The developerWorks Live! blog is brought to you by our very own briefing presenters. Together, this team of technical and marketing professionals have a wide variety of experience across multiple products and technologies. They work closely with developers and business IT professionals, along with collegiate faculty to provide information on the latest technologies, standards, and tools.

D is for Delightful (and Dallas)

If you've ever been to one of our briefings, or even if you've just looked at the briefings Web site, you know that our typical schedule is to do one or two briefings in one city on a single day. Then a couple of days later we might do another briefing or two in another city. Ever since we started the developerWorks Live! briefings, we've always done it that way. But last August we tried something different, and I want to tell you about it.

A member of my team, Chris Nelson, has been working on a project called the Shared Software Infrastructure Program (SSIP). In August, a conference centered on this program was organized by the Institute of Software Engineers (ISE) at the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas). The ISE invited students, faculty, and businesses to the conference. As part of the conference, Chris thought it would be a good idea to present some of our briefings to interested conference attendees. He wanted to present each briefing more than once during the three days of the conference, so that conference attendees would be able to attend as many of the briefings as possible. Chris also had an idea for a change in the format of the briefings.

Our briefings have always been designed as presentations, i.e. the presenter discusses the topic of the agenda using a set of PowerPoint slides periodically punctuated with demonstrations of the products. The audience role is passive; they are presented to. Chris wanted to try something different. He felt that the audience should have a more active role — that in fact they should have computers in front of them to do the demonstrations themselves, like labs or exercises in a training class, though following along with the presenter. We decided to give Chris's ideas a shot.

We picked five of our briefings to take to the conference: Architecture, Testing, Change and Release Management (CARM), Eclipse, and Open Source (these are our short names for these briefings). We had three rooms at the conference site, with 20 laptops in each room. Since these are all half-day briefings, we could do (and did) six briefings each day, and each briefing was presented at least three times during the three-day conference.

The results were fabulous. Attendees really loved the hands-on format, and were appreciative that they had a chance to see all five briefings over the course of the conference. Because it takes longer to do demos with audience participation, we had to cut back on the number of slides we could present during a session, but the attendees felt that this was more than compensated for by having the chance to touch and feel the products. Plus, we pointed the attendees to the briefing Web site, where one can download the entire presentation, with notes, for each briefing.

We had an excellent staff supporting us at the conference. Here is a photo of (from left to right) Kathy Fincher, Suzanne Baird, and Jayna Olsen, who signed in attendees, coordinated lunch, pointed people to the right rooms, distributed and collected feedback forms, and all of the other myriad things that help to make an event like this run smoothly, and without whose help we speakers just could not do. (This picture is small, but their contributions were HUGE.)

We will probably continue to do briefings again as we did before the UT Dallas conference, but the success we had at this conference has led us to schedule similar events, although not in the context of an academic conference. We are calling these events developerWorks Live! mini conferences, and we will use the same format as we did in Dallas: multiple consecutive days with multiple briefings presented each day, each briefing delivered more than once during the event, and hands-on participation by