Long time since I last posted. Need less to say, I have been a little busy. I hope to resume most of my regular life soon, but here are a few highlights (to be followed with further posts later) of what I've been up to:

• Julie and Allie came back from a month long trip to Taiwan, to visit Julie's mom. Allie got her second hair cut - the last was when she was 1. She went from waste length hair to just past the shoulders. She made amazing progress in Chinese. Before this trip, she had a bad accent and very limited vocabulary. Hanging around with two cousins she adores, as well as dozens of other extended family members willing to spend time doing things with and talking to her made a huge difference.
• At the beginning of November, I was invited to participate in a week long training session my company puts on - not for developers, but for analysts. It was a really neat experience and I think it speaks highly of our management - that they get the need to keep developers as up to speed as anyone else on how the business works. I learned a ton of stuff, and go to spend time with top minds in the industry (and bug them with questions.) In addition, I met a bunch of cool people from our offices all over the world. We have a lot of work to do on the technology front to improve our organization, but I have now doubt that we're going to do it. This company will grow amazingly over the coming years, and I am glad to be here to take part in that.
• We were going to go to our friends Monique and Dominique's house, in Portland, for Thanksgiving, but ended up inviting a few people over. More people got invited. Then a few more. In the end, I think 19 people showed up. We had a blast, but it was a lot of work to get ready and clean up.

Enough personal stuff...

• I enjoyed the final day of the Seattle Code Camp. I got a chance to talk to two of my agile heroes, Brad Wilson, and Peter Provost. I also got to talk to Stuart Celarier, and was introduced to the Seattle XP Group. Too bad their meetings are the same day as South Sound .NET - which I haven't gone to either in several months. Argg...
• Speaking of user groups: Some co-workers finally got me excited enough to form an in house Developers Group. I had the good fortune of getting to know someone in our company that is one of those "do-er" kinds of people - the kind that can organize a teleconference on 3 continents with 100 people, in under an hour, without batting an eye. I kind of bashfully asked if there was any way we could use one of our company's fancier meeting/conference rooms after hours for around 20 people. She basically said, "Go for it!" and I found that it was actually as easy as inviting the room to our conference. I could even invite coffee and his friends pizza and sandwiches from the cafeteria downstairs if my boss was willing to pay for them (hmm...haven't asked about that...) We got a sweet conference room on the twelfth floor, with an awesome view of the Puget sound, a massive projector and computer, fancy mood lighting, comfy chairs, a mezzanine level - the whole nine yards. I hope about 10 people will show up, which we will try to grow to 20 or 30 as time passes. Thanks Wei, Michael, and Ariel for finally pushing me over the edge on this!
• I've been learning SSIS. It's been kind of frustrating, kind of fun. Mostly, it's only fun when it works. It was really painful to get to the "works" stage with my first couple of projects, but aside from a few gripes, I see how powerful and useful it could be going forward.
• Our development team at work feels like it's getting tighter. Inspired by Brad and Peter, we spent more energy trying to do pair programming and share code better. I think we are good, but we could be a lot better. We only have one project we are doing right now that is truly owned by all developers on the team. The other 4 projects we actively work on all have code owners, and we are working to abolish that.
• My boss said I was a "hippy coder" at a recent team meeting held down the street, in an...umm...off site meeting facility with fermented beverages. I was a little shocked. I try to be open minded, but compared to most of the other developers in our organization, I think I am _more_ disciplined - I use TDD, automated builds, normalized database schemas, consistent names, etc., in comparison with the local standard, which is to say "good enough" a lot. I guess I was just kind of shocked about this, but my boss has a history of making startling observations about me, which give me great cause for self reflection - which is a good thing.
• I installed Vista...like it...not the stuff of dreams, but lots of little things I like (parental controls especially.)
• I finally checked out the "Baroque Cycle" from the local library. What a read. Lots of history. Lots of math and science. Heavy. Sucked up a lot of time.
• I have been working on something kind of neat, integrating SQL Server, our applications, and OLAP. For a taste, here's a paper a colleague wrote several years ago, about doing almost the same thing, just using SAS for the application part (where I would be using .NET.)

