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The full list is here . It's a pretty prestigious group--and I'm totally floored that I'm there next to some pretty big names. In homage to Ms. Sally Fields, of so many years ago... "You like me, you really like me". Having somebody come up to me at a conference and tell me how much they like my blog is second on my list of "fun things to happen to me at a conference", right behind having somebody come up to me at a conference and tell me how much they like my blog, except for that one entry, where I said something totally ridiculous (and here's why) .... What I find most fascinating about the list was the means by which it was constructed--the various calculations behind page rank, technorati rating, and so on. Very cool stuff. Perhaps it's trite to say it, but it's still true: readers are what make writing blogs worthwhile. Thanks to all of you. Enterprise consulting, mentoring or instruction. Java, C++, .NET or XML services. 1-day or multi-day workshops available. Contact me for details . Read More...
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For those of you who were at the Cinncinnati NFJS show, please continue on to the next blog entry in your reader--you've already heard this. For those of you who weren't, then allow me to make the announcement: Hi. My name's Ted Neward, and I am now a ThoughtWorker . After four months of discussions, interviews, more discussions and more interviews, I can finally say that ThoughtWorks and I have come to a meeting of the minds, and starting 3 September I will be a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks. My role there will be to consult, write, mentor, architect and speak on Java, .NET, XML Services (and maybe even a little Ruby), not to mention help ThoughtWorks' clients achieve IT success in other general ways. Yep, I'm basically doing the same thing I've been doing for the last five years. Except now I'm doing it with a TW logo attached to my name. By the way, ThoughtWorkers get to choose their own titles, and I'm curious to know what readers think my title should be. Send me your suggestions, and if one really strikes home, I'll use it and update this entry to reflect the choice. I have a few ideas, but I'm finding that other people can be vastly more creative than I, and I'd love to have a title that rivals Neal's "Meme Wrangler" in coolness. Oh, and for those of you who were thinking this, "Seat Warmer" has already been taken, from what I understand. Honestly, this is a connection that's been hovering at the forefront of my mind for several years. I like ThoughtWorks' focus on success, their willingness to explore new ideas (both methodologies and technologies), their commitment to the community, their corporate values, and their overall attitude of "work hard, play hard". There have definitely been people who came away from ThoughtWorks with a negative impression of the company, but they're the minority. Any company that encourages T-shirts and jeans, XBoxes in the office, and wants to promote good corporate values is a winner in my book. In short, ThoughtWorks is, in many ways, the consulting company that I would want to build, if I were going to build a consulting firm. I'm not a wild fan of the travel commitments, mind you, but I am definitely no stranger to travel, we've got some ideas about how I can stay at home a bit more, and frankly I've been champing at the bit to get injected into more agile and team projects, so it feels like a good tradeoff. Plus, I get to think about languages and platforms in a more competitive and hostile way--not that TW Read More...
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Another DZone newsletter crosses my Inbox, and again I feel compelled to comment. Not so much in the uber-aggressive style of my previous attempt, since I find myself more on the fence on this one, but because I think it's a worthwhile debate and worth calling out. The article in question is "5 Reasons Why You Don't Want A Jack-of-all-Trades Developer", by Rebecca Murphey. In it, she talks about the all-too-common want-ad description that appears on job sites and mailing lists: I've spent the last couple of weeks trolling Craigslist and have been shocked at the number of ads I've found that seem to be looking for an entire engineering team rolled up into a single person. Descriptions like this aren't at all uncommon: Candidates must have 5 years experience defining and developing data driven web sites and have solid experience with ASP.NET, HTML, XML, JavaScript, CSS, Flash, SQL, and optimizing graphics for web use. The candidate must also have project management skills and be able to balance multiple, dynamic, and sometimes conflicting priorities. This position is an integral part of executing our web strategy and must have excellent interpersonal and communication skills. Her disdain for this practice is the focus of the rest of the article: Now I don't know about you, but if I were building a house, I wouldn't want an architect doing the work of a carpenter, or the foundation guy doing the work of an electrician. But ads like the one above are suggesting that a single person can actually do all of these things, and the simple fact is that these are fundamentally different skills. The foundation guy may build a solid base, but put him in charge of wiring the house and the whole thing could, well, burn down. When it comes to staffing a web project or product, the principle isn't all that different -- nor is the consequence. I'll admit, when I got to this point in the article, I was fully ready to start the argument right here and now--developers have to have a well-rounded collection of skills, since anecdotal evidence suggests that trying to go the route of programming specialization (along the lines of medical specialization) isn't going to work out, particularly given the shortage of programmers in the industry right now to begin with. But she goes on to make an interesting point: The thing is, the more you know, the more you find out you don't know. A year ago I'd have told you I could write PHP/MySQL applications, and do the front-end too; now that I've Read More...
