Category: Archive

Last year I wrote a blog called “Why people in the USA are polite and smiley rdquo;. This is part two to that blog.

This year the real estate bubble burst, and there are about 500,000 houses in a pre- foreclosure state. These people are a couple of months behind on their mortgage payments. These are the people who abused the bubble. They were thinking that purchasing an investment property with zero down and no money on your bank account is OK. The house was expected to magically appreciate in value, then an easy sale with lots of free cash.

Other people have refinanced their primary residencies several times extracting the cash from the equity and purchasing luxury items that they could not afford before.

Now, many of them can “t sell these houses even for 80% of the purchase price. These people put themselves in a really bad situation. What do they have to do now? Declaring a bankruptcy does not get you off the hook as it did in the past. They have to get a second job and smile to you even wider than before. Sad but true.

As of this coming Monday the stock symbol for Sun Microsystems will be changes from SUNW to JAVA (see http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-08/sunflash.20070823.1.xml ). “The Java brand and technology have evolved to be among the most pervasive on the internet, yielding extraordinary awareness for Sun and opportunity for the community that leverages it, ” said Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO of Sun.

This is an attempt to bring more attention to investors that just love Java as the programming language. Individual software engineers having some extra cash to invest (mainly the impulse buyers who do not have time to learn the rules of gambling on stock market) will quickly purchase a couple of hundred of JAVA shares. Sounds cool, and I personally will also do this just to show my respect to a programming language that feeds my family nicely during the past ten years.

But this also reminds me these fund raiser events that invite celebrities from the past. Mohammad Ali will be there hellip;let me go and support Joe Smith, the mayoral candidate.

During the last ten years Sun Microsystems and Java experienced very similar evolution. Go to Google Finance and do a search on SUNW (http://finance.google.com/finance?q=sunw ) or, I guess JAVA now. Here “s the 10-year stock price chart of SUNW.

Forget for a second that you are looking at the performance of a publicly traded company. Don “t you think that it looks very similar to the evolution and popularity of Java, the programming language? 1998-2001 were the best years of this language. It was very exciting time. Sixty bucks a share! After that, speaking financial language, Java has found it support at five bucks a share and not much is going on in this camp.

Do not get me wrong, Java is tried and true solutions in the enterprise and mobile space. Millions developers will keep using it as a mainstream language for years to come. But I “d love to see something more exciting routine programming in a heavy-weight environment. The fact that Java has overlooked a huge Internet consumer “s market (Java Applets is a last century solution) hurts. Recently announced JavaFX scripting language does not impress me so far. The fact that it “s build on top of Swing libraries does not seem to be a right decision. JavaFX should be build on a new set of GUI components. Let “s wait for another year though.. .

Carrying over megabytes of unused libraries from one Java version to another do not help. I do not support the moves to make the language syntax even more complex (i.e. introduction of closures in Java 8). IMO, using a smaller and more agile JVM as a runtime engine for various programming languages may be a way to go. Upcoming Consumer JRE and Java Kernel may help in reviving the popularity of Java.

Having said all this, I wish all the best to Sun Microsystems and to Java language. Let “s see if IBM will change their stock symbol to COBOL (actually IBM is listed on NYSE that does not allow more than three symbols for their securities).

Here ‘s another thought – does it mean that Sun is planning to get rid of their hardware business?

When I came to America fifteen years ago and saw a PC with 286 processor and 40MB hard disk in my friend “s house, I told him, “You are set for life with this PC rdquo;. I came from the country, where I had the same PC being a lead programmer in one of the research institutes. Boy, I was wrong!

PC “s and laptops are getting much faster and every new Windows OS runs a lot slower. Two years ago I “ve had a 1.7Ghz/1Gb RAM single CPU laptop with Windows XP, this year I use 1.7 core Duo 1.7Ghz/2Gb laptop with Vista, and it “s a lot slower than the old laptop. I “m constantly in a time crunch and just do not have time to erase Vista and install XP. Actually I might be better off installing Windows 2000. What “s wrong with this?

