that group that I started using JUnit in anger back in about ... 2002? I had to do an NTCIP Driver in Java. Consequently I got paired with a very bright Mathematician/Programmer to help me out with the bit manipulations and byte mathematics. Especially as Java doesn't have unsigned types, so we had to manipulate all that stuff in util classes to get the correct bytes for the driver.

One of the things I remember the most was Randall doing the bitwise operations in his head and using his fingers to show the output. He would have all four fingers of both hands on the table representing the byte and would remove a finger from the table to represent an off bit. It was like watching him play piano as he bit shifted up and down in his head.

The other recommendation I got was from Scott who I was a cube neighbor with. Again for vanity's sake;

Cam is a very smart and talented developer. His impact was immediately felt when he was brought onto the team. He showed initiative in not just his own area of expertise (and job description), but also wanted to really understand what was going on with other parts of the project we worked on.

He is level headed and showed excellent leadership qualities and was able to interact with his colleagues and managers very well. I would give Cam an excellent recommendation.

That is for where I am working now. It is pretty wide system with a tonne of stuff going on and million other systems to be integrated with. It is a big enough system that its topography still has some gray areas. There are also multiple arms to the system so you have to everyone's mate just to get an idea of what is going on in the system, what it is being used for, and what it is being bent to; in order for people to be efficient and get what they want for it. Quite challenging really to maintain that while improving the quality, design and code-base concurrently.

Anyway, back to the main purpose of the post; deleting my LinkedIn account because it does not add value to my life. To delete your LinkedIn account it takes several steps, clicking of buttons, etc;

To close an account and remove your profile from LinkedIn, take the following steps

1. Log into the account you wish to close.
2. Hover your cursor over your name in the top right of your home page and then click "Settings"
3. Click on "Close Your Account" under Personal Information.
4. Select a reason for closing your account.
5. Click on "Continue".

Like facebook they keep your profile active for 24 hours and it gets reactivated within that time if you want it. You also have to click three buttons to really, really, really close the account.

It is done. No more LinkedIn.

More Reading on Linkedin

• LinkedIn
• Minimalism
• What is LinkedIn For?
• Deleting LinkedIn