Network. Hardware. Analyst Predicts Huge Growth in Dev Teams, Focus on Talent -- ADTmag. News Analyst Predicts Huge Growth in Dev Teams, Focus on Talent Enterprise developers -- already sitting in a pretty good spot -- are becoming so critical to business success in the age of "digital transformation" that research firm IDC said getting and keeping top dev talent should be a main priority for company CEOs next year. "Yes, I said CEOs," IDC analyst Frank Gens reaffirmed in a Web conference yesterday outlining the firm's worldwide IT industry predictions for 2016. That advice was so startling that Gens had to clarify during a question-and-answer session that he didn't actually mean CEOs should be making headhunting calls to developers, but rather should hold senior management accountable for finding the best talent and paying appropriate wages to keep them onboard. Getting Top Talent Is CEO Priority"Recruiting and retaining the best developers in your industry must be a top-five strategy for CEOs," Gens said.
The overarching new theme in 2016 predictions, IDC said, is scale. Google Blames Software Glitch for Two-Hour Cloud Service Disruption. High availability. High availability is a characteristic of a system. The definition of availability is Ao = up time / total time. This equation is not practically useful, but if (total time - down time) is substituted for up time then you have Ao = (total time - down time) / total time. Determining tolerable down time is practical. From that, the required availability may be easily calculated. High availability system design approach and associated service implementation that ensures a prearranged level of operational performance will be met during a contractual measurement period. There are three principles of high availability engineering. 1. 2. 3.
Modernization has resulted in an increased reliance on these systems. Scheduled and unscheduled downtime[edit] A distinction can be made between scheduled and unscheduled downtime. If users can be warned away from scheduled downtimes, then the distinction is useful. Percentage calculation[edit] Uptime and availability are not synonymous. Would be (cf. [edit] [edit]
Zombie BPM. This week I attended the bpmNEXT Conference in California. Unlike virtually every other conference I’ve ever attended, this one attracted Business Process Management (BPM) vendors and analysts, but not customers – and the vendors were perfectly happy with that. Essentially, this event was in part an opportunity for vendors to show their products to each other, but primarily an excuse to network with other people in the BPM market over drinks and dinner. You would expect such a crowd to be cheerleaders for BPM, and many of them were. But all was not right in the world. So, what’s wrong with the BPM market? Welcome to the BPM zombie apocalypse. Cloud, BPM, big data. Is the Office Really the Best Place to Get Work Done? Programmers for $2,000 per Month, More? Or Less? We Recommend These Resources One of the top stories on Hacker news this morning had to do with someone getting feedback on his idea to rent world-class programmers for $2,000 per month.
TL;DR: He plans to set up an office in Manilla and hire locals for, I don’t know, $50 per day and rent them to companies tired of outsourcers who share “their” programmers with other clients. In this guy’s model, you get 100% of the programmer’s time for each one you pay for. If I were setting up a consulting business, I would do it one of two ways. My first impulse is to go even further and not hire humans at all. That would be more cost effective, but Primate Programming, Inc. stole my idea. Given that, I might take the opposite approach: Setup shop in Manilla and pay US wages for outsourced development (not Silicon Valley wages, I’m not that crazy). Well Hacker News, what do you think about that?
One plan I like a lot is Balsamiq’s. Can You Recover in 10 Minutes? 0inShare I don't think "reboot" is gonna fix this. "whatever" tech-supports says. My alma-mater may be better known for its football team, but the engineering fraternity Theta Tau hosts a pretty wicked egg drop competition. Some entries are really just an excuse to publicly drop something fun out of an eight-story window in front of an audience. Computers are regular victims. What would happen if two engineering students broke into your data-center, grabbed a server, and chucked it off the roof? While I doubt anyone has engineering students on staff for the purpose of throwing boxes off the room, Netflix is known for intentionally making internal applications destructive—they need to test their resilience just like you do.
*image from * a similar image was used by @hchaight in his IOM keynote reminding me of this awesome tradition. Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant. Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate.
“Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer.
“It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.” “I see Microsoft as technology’s answer to Sears,” said Kurt Massey, a former senior marketing manager. Dealing with Marchitecture. Cartoon by David Fletcher - CloudTweaks Marchitecture (aka Marketecture) is an architecture produced by a vendor mainly from a marketing perspective. As a company's Engineer, Architect or Manager, you will be exposed to it at some point or another. Vendor representatives will come in and make a shiny PowerPoint presentation about a new product, and you and other colleagues might be asked to provide your opinion on whether that product could be of any use in your company. I used the word "shiny", because the main point of a Marchitecture is to get your attention, so the vendor can engage in further conversations & negotiations, and...make a sale, of course. Here's an approach that can be used to deal objectively with a Marchitectured product.
First, start by not making assumptions. One consistent thing Marchitecture does is emphasize the positive aspects of the product, and at the same time "forget" to mention, or downplay the negative aspects. 1) During the presentation. The Rise of Developeronomics. We Recommend These Resources I have some thoughts about Venkatesh Rao’s Forbes article, “The Rise of Developeronomics”. The article, in brief, argues that “software is now the core function of every company, no matter what it makes,” and that, as “software eats the world,” maintaining relationships with excellent software developers is a prerequisite for survival for all firms.
One of the article’s insights is, “while other industries have come up with systems to (say) systematically use mediocre chemists or accountants in highly leveraged ways, the software industry hasn’t.” This is certainly true, and the most successful firms realize it. Again and again, I’ve worked for companies that try to save money, or accelerate development, by adding teams of mediocre (typically offshore) developers to a staff of great hackers. But I’m not sure that’s always going to be so. From.
