Eric Kepes

This post captures it perfectly.

Am I the only one sick and tired of [the media|journalists|management|etc.] just choosing to define words however they want whenever they want? Here’s a quick tip: some of us make a living “Outsourcing”. It’s what happens when a company decides to farm out some work to some consultants. Outsourcing can be done at the client site, at another office in the same town, at another office across the country, or, at another office somewhere else in the world.

It is NOT the interchangeable with “Offshoring”, but try telling that to your local newspaper editor or technology magazine article writer…

Code Camp was pretty cool. I’m planning to put up a few posts with my impressions of the day. It was great to be able connect some faces with the names I’ve been seeing around this here blog-o-sphere. I had a chance to actually meet Darrell Norton, which was cool. I got to see Julia Lerman speak, also very cool. I saw Bill Ryan speak – he’s as entertaining live as he is in his blog. Much more – I’m hoping to get a chance to write some more about it today. But, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out a picture I found of me at Code Camp – notice they got my good side. (I’m the guy right smack in the middle of the picture – blue shirt, blond hair).

Andrew and company did an excellent job putting this thing on (even if they did leave us standing in the lobby right up until 9am – which meant nearly 45 minutes for me, since I’m one of those disgusting morning people… J). After that, everything seemed to go off without a hitch. Pretty impressive!

It seems to work exactly as if you were connecting to SQL 2000.  First, you need to turn on the TCP/IP Protocol (via the SQL Computer Manager, or using the SQL Server Surface Area Configuration tool), and (this is the part that got me - duh) restart the SQL Service, or else it won’t use the new protocol.  The other detail to keep in mind is that the server is probably an instance, so if you are connecting to an instance on your machine, the connection string might look like this:

"Server=.\\SQLExpress;Database=AdventureWorks;User ID=sa;Password=<pwd>;Trusted_Connection=False"

Move to my new blog.

There is a drug problem in our own industry.  Seems we are all (or at least most of us) abusing a performance enhancing drug.  I guess we should cut those baseball players and other professional athletes some slack, eh?

If you are building a {system|application|website}, and you think it might be nice to have some way to control who {sees|does} what, it might be a good idea to design the permission model prior to constructing the software.  Just a thought…

Any part of your architecture that affects all (or most) of your problem space, should be laid out as much as possible prior to building the solution.  Otherwise, retrofitting it is a nightmare.  But then again, what can I expect from a client that doesn’t believe in ANY (well, OK, napkin equivalents are permitted) specifications? J

I’m going! My wife has an old friend that lives in the DC area, so we’re all heading down for the weekend.  I get to geek out while she hangs with the kids and her friend. I’m looking forward to meeting some of the people I’ve only “met” virtually via weblogs. Let me know if you’re going – I’d love to meet you.

Speaking of business school, I’ve decided to get an MBA. I start next fall – I received my acceptance letter last week. Robert Morris, definitely not a top tier school, has a promising looking e-commerce concentration that has a bit of an entrepreneurial focus.  I have been torn for years over the decision – I haven’t been able to cost justify the experience, and it hasn’t seemed to be terribly important to my career thus far.  However, there are always those occasions when there is an interesting job opportunity, and they want the applicant to have an advanced degree.

That’s probably not a good enough reason. Really, my reason is because of the program itself. It seems like a good opportunity to learn all of those things I didn’t really take seriously in undergrad (marketing and finance), and to meet and network with other like-minded people. Granted, it doesn’t provide the advantages that a name school would provide, but then again, I’m not really interested in a Fortune 500 career – I’ve worked in large companies before, and I didn’t much care for it. The extra cost (CMU costs at least 4 times as much as RMU) is just not justified unless you want to be the CEO of Intel someday.

OK, actually, the real reason why I’m doing it is to keep up with my wife – she already has her master’s degree – she’s a nurse practitioner… J

This is meant to be humorous. And it is. But it is also realistic. Oftentimes, we techies forget that the reason people pay us to develop software is to provide value to the business paying for the software, be it the company we work for, the client, or the people who buy our shrinkwrap. It doesn’t matter how elegant the solution is, if the solution doesn’t make business sense (i.e. pay for itself, at the very least), then the effort taken to produce the solution is wasted.

I have been reading Return on Software.  It’s a decent book – reminds me of all of those classes I took in my undergraduate work (my degree is in Quantitative Business Analysis).  The author spends a little too much time on the math, but then again, I’m only about 1/3 of the way through the book, so he has basically only been laying the groundwork for the rest of the book.  I’ll write a full review when I finish, but suffice it to say that, even if the book isn’t that good (actually, it’s not too bad – not the greatest book I’ve read, but not bad), the concepts it contains are terribly important to our industry, and constantly overlooked.

This auction says it all.

"I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day."

- Frank Sinatra

Here is an example of the problem that Scott is talking about.  An open source project, that shall remain nameless (but it is closely related to one that may be of some import to us here at DNJ J), contains the following stored procedure:

CREATE PROCEDURE forums_Styles_Get

(

    @StyleID    int = 0

)

as

    select

          *

    from

          forums_Styles

    WHERE

          StyleID = @StyleID OR

          (

                @StyleID = 0 AND

                1=1

          )

Now, I’m sure the C# code is just fine (I haven’t looked yet), but the stored procedures for this project are an abomination.  There indention and whitespace have no consistency, SELECT *’s abound, names are qualified with the owner (dbo.X is a best practice, you know).  And then you have that wild little “1=1” – yeah, that adds a lot to the logic.  A primitive obfuscation?

Paul Graham, a noted “hacker” has an essay on his site about how to start a startup company.  Always looking for information about the software business, I am reading it.  One thing he said, though, just sounds wrong:

Almost everyone who worked for us was an animal at what they did. The woman in charge of sales was so tenacious that I used to feel sorry for potential customers on the phone with her. You could sense them squirming on the hook, but you knew there would be no rest for them till they'd signed up.

I don’t know about you, but that just doesn’t seem like the kind of sale I’d want to have.  To be successful in software (package apps or consulting, or anywhere in between), it is quite clear that you need to have repeat sales.  A salesperson like that might land that sale, but they have pretty much have eliminated any possibility of a repeat sale – the customer will just refuse the phone call.