Henry

Craftsmanship: The Meaning of Life

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Craftsmanship: The Meaning of Life

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Qualities of Craftsmanship

Regardless of whatever you do, Craftsmanship is the key for a successful professional life. A good craftsman always possesses the following key qualities.

The end of Java as we know it

After working with Java for more than 10 years, its hard to say goodbye, but everything that has a beginning has an end. I feel, Java become too much of overhead for any new software development projects whether it is enterprise projects or niche product development.

Too many standards, and too many implementations, make even a small project very complex.

Standards are great, but the main focus for these standards become vendor independence rather than simplicity and practicality. for this very reason, frameworks like Spring and Hibernate have overthrown standards like EJB.

last few years, new frameworks like Rails, not only changed the we develop applications, also brought new perspective on developing framework itself. with dynamic capabilities and user friendly DSL (Domain specific languange) approach, put these frameworks far ahead of java in terms of development speed and simplicity.

Today, time has come for us to move beyond Java and embrace some the better and simpler alternatives like ruby on rails for web development, Adobe Flex for rich internet applications, Adobe AIR for cross platform desktop applications, Groovy and Grails for web development with java integration. Erlang for concurrent applications.

in spite of all the complexity, the best thing happened to java is, that it has evolved beyond java and become a platform of languages, today it supports all leading languages including ruby(jruby), python (jpython), groovy, etc.  this means you can use new languages and frameworks like groovy, and grails on java platform, while utilizing the existing java components.

13 Great Ways to make your Offshore Project Fail

At Arrk, our CEO, Julian Howison, started a series of articles on '13 Great Ways to make your Offshore Project Fail', first part of this series available here

Reinventing Offshore

Offshore software development is one of the great success stories of modern India. Just from 4 billion USD to 50 billion USD in less than 10 years, it is a great progress in terms of growth, and employment creation. It also fulled a great demand for support services and created all new consumer segments, most importantly, It produced some of the great entrepreneurs and leaders. 

From the beginning, Off-shoring managed to adapt changing condition in the industry and the market, whether it is Y2K, Dot-com, Great dot-com fallout, era of enterprise maintenance, web development, etc. 

When I look back, I feel sense of proud and achievement to be part of a great journey. 

But regardless of all these success, there is a sense of disappointment in every project executed in offshore. With few exceptions, I never seen neither a satisfied customer nor a happy developer. These are not isolated incidents, every company and every customer has a story to tell. 

If these issues repeated in every project then some thing fundamentally wrong. Instead of looking them as project level issues, we need to understand the common thread connecting them all and reinvent they we do things.

This is exactly, we are going to explore in my series 'Reinvent Offshore'

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking." — Alfred North Whitehead

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay

A Change is on the Horizon

One of the noticeable differences between a great programmer and bad programmer is their interest in learning new languages.

Learning a new programming paradigm helps to stretch your mind and makes you a better programmer overall, even if you never directly apply any of the new techniques. Notice I’m talking about paradigms here, not languages. Learning C++ if you know Java may make you a lightly better programmer over all, but going from Procedural programming to OOP for example, can be a mind-bending experience. – Arsalan Zaidi

When a new programming paradigm is accepted, the entire landscape of computing changes. The very reason why Java dominated our industry in the last 10 years is because of the adaptation of Object Oriented Programming (OOP)

Now the trend is moving from OOP to what we call Dynamic/Meta Programming. The languages like Ruby, Groovy and Python belong to this category. They are already making a big impact on enterprise software development.

There is another trend is moving towards Functional Programming. This includes languages like Scala, Erlang and Haskell. They are interesting but suitable for writing scientific applications.

Start learning at least one or two languages from the above list. Even if you are not going to use them in near future, at least, it will help you to become a better programmer.

If you have any problem in selecting a new language, then few more to choose from

iCamp, Bangalore

India’s first Innovation Barcamp (iCamp) is happened in Bangalore on 23rd Feb 2008, more than 80 people participated. It was a great success with interesting topics and discussions.

The camp was started with my presentation on Design Driven Development (D3), many discussions happened around my presentations until we ran out of time.

Some of the other presentations, includes

• Innovation in MBA and Education by Pavan Soni
• Unusual sources for innovation by Kalyan
• Spirituality in innovation by William Miller

Read Saurabh Minni (one of the participants) commentary for more detail

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"The boundary between where a product ends and where a customer begins is changing."
-John J. Sviokla, Vice Chairman, DiamondCluster International Inc.