Recovering from and avoiding "cloud service" lock-in. We Recommend These Resources We all love our shiny cloud services — until they break, die, or otherwise go away, turning all those unicorns and butterflies into what can only be described as a bark salad. Case in point: sometime this week, I’ll be wasting time migrating data out of DabbleDB. DabbleDB, if you don’t know, is was this great interactive “relational” database service: think of it as a massive spreadsheet where anything could be related to anything else — schema-free, BTW — with hooks into web forms for surveys and such, an excellent reporting and query engine, and all sorts of goodies like mapping geographically-related data, charting, etc.
Similar services include WuFoo, Intuit’s Quickbase, and ZoHo Creator. I say was because DabbleDB was acquired by Twitter last year; as a result, the service is shutting down next week, and I need to yank the data we were storing there and reconstitute it into some corresponding in-house applications. The mantra of CA Technologies' Donald Ferguson: Simplify. 9 December 2010Last updated at 00:01 Each week we are asking chief technology officers and other high-profile tech decision-makers three questions. Dr Donald Ferguson, CTO of CA Technologies: "The biggest problem is the complexity of IT" Answering today is Dr Donald Ferguson, chief technology officer of business software firm CA Technologies, which specialises in IT management software that helps companies to stay in control of their IT systems.
CA Technologies, once known as Computer Associates, is based in the United States, with headquarters in Islandia, New York, and employs 13,200 people. During the past financial year the company had a turnover of $4.3bn (£2.7bn) that generated a net profit of $771m. What's your biggest technology problem right now? There are many people that think I'm the biggest problem right now [chuckles]. But the biggest problem is the complexity of IT. So we have to simplify IT, but that's really hard. What's the next big tech thing in your industry? Stuck in the middle. The domain model as REST anti-pattern Today JavaLobby published yet another domain-model-as-REST article, using Spring and Jersey. As already pointed out, this really is an anti-pattern, and is not RESTful, and cannot be so either. The point that all of these types of articles miss is the HATEOAS part, the hyperlinking of resources.
If you expose your domain model, basically saying "here's all I got, use as you see fit", there is no sensible way to create links between resources that expose the application state. There is no sensible way to tell the client "here's what you can do next", because the "REST" API allows anything at any time.
Here's an example, from my own app, which showed me the problem with this approach. /user/<username>/changepassword/user/<username>/resetpassword I'm just doing what the article suggests, which is to expose my domain model, and all that I can do with it. So what to do instead? What did we do in our REST API to fix the above? And that's pretty much it. 10 Types of Employees (or Partners) to Avoid. 5) People Who Aren't Genuinely Excited About the Project People not genuinely excited about the goals, direction, technology or other aspects of the project tend to be mercenaries who are there to collect a paycheck. They tend to add little excitement to the project and tend to jump ship to the next project that offers larger material compensation.
They tend to be the first to leave during tough times when they are needed the most. That can really cripple a project and it is better to pass on that hire because the common result of the hire is usually below a 110% effort which the modern business environment requires. 6) Flakes and Talkers The old expression that time is money never ceases to be literally true. 7) People Unwilling to Learn or Step Out of Comfort Zone In the modern Web business world, the speed of innovation is accelerating and people have to be more and more nimble and flexible. 8) Big Shots 9) People Who Will Not Benefit From Working For You 10) Actual Lawyers. 10 Types of Employees (or Partners) to Avoid.
The success of a business or a project is very often dependent on whether it can sustain itself financially or not. Sometimes that is a matter of having sufficient revenue to cover the costs, but it is also often a matter of directly controlling the costs and keeping them low. A great way to control costs is to hire slowly or forego hiring for a position completely. Another benefit of not adding personnel is that smaller teams tend to have a higher per-person productivity and efficiency. In this article I will outline ten ways to control costs and raise efficiency within a project by going over ten types of people or types of positions that should not be hired in order to preserve the efficiency of a small team. 1) Someone Who Will Turn You into a Lawyer [login] Most people with good work ethics tend to be thrilled to get their hands dirty and start being productive when embarking on a new project. 2) General Business People There is a bevy of skills a “business” person may have.
Lock-in: Let Me Count the Ways. We've all heard the term "Vendor Lock-in," but many don't know about the wide variety of ways in which this stealthy lock-in takes place. Rigidity and frustration caused by this lock-in can mean high costs for enterprises and unhappiness for developers. With new technologies like virtualization and cloud computing, vendors are finding more ways to force users to stay on their platform and purchase their offerings. The following list describes the different kinds of lock-in that have been seen in the IT industry. 1. Single-Source lock-in This is the most traditional sense of lock-in where the installation, configuration, and development with proprietary software require significant up-front investments. 2.
With the advent of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, much of the software installed on your organization's infrastructure is being outsourced to service providers. 3. This lock-in is especially bad for enterprises that base much of their value on the data they've accumulated and leveraged. 4. 5.
Sebastian K. Where SOA ends - SOA Talk. Mar 5 2009 6:01PM GMT Posted by: Jack Vaughan Tags: Thanks! We'll email youwhen relevant content isadded and updated. Following Follow SOA development SOA governance By Ted Neward In the rush to embrace new technologies and demonstrate “cutting-edge awareness”, companies (and individuals) sometimes create mountains out of molehills. One of those more recent trends has been the SOA bandwagon. 1) Boundaries are explicit 2) Services are autonomous 3) Services share schema and contract, not class 4) Service compatibility is determined based on policy Nowhere in here do we find reference to SOA governance, SOA enablement, or any of the other elements that have been attached to the SOA name.
I always thought CTOs and CEOs had something… I don’t know… *better* to do. Don’t get me wrong: any organization that spends time thinking about how their various software systems are going to interact with one another is already a huge step above those that don’t. It’s useful, but it has an “end”. Merks' Meanderings: Grieving Over the Death of a Cash Cow.
Don't Build Software That's TOO Smart!
Performance.