So the recession is tough. I find that any downturn in the global economy means that it's tough for developers, because now that the world relies on IT (I mean try and think of a business that can get away without using a computer). Businesses today depend heavily on IT and therefore invest vast amounts of money in their internal development and infrastructure. Therefore it makes perfect sense that any call for tougher spending or cost cutting and you go after the most costly workforce or rein in the costly projects. Bang! there go the developers out the door. Whilst I understand the mentality and agree with the business ethics, its hard as a developer to not feel victimised by the economy sometimes. On the up side developers are paid well and therefore take the cons with the pros.
I read about the lack of opportunities this recession has cast upon the new age of developers and feel I need to help them or at least advise those looking for work. What never ceases to amaze me is how little we can predict or understand business trends within such a period, so it comes as a shock to me what I am saying to my sales team and writing in my own blog. The financial world needs you! At present my developers are receiving approximately one call per day from different agencies, tempting them to haul out and leave my business and go to work for the banks direct. The investment banks are expanding and a tremendous rate this year and at the peak approximately two months ago, I personally was receiving over 3 calls a day. My only explanation is that within recession comes buy-outs and bankruptcy, so the banks have new businesses to incorporate and IT systems to merge. In addition to this those clever bankers have come out the recession having written off all debt (now wouldn’t that be nice). So they are now spending there way into better results for next year.
So today I had yet another meeting and this time along with the usual brain flexing developers that exasperate themselves on mentioning as many acronyms as possible, I heard one that I not before. I started to pay attention and did the un-think-able. In the middle of a development and architecture meeting, I asked “what does UML stand for?” Developers will never admit to not knowing something, in favour of Googling the answer upon immediate return to their desks. The developer in question (to my satisfaction) didn’t really know what UML stood for and gave a wishy washy answer about modelling our code prior to development.
In short UML or Unified Modelling Language was a big buzz in 2005 when it was launched and was predicted (when in use with development techniques) to improve the development process 10 fold. I love when new methodologies are developed and start making claims about coders almost becoming a thing of the past or increase coders performance 1000 times using our new spangled methodology. I am always cast back to being introduced to ‘Paired programming’ and new way of increasing performance and reducing bugs “10 fold”. Possibly the most wasteful and ridiculous method I ever heard of, where two developers sit side-by-side to advise each other whilst writing. One developer has the keyboard for a period and the other one questions the code as its written. Utter stupidity for companies with more money than sense. One developer types and this ends up with the other looking out the window or going for a walk until it’s their turn, and all for double the price. Back to UML and another world of incredible claims and the almost obliteration of the developer (well almost I said). UML is basically another over complicated way to push developers into one company’s utopian way of developing code. I’m guessing that most of you that read my blog will not have heard of it and for good reason. It’s mainly for architects and project managers to adopt and push upon the development community in hope of showing some signs they are earning their over inflated pay cheque. The article I read about UML, Greg Carter, executive vice president and CTO of Metastorm (a provider of architect software), believes that UML is a little less of a hot topic because “application development is changing and people are using modelling now to generate executable applications as opposed to generating code, and that is just a fact”. Carter later went on to say “I think the generating of code is getting a little passé”. Perhaps Carter should learn a little phrase called “talking your own book”, a trading term where you only support ideas that will help your trades. Coding a little passé, I mean how does Carter think his generating code software was developed! And this is a CTO, wow! It’s these kinds of architects and theorists that come up with a method such as ‘paired development’ or UML and it’s these people that promote them. Ask any developer, they are just an old development method wrapped up in pretty packaging to impress a CTO enough for them to write about it (or even worse, badly quote on it), or force it upon their poor minions.
My customers are some of the richest, fastest growing and cutting-edge technologists in the world. We predominantly work with investments banks with exorbitant budgets. They don’t use UML and I am not likely to advice them to do so in the near future, unless someone turns down the temperature to hell by some considerable amount.
