Shades of Vista

Is Windows 8.1 to Windows 8 what Windows 7 was to Vista?  Is this some form of marketing strategy to release the a major new version, let it take a lot of heat, then release a relatively minor version and watch everyone suddenly embrace it ?  I never saw much of a difference between Vista and Windows 7 but the former was a flop and the latter a success.  Is the same thing happening again?

I didn't know how empty was my soul until it was filled

 

A few years ago I took a data warehousing course with the Kimball group and remarked at the time that the data warehouse field appeared to have a highly structured approach to designing data warehouse solutions.  While building data warehouses seemed to have well established patterns and methods for how to construct them, software systems seemed to be like snowflakes, each one built with different methodologies uniquely suited to particular project/team/company. And no shortage of debate about the competing merits of varying approaches and methodologies.  Data warehousing felt like engineering while software development was more like art.

That perspective changed a few months ago when I had the opportunity to attend the IDesign Architect's Master class taught by Juval Lowy.  In this course, Juval presented a highly structured methodology for software design.  I found the course riveting and eye opening.  It was my first experience with a comprehensive proven methodology that could credibly demonstrate a method for taking software development from craftsmanship to engineering.  The single most compelling thing I took from the course is the idea that, contrary to appearances, there aren't a paralyzing myriad of options making each software system design a unique creation.  This sentiment is distilled into Juval’s Zen of architecture.

For the beginner architect, there are many options
For the master architect, there are only a few

But there’s a big difference between theory and practice, and while an appealing sentiment maybe I’d drunk the cool-aid too quickly and fell for the cult like lure of Juval’s style.

However, since that course I have also had the opportunity to work with Shy Cohen of IDesign, and have seen the Method applied first hand when we hired him to help develop a new high level architecture for our corporate systems.  Its an impressive thing to see a method produce an enterprise architecture in one week.  It further bolstered my belief in the prospect of true software engineering.

Years ago I attained a Master of Software Engineering degree largely because I craved a more formal discipline to compliment my self taught skills.  While my master's studies really never provided that, I think I have now found with IDesign what I was seeking back then.  I'm still a long way from taking it from architecture to implementation, nor am I practiced in the Method, but then again I've only begun to study with the masters and I’m pretty optimistic of my chances.

RIF Notes #22

“It’s better to be wrong than vague” – Frederick Brooks Jr.

• More on Craftsmanship-Ted Neward’s continuing debate with software craftsmanship.
• Windows 8 LOB Story-Rocky walks us through the pain of deploying winrt apps to the enterprise.
• I had a recent discussion around the seemingly arbitrariness of the 40 work week.  It appears that its far from arbitrary with “150 years of research proves that long hours at work kill profits, productivity and employees “
  • We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor
  • Why Working More Than 40 Hours a Week is Useless
  • Bring back the 40-hour work week
• When culture turns into policy- A fine line exists between spelling out company culture and inadvertently engraving it as policy
• Every Employee Should Work From Home- More remote work fallout of the Yahoo and BestBuy policy changes.

RIF Notes #21

These posts, originally intended to be weekly, are coming much less frequently. Oh well…

“The fantasy model of collaborative design reflects a monumental unconcern about conceptual integrity. Jill pats the design here; Jim nudges it there; Jack patches it yonder. It is spontaneous; it is collaborative; and it produces poor designs. Indeed, we know the process so well that we have a scornful name for it—committee design. If collaboration tools are designed so they encourage committee design, they will do more harm than good” – Frederick P. Jr. Brooks

• Better remote collaboration will make protectionism harder- A case for the economic advantage of remote work.
• On Knowledge – “There are three kinds of knowledge: what you know you know, what you know you don't know, and what you don't know you don't know”
• Michael Montgomery of IDesign points out a major gap in Agile, the lack of architecture.
  • Able Architecture: Part II
  • Agile and the Architect
• Silverlight is "Dead"- Rocky talks about what it means for a technology to be ‘dead’.
• Port Bridge - Building “hybrid” cloud applications where parts of an an app lives up in a cloud infrastructure and other parts of the infrastructure live at a hosting site, or a data center, or even in your house ought to be simple – especially in this day and age of Web services.
• C# 5.0: More Than Just Async – Very cool caller information that obsoletes the need to walk the stackframe.
• Give Your Classes a Software Contract – Code Contracts seem like a useful practice.
• BI Components for Business Value- Each data warehouse/business intelligence (DW/BI) lifecycle iteration delivers a coherent, incremental data set that provides value to the organization and can be implemented in a relatively short time frame
• Cache busting in ASP.NET – Looks like a fairly straightforward way to do it.
• Cost to enable side-loading on a Windows 8 device
• On the Dark Side of "Craftsmanship"- Ted Neward questions software craftsmanship.
• Surefire Ways To Destroy Employee Morale- My new years resolution is to hit all 9 this year.
• SQL Server Backup and Restore to Cloud Simplified
• Introduction to Service-Orientation-  appendix from Programming WCF Services by Juval Lowy.

“stand in the corner and scream with me”