Independent software vendors do not bother with memory optimization – the memory is cheap and they force consumers buying more memory, which does not help because a) max memory size in your laptop is limited and b)users run several programs at the same time, which leads to memory swap and slows down your work.

People who create Web applications assume that their user are sitting on T1 or cable modems alone. But when kids come from schools, your connection speed drops to tremendously and becomes comparable to the dial up modems from the past century.

Internet is s-l-o-w-w-w-w-w-w…

Should I switch to a different OS? I “m not ready yet to purchase Mac notebook. It “d solve some problems but introduce others. It “s like driving a red convertible Mercedes trying to hide from a mid-life crisis or an exhausting divorce. Both both the convertible Mercedes and Mac are good as a second “cool rdquo; gadget.

I guess, I “ll be able to browse the Internet and check my emails faster if I “ll install Windows 2000 on my laptop. Just a thought…

America is a multi-national country. It “s one of the richest countries in the world. Everyone has food here. Yes, some people buy chicken legs for fifty cents a pound, while others routinely enjoy wild salmon at $25 a pound. But all people have food here.

People have places to live. Yes, some people live in mobile homes or in poorly maintained “projects rdquo;, there is a small number of homeless people (many of them have chosen this lifestyle themselves) while other live in mansions. But people have places to live.

People have work in America. Yes, some people never worked here, but even they collect money from the government and many have medical insurance. Every person in reasonable health who wants to work has work in America.

That “s why about two hundred nationalities peacefully live together in New York City. America talks about diversity. Large companies create diversity programs where people can get familiar with traditions of people of different descent, race and culture. In all kinds of application forms there is an optional question about your race. Affirmative actions require federal organizations (some large firms have adopted this too) to hire minorities (read black) people substantially lowering their skills requirements for the job. But no matter what you say about diversity, there is a slow-burning conflict between black and white people.

Paul McCartney sings, “Ebony and Ivory live together in perfect harmony side by side on my piano keyboard, Oh lord, why don ‘t we rdquo;. The piano keys live in harmony because they are pretty limited in their actions.

The law enforcement works well in America too, so different people live in some harmony here. But all these diversity programs do not make people equal, and will never do for a simple reason ndash; people are different.

Black people claim that white people do not like them because their skin is black. This is nonsense. If white people do not like blacks, it “s because of this “Yo, man rdquo; culture, it “s because of generations of black people living on welfare without any intention to get a job, it “s because of the fact that the most dangerous and poorly maintained areas in New York City are populated by predominantly black people. Look at the prisons ” population. There is an old joke, rdquo;Three men are sitting in the car ndash; one black, one Latino, who “s the third one? The answer: policeman rdquo;.

At this point someone can remind about the black slavery and not equal opportunities for black and white kids. Yes, not everyone was born in a family with a similar past, wealth and culture. But everyone has a shot in America. I “ve had a chance to work with brilliant black software engineers. Trust me, the color of their skin did not matter to me and never will (as a matter of fact, many Indian programmers have darker skins than some African-Americans). We have not the same but similar cultures, education and we have a lot to talk about. These black people took their shots, and I do not think that 150-year old slavery really matters to them.

Well, sometimes the slavery reasoning becomes handy. For example, Johnnie Cochran successfully played this card during the murder case for O.J. Simpson.

Take your shot. Stop whining about slavery. Pull up your pants. Zip them up. Take off your golden chains. Work hard. Study. And you “ll be all you can be. I came to America as an adult with no money, and English is my second language. I did not get a penny from the US government. I took my shot. I do not complain.

The audio of the carcast #8 can be downloaded from here (17Mb).

