I hope you are enjoying your summer (or winter!).
It’s been an uber-busy summer for me and, unfortunately, not all of it has been joyful.
On the sunny-side, I have been helping clients model service and product domains. It’s great fun again to observe progress measure in days and hours, with some of those days producing ‘aha’ moments.
On the cloudy-side, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of life energy packing/unpacking boxes, consolidating our ‘things’ and moving our household. Yes, that type of summer un-joyfulness.
There is a sunny-side to moving, though, like being forced to clarify one’s life priorities – a requirement if you must reduce an overwhelming pile of life accumulation into a smaller pile worth moving.
Active-lifestyle-centricity is at the top of my list – keep the legs and ticker strong, see more of the world, etc – so bikes, hockey equipment and rock climbing gear made their way into the smaller pile.
Spending-the-better-part-of-a-decade’s-worth-of-weekends-and-holidays-restoring-a-1905-inn-on-Cape-Cod is no longer on the list, so my collection of DIY home improvement books were moved to the pile in the Westford Library donation box. Time for some other fool to…oh, never mind.
Heritage-artifacts is on the list so the two journals my father wrote while living at our off-the-grid camp in Vermont made the smaller pile as did a collection of personal and professional journals I have written – sporadically, often intensely, generally consistently – from the 1980’s through, well, yesterday. There are more than 40 of them.
Within this collection, are my Engineering Notebooks. I found them stacked neatly together in a dusty cabinet, like a cohort of twelve long forgotten hardcover friends standing idly at the street corner, hands in pockets, awaiting my return. I was thrilled to see them and gave each one a hub.
This is a small treasure to me and may someday be to a bored ancestor of mine. The notebooks are the record of my engineering thoughts from the 1990’s when I was recently out of engineering school, through the 2000’s when I ran The Java Team and, finally, through the mid-2010’s when I went ‘corporate’ and they wound down as paper, (static, not scalable) seemingly ceased to exist on the big office, was replaced by the mind maps (dynamic, scalable) which now bear the repository brunt for my R&D note taking.
Standing before a million and one boxes left to unpack, I’ve had precious little time to thumb through any of these notebooks. The other day, though, exuberant after six box unpacking success, I opened the cabinet (made the smaller pile, now dust-free) and blindly picked one of the journals off the shelf.
I opened to a random page and read – a small, risky experiment to see if my thoughts from the time of writing were lucid and/or, well, interesting .
On the random page, I found to my delight a four page argument about how I would assess and integrate software products and 3rd party platforms, positively influencing our friend, the Time, Cost, Quality Triangle. Here’s the first sentence:
“The first thing I look at in a third party enterprise building block system is its API set, including its language support (Java, C/C#/C++, etc) and Object Model.”
Enterprise system? How very January 7, 2010 of me! So old school.
This ‘first thing’ is clearly a very quick, cursory process but, for anyone who has built or integrated with 3rd party systems, it can produce solid ROI in the form of an indication about the experience level and long term thinking of the 3rd party engineering team that built the system, qualities which will be reflected in the system itself.
(TLDR: quality teams build quality systems – and vice versa)
Old school or not, my argument was based on empirical results from a healthcare medical records platform we were building on top of other systems. Thankfully, I found the argument to be cogent and, more importantly considering today’s plethora of integration demands (PaaS, SaaS, open-source modules and frameworks), relevant.
In fact, coincidentally, just a few weeks ago, a client and I performed the same ‘first steps’ process as part of a larger assessment of two cloud-based SaaS platforms competing for their business. Within a lively and fun hour or two we had a very clear leader.
There is more to my argument – it is, of course, four pages long after all.
My favorite – also empirically based – is about the transformational process by which software development organizations can achieve remarkable long term cost savings, increased development team performance and achieve high product quality by wrapping 3rd party platform interfaces with domain-based object models.
But that’s a larger, nuanced, strategic Triangle discussion which I must leave for another day because, well, I’ve got a mountain of unpacking joy to attend to.
In the meantime, if you have questions about these ideas or are interested in a one-on-one with me, ask below or DM me and we can talk.
Thanks for reading.
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