Be Different…

Boycott Times of India

I come from India and love to check whats going on in that land  on a daily basis.
I used to live in Bombay and used to worked near the Times of India building.

I really like the physical version of the paper for example http://epaper.timesofindia.com

It is appaling and i cant understand why I  get bugged with pop ups ads ( shaadi.com) whenever i visit that site. For those of you who dont know shaadi.com is like match.com

a) I am not in the market looking for a match ( My wife and two kids should be proof enough for that)

b) If at all you have no other revenue steam , altlease show some intelligent ads that i many not  mind watching. Show something on technology, Agile development.
I am competely put off sites that have no data whatsoever and simply throw a pop up . Hello there is something called as data analysis.

There is a secret to making money in the business. If you visit the times of india building in Bombay, the grond floor of the parking lot (one full section) was dedicated to the expensive cars that times of india executives drove.
How much more greedy you want to get.

If you really want to make money write excellent articles. Learn from other sites.
IBN CNN, slashdot,CNN, reuters etc. If you make me come more to  your site, i may end up
reading more of your  news.

Wonder why people are not angry at this.

I tried after a year http://www.timesofindia.com. Before i read the first news item, I had to bear with the stupid pop up.

If you read time of india please do me a favor, write about your user experience.

May be they will see the light

I have heard a lot about Barcamp . THis weekend a different take of BArcamp called Barcamp Bank is being held in Seattle.

I am very eager to go to this as most of what i have done in the last 12 years is software development for financial services. I am eager to meet folks in the industry who are actually involved day in and day out and hear from them the technical and process related challenges they are facing?

If you are in town this weekend  dont miss this event. If you make it stop by and say hello to me:)

In the book Good to great Jim Collins talks about a Stockdale paradox. Many organizations are busy today trying to implement a myriad of new processes and metodologies. But are they really aware of thier actions.

At the end of the day every business software project or product has a certain life span. Most of the software we write today has a life span of 5-7 years.

How many applications are there today on the internet that existed  five years ago.?
Think of what you did five years ago.The internet was quite new, google was absent, so was You tube , Skype and ITunes. IPod was not such a hot commodity a s it is now. Today IPOD has become synonymous to Mp3 players.

These are some software products that in my made have made a huge difference in how we percieve and use techy stuff ( from a common mans perspective )

1) Google Search
2) Hotmail / Yahoo mail
3) Apache server
4) Yahoo finance
5) Microsoft word
6) Windows XP
7) Yahoo messenger
Mapquest
9) EBay/WIkipedia
10) Travelocity

There are thousands of other products that have made a huge impact but in my view the above 10 have made the maximum impact on what we do today

Do you think all the tools above followed XP, Scrum or similar methods, and Agile. Are all of these TDD driven, have acceptance tests and follow iterative development.

I am sure of almost seven in the list which certainly were in no way developed on any agile technique.

What drove them was the fire to innovate, the need to be different. There was a wide open need and a product was developed that met the need. IT need not have been the best. Case in point , many of us dont use Mapquest today but use the much fancier version google maps or other look alikes like Microsoft maps.

As software developers and product owners we should not again become slaves to processes. If we start talking too much about things that dont matter then we are not going to be succesful.
We dont write code in agile or XP. We write in Java, C and C# ( Oh and how can i miss out on the Ruby lovers ).

What if all of a sudden tomorrow,  we forget about agile.XP and Scrum / Lean  {CTRL ATL DEL),  would we stop developing software and provide value to customers.

It is important to take a hard look at how we all develop software and think of this paradox

Do we sometimes create more problems for ourselves when we dont have to. Over the years I have seen that there has been no ground breaking innovation in how we program. The problem has only gotten worse.

We keep adding framework after framework. Layer after layer. At one side there are some simpler languages like C and Ruby. Then on the complete other spectrum we have languages like Java and .NET ( C# for example)

Java came out in 1996 timeframe and it was a new wave of programming. Not much has happened since then. Vendors introduced this confusing architecture called SOA which in 90 percent of the cases is Simply Over Architecture( SOA).

Then there are tools like Eclipse and Visual Studio. We speak of complicated things like collections, generics and Linq and Hibernate.Most of these are questionable frameworks. Well collections may be not.

I have worked extensively in both the Java and the .NET stack and its sad to say that even after 11 years , we have made no significant progress in how we perceive programming.

Software industry is very predictable.

First there are vendors like Microsoft and Sun and IBM etc whose sole purpose in life is to inculcate fear and create a need when absolutely no need exisits. For the last three to four years all the CEO and CTO’s are drinking the SOA and Agile cool aid.

Then there are thought leaders whose sole job is to create fear too, write books and take us to a programming model that we for ourselves have never created. Thanks to gang of four for creating a never ending confusion of Patterns. If they did not write that book, I think life would have been much simpler.

Take the  patterns and practices group in Microsoft. These folks basically create the next best framework that adds no serious value to enterprise software. It does make it simpler to some extent but its not an easy thing to use. For those experienced in any enterprise library from Microsoft, its no simple framework.

Same appears to be the problem in the Java world. Do we really need Entity Beans CMP? I can count on my finger tips that number of entity beans i have written in the last 10 years. Oh wait, I dont have to count, I never had a need to write one.

Why did we invent the wsdl?It uses XML. XML based communication is the least efficient way to transmit text for a webservice.Whatever happened to the good old binary format Now we tell hackers exactly what the password is or the ss no is as its in clear text.

Take an example of the new .NET 3.0 framework. First we had remoting, then webservices and now we have WCF /indigo. Create need when there is none. There is something called Jini in Java world that somehow did not see the light at the end of the tunnel.

By the time you would have even figure out what these mean , they will be out with the next set of acronyms. If all you are doing is showind data from the database in a fancy UI why not make life easy.

Take a look at WXF stack and you will see what i mean.. The whole premise of WXF stack is confusion.

Oh innovators where are you? You sure are not in Google , Microsoft , IBM and Sun. While they are busy adding more confusion to the already messed up programming models there must that only person who is thinking about the problem in a much sim

Make it simple, make it work.