@ jomama717 I used to be in your situation too - very little time to code, and responsible for a team.
The single biggest improvement to my life at work as a technical team leader came about when I learned to better delegate. You have an entire team at your disposal! They are there to help you, as well as each other! It's all to easy to slip into 'control freak hero' mode, where you feel the need to do everything yourself because you don't feel anybody else can do it... but that will only ever perpetuate the situation and never give less experienced developers the chance to learn the ropes and be able to do what you can do. And if they don't get better at what they do, then they can never help take some of your workload off you.
In other words, If you don't feel you can delegate because you believe that others won't do the work to your standards, then you need to start fixing that, by making time to coach them through tasks and give feedback. If there are already developers on your team that you do trust to complete tasks to your standards, then you must delegate more immediately!
If you sub-divide and delegate a number of tasks between 4 or 5 developers (and yes, sometimes these are non-coding tasks, just like yours), then what might be a small effort or trivial interruption for them, can be a major load off your stack. It all adds up.
This would allow you more time to code up some solutions or example code as a technical lead (which are folded back into the team projects, again helping the team be more successful), or coach individual developers to bring them up to your required standards (if you don't feel you can delegate to them yet) - everybody wins; it's a virtuous circle.
If you feel you are struggling under the weight of non-coding tasks, again it's worth stressing that you can give out non-coding tasks too - say you need to write a document guideline for a web service API, there's nothing stopping you delegating that, to another developer, even if it's not coding work. Send a team member to a client meeting to gather feedback, and ask them to summarise the feedback for you. If it doesn't work out the first time, try and understand why and fix it.
If you aren't doing this already, then you should give that a go for six months. After that time, if it doesn't work for you, then...
Become an independent software contractor - where you will be paid to focus on code, because that is specifically what you will be hired to do. You get to work with a great variety of teams and codebases, learning much more than you would at a single company.
You can better set and negotiate your wage (within reason) and there's also no more performance reviews, unnecessary meetings (time is money), much less politics to endure as a 'non-employee', and at the end of a contract period you can give yourself a few weeks off to travel or recharge at home when, as you want it (Yes, you can give yourself 6 weeks annual leave to de-stress if you wish, and nobody can deny you that privilege).
I think that you're missing the point. There's more to ActiveRecord than just DB wrapping: It's Ruby's strengths of reflection and meta-programming, and being able to dynamically add methods and properties to objects at runtime that allow ActiveRecord to really fly, and that is why people get excited about it. Sure you can still do these things in Perl, but it's more painful.
Though there may be intellectual property issues concerning Windows Forms and other high level Windows toolkits - I think that it's necessary to point out that from the Start the primary goal of the Mono project was to implement the ECMA C# standard and core libraries - And they have met that goal with great success.
As far as I remember, right from the beginning Miguel said that even if Mono was forced to drop Windows compatibility, that Linux would still have an excellent memory-managed CLR and RDE to boot. It's important that you remember this.
Even if you are right, and M$ start playing the 800 pound gorilla, they cannot take away the ECMA standard core. In such a scenario, Developers will still be able to Develop C# applications for Linux using the GTK# GUI toolkit.
If you are worried about MS IP in your Mono Linux app, it's simple - don't use Windows Forms - use GTK#
Yup, good point - but don't misunderstand me - I'm not saying that Cocoa ain't full of good things - I've used Cocoa and I like it. I like Obj-C too! I'm simply seeing Mono on PPC as a very attractive, flexible proposition to developers that are already using.NET, and have built codebases that use the.NET framework.
If they've been good developers and kept to a nice clean MVC design for their Linux and Window apps, then it wouldn't take much more effort to release versions for OS X.
Oddly enough, I reckon the disruptive technology on Mac OS X won't come from Apple - it will be C# and Mono... more specifically the PPC JIT. Give it another year and you'll start noticing quite a few.NET apps running on Mac OS X.
Cocoa is a great technology, but it isn't agile enough. By that I mean that it's more monolithic application/client oriented, wheras the.NET framework blurs the boundary between client and server, or native app vs. sandboxed web app. vs ASP.NET web pages. Furthermore the C# developer base is growing rapidly.
Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc,
Like, WTF? This has to be a troll right? Off the top off my head, I can think of 3 Journaled files systems, and I know there are more. SMP support? It's been there in Linux for years.
As for your comments on the venerable Apache project - the is pure flamebait. Please educate yourself, Sir! And please apologise for your astounding rudeness to the Apache Foundation.
I can only assume that you hoped that Apache would run "out of the box" and didn't bother to investigate it's configuration options for serving larger numbers of requests. Also - you should have been using Apache2 - it has a better threading model.
Maybe it's just me... but everytime I look at that Caldera logo I just see the corner of a giant Mickey Mouse head hovering like a dark shadow across the globe.
I really don't know what you are talking about - though I concede that MySQL is far from perfect, I have no problems running it 24/7 primetime, and yes, I run it on Linux *and* Solaris. It's uptime is admirable and it is fine for a medium-sized web service.
Your "there is no place for MySQL in a web service." sounds like simple chest-beating posturing to me.
We've had more trouble with disk burn-outs, and we've not had very many of those.
To be fair - The IBM guy was trying to get
his voice recognised over a loud quicktime movie.
It would be pretty hard for the software to
separate out his command from all that
noise. Let's give him a break on that one.
I'm not so sure that we should be discussing the finer points of what he said here- What's really interesting is that M$ are starting to say these things at all - Now they've officially started the FUD, one can only surmise that they are now *really disturbed* by this global paradigm shift, and feel genuinely threatened. The cracks are starting to show, it's only a matter of time - drip....drip.....drip....drip....drip....
Slashdot Mirror
@ jomama717 I used to be in your situation too - very little time to code, and responsible for a team.
The single biggest improvement to my life at work as a technical team leader came about when I learned to better delegate. You have an entire team at your disposal! They are there to help you, as well as each other! It's all to easy to slip into 'control freak hero' mode, where you feel the need to do everything yourself because you don't feel anybody else can do it... but that will only ever perpetuate the situation and never give less experienced developers the chance to learn the ropes and be able to do what you can do. And if they don't get better at what they do, then they can never help take some of your workload off you.
In other words, If you don't feel you can delegate because you believe that others won't do the work to your standards, then you need to start fixing that, by making time to coach them through tasks and give feedback. If there are already developers on your team that you do trust to complete tasks to your standards, then you must delegate more immediately!
If you sub-divide and delegate a number of tasks between 4 or 5 developers (and yes, sometimes these are non-coding tasks, just like yours), then what might be a small effort or trivial interruption for them, can be a major load off your stack. It all adds up.
This would allow you more time to code up some solutions or example code as a technical lead (which are folded back into the team projects, again helping the team be more successful), or coach individual developers to bring them up to your required standards (if you don't feel you can delegate to them yet) - everybody wins; it's a virtuous circle.
If you feel you are struggling under the weight of non-coding tasks, again it's worth stressing that you can give out non-coding tasks too - say you need to write a document guideline for a web service API, there's nothing stopping you delegating that, to another developer, even if it's not coding work. Send a team member to a client meeting to gather feedback, and ask them to summarise the feedback for you. If it doesn't work out the first time, try and understand why and fix it.
If you aren't doing this already, then you should give that a go for six months. After that time, if it doesn't work for you, then...
Become an independent software contractor - where you will be paid to focus on code, because that is specifically what you will be hired to do. You get to work with a great variety of teams and codebases, learning much more than you would at a single company.
You can better set and negotiate your wage (within reason) and there's also no more performance reviews, unnecessary meetings (time is money), much less politics to endure as a 'non-employee', and at the end of a contract period you can give yourself a few weeks off to travel or recharge at home when, as you want it (Yes, you can give yourself 6 weeks annual leave to de-stress if you wish, and nobody can deny you that privilege).
I'll second that! You just made another friend :o)
I think that you're missing the point. There's more to ActiveRecord than just DB wrapping: It's Ruby's strengths of reflection and meta-programming, and being able to dynamically add methods and properties to objects at runtime that allow ActiveRecord to really fly, and that is why people get excited about it. Sure you can still do these things in Perl, but it's more painful.