Anyway, I hope to blog more now. Later!

 

One thing that's always a pain when applying for a new job is wrestling together a bunch of phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses, etc., to use as references. It's kind of embarrassing and awkward to boot.

The nice thing about being in a users group (like ssdotnet - especially one that's not too big, where you can know everybody) is that you are in a group of people that are dedicated enough to their craft that they take time out of their busy lives to come hang out with you - we all know they could be doing lots of things more interesting than that. Putting some effort into being a better developer is instant karma in my book.

If you know me from a users group or conference or something and you need a reference for something, let me know. I know you are the type of person I would want to work with and I have no problem sharing that knowledge with others.

 

I went to dotnetusers.org's meeting tonight for a WCF presentation. The presentation wasn’t as deep as I had been hoping. I am trying to get back into this stuff and need some oomph. After seeing more and more really awesome presenters, I am really starting to hate power point.

There were a few more people than at ssound.net in Olympia, but if we keep things going at ssdotnet, we can take 'em.

Ted Neward was there and some other people I almost recognized from somewhere.

Jason Haley indicated he was going, but I don’t know what he looks like (ok, look, there is a picture here…but I don’t think I saw you.)

For a large chunk of my developer career (from about 1999~2004) I was really, really interested in distributed systems. I remember when the ATL developer’s mailing list morphed into the SOAP mailing list (or maybe I morphed into someone reading the SOAP mailing list.) I loved COM+. I loved web services. When I first heard about Indigo, I was soo excited.

Then something kind of weird happened. I started seeing people actually building apps with XML Web Services. They sucked.

The last straw is still unfolding into my life. At work we are doing this huge, uber-high-stakes integration project with a third party application. The API blows chunks. I don't (really do) want to get into details, but someday, after I have filled my lungs with this, I will have some stories to tell, I am sure.

This is a high-visibility project and my boss is heavily leveraged. He (we) need this to work out well - but I just know something is wrong. All the signs are there. The first sign was when I saw they had a XML Web Service (...kind of thing....ahem) that returned a "cursor" (and I knew the backend database was Oracle...hmmm...cursors...Oracle...web services...)

Other signs:

• They've been talking/planning/meeting 20+ hours a week about it for almost a year, but ask any two people and you'll get 3 different answers about what they are doing and how it all works. The tracking error grows geometrically as you move away from the source.
• Every developer looks at the service interface and sees something different (I call them bad XML web services, but someone else might call it floor wax.)
• I sense a lot of apathy from some of the people that are supposed to benefit from this.

reduced:

• Lack of vision
• Lack of cohesion
• Lack of perceptible benefit

So what does this have to do with WCF? The reason I am having trouble getting back into this is that it is too far gone from reality. 3 years ago, it kind of sounded plausible that we would have all these people building loosely coupled apps with WS-* and the hundreds of specifications and rules they would have to learn to make it work right. Now...it frankly sounds kind of naive.

WCF makes it really easy to do things really right for Windows developers. For java developers there are things like this too, but when you read white papers from IBM or Oracle, you just know they aren't talking about exactly the same things. There is some kind of disconnect that keeps everybody from agreeing on things and just building stuff - and in the confusion, vendors like ours are born.

Being able to move up the food chain by claiming to support, "integrated, enterprise, solution-oriented, xml, distributed, _standards_based_, web services," is a boon to the sales forces of companies like this. Before they had libraries based on COM, Java, maybe perl or something, the sales guys didn’t know what any if that meant, and everything sort of worked. Nowadays you can put lipstick on a pile of XML pasta and sell it as a feature. All the sales guys “know” what that means, but not the developers.

I know we will be using WCF to unify how we build distributed apps in-house and I know some vendors will do the same thing. But we still have a long ways to go in integrating applications.