Category: Technology

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Technology

Open Source on Launchpad

A synergistic moment if there ever was one.

I love my OS. I don’t dislike my XP. It’s been good to me (and continues to be) but i *really* enjoy working on my ubuntu. And i’m still discovering things about it, which is half the fun right there. And as a result, i was introduced to launchpad.

And i really enjoy working on launchpad. I don’t dislike sourceforge. It’s been good to (and continues to be) but i *really* enjoy working on launchpad. And i’m still discovering things about it, which is half the fun right there. (Codeplex hasn’t really shaken my boots much in any form or manner yet).

I love programming. I don’t dislike .NET. It’s been good to (and continues to be) but i *really* enjoy working with Ruby, and in particular, with Rails. And i’m still discovering things about it, which is half the fun right there. And in all my discovery and learning, it was about time to bring the 3 together, in a practical way which helps me be more productive, first and foremost in keeping a tab on my new adventure as an entrepreneur.

Introducing… timesheet. Nothing new, nothing too fancy. It’s Rails, developed on ubuntu, using *nix editors and IDEs where i could scour them, and hosted on launchpad. It works, it’s functional (and i can even port it sans changes to my XP environment) and readily available. Probably has enough bugs (certainly more roadmap expected) to keep me busy exploring features in launchpad, but at least it looks marginally better than my excel spreadsheet (lol)

timesheet.png

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Business Technology

IT vs Business

Who’s gonna win?

Judging from the insights that are developing, not only within myself, but also from more prominent journalism, i would say business will eventually catch onto how IT’s supposed to be managed and augmented into adding value to the core focus of the business. Obviously, IT-centric business will be oh so slightly different. But the point is, if you’re a developer (as an example), you should be thinking of how to join the company, not the development team. Your approach and your skill-set should be centered on supporting the core business and not just how good you are at coding. This is a marked difference, and while some have been getting it right, it won’t take long before everyone is forced to get it right. Again, IT-centric (or technologically oriented) organisations will have their subtle differences.

What does that mean in the short term? Don’t think of business as ‘them’. It’s ‘us’. And there’s also no ‘us’ when it comes to the dev team. The ‘us’ is the company.

How do you identify with the change? Well, think of the any other division within your organisation. Accounts, procurement, call-center; any of them, all of them, see themselves as the business or aiding the business directly. They don’t have this distinction (by and large) of ‘there’s us’ and then ‘there’s the business’. It’s the same thing.

Getting this mindshift entrenched as part and parcel of IT as being within the company and not external to the company will certainly be a much needed move forward. The technological advances (again, programming wise) are not that radical; the improvements do need to come from another aspect, and this change looks to be it.

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Business Rants Technology

IT “Industry”

I say “industry” but there’s no real regulation put in by the government (at least here) which keeps the industry in check. For one, it’s not illegal to provide IT services or build software without a licence, while in more established industries, it is illegal to, for example, provide medical, financial, engineering or manufacturing services (where people’s lives are at risk) without a licence. Anyway, that’s not a formal classification or rule, just an idea that appeals to me. Why the necessity to make the distinction?

Over the last decade of building software, i’ve seen a fair share of hair-brained ideas. I’ve also seen some brilliant ones. What i haven’t seen much of though, is brilliant management. I’ve seen some, but these generally come from the business-oriented bunch who just happen to end up in IT; very rarely from tech-savvy management trying to keep a business going. In fact, most of the time, tech-savvy management who try to run their business without business-focused partners end up either working way too much overtime (work = life =work) or going belly up. Somehow, there exists this hype perpetuated by punctuated newsworthy stories of geeks-in-a-garage-cashing-in. So if they can do it, why can’t we? ‘Cos not every story turns out that way.

And particularly software. Manufacturing, distribution or sales, whether it’s IT or food, is the same thing, mostly. That is, the science and art of management has been established and the discipline is well understood. Software, on the other hand, doesn’t fit the mould. Yes, it’s plain manufacturing, distributing and selling, but therein lies the rub. You approach it with business fundamentals, and it works, but if you don’t adapt some of those implementations; you get left behind- and quickly. You toss out the fundamentals in order to keep up; you get dropped behind- even quicker.

