Shahid’s Perspectives

Last week I had lunch with a non-technical manager customer of mine who is using our Netspective Enterprise Frameworks Suite for develoment of some heavy-duty mission-critical web applications. After choosing our NEFS, the client has seen many developers complaining about the web development process becoming “too simple” and that it will not be helping their careers and that they should switch to Struts. The manager was suprised that NEFS allowed developers to finish their project on time and budget but developers were complaining anyway. He also noted that the previous project done with Struts was late and overbudget but the developers were happy. I chuckled for a bit and found it amusing that this was the first time the manager came across a situation where programmers wanted to use tools, techniques, or technology to improve their resume instead of solving the customer’s problems. When I explained to him the concept of RDD (resume driven development) he was surprised to know that it’s actually a very widespread problem.
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If you’re a heavy keyboard user (and what programmer or technical person isn’t) you probably get tired of grabbing the mouse to go to the quick launch bar or click the start menu to start an application. If you want to keep your hands on the keyboard and quickly navigate all the applications and folders on your workstation, give AppRocket a try. On my OS X box I use LaunchBar which is a little nicer than AppRocket but I’ve found AppRocket to be much better than many other application navigation utilities on my Windows box. When I’m on my UNIX boxes using bash I use CDPATH and AppRocket and LaunchBar are like CDPATH on steroids because they give you incremental searching of all kinds of different OS elements and not just files and directories. AppRocket requires .NET 1.1, though so if you don’t have .NET on your machine you’ll be asked to download it during installation.

As a person that spends equal time with business and technology issues I take lots of notes and have tried my share of “note taking” software. However, I never spent more than a few weeks on any particular note taker or outliner software. That was true until I tried Microsoft OneNote. I’ve been sticking with it because it just works — it captures all my thoughts, lets me drag and drop images from the web, it lets me do research for my writing (both code and papers), and puts it all together in a way that keeps my desk less cluttered. If you’ve been looking for a note taking application, give OneNote a try — it might change your mind, too.

For the past few months I’ve been experimenting with the new social networking tools that are available online. The one I’ve found most useful (relatively speaking) is LinkedIn. Internetworking websites and software are designed for business development, closing deals, generating leads, helping people find work by showing potentially invisible connections between aquaintances and friends. The idea is that we all know a finite number of people, and each person we know knows another finite number, and so on (colleagues at work, people at church or mosque, college buddies, etc). By each of us connecting who we know, our previously hidden network becomes visible and we can conduct business, hire employees, and even get jobs through connections we didn’t know we had (since presumably we know only our friends, but not our friends’ friends, and certainly not their friends’ friends). It’s a powerful concept but only time will tell how useful it is. If you already network well socially and professionally these new software tools will only improve your capabilities. However, if you’re like most programmers, engineers, and scientists that don’t know how to network professionally the tools may help you even more.
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I attended the Robert H. Smith School of Busines Fourth Annual Netcentricity Conference yesterday at the University of Maryland. I expected it to be a stuffy academic conference without much applicability to my life as a CEO of a software development firm or as a software architect. However, I was pleasantly surprised that I actually learned things from both a business and technology perspective. The Smith School’s dean is defnitely technology-aware and the faculty are quite technology saavy as well. I was glad to see that technology and its use are fully integrated into the business school curriculum. However, I was a little disappointed that all we received was paper materials instead of a CD with the presentations and notes. The conference started out with a great morning keynote “The Future of Electronic Markets” by Harvey Seegers, who was CEO of GE Global eXchange Services, the world’s largest providers of B2B e-commerce services. He was hired by Jack Welch to “get GE on the Internet” in 1996 and the rest is history. GE conducts billions of dollars of transactions through their exchange and Harvey was one of the guys that made it happen.
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