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This comment deserves response: First of all, if you're quoting my post, blocking out my name, and attacking me behind my back by calling me "our intrepid troll", you could have shown the decency of linking back to my original post. Here it is, for those interested in the real discussion: http://www.agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/jurgenappelo/professionalism-knowledge-first Well, frankly, I didn't get your post from your blog, I got it from an email 'zine (as indicated by the comment "This crossed my Inbox..."), and I didn't really think that anybody would have any difficulty tracking down where it came from, at least in terms of the email blast that put it into my Inbox. Coupled with the fact that, quite honestly, I don't generally make a practice of using peoples' names without their permission (and my email to the author asking if I could quote the post with his name attached generated no response), so I blocked out the name. Having said that, I'm pleased to offer full credit as to its source. Now, let's review some of your remarks: "COBOL is (at least) twenty years old, so therefore any use of COBOL must clearly be as idiotic." I never talked about COBOL, or any other programming language. I was talking about old practices that are nowadays considered harmful and seriously damaging. (Like practising waterfall project management, instead of agile project management.) I don't see how programming in COBOL could seriously damage a business. Why do you compare COBOL with lobotomies? I don't understand. I couldn't care less about programming languages. I care about management practices. Frankly, the distinction isn't very clear in your post, and even more frankly, to draw a distinction here is a bit specious. "I didn't mean we should throw away the good stuff that's twenty years old, only the bad stuff!" doesn't seem much like a defense to me. There are cases where waterfall style development is exactly the right thing to do a more agile approach is exactly the wrong thing to do--the difference, as I'm fond of saying, lies entirely in the context of the problem. Analogously, there are cases where keeping an existing COBOL system up and running is the wrong thing to do, and replacing it with a new system is the right thing to do. It all depends on context, and for that reason, any dogmatic suggestion otherwise is flawed. "How can a developer honestly claim to know "what it can be good for", without some kind of experience to back it?" I'm talking about gaining Read More...
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Recently this little gem crossed my Inbox.... Professionalism = Knowledge First, Experience Last By J----- A----- Do you trust a doctor with diagnosing your mental problems if the doctor tells you he's got 20 years of experience? Do you still trust that doctor when he picks up his tools, and asks you to prepare for a lobotomy? Would you still be impressed if the doctor had 20 years of experience in carrying out lobotomies? I am always skeptic when people tell me they have X years of experience in a certain field or discipline, like "5 years of experience as a .NET developer", "8 years of experience as a project manager" or "12 years of experience as a development manager". It is as if people's professional levels need to be measured in years of practice. This, of course, is nonsense. Professionalism is measured by what you are going to do now ... Are you going to use some discredited technique from half a century ago? • Are you, as a .NET developer, going to use Response.Write, because you've got 5 years of experience doing exactly that? • Are you, as a project manager, going to create Gantt charts, because that's what you've been doing for 8 years? • Are you, as a development manager, going to micro-manage your team members, as you did in the 12 years before now? If so, allow me to illustrate the value of your experience... (Photo of "Zero" signs) Here's an example of what it means to be a professional: There's a concept called Kanban making headlines these days in some parts of the agile community. I honestly and proudly admit that I have no experience at all in applying Kanban. But that's just a minor inconvenience. Because I have attained the knowledge of what it is and what it can be good for. And now there are some planning issues in our organization for which this Kanban-stuff might be the perfect solution. I'm sure we're going to give it a shot, in a controlled setting, with time allocated for a pilot and proper evaluations afterwards. That's the way a professional tries to solve a problem. Professionals don't match problems with their experiences. They match them with their knowledge. Sure, experience is useful. But only when you already have the knowledge in place. Experience has no value when there's no knowledge to verify that you are applying the right experience. Knowledge Comes First, Experience Comes Last This is my message to anyone who wants to be a professional software developer, a professional project manager, or a professional development Read More...