As an example, my last company just liquidated. There are lots of different stories as to why, how, when, where or who. Bottom line, no more business. I can only comment on the software aspect; not the rest of the operation. So the only thing i do know is that it was very tricky getting the software strategy just right. Everyone pushed and pulled and chewed on this one all the time trying to get it to work. Maybe, with a little more time, it could have worked out ok in the end? Next time 🙂

More evidence supporting the notion that “software is hard”. And it makes me wonder how different things would be if you had to be officially licenced/qualified, by law, to operate in providing a software writing service. Not a fly-by-night programming course. Not a dummy’s guide to programming. Something professionally trustworthy and legally accountable. I wonder just how far would that go towards stabilising the “industry”? Make it more reputable and have governing bodies presiding over fair exchange between vendors and clients; also ultimately curbing the number of software businesses that just don’t make it.

Neh. Where would we be without the hype? It’s part of the magic of this little world 😉

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Business Rants Technology

Crack My App

What do you do if someone asks you to do something illegal?

Of course (and i do sincerely mean and hope, “of course”) the first response is to just say “No”. But does it end there? Maybe it depends, maybe it doesn’t?

Well, I was asked by a company to crack some software. Everything was totally illegal and i declined, of course. But as i sit here thinking about it, revising my study module on business ethics, i wonder if just declining is enough? Should i actually report it to the authorities?

If someone asked me to go steal a car, i would definitely report that to the police, after carefully and probably politely removing myself from the company of the requestor.
If someone asked me to steal some money, even if it was money owed to them, i think i would also probably alert “someone”. But if someone asked me to crack software (because i can since i’m a programmer- or at least, that is the assumption), whom do i tell? Do i even need to? Nothing illegal has happened.. but just where does the line end?

Grrrr. Why do idiots want to crack stuff anyway? Just play by the book and it’ll be easier for all of us 🙂

Categories
Technology

Ruby Nuby Catch

I was reading up quite a bit and getting a project on the go with Ruby and Streamlined. Perfect for an admin console and mass data capture application. But in my zeal and learning curve, i kept bumping my head against habtm relationships not really working. It was acting weird, and depending on when you pick up on the glitch, you’d explain it a dozen different ways.

Short story long, i scoured- found folk with similar issues and put it down to “bug”- but not convincingly.

And then i was reminded: habtm tables don’t need a surrogate primary key for ActiveRecord development! Doh! changed my associative table scripts to include :id => false and it all works like a charm!

Now if i can only find those threads again and post the “solution” there… Arrrrgg..

But here’s a fantastic post/tutorial on the issue by Sam Aaron.

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Rants Technology

Recycled Software

What’s up with everything being ported to .NET? There’s nothing more boring than copying somebody else’s idea, unless of course, your own ideas are pretty crap 🙂

And (sup)porting a dozen applications to be used with the .NET framework surely cannot be considered as innovative either- it’s real name is “market strategy”. I must confess though, we’ve (that is, i) benefitted much from having tried and trusted Java libraries (example, NHibernate) ported across, but i’ve also wondered many a time, why not just use Java then? And now emacs.net?

An aside, what i loved about the marketing around NHibernate is that it builds on the solid reliability and legacy robustness of Hibernate in a Java world 🙂

But it’s all just recycled software ideas and methinks a large pop of the lemming community are looking for “innovation” in all the wrong places.

<warning>Massive Generalisation About to Occur</warning>

Software developers are more into being “advertained” (advertisement + entertainment) than any other population group i know. Trouble is, i always presupposed we’re more critical than most. But perhaps we’ve reached a point where we’ve started buying into our own hype? Afterall, we can make it fly with words like interoperability, multi-platform and integration. Oooooo… :p

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Rants Technology

Quality

Much has been said about quality of software, and even more attention has been given to it. Further, a lot of methodology, and general how-to-do-stuff from project management to code implementation, even design and testing is focused on quality, including the ubiquitous “best practices” and framework collections out there. But then it struck me. All the software i “actually” work with is buggy.

It’s good enough, get’s the job done and i live with it, mostly. And like any good web-theme, the software will be replaced (read: recycled) soon enough, so why the big fuss about quality anyway?

If you got a good idea, get it out, sort the bugs out later, and if your idea is any good, you’ll break even before you manage to iron out most your major bugs, by which time it won’t really matter anyways. Uhuh, i hear a lot of “but that won’t work with real business software”. Really?

How many projects you code, pick up, migrate, port, patch, fix, debug or rewrite because business was complaining that they were (now) “too buggy”? But they were using them, right? And probably surviving pretty well with the “broken software” since now they can afford a software team to code, pick up, migrate, port, patch, fix, debug or rewrite. And the job would be done “ok” except that now, quality is an issue.

Reactionary management has a lot to do with it, but it leads astray and breeds a buzz which forges a plethora of blogging on delivery quality, all under the guise and good name of “it’s what the customer wants”- which they do. But not actually :p

When last did you use bug-free software to pay the rent?

