mike.mainguy

I just had the pleasure of attending a 3 day "crash course" architectural thinking class. This was sponsored by my company and facilitated by architects from a large and successful consulting company. It was very interesting to see the perspective of the consultants who taught the class. The material was very relevant and the discussions with my peers in our organization where good. By the middle of day two I really began to question the point of the class. Much of what was discussed was very necessary for a consulting organization and I would argue has value in any IT department, but I'm not sure it was solving problems we need solved. In discussion after the class, one major problem we need to address is what I call the "road to nowhere" problem. We're furiously building solutions, setting standards, generally doing a bang-up job getting things done; but we're not sure where we're going or worse yet, if anyone else is going to want to go ther...

Software development in bigger shops is getting more complicated due to the movement toward agile processes. Management often seems to think "oh great, I can deliver more product faster" without getting rid of any of the overhead their old process incurred. So now we have a situation where we have an 80 hour development effort saddled with 20 hours of meetings, status reports, use case writeups, blah blah blah. None of which is actually used for actual development and none of which enhances the interaction with the customer. There is a sore need to bring the agile process into the fold of SDLC and start espousing that Agile IS SDLC, just a different version from waterfall.

Why do many corporations insist on reinventing the wheel? I recently proposed we open source some software we are writing. I did this it's a pretty cool concept and we cannot afford any developers. I went and spoke with a few of my cohorts at other companies and they thought it would be a cool project to work on, but our company cannot currently afford to pay these folks. Hmmmm, what to do? I know! we'll make the core infrastructure of the project open-source.... perhaps get a free version of Jira/confluence and start building a communnity around it. This has the benefit of getting some (potentially) high quality developers to work in it for free, and additionally if I leave, I get to use this software at my new location. From my employers perspective, they will still get fixes after I leave (it's open source, everyone will right?). This sounds like such a win win win situation that I was excited to share this idea with my team. Needless to say it did not fly well and...

In the spirit of the SETI project, I'm asking myself again... Why do we spend money for really expensive machines that spend over 1/2 their time rendering whiz bang screen savers? A company could make a killing with a distributed agent that used those cycles to solve business problems instead of displaying a screen saver.

We recently had a team meeting where we discussed how important it is to be on time for meetings. A comment was made that "It's disrespectful to be late for meetings". As a prime offender, I kept my mouth shut, but certainly had a few pointed questions I really wanted to ask. It's great to SAY we should all be on time for every meeting, and we should respect everyone's opinion, but DOING that is a little more problematic. In the past, I personally had an average of about 3 hours of meetings per day. These were recurring, scheduled meetings, that I typically sat in and listened to other people talk. Truly there was probably about 2 hours of meetings per week that I actually had conversations and constructive/useful information that was communicated. I actually think the problem should be turned around and we should make sure that meetings are useful. To me, a 1 way dissemination of information is best served by an email message. Meetings should be reserved...

I saw an interesting article about violence and video games and their impact on children. There is evidently a book called "Grand Theft Childhood" that examines this. I might have to take a look.

I had an interesting situation back in January. I was called into a last minute minute meeting and asked to explain why I thought we needed JBoss and why websphere wasn't OK. Frankly, I was stunned. I was told the meeting was to discuss what sort of hardware we needed and where it was going to be deployed.... Suddenly I'm asked to justify using JBoss instead of websphere to a bunch of fairly skeptical folks who where VERY interested in using websphere at all costs (for some reason). Well, I stammered and stumbled since I wasn't really prepared to answer this and I could almost hear the folks on the other end of the call tapping their fingers on the table, waiting expectantly for my answer for them to instantly debunk. I stopped for a full minute, my entire mind switching gears from "what sort of hardware/capacity might we need" to "why do you want to use JBoss instead of Websphere". I then proposed the obvious thing (to me) "Well, Jboss is free...