I have loved this marketing accident of the iPhone killer statement, being branded about by varying marketing and PR firms in a vein attempt to get users on their client’s newest mobile/Smartphone. Inadvertently they are propagating the extreme success of the iPhone in one sentence and furthering their success by motioning that they are the one to beat and therefore the best. Who do they think they are working for?
If I were a mobile phone company CEO and my latest launch was imminent and I reviewed the literature of the PR or marketing company I had hired, to find the words “iPhone killer” anywhere in the text, I think I would throw them from my building, preferably from the top floor!
To truly beat the phenomenon of the iPhone you will need the following ingredients:
1. A mobile that does not hang i.e. is responsive upon every touch
a. iPhone’s single task functionality gave them something no one has ever delivered. An OS that waits for you!
2. Touch screen and fluid animation
3. MOST IMPORTANTLY! A massive development community
That’s it, that is the recipe. So far the competitors have been clunky, slow and with worse graphics than the iPhone. They have tried to woo the community with free music or cheap phones. Users don’t care about buying the phone, and the fact that an iPhone costs users $300 upwards shows them this. Get the recipe right and they will come.
In my mind there are only two companies in the world that can become greater than the iPhone or be the, dare I say it “iPhone killer” (there, I said it). They are, Google and Microsoft. It’s obvious; these two companies don’t make mobiles natively. I hear you scream, “why these two companies”, because they are content providers, that’s why. All other mobile companies predominantly make hardware, but not these two. Apple succeeded because they had a great product AND the Apple store waiting to pump iPhone's full of content. Google have the most content in the world and the development community to buy into developing apps for their phones. Microsoft however have a great deal of content, but and that’s a big BUT, they have the development world at their feet. They deliver brilliant dev environments and software and can tap into the biggest market share of developers and existing OS’s the world has ever seen. They are currently pumping money into the development community to get people like me to start writing apps for their new Mobile 7 software. This OS has badly needed an overhaul for years and I think their timing is just about right. They will stand on the shoulders of the iPhone experience and providing their phone is a responsive and pretty to use, they will match and probably go beyond the content that Apple has created within a few years (not instantly, but watch the wave form when they launch).
Google are a great contender, but hey everyone wants to make money, not just Google and they focus on free too much for the development community to invest their time and effort to Google own success, rather than perhaps their own. However Microsoft will soon have courses and exams and business software and links to exchange and encryption and contracts with the government etc…..
My money is on Microsoft; watch out for Windows Mobile 7!
I got that familiar ping in my pocket today signifying an email and there it was, an invite to VMworld 2010. I would love to say that VMware invited me personally (and well they should after delivering V-Ployment to the world), but ney, it was a vendor that has kindly asked me to go and discuss their hardware and development capabilities around this great software.
Yes VMware is great software, I say this slightly bitterly after releasing some software of my own (V-Ployment) that complimented ESX 3.5. Only after providing the VMware labs a ‘Free’ copy to help them build their servers (which they did manually) did we see a great deal of our features in ESX 4 (hmmmm). Ah well, despite my unlucky timing, I still regard them highly as software manufacturers and believe as stated in previous posts that the virtual world is the future of all computing.
My thoughts will be as always on the development side of VMworld 2010. With the use of powershell and VMwares clever infrastructure anything can be achieved. However I cant help but think, where is Citirx world? Citrix has been hot on the heels of VMware for a number of years now and we are starting to hear of lots of technologists converting to their cheaper and some say faster alternative. Having played with their desktop images, I can say that in that space they are certainly better and you can see some great examples of people building and using vast numbers of Citrix desktops on youtube in seconds.
Citirx are another vendor who have bought into Powershell and my recommendation for today having spent some time now discussing the benefits of Citrix over VMware, other than the big plus of cost (Yes Citirix is far cheaper), is, its time for Citirx world!
Citrix is a brilliant software vendor and technologists should leap from their comfort zone and give them a try.