A NASA spokesperson said that the rover was projected to reach the Longhorn rock "sometime in 2005... no wait! 2006... um... 2007?"
You're offtopic. The article is talking about ASP.NET and you are talking about ASP. They are two very different technologies.
Though there may be intellectual property issues concerning Windows Forms and other high level Windows toolkits - I think that it's necessary to point out that from the Start the primary goal of the Mono project was to implement the ECMA C# standard and core libraries - And they have met that goal with great success.
As far as I remember, right from the beginning Miguel said that even if Mono was forced to drop Windows compatibility, that Linux would still have an excellent memory-managed CLR and RDE to boot. It's important that you remember this.
Even if you are right, and M$ start playing the 800 pound gorilla, they cannot take away the ECMA standard core. In such a scenario, Developers will still be able to Develop C# applications for Linux using the GTK# GUI toolkit.
If you are worried about MS IP in your Mono Linux app, it's simple - don't use Windows Forms - use GTK#
Yup, good point - but don't misunderstand me - I'm not saying that Cocoa ain't full of good things - I've used Cocoa and I like it. I like Obj-C too! I'm simply seeing Mono on PPC as a very attractive, flexible proposition to developers that are already using .NET, and have built codebases that use the .NET framework.
If they've been good developers and kept to a nice clean MVC design for their Linux and Window apps, then it wouldn't take much more effort to release versions for OS X.
Oddly enough, I reckon the disruptive technology on Mac OS X won't come from Apple - it will be C# and Mono... more specifically the PPC JIT. Give it another year and you'll start noticing quite a few .NET apps running on Mac OS X.
.NET framework blurs the boundary between client and server, or native app vs. sandboxed web app. vs ASP.NET web pages. Furthermore the C# developer base is growing rapidly.
Cocoa is a great technology, but it isn't agile enough. By that I mean that it's more monolithic application/client oriented, wheras the
Everytime you say SCO - A kitten dies.
So is this like uh... a thinly disguised advert, or what?
(Yes, I checked out the site)
Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc,
Like, WTF? This has to be a troll right? Off the top off my head, I can think of 3 Journaled files systems, and I know there are more. SMP support? It's been there in Linux for years.
As for your comments on the venerable Apache project - the is pure flamebait. Please educate yourself, Sir! And please apologise for your astounding rudeness to the Apache Foundation.
I can only assume that you hoped that Apache would run "out of the box" and didn't bother to investigate it's configuration options for serving larger numbers of requests. Also - you should have been using Apache2 - it has a better threading model.
Maybe it's just me... but everytime I look at that Caldera logo
I just see the corner of a giant Mickey Mouse head hovering
like a dark shadow across the globe.
Hey. Maybe Disney should sue.
I really don't know what you are talking about - though I concede that MySQL is far from perfect, I have no problems running it 24/7 primetime, and yes, I run it on Linux *and* Solaris. It's uptime is admirable and it is fine for a medium-sized web service.
Your "there is no place for MySQL in a web service." sounds like simple chest-beating posturing to me.
We've had more trouble with disk burn-outs, and we've not had very many of those.
To be fair - The IBM guy was trying to get his voice recognised over a loud quicktime movie. It would be pretty hard for the software to separate out his command from all that noise. Let's give him a break on that one.
Sorry, the link pasted badly in this sucky
p g
Microsoft GUI - if you haven't guessed there
should not have been any spaces...
http://
homepage.mac.com/Cipher13/.Pictures/vergleich.j
http://homepage.mac.com/Cipher13/.Pictures/verglei ch.jpg
I'm not so sure that we should be discussing the finer points of what he said here- What's really interesting is that M$ are starting to say these things at all - Now they've officially started the FUD, one can only surmise that they are now *really disturbed* by this global paradigm shift, and feel genuinely threatened. The cracks are starting to show, it's only a matter of time - drip....drip.....drip....drip....drip....
Well- If we could get servers to run on Spam, I think we'd have the whole global energy problem sewn up.