Henry Jacob

What Dragon Rider, Cloud Computing, Ruby on Rails, and other Emerging Technologies got in common?

This is a revised version of new technology series presentations. I love to use metaphors, they can put the message straight. This is presentation is more of strategy to deal with emerging technologies, you might also find answers to 

• What Dragon Rider, Cloud Computing, Ruby on Rails, and other Emerging Technologies got in common?
• Why shouldn't you watch 'Reign of Fire' and other dragon movies too many times?
• Why shouldn't you listen only to Java and .Net guys?
• Why shouldn't you ever fight a dragon?   

Dragon rider and emerging technologies

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This is an extension to my earlier presentation on impact of new technologies, which discuss the actual technologies in detail.

Impact of new technologies

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Videos of these presentations are available at

Your Employees Are Liars

When I read Mike Sigers post Your Customer Are Liars from Simplenomics, it reminded a similar situation in organizations, where employees don't offend their managers and managers shy away from asking the right questions. It applies to every level in an organization, unless you insists (one more time) people always say 'what you what to hear'.

Everyone wants to be heard, but they never going to openup, unless they sense a sincere and honest effort.  

Coping with changing technology

Every time we start a new development project, we end up using new set of technologies, some are similar, others completely different. For example the following are the combination for technologies used in our projects in last two years

• Drupal, PHP, MySQL
• Flex, Cairngorm, BlazeDS, Jersey, Java, Servlet, EJB, Oracle, DB2
• Struts2, Metro, Spring, Spring Batch, Hibernate, JPA, MySQL
• Ruby on Rails, Capistrano, Mongrel, Nginx, MySQL
• JSF, Spring, Hibernate, Oracle
• Spring MVC, Spring, Hibernate, jQuery, Oracle, SQLServer
• Struts, Spring, iBatis, JQuery, Oracle

Each of these combination brings unique advantage to particular projects, but how to get the right set of people in place. Even if you hire, we may not get people with all combination, and it is a few weeks/months process. Exiting people can learn on the job, but can't expect a quality output.

The solution is to organize 'throwaway micro projects' with all the key technologies,

the key aspect of this approach:

• Real time problem similar to the project
• Agile approach with 3 hrs Iteration/Sprint cycle
• Duration: 3 to 5 days
• No deadline
• Complete throwaway project - no expectation of reuse or any kind

This approach allows the team to understand and experiment technologies, quickly tryout some practical scenarios, understand the limitations of used technologies, quickly learn from the failure and identify best practices. Also this allow different individuals to come together as a team.