mike.mainguy

OK, normally I don't do tech stuff in my blog, but this has been a long standing frustration that, now that it's fixed, I feel the need to share. Background: A year or so ago I bought a fairly inexpensive laptop from Tiger direct. It was a toshiba satellite A215-S740 and only cost around $600. This is a fairly decent machine and I intended to use it for work. It came preinstalled with Vista, but I typically run Linux (ubuntu to be exact). I thought I'd run vista for a while and see how I liked it, tired after two days of the constant interrogation. I felt like Vista was an overly agressive Gestapo agent... so I installed Ubuntu (ahhh, much better). My first problem, however was that the built in ATI driver did not support 3d. At the time I was playing with building 3d visualizations of our systems and I REALLY needed 3d (because software 3d was way too slow). I found the ati proprietary drivers, installed them, and everything seemed OK acceptable, but not quite Grea...

There is an interesting difference between how folks do things when its "two guys in a garage" and "a really big multinational company". The first thing I would say is that you can run a company of either size the same way. The second thing I would say is that you CANNOT run a company of either size the same way EFFECTIVELY. If you are a working in a web based software startup with 16 people and you have 2 developers, 4 project managers, 6 vice presidents, a CIO, CTO, CFO, and CEO... you are destined for failure (if you don't know why, I bet your title had the word "Chief" in it). On the other hand, you have an established company with 1600 employees, 24 well known brands, a B2B application that does a billion dollars a year in sales, you might need a couple of managers who try to keep things organized. You really don't need 40 developers all "doing their own thing" with little rhyme nor reason. I've been on both ends of this ove...

Anybody write java code out there? Anybody have a data access layer? How about a business layer? How about a service layer? Why? I've heard all manner of crazy answers like: It makes my code more flexible. I can dynamically swap out components for one layer or another. I need to keep things isolated so that a problem in one layer don't impact the other. Convince me, because I'm just not sold at this point. I went through a number of projects with this fad back in the 2001-2005 timeframe and none of the theoretical benefits never seemed to emerge...

I've been rereading my journal (not blog) and realized that every year, for the last 3 years, I've been engaged in a crazy "meet the date at all costs" project that ultimately ended up being canceled around the March to July timeframe. This year was no exception and I raised red flags, drew charts, rang warning bells, blew whistles, rang gongs, frankly I think I did everything but set myself of fire and for some reason... we continued to mindlessly tool along using an outright crazy set of expensive tools to "deliver" a project that was totally behind schedule, didn't do what we wanted, and frankly was one of the most ridiculously avoidable failures I've had the misfortune to be involved with. Mind you I'm sure it ended up "working" and probably wouldn't be canceled this year because it had good buy-in from senior management, it's just we did it the hard and expensive way and relied on heroics of individual people instead of ...

The strangest thing happened today... I met myself at lunch. Or rather, I met someone who sounded a lot like me. You see, I just started a new job and I went out to lunch with few of my new team members. Part of the lunch digressed into a bit of a bitch session about stupid crap at work. It was kinda nice to have folks be so upfront and just vent instead of dodging around the issue and playing little word games to try and see if I would finally understand what they really meant. Someone just said "I think so and so is a dumbass" and that was that. No "well, you know (make up little story that is hopefully a metaphor I would understand) and then proceed to allude to this fact over the next 30 minutes, it was just flat out and out "so and so is a dumbass". I like it... I'm not saying that this person was right or wrong, it's my first day, how could I know? But what I like is that I don't need to guess what that person thinks. While I supposed t...