Disclaimer: naturally, this is not a call to “down with quality”, or even “forget about tests”. it’s just a very radical and extreme (for me, at any rate) reflection on the focus we give to quality. For one, i groove on quality 🙂 while at the same time i can secretly admire that *some* manage to manage buggy software better than they can actually write it 😀

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Technology

Bitnami Application Stacks

If you’re looking for an application stack to run on *any* OS, particularly one of the very famous and useful open source applications (subversion, wordpress, joomla, drupal, apache, ruby, moodle, mysql, php, trac, …) and want to get started quickly, i would suggest bitnami for most your needs.

And especially if you’re stuck with a Windows server :p but really need to set something useful (server application) up and running, chances are, bitnami will have a stack you can download, click and install. They even have got Ruby on Rails. And the growth in the last few weeks has been quite considerable (ito offerings) so there’s very little excuse for not trying out (self-hosting) any of these wicked-cool apps on your internal networks 😉

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Business Technology

Enforcing DDD

So you’re all excited about TDD by now. You’ve also hooked into DDD and cutting your teeth on some of the more progressive methods for delivering software accurately, and, fairly rapidly. And with time, you probably need to start leading a team in DDD. Or you just need to interface with a team but want to make sure everyone’s on the same page. That is, the last thing you need is DDD-mutiny…. 🙂

We were putting the domain together and started adding in the NHibernate mapping files. One of the many beautiful things about NH is the ability to generate the schema based on the mapping file data. Now, strictly speaking, the database is not all that important from a design perspective. At least, that is, not initially if you try remain true to your DDD-allegiance. Anyway, this post is not about all that. This post is about enforcing DDD and one of the things you might want to do is remove the temptation to do some fundamental ERD analysis during the domain design. And if you don’t want to, then don’t 🙂

So how’s this for aggressive and extreme?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<hibernate-mapping xmlns="urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2">

    <class name="NHibernate.Examples.QuickStart.User, NHibernate.Examples" table="[2239987-9382WED-23D23]">

        <id name="Id" column="[LKJDSA-98DSJHDS-9D76SD]" type="String" length="20">

            <generator class="assigned" />

        </id>

        <property name="UserName" column="[130SF98-08JDY-98BNXDS]" type="String" length="40"/>

        <property name="Password" column="[10DDD398-08EFHJDY-98CVBDDS]" type="String" length="20"/>

        <property name="EmailAddress" column="[1098-0KHS8JDY-98DDDS]" type="String" length="40"/>

        <property name="LastLogon" column="[10998HG-08JDY-98DS]" type="DateTime"/>

    </class>

</hibernate-mapping>

You get the idea? And replace those funny column/table names with GUIDs for extra spice. Or even better, random base64-encoded strings. Of course, you can write a script to generate random table and column names for all your mapping files in a release build if you’re not comfortable with the idea of a “random” database schema during development.

Imagine trying to decipher the following while debugging:
select KJHDSA-AS878, SL-983LD23-2J FROM ASLKAJS8-32JH INNER JOIN ASLOE-876-35 ON DAS-3FE-43 = 321JDH-8786 WHERE ALOYWI-9876D = 2

For me, the bigger question would be: why are you trying to debug the SQL when you’re effectively abstracting that part of the solution and ‘supposed’ to be treating it like a black box?

But before anyone gets me (too) wrong, I’m not suggesting this as a standard practice, just a far-out idea which opens up some possibilities for managing DDD adoption 🙂

Categories
Business Technology

Overdone

Following up on the theme of overtime, voluntary or otherwise, there’s another good reason why it’s counter-productive. In a team environment, all it takes is one person to work that little extra bit on a regular basis, and because everyone’s capacity is inter-dependant, that extra workload starts to catch up and takes it toll.

For example, imagine a business manager getting more leads than hours in the day to follow up on.

Developers producing more code than hours available to test.

Testers reporting more bugs than hours available to fix.

Analysts churning out more requirements than there are hours to spec.

Might not be such a bad situation, but one of two things end up happening. Everyone catches up at an unnatural pace, or the pace-setter gets bored or frustrated because the feedback cycle is taking too long- for them.

Estimates become unreliable, planning ends up hazardous, at best, and a false sense of productivity starts to pervade the project. But it’s not all gloom and counter-productive. It only really becomes an issue when the feedback gap gets too wide. And that’s where methinks the heart of most productivity, and certainly learning issues lie: the length of the feedback cycle. But that is a book on it’s own 😉