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A couple of people have asked me over the last few weeks, so it's probably worth saying out loud: No, I don't work for a large company, so yes, I'm available for consulting and research projects. If you've got one of those burning questions like, "How would our company/project/department/whatever make use of JRuby-and-Rails, and what would the impact to the rest of the system be", or "Could using F# help us write applications faster", or "How would we best integrate Groovy into our application", or "How does the new Adobe Flex/AIR move help us build richer client apps", or "How do we improve the performance of our Java/.NET app", or other questions along those lines, drop me a line and let's talk. Not only will I cook up a prototype describing the answer, but I'll meet with your management and explain the consequences of the research, both pro and con, for them to evaluate. Shameless call for consulting complete, now back to the regularly-scheduled programming. Enterprise consulting, mentoring or instruction. Java, C++, .NET or XML services. 1-day or multi-day workshops available. Contact me for details . Read More...
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Recently, a number of folks in the Java space have taken to openly ridiculing Microsoft's use of the "Mort" persona, latching on to the idea that Mort is somehow equivalent to "Visual Basic programmer", which is itself somehow equivalent to "stupid idiot programmer who doesn't understand what's going on and just clicks through the wizards". This would be a mischaracterization, one which I think Nikhilik's definition helps to clear up: Mort, the opportunistic developer, likes to create quick-working solutions for immediate problems and focuses on productivity and learn as needed. Elvis, the pragmatic programmer, likes to create long-lasting solutions addressing the problem domain, and learn while working on the solution. Einstein, the paranoid programmer, likes to create the most efficient solution to a given problem, and typically learn in advance before working on the solution. .... The description above is only rough summarization of several characteristics collected and documented by our usability folks. During the meeting a program manager on our team applied these personas in the context of server controls rather well (I think), and thought I should share it. Mort would be a developer most comfortable and satisfied if the control could be used as-is and it just worked. Elvis would like to able to customize the control to get the desired behavior through properties and code, or be willing to wire up multiple controls together. Einstein would love to be able to deeply understand the control implementation, and want to be able to extend it to give it different behavior, or go so far as to re-implement it. Phrased this way, it's fairly easy to recognize that it's possible that these are more roles than actual categorizations for programmers as individuals--sometimes you want to know how to create the most efficient solution, and sometimes you just want the damn thing (whatever it is) to get out of your way and let you move on. Don Box called this latter approach (which is a tendency on the part of all developers, not just the VB guys) the selective ignorance bit : none of us have the time or energy or intellectual capacity to know how everything works, so for certain topics, a programmer flips the selective ignorance bit and just learns enough to make it work. For myself, a lot of the hardware stuff sees that selective ignorance bit flipped on, as well as a lot of the frou-frou UI stuff like graphics and animation and what-not. Sure, I'm curious, and I'd love Read More...
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The recent "failure" of the Chandler PIM project generated the question, "Can Dynamic Languages Scale?" on TheServerSide, and, as is all too typical these days, it turned into a "You suck"/"No you suck" flamefest between a couple of posters to the site. I now make the perhaps vain attempt to address the question meaningfully. What do you mean by "scale"? There's an implicit problem with using the word "scale" here, in that we can think of a language scaling in one of two very orthogonal directions: Size of project, as in lines-of-code (LOC) Capacity handling, as in "it needs to scale to 100,000 requests per second" Part of the problem I think that appears on the TSS thread is that the posters never really clearly delineate the differences between these two. Assembly language can scale(2), but it can't really scale(1) very well. Most people believe that C scales(2) well, but doesn't scale(1) well. C++ scores better on scale(1), and usually does well on scale(2), but you get into all that icky memory-management stuff. (Unless, of course, you're using the Boehm GC implementation, but that's another topic entirely.) Scale(1) is a measurement of a language's ability to extend or enhance the complexity budget of a project. For those who've not heard the term "complexity budget", I heard it first from Mike Clark (though I can't find a citation for it via Google--if anybody's got one, holler and I'll slip it in here), he of Pragmatic Project Automation fame, and it's essentially a statement that says "Humans can only deal with a fixed amount of complexity in their heads. Therefore, every project has a fixed complexity budget, and the more you spend on infrastructure and tools, the less you have to spend on the actual business logic." In many ways, this is a reflection of the ability of a language or tool to raise the level of abstraction--when projects began to exceed the abstraction level of assembly, for example, we moved to higher-level languages like C to help hide some of the complexity and let us spend more of the project's complexity budget on the program, and not with figuring out which register needed to have the value of the interrupt to be invoked. This same argument can be seen in the argument against EJB in favor of Spring: too much of the complexity budget was spent in getting the details of the EJB beans correct, and Spring reduced that amount and gave us more room to work with. Now, this argument is at the core of the Ruby/Rails-vs-Java/JEE debate, Read More...
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