We made it back from Baltimore. This weekend was a total blast. Bo Dollis & The Wild Magnolias were joined by a couple of Mardi Gras indians from Bo’s tribe. And as always Buckwheat Zydeco got the crowd moving and left them wanting more. Rachel and Fernando were excellent hosts, and it was really nice to catch up with Linda and Jeff. All and all, it was a great weekend. Too bad we couldn’t stay longer.
Melanie and I are flying down to Baltimore today. I’m so psyched for a number of reasons. First, I have always wanted to visit Baltimore, the hometown of such greats as John Waters and Divine. Secondly, we are going to visit with Rachel and Fernado another of Melanie’s sisters and her sister’s boyfriend respectively.
Another reason for being excited is Artscape, which is going on this weekend in Baltimore. And the best part of Artscape is Buckwheat Zydeco who will be performing on the Sun Stage at 8:45 pm on Saturday. This guy really gets my butt ah-movin’.
And finally, I am psyched about the trip to Baltimore because my friends Linda and Jeff, originally from St. Louis now living in the DC area, are driving up for the weekend. It’s been two years since I have seen either of them, and I am so excited that we will be meeting up at Artscape. It’s going to be a great weekend!
Last night Melanie and I saw Chicago. Entertaining but the crowd was not into it as much as the crowd at Hairspray. My favorite part of Chicago? The outfits. Totally reminded me of the preferred style for many at Monday night Fetish night in St. Louis. I miss those Monday nights at time.
A year ago today, Melanie and I were part of a group going to a Yankee’s game. Melanie and I separated from the group to find a shorter line for beer and hot dogs. We got to our seats before the rest of the group and started talking. We talked to each other for the rest of the game (and I was gracefully trying to stare at her long, tan, smooth, sexy legs). I wonder if she ever caught me looking.
Recently my friend Karsten Januszewski posted a message to the RSS-DEV group suggesting that UDDI could be used as a directory of RSS feeds. I for one really like the idea. UDDI provides not only a public directory that is easily searchable but an API that would allow me to automate the search rather the discovery of new RSS feeds that I might be interested in.
Ironically a couple of days prior to first learning of Karsten’s idea, I spent an hour looking for RSS feeds covering a particular topic for a customer. Sure I found various sites listing some feeds and such but no definitive directory. Should Karsten’s idea take off then the time it took me to find feed in the past will be greatly reduced. And as I said I can automate the discovery of new RSS feeds. I for one fully support Karsten’s idea.
xsd.exe from the .NET SDK has been a favorite tool of mine in recent months, but it let me down tonight. It seems that xsd.exe does not support schema files that import other schemas. I’m bummed.
The brief power outage in the lower Manhattan was an interesting experience. With no power in the West Village, shops and restaurants were forced to close. This sent a large number of people out onto the streets. And traffic was a total mess with no traffic signals working. Subways were not working and buses were overflowing with people.
I was planning to meet Melanie and Brenna for lunch in Central Park just as the power went out. So I started walking. And I walked, and I walked. I can now say I have walked from my apartment to Melanie’s Upper Eastside pad with only one brief stop in Central Park. Although an enjoyable walk, it’s not something I care to do on a regular basis.
Last night Melanie, her sister Brenna, and I saw the new Broadway musical Hairspray based on the John Waters’ movie of the same name. The show set in Baltimore, 1962, was not only hilarious but energetic, up-beat, and quite entertaining. The story is about a plump teenage girl who fights for racial equality and integration by appearing as a regular on a local TV dance show. What’s more funny than that? Well, a lot of things I guess but this show is still very funny. And Harvery Fierstein is simply divine as Edna Turnblad.
I am starting to realize there are different types of software developers. I guess I have always known this but it was not clear to me how the differences affect delivery of software solutions. This probably explains why I am happy on some gigs and frustrated on others. And why I can easily become frustrated on projects where I start out happy.
As Joel Spolsky says, there are five worlds of software development: shrinkwrap, internal, embedded, games, and throwaway. I come from the shrinkwrap world where programs should have easy to use interfaces, be easy to install and deploy, and resilient to variations between computers. After all, shrinkwrap applications are expected to be used “in the wild” by a large number of people. Developing shrinkwrap applications requires a mindset not commonly found in the corporate and consulting worlds. And with this different mindset comes a different way to work towards achieving the goals.
I’ll pick on my buddies at Antenna Software for a moment. Now in their defense, I will say I left Antenna over a year ago and a lot has changed in that time. My comments here are based on my time at Antenna as an employee.
Antenna had the dream to be an ISV focused on mobile and ASP-based solutions for the field force automation. In my mind to be successful we had to think like those companies producing shrinkwrap and embedded applications. However the software engineering team was staffed with primarily people either recently out of college or from a corporate IT background. The college guys are okay because you can shape and mold them but the corporate folks are a different story. And I believe this contributed to the lack of a solid product after my one year at Antenna.
A lot of assumptions can be made when you are developing applications that only run within a single company. It is easier to demand certain restrictions or hardware configurations. And deployment can be more involved. It can be tough for most ex-corporate developers to make the switch from controlled environment programming to programming for the wild, which leads me to my current thought and reason for this post.
I work in the consulting world of software development. I like the freedom it provides and will probably remain a consultant for the rest of my career. But most of the projects that consultants work on are custom software development for a single corporation. There are exceptions from time to time like the work I did last year at i-Deal, which was an internal software development effort turned commercial Web-based software. But for the most part consulting gigs are on internal software development efforts.
In my career I have observed an interesting fact. When I apply shrinkwrap techniques and approaches for delivering an internal software solution the customer tends to be happier and the solution is perceived as having a higher level of quality. Working in this manner will not make the software developer’s life easier. In fact, it is harder for the developer and requires more work. But software development is not about making the developer’s life easier. It’s about making the end user’s life easier.
