Adventures in version control
So I spent a lot of the weekend refactoring my Healthy Homes database system. (I know, what a party animal.) And after getting some solid work checked in, I realized it was definitely time to do a major refactoring of the Data Access Layer (DAL) code.
Things you can’t possibly know
My attention was drawn this morning to an article on “10 Technology Skills That Will No Longer Help You Get A Job.” I’m not so impressed, mainly because I spend a lot of time around people who do research. This… isn’t research.
#3, “Software Support,” has no support.
The evidence for #4, “SEO Specialist,” is that Google renamed its Search Group. Nomenclature has power! That’s why my retirement account is named “Piña Coladas on the Beach With Jodie Foster.” (I am not making this up.) It should work, right?
#5, “QA Specialists and Managers,” seriously? “These days, the tech industry seems to be following Google’s lead and turning everyone into beta testers.” Hey, just because it is being done doesn’t mean it really can be done. This is a trend that won’t work out. (As some of the commenters pointed out, how’s that going for military and medical applications?)
I could go on, but the main thing I’m seeing in this article is a host of extrapolations, half-baked wishes, and flip assumptions. I do that all the time, too, but I save it for when I’m bored on long driving trips with anarchists. Heck, even my speculative blog posts here are full of anecdotes, not wild guesses.
Honestly, I’m just not seeing the value-add in that article. Maybe it would have been a good “link collection roundup” kind of post. Nothing wrong with that.
Is it worth it?
I got a kick out of today’s XKCD comic strip. (Chart: “How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you’re spending more time than you save?”) It reminds me a lot of a conversation I had last Friday with an entrepreneur who’s trying to automate some, but not all! of his information business.
See, “Allan” gets a lot of documents that are not so well standardized, puts their contents into a database, and essentially gets paid by his client companies to let them know when and where they–or their subsidiaries–are mentioned. (There’s more to it than that, but this is the relevant part right now.)
“Minimum Viable Product” jive
My college homie Dave is working on the “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP) version of his Baqbeat product. I’m always interested in what old friends are doing, so I asked him about it.
Baqbeat is a little hard to describe. Dave filled me in:
Baqbeat generates timelines of configuration changes to all the servers in
your development and operations environments – version control, build
servers, app servers, databases, and others. It automatically infers
related events on different timelines. So for example, you can see problems
in your production environment and immediately trace it to the code change
that broke it.
Help right now for tech-dependent startups!
(tl;dr: Answer a few easy questions to see if I can help your startup!)
Do you have a startup company that’s not yet all the way started up? Not quite done with the software tech product that defines you? Not sure how to finish it, or where to go next? Are you still stuck for a platform? Worried about funding? Afraid of making expensive mistakes?
I’m hearing you.
So you have this small business. You probably just started it. You’ve got a pretty good business plan, you’ve stashed some money to keep it going until it breaks even and can pay you, you’ve worked out health insurance and stuff… or maybe you’re keeping your day job and working a lot of nights and weekends to get it together. And it’s a cool idea: some product or service that people are definitely going to want to pay money for. It’s exciting and terrifying, because you don’t know what could go wrong, but you’re also a little apprehensive about how it will go right in the end.
Pre-Announcement: Help for your tech startup!
Well! I just spent a lot of time with various tech-related startup companies. Some of them have Projects That Suck; others are simply getting started with new things. I’ve learned a lot more about what does and doesn’t work, and I’m ready to share the results with you.
Do you have a startup that’s not yet all the way started up? Not quite done with the software tech product that defines you? Not sure how to finish it, or where to go next? Still stuck for a platform? Worried about funding? Afraid of making expensive mistakes?
If this sounds like you, watch here next Wednesday for the plan and the details. We can work together to get your startup project on track, within budget, and under control. I’m really excited about this. I think you will be too.
Adventures in Unix administration
I’ve been underground and off the blog for quite a while now. A lot of distractions have been going on, and the biggest project over my last couple of years has been under heavy non-disclosure, so there hasn’t been much to write about and even less time to write it in.
But one of the biggest distractions is on its way out. That’s right… the criticalresults.com server is getting an upgrade! Yay!
Cost of convergence
I was recently developing a significant new feature on an ASP.NET application. The client’s regular dev team is located in India, but for this new feature they wanted somebody whom they could work with face-to-face, and having me dedicated to the project (for a short time) seemed like an advantage.
We started off really well. I was able to get into TFS for version control, connect to the development database, and add a few basic pages to get started.
Rules for nothing
One blog entry from last year, “Look. This SOPA/PIPA Thing,” started out as an offhand blurb on my Facebook status. I think I spent two whole minutes writing it, which can be pretty effective when you know exactly what you want to say:
Rather than doing their own damn work chasing down copyright violators, they want to keep everyone off sites that *might* be used for unauthorized copying.
My favorite comment came from my old Grinnell College homie, Laura Allender Ferguson, who said simply: “Go Agile.” She was responding to my side-whine about the ever-changing requirements that we always get from software development clients.
Solving the right problem
For several years now, I’ve been describing my business as “Making Your Software Project Not Suck.” Here’s where that catchphrase came from, and how I actually go about doing that.
Where it came from
Maybe twelve years ago… yeah, okay, that would have been in the lull after the post-Y2K slowdown and just before 9/11… I was pretty much in between major projects. As was almost everyone else.
It was time to Work on Marketing! Which if you’re smart, is something you do all the time, but in some ways I’m just not that smart. Or more to the point, I do know what I have to do but there are always competing priorities that appear to be more urgent. You know how it goes. Fire-fighting often trumps planning.