1. I “ve started a new users group on RIA in New York at NYSIA

http://nysia.org/events/SIGpgs/sigvil.cfm?sid=40

The first meeting will take place on Oct 9:

http://nysia.org/events/calendar_disp.cfm?me_id=566

2. Flex Developers in London have created a Flex User Group.The agenda is not clear other than who “s buying…

http://ria.meetup.com/7/calendar/6042223/

3. This is what I call cool – UBS Trading Floor

4. I wish I did not understand English hellip;

I like the way Shakira looks and performs , but the lyrics hellip;

I love you for free and I ‘m not your mother

But you don ‘t even bother hellip;

Next to her cheap silicon I look minimal

That ‘s why in front of your eyes I ‘m invisible

But you gotta know small things also count hellip;

5. Last week I “ve purchased an interesting called Founders at Work. A couple of sample chapters are available online

6. Yakov, stop whining about morning commute. Some of your fellow programmers would love to switch with you

7. My latest gadgets for improving the quality of commute:

a) The FM transmitter for the car: RocketFM

b) Tripp Lite Power inverter

This Monday, I “ll be presenting at the RealWorld Java seminar in New York City. I “ll be showing some applications demonstrating how Adobe Flex and Java can be easily integrated and complementing each other. After the presentation I “ll be giving away three free licenses of our Flex Productivity Pack that includes the following Eclipse plugins: Clear Data Builder, Fx2Ant, Fx2Doc and Log4Fx ($846 value each, see product descriptions below or visit http://www.myflex.org for more details).

Clear Data Builder ndash; this Eclipse plugin is a commercial version of an open source DaoFlex code generator. It takes away complexity of writing Java code for communication with relational databases. All Java and Flex artifacts are created automatically based on your SQL Select statement, including creation and deployment of the Flex FDS Web Application. You do not have to know Java to create end-to-end Flex-Java-Database CRUD application in minutes.

Fx2Ant ndash; this Eclipse plugin instantly translates the settings of your existing Flex Projects into ANT build scripts, so that you can build your modules, libraries and applications outside of Eclipse and create larger builds integrated with J2EE projects. What takes weeks on even a mid-size project, can be done in seconds with Fx2Ant. While generating the build script, Fx2Ant applies additional size-optimizing echniques that help to modularize development and cut the download time of enterprise Flex applications.

Fx2Doc ndash;this plugin allows you quickly build and organize the documentation for your project. You can upload your documentation to the corporate or the community server, so that it becomes shared by other developers.

Log4Fx ndash; this component provides a number of configurable implementations of log targets and an interactive control panel. You can target your log information to Eclipse IDE, local or remote server and other destinations.

We “ll also run a full day Flex bootcamp there and our company (Farata Systems) will have a table in the vendor “s area. Stop by if you “d like to learn more about how to start your next Flex/Java project from the right foot.

Earlier this year, after completing working on a heavy-duty technical book , I said, “Never again. No more books “. But after a short break, I “ve decided to write a small non-technical book discussing an everyday life of an enterprise software developer.

Observing the business side of the corporate software development cycle is pretty interesting activity, and I write about things AS THEY ARE rather then trying to present a pretty picture of IT departments of enterprise giants that are developing bleeding edge software day in and day out.

I “ve gotten OK from the publisher, and here “s a preliminary layout of this book with a working title “The life of an enterprise programmer “:

Foreword

What this book is about

Part 1: Getting into IT

Do you want your child to be a programmer?

Enrollment in CS and IS majors is on decline

Out of college: catch-22 situation

How to pass a technical interview with flying colors

Interviewing Enterprise developers

Give a second chance

And he hung up during the interview

Part 2. Living in IT

Manage your software development career

Who are these IT contractors, anyway?

Why hire an IT contractor

Will high-paid contractors extinct?

How comfy is your cubicle?

On casual Fridays and a revolution made by women

Arranged Marriages

The Honeymoon

The Family Life (a.k.a. Corporate Politics)

The Family Budget

Divorce Is Not an Option

Corporate Java Training

Who Is Teaching

Finding Quality Training

Enjoy your technical conference

The cost of attending a technical conference

Increase your visibility

Manage your manager

Self-publishing a book is easier than you think

Outsourcing

The world is round

What CIO should know about outsourcing

Ten tips on dealing with offshore developers

Dead souls from overseas

Outsourcing to students

Cultural difference in outsourcing

Russian Programmers

And Pedro said, “Move over, Ravi! rdquo;

Visiting an offshore training camp for programmers

Once again on outsourcing

Insourcing – the foreign programmers

Welcome to the USA!

H1B Visa

How to select a software vendor for your next enterprise project

Political stuff

Another Brick in the wall

What “s your salary?

