I came across this really great podcast today and I felt compelled to follow up with my own .02. Please do yourself a favor and listen to it.

Hanselminutes Podcast 65 - Martin Fowler and David Heinemeier Hansson

I too was a .Net developer and transitioned to RoR last year for all the reasons that DHH and Fowler stated. I was annoyed (and still am when I have to do .Net) that every time I started a new project I had to go through the same process of where do I store my resources and where do I store my source.

It was quite nice to get some validation and hear it articulated in such an elegant manner. I also very much enjoy hearing DHH speak.

I have a vendor that lives for complexity and all the things that I’ve grown to hate in the “enterprise” software scene. They operate an Oracle ESB in conjunction with BPEL/OAG as their data-exchange.

Call me naive or “not enterprise” all you want, however, if I’m not mistaken the whole point of having an ESB is so you can take varying inbound and outbound data from disparate systems and transform them to their respective targets formats regardless of what the source data’s format may actually be.

Now back to said vendor… Rather than hang a simple web-service endpoint out there to exchange 7 fields and transform that data to the OAG format before queuing in the ESB. They’ve mandated a single-point of entry where everything is OAG compliant regardless if there’s 1 field or 100 fields in the exchange.

Absurd as that may sound, it’s not the most absurd. We have to implement a web-service on our end to exchange 2 fields. They’re now trying to mandate that we implement OAG on our end.

I’m reminded of Cindy Mitchell’s statement “bloated corrupt and incompetent” when she spoke of the current state of “enterprise” software at RailsConf 2007. If only I had the supporting picture of Terl/Cheney.

This past weekend I needed to build a new LAMP/RoR dev box. We’ve got this old Compaq ProLiant DL360, a perfect candidate for a low-traffic development box. I’ve been using Ubuntu for a while now and decided I give Ubuntu 6.10-Server a try.

As I’ve come to expect from Ubuntu, the installation went without a hitch.

Wait, not so fast. After rebooting, and doing the initial boot sequence, Grub outputs a fatal error: cpqarray: error sending ID controller

I rebooted the box again, just to be sure. It’s an old Windows habit. But this error wasn’t going away.

Initially the error was frustrating, however, after googling a bit I managed to muster up a few links that gave some insight:

• http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/linux/proliant/
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=82466
• http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=255335

The gist of what I needed to do is outlined below:

Reboot the machine with the installation CD. Select “Rescue System”. Follow all the steps until it errors. This will present you with the advanced installation widget.

Select “Execute Shell”

After you enter the console. You need to execute the following commands:

$ mkdir target
$ mount /dev/ida/c0d0p1 target
$ chroot target
$ echo "cpqarray" >> etc/initramsfs-tools/modules
# for dapper
# $ echo “cpqarray” >> etc/mkinitramsfs/modules
# thanks jallen
$ update-initramfs -u
(I’ve skipped any steps outlining the implicit requirement to backup files)

Now simply reboot and voila you have a functional server.

Well you could say I’m throwing in the towel… I thought that I wanted to build a consulting firm and be fully self-employed. However after three months of 100 hr work weeks for 40-45 hrs of which were billable, I began to re-evaluate if I was on the right path.

This lead to some rather lengthy discussions with my family about priorities and sacrifices. We decided that it’s in our families best-interest for me to go back to work.

Going back to work is a bigger challenge than one might anticipate. Within three days of putting word on the street, I had several job-offers to mull over. Call me skeptical, but I’m just not incredibly moved by job-offers anymore. They never seem to be forthcoming and frankly they seem to all feed you the “used-car salesman” line.

There was however, one refreshing development company (Odindev) that stood out. The CEO was very frank about the nature of the company in its current state, as well as, where he wants the company to be. After several discussions an offer was extended to me and I have accepted.

I will be charged with technology leadership, as well as, leading all software development, which includes, but is not limited to, custom solutions and product. There will also be the opportunity to mentor several junior developers and I look forward to that.

I derive a great deal of satisfaction from results, 2006 was very bleak on results for me. I gained a lot of experience and broadened my skillset at least two-fold. But in terms of quantifiable wins, it was a very lackluster year for me. I’m eager to take on this new position and get myself back on a winning track with a team that I see great potential in.

Cheers…

I’ve been developing software since 1998. Originally, I cut my teeth doing CGI’s with Perl on Slackware and genuinely enjoyed my simple little successes. However, a few years into my career I bounced into a Microsoft shop, and inadvertently managed to drink the kool-aid.

I spent the next 5 years evangelizing every development that transpired out of the .Net platfrom. I spoke MS acronym’ese fluently. The most flagrant fanaticism on my part was the implementation of “Enterprise” systems.

If a client wanted a simple CRUD web-application, my goodness, it had to be “Enterprise” because we had to be able to scale it. This would usually involve an Asp.net front-end, a web-services layer, a lightweight service-bus, a data-tier and Sql Server. You know all the components that make an architecture “Enterprise”.

Ultimately though, after several years and many project lifecycles of over-architecture, over-complication, and missed timelines, I began fostering an ovewhelming feeling of chagrin toward development.

In early 2006 a colleague of mine introduced me to Ruby, and though I had heard the buzz for well over a year, this time I took note. For the first time in probably 4 years I was having fun writing code again.

I won’t claim Ruby is a silver bullet, however, it was enough of a catalyst, that it energized me out of a state of complacency.

Here we are in December of 2006 and now I’m compleletely MS free. I’m doing pure open-source (RoR and LAMP) web-development on a Macbook.

Since transitioning back to the open-source development paradigm I’m hitting my timelines, my codebase is significantly smaller, my client’s are happy and most of all… I’m happy.

I’m by no means advocating that there’s no place in the world for “Enterprise Systems”, just that 99% of the development in the world doesn’t require an “Enterprise System” nor does it require .Net or Java

I’ve tried hard to be a corporate employee, you know, live-eat-breathe the organization, work numerous hours “for the greater good”, volunteer your own hardware for the struggling start-up, hire your friends, and ignore your family week after week.

I bought into that lie one too many times and the perception my significance, in said organization, was of much less relevance than I had actually been lead to believe.

Twice in the past year (7 months), I have had my position terminated, both times for being told with no uncertainty that I was “Kicking butt and continue doing what you’re doing”.

In my most recent position I advocated hard on behalf of my organization to hire one of my best-friends to work in tandem with me. Within a matter of weeks my manager placed me as subordinate to my own friend, then several weeks later forced my friend into the uncomfortable position of terminating me.

Essentially, I was told that I was far to expensive of an employee for the quantity of wins, over a six month period. For context, in six months we launched head long into about ten different projects, we only completed three. This was due primarily to management’s failure to commit to a project. The projects for which there was an actual commitment… were completed. In addition I also wore the hat of, server-administrator, network-administrator, as well as, occasional help-desk.

Where does this leave me? Quite disillusioned about life as an employee.

I’ve talked about self-employment for some time, and have yearned to make that transition from moonlighter to professional independent consultant for many years. I’m going to take advantage of this opportunity right now to do just that. The market is very robust right now, and I’ve already had several colleagues indicate interest in me doing just that.

At this point I believe my experience is broad enough to cover most of the requirements in either product or business. Given my recent transition to a platform agnostic development philosophy, coupled with some short-term wins… This latest organization may have just done me the best favor of my life.

After several years of deliberation, and much goading from several colleagues I’ve finally decided to commit to the blogosphere.