This week I finally had call to implement and test Windows 7. As we always strive to be at the forefront of new technologies, we must have been one of the only businesses in the world that adopted Vista. I personally am a big fan of Microsoft and see them as heroes of mine. Imagine the sheer disappointment and pain after running our kit on Vista for only a few weeks. We abandoned our core machines and re-built them as XP once again. I have no idea what went wrong but am I glad that the Vista era is over!
We welcome a new era of Windows 7 and after this week, we welcome it with open arms. This is what we have been waiting for, faith restored; hero worship back in order and a truly marvellous operating system sits before us. I thoroughly enjoyed installing and configuring Windows 7, not only was it light weight in response, but it gave me that feeling of a great new gadget, just like XP did when we first had a play.
I will not rant on about how good it is, because I don’t want to sound like an advert for Microsoft. As you all know I am completely independent and have no affiliations ,other than that of NRLComputers (those genius software developers and support engineers). However I want to give a few examples of why Windows 7 impressed me. Firstly we run some old IBM kit that always had driver and hardware issues because XP and Vista didn’t have the necessary drivers within. These all worked perfectly after install. To be even more impressive, the presentation laptops (all IBM) always had sound card issues and the Wi-Fi never ever worked (despite countless calls to IBM and Levano). After installing Windows 7, my little face dropped as this was still the case. 5 minutes later when I heard a little ping and looked down and found that these devices have been repaired and are now working “tah dah”!
It always makes me laugh when you boot up Windows or any software and they give a fanfare welcome in some way. Why, because they haven’t done anything yet. I don’t wake up in the morning and suddenly start trumpeting how good I am. I tend to do this after doing something slightly meaningful other than opening my eyes. However when Windows 7 gave its gentle welcome trumpet, I was quite happy to finally see a worthy little sibling of Windows XP.
It must be that time of year again when all the CTO’s in the US and UK have just arrived home from their yearly off-site where they discuss their golfing scores, new purchased yachts and the usual annual announcement of either off-shoring or outsourcing IT resource. Some call me cynical, but I have been in the IT business for too long not to notice the trends and patterns. These patterns are most pronounced either just as summer begins (so around now in the UK) or upon the arrival of a new CTO. At these pronounced moments in any industry, remembering that the CTO usually can not produce money for the business (unless a software house), so the normal and obvious pattern is to save vast amounts of money and therefore earn the exaggerated bonus either leveraged from this or contractually bound to them. So, just as summer kicks in and business starts to take its sunny day lull, we hear the trumpets blast as the latest IT trend hits the IT management team. All technologists hold their breath in anticipation of the latest announcement, waiting to find out if this year’s initiative will be off-shoring or outsourcing to save bundles of cash.
Computers weekly state that for this year:
• 43% will outsource remote infrastructure management.
• 31% will be investing in business process outsourcing (BPO).
• 16% of organisations will be outsourcing their BI functions.
I don’t really have any issue with anyone making the decision to outsource or use remote resources to save money. After all I am a director of nrlcomputers and that’s pretty much what they do. I do however scoff at the CTO that looks to save the most amount of money via off-shoring with little knowledge or consideration into how the service levels will drop. This is something that notoriously CTO’s are brilliant at. They sell the off-shore investment to the board in waves of promised saved expenditure. Then they drain the local IT resource almost to melting point in order to maintain the accepted poorer levels of service that inevitably follow through less expensive, culturally divided and geographically disjointed off-shore companies (not to say all are like this, some are brilliant!), but when saving money, the cheapest that promises the most usually wins out. Its only when service levels are at screaming point and someone on the board wants to know “how we got here”, that someone like me smiles at the recent departure of the brilliant CTO that conceptualised, tantalised and implemented the whole off-shore or outsourcing project. Once completed they took themselves and their fat bonus off to another unsuspecting company, with their gleaming reputation and another successful money saving exercise under their belt.
Guess what the new CTO’s plans are going to be for this year?