Underpaid? Quit!

Overpaid? Hardly!

Working overtime? Poor management!

Is life in startups any different?

SOA, RIA and the Human factor

SOA Ground Up

SOA Top Down

SOA as a burner

SOA Maturity

Technical Benefits of SOA

ESB Infrastructure

To SOA or not to SOA

Making Business Users Happy

SOA+RIA

Agile development

Part 3. Getting out of IT

And he was fired

Do not tell me cause it hurts

Thoughts of an aging programmer

My friend is a 72-year old programmer

If you think I “ve missed a topic or would like to share your story that illustrates an interesting, stupid, political, or career aspect of lives of enterprise software developers, just shoot me an email at yfain at sys-con.com.

This book summarizes my personal opinions that were formed during twenty five years of wearing different hats in Enterprise IT and running a small startup. The odds are that you will not agree with all my observations or find some of them rather cynical or even insulting. But this is how I see things today, in 2007, living in the geographical area known as Big Apple.

If you are an active and serious software developer, you have to make sure that your technical skills are not getting rusty. You need to get trained. In our trade the rule of the game is that you constantly have to be in a good technical shape. Your other choice is to keep complaining about outsourcing. Excuses like we are in a crunch situation with our project at the moment, and this is not a good time for studying are good for amateurs.

Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What “s this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web front end of your Java applications?

Do not miss an event in NYC this Monday, that is created for people who think that they are way too busy to take several days off and spend them in the class. Just take one day off and attend the RealWorld Java event. The discounted rate for this event is $395. To get this discount, enter the coupon code “JUGgold ” while registering

Here “s another lame excuse for not attending, “Our corporation has a list of approved training vendors and courses to choose from, and I just can “t go to an arbitrary conference rdquo;. Wrong. Did you even try to ask if you can go? Just remind your boss about all those long hours you ‘ve spent on the project. You need and deserve quality Java training! Most likely your employer has some training budget ndash; use it or lose it. This seminar features many first-class speakers who are practitioners, and many of them are book authors as well.

Yours truly will run a co-located full day bootcamp on development of rich Internet applications with Adobe Flex and Java . If you are interested, send me an email and I “ll ask the meeting organizer to shave of $200 of the registration fees.

Many Java programmers still do not know what ESB, AOP, and Flex are for. How about you? Ask your colleagues the same question and see for yourself. There are plenty of great programmers who just write Java code for their employer day in and day out. Raise your head and look around. Get trained, or else hellip;

Besides developing software, our company Farata Systems works on all kinds of consulting projects for large and small enterprises. At this point you may think that I “ll start bragging about how great we are, and that you should hire us. On the contrary, I “ll tell you about our failures and the lesson learned.

During the last year our company have lost the bids on a couple of consulting projects, and we “ve noticed the same pattern. Here “s one of these cases.

A large company approached us asking to bid on a project. We knew how to do the job, we “ve estimated the time and resources and came out with the numbers: $200K over 6 months. In about two weeks we were notified that they “ve decided to go with a different vendor that offered them to do this job for $60K. We shrugged and moved on with our business.

Six month later, we “ve got a call from the same client asking if we could help with that project. By that time they paid already $300K to the vendor-winner, and the project was not finished yet.

Since we “ve seen similar scenarios in the past, it seems that we are dealing with a sales pattern here ndash; some vendors are giving unrealistically low estimates just to get the foot in the door. Then, little by little they present valid reasons that require additional budget, the client is on the hook, someone “s career is at stake, and they have no choice but sign the next invoice and keep dragging the project until it comes to a full stop.

A little lie during the job estimates seems to be a trick of the trade of any salesman from construction to timeshare business.

When an Enterprise IT department gets the budget for a new software development project, pretty often they ask several vendors to bid on the project. Some of them will come up with beautiful PowerPoint presentations showing where you are now – the current state assessment, the future state assessment, and a roadmap to this bright future, which can be fairly technical. More agile vendors hate this stupid paperwork – they will present you a two-page write-up with technical solution addressing your functional specification. The third type of vendors is prevalent and they will present a decent diagram and some technical meat.

