Work

Items of relevance to my work for a company in Edinburgh providing solutions to the Finance Industry.

Quality of development work unrelated to time spent

alistairl

Joel Spolsky recently added an article to his Joel on Software site, continuing his ongoing work about which programmers are best and whether it matters at all.

To begin with, I disagree with an early comment about building a better mousetrap to solve some problem that hasn’t been solved before. Sorry Joel, but the mousetrap was invented to solve an existing problem with mice. Better implies an existing solution to be improved on.

There – got that off my chest.

The really interesting bit in the article are stats relating to quality of software development mapped against time spent, as collated by a Professor Stanley Eisenstat at Yale. This appears to show that they aren’t correlated. I need to have a proper think about my opinion on this, but I’m not sure that it substantiates Joel’s claim about good programmers, just that it is ammunition against other attitudes to doing development on the cheap.

Ivars Postcard in June

alistairl

It has taken me a long time to read this, and comment on it. The Ivar in question is a chap called Ivar Jacobson, who you may have heard of being as he was one of the original team involved in the development of UML.

He now travels the world and the posts to his email list are called Ivar’s postcards. I am subscribed on my work email, which I don’t read as often these days being based out of the office so I haven’t worked through the mailing lists for a while.

Ivar’s postcard from June recounts his recent trip to China, and like parallel developments in India, looks at the rapidly maturing software development industry across there. Key in his discussion is the quality vs process argument, as expressed in the efforts of the Chinese to scale the heights of the Capability Maturity Model.

It reminded me of my early experiences of formal processes, and how in my younger (and more naive) days I thought that process was the way to go. Of course, BS5750, ISO9000, and later Prince 2 etc are good reminders but they don’t (and shouldn’t) take away from the skills of experienced managers and developers engaged in the delivery of a project. One particular project manager I worked with on a retail e-commerce project impressed me at the time, and spoke a lot about achieving the scales on the capability maturity model. There are of course balances to be sought, others have commented that it can effectively drive out innovation and turn a company completely risk averse if taken to extremes.

At this point, I could refer to Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but unfortunately after reading it I can only remember being saddened by the life of the writer and the decline of his son. I know it is supposed to be an exploration of quality – I’ll have to read it again! And yes, it has motorbikes in it.

Anyway, don’t confuse a good process with a “good” product.

Perks of the Job – Euan Garden

alistairl

Had the priviledge yesterday of attending a presentation on SQL Server 2005 given by Euan Garden.

Its around three years since he was last in Scotland talking about the product and he is one impressive presenter. Bearing in mind the product is being developed by 1000 devs at Microsoft, Euan does an amazing job of covering the spectrum of the programme from Integration Services to CLR.

Top stuff!

It also reminded me that I am but one exam away from MCDBA, ah to cover so many disciplines!

Getting the bus to work during the G8 week

alistairl

These days I am leaving the Passat at home, using the bus in preference as it goes in on the green lanes into Edinburgh. Apart from the fact that half of them appear to be dug up at the moment, and they only start half way along Calder Road.

The big wonder I have at the moment is how next week is going to Pan out with the various G8 related “celebrations” going on in the middle of Edinburgh. The bus that I get normally terminates in Waterloo Place, which is the other end of Princes Street, the main place to go up and down if you are going to have a March.

It will all be interesting, I’ll keep an eye on the television in the evening to watch the festivities.

The last few weeks at work

alistairl

Names changed to protect the innocent and all that, but the work landscape has been quite different lately.

In April I had a few days writing load tests scripts to hit an Accounting system. An interesting mix of VBScript sendkeys, bits of analysis and had the other guys doing a good bit of Citrix tweaking to build up a load to hit the server farm.

Then mid April I was assigned to a Business Analysis job at one of the Banks headquartered in Edinburgh. Being a bit of a techie (really!) it is a bit of a change, but a good opportunity to practice this bit of the development lifecycle that tends to be neglected when the ability to deliver is also present. It can be all to easy to dive into code, so a long stretch doing requirements documentation and Functional Specification will sharpen up my skills there.

Long term onsite assignment is something I’ve done from time to time, though it takes a couple of minutes to explain that I’m still employed by the same lot, I still do kind of the same job, it just so happens I’m working from the client premises till the end of the year.

As it happens, MartinS and MattL are also around and about the same site, though I float between buildings – one when I am working in the building that is the base for the division I am attached to, the other when I am out seeing “The Business”.

Being back in centre Edinburgh means public transport again, getting the bus in and out from West Lothian to Haymarket. I’m getting used to it, sitting on the bus just letting my thoughts wander, a lot less concentration than driving the car in similar traffic. I’m still blighted by my travel sickness though, worse when the bus is hot and windows steamed up. Something I hope I will grow out of (lol at my age). The other side effect is my driving needs a few miles to sharpen up each time – instead of my usual 40 mile round trip commute, I only drive the Passat from time to time.

Of Jonathan Blair

alistairl

If you follow my sparse blogging efforts, you may remember a post I made in November Of Rhana Consulting and Jonathan Blair. This was a reference to an MCP that is the subject of a case study on the MCSD web page at Microsoft.

If you check out the comments on that post, someone claiming to be Jonathan Blair has given us an update. I’ve no particular reason not to believe the post, so good to hear that he has landed on his feet, even if Rhana have nose dived somewhat.

Jonathan – an invitation – tell us more !!

How to give a good technical presentation

alistairl

I just watched an excellent video of Don Box talking about a few of the ground rules that he applies to presentations. He does give a good presentation himself, I saw a few at the PDC and he applies the tips he talks about. Runs for about 23 minutes, but worth it!

I hope one or two are familiar to you if you have had any training in presentation skills, but I like the technical spin on this.

I’ve been quite impressed by the recent material I’ve found on channel9, but this is real world useful stuff rather than just interesting background information like the SQL Server team videos. You can see the post that the video comes from at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=31792.

Another one, 70-315 passed this time

alistairl

Just passed 70-315 Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, the first of my c# exams towards my MCSD. Woohoo!

Amazed myself at a half decent pass mark too – they are still sticking back to giving pass marks and section scores and I was more than a hundred over the pass mark (just ;)).

The Que book and the transcenders were helpful, though I felt that the mix of questions was quite different to that of the transcenders in the exam that I took. And as I expected, the exam doesn’t test coding per se, rather the framework elements related to web development. So there was a good amount related to the handling of web forms and the new data handling bits that they head up as ADO.NET.

Now for a brief breather of an evening, then preparations for the windows app exam, 70-316.

Only two c# exams to get, and I’ll be an MCSD .NET to go with my MCSD for Visual Studio 6.0!