Powershell is Microsoft’s answer to the command line on Unix or Linux. Having played with it for a while, it seems that everyone is buying into it. All the big houses are releasing Powershell api’s or Powerpacks as they are now called (utilities of powershell scripts). Much like xml, if adopted by the development community then what-ever the technology may be, it will be big. Powershell is no exception here, as companies as big as Citrix, VMware and obviously Microsoft are including powerpacks and powershell API’s into their commercials.
Powershell is much like dos, but on steroids. It contains greater scripting power by far and enhances each line to a greater granularity, so that once properly refactored you can do a great deal more than dos in much less code. Powershell is to DOS, like Linq is to for loops (kind of).
The main drive for this new command line language has to come from the Windows engineer’s, who tirelessly support our ever increasing server and pc base in the world with ever changing and more advanced scripts. Some of these script writers produce such advanced and complicated code in order support vast estates that something like Powershell, I would imagine will be a welcome relief. Given that Windows server can now come as a command line OS only, Powershell was designed and built to fill that gap of functionality on this base level OS. Therefore early adopters will most certainly retain a higher day rate for the future.
For those of us who have purchased, used and loved their iphones, the big wait for the next generation is now over. It looks great at 24% thinner and unlike some other software houses, it seems like they have actually listened to their customers (finally). Although I'm getting a bit fed up of Apples fill-in versioning. We all know they had the capability to add a 5mp camera with the 3gs, but why release it when you can add it to the next one and get more sales for the interim. That’s my main moan over...
What Apple have achieved is remarkable and the app store is the epicentre of their success. Apple have now made millionaires around the globe with their ingenious interface around the store and iphone. As more people develope apps there will be more need and requirement for objective-c code. We are actively encouraging the community to upload projects and snippets of objective-c to help developers profit further from the iphone phenomena
At the beginning of the week we had a new requirement from a client to produce an online Pivot Table control for reporting on Market Risk within the financial sector. This was the excuse we were looking for to build a new Microsoft Silverlight piece. Microsoft have been pushing this new technology pretty hard and we want to get on-board with all new technologies, so we jumped in.
The initial setup was painful to say the least. I hope to see native Silverlight in Visual Studio one day soon. That would be a big plus. Given that Silverlight uses Asynchronous threads and WCF we are given a great deal of power, which is relatively easy to harness. I'm impressed and I think that Silverlight will play a much larger part of development in the near future. If nothing else, web apps will act and feel like win apps to almost a like for like level.
What is NRZEE I hear you cry? Well as a developer and part of a big team within NRLComputers (The guys that wrote NRZEE), we were a bit fed-up of giving our code away on libraries and blogs. It seems that in any profession in the world, be it accountants, legal advisors or bus drivers, everyone gets paid for their time. Developers on the other hand are expected to share everything despite the hours of toil and sweat to make it work, but all for the good of the community. NRZEE was designed and built for developers to help each other and at the same time make money from selling code. Through buying and selling code, the NRZEE community grows and becomes the only online market place for developers in the world. The idea that you pay a small premium for your code snippets ensures that you get well rated, proven code, rather than the snippets you find trawling the web. Plus you get to use the support forum and talk to the developer direct. He or she will get an email when you post a question (what a great idea). By giving developers the ability to make a few dollars by posting code, we encourage the community to post great, re-usable and up-to-date snippets for everyone to use and benefit from. The best thing of all is that NRZEE gives the greater percentage of every sale to the coder themselves (50% upwards).
I have written articles about the benefits of a virtual environment before, but I am reminded by a client once again that whilst VMware and Citrix alike are worth 'X' billion dollars, the IT world still needs to wakeup to virtual machines. IT managers are still paying enormous sums for hardware and experiencing all the pain of running servers estates, when a simple ESX server will do the job within a contained, remotely managed environment. Helpful tip of the day - VMotion used in-line with VMware can ensure your server is up and running on another ESX machine, potentially on another site (say DR) with the same state and the same everything (ip, mac etc...) within seconds. Makes clusters look like wind up toys.
Wake up and virtualize. I am encouraging users of virtual environments to post up code that helps easily build and manage virtual estates (like NRLComputers VPloyment)