Then the cost comes into picture. Vendors ” marketing people will estimate the cost of the resources. If you are a newcomer in the enterprise software world, you might not know that “resources rdquo; are actually people. Salesmen do not call software developers people, they call them resources. In one of the corporate meetings, I ‘ve heard an account manger saying, “A father of one of my resources died so this resource will not be available for a week “. Could it get any worse? Actually it could, for example, “An ancestor of one of my resources died so this resource temporarily will not perform its functions “.

Getting back to the main subject, if you see a cost estimate of one vendor substantially lower then the others, most likely that they “ll be using dirt cheap resources.

So how you, the enterprise development manager can pick the right vendor that will deliver the project in time (or at least without substantial delays)? Here “s a solution: give each vendor two weeks and ask them to come back with a working prototype of the system to be developed. Important: you have to pay for this two-week job to each vendor.

I want to make it crystal clear ndash; they should come back not with a UML diagram of the system, not with wire frames created in some third-party tool, but with a working application that is built using the software approved for the real project. Of course, this application won “t be fully functional, it “ll run locally on a laptop with lots of dummy pieces of code, but IT HAS TO WORK.

Say you have five vendors bidding on your project. The odds are that after such an offer two of them will quietly withdraw their proposals. One of the remaining three will ask for another week. This is not a good sign and this vendor should be out. The remaining two will present their working prototypes on time and you “ll be surprised to find out that the job of picking the right vendor became extremely easy. Yes, it “s cost you a little bit of money, but it was the money well spent.

This was our lesson learned ndash; if we have to bid on a decent size project, we offer the client to try us on this mini two-week project. It “s fair to our clients, and fair to us.

I have a gut feeling that 2008 will cry for a new breed of IT people called User Experience Professional. These people should be experienced professional Web designers with some knowledge of programming. I already see some serious changes in the process of designing front ends for such boring business Web applications as pension plan management system or a stock trading application.

In the past, a group of programmers would quickly put together (to the best of their design abilities) a wireframe of an application to be developed, discuss the functionality with the users and would start coding. Now it “s slowly changing. Recently, I “ve been running Adobe Flex training for one of the major Wall Street firm. Java programmers were in the audience, we “ve discussed specifics of the integration of the new front end with their J2EE systems, and then I asked them if they took care of the screen design yet. And they showed me a design document. I was speechless ndash; this was clearly the best screen design document I “ve ever seen in my 25 year career in IT. Very neatly done, eye-candy looking screens color schemes were impeccable. They “ve hired a third party firm that does just this ndash; design of user experience.

With emerging of such development tools as Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight we “ll see more people from an artistic crowd (Photoshop Illustrator, AfterEffects, Flash Professional) starting getting their hands dirty with more developer targeted tools like Adobe Flex Builder or Microsoft Expression Studio.

As of today, many Web designers suffer from the lack of knowledge of programming languages (i.e. ActionScript 3) that may be required to get hired for the next gig.

While the merger of Adobe and Macromedia was made in heaven, the skills of developers and designers are not merging that easily and Adobe has to pay more attention to creating some bridging tools that would allow designers fill comfortable in Flex Builder. Microsoft has done a better job in this regard ndash; I “ve seen a presentation nade by a Web designer (not a programmer) of their Express Studio. He felt there at home. Microsoft has their own challenges though ndash; how to bring predominantly Adobe-ish designers to their RIA and User Experience development tools.

Slowly but surely the most active Web designers will start learning development tools. They “ll do it for a very simple and pragmatic reason ndash; to increase their employability.

I “ve created a new users group on Rich Internet Applications under the umbrella of NYSIA ndash; New York Software Industry Association (we “ll have our first meeting on October 9 ). While most of the times I “ll be inviting software developers to present on such emerging technologies and techniques as AJAX, Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, JavaFX, OpenLaszlo, I “ll definitely would love to have there presentations on User Experience at it best circa 2007.

I am very much interested in learning some tricks of the trade of these mysterious people called Designers. If you are a User Experience Expert and would like to speak at this new RIA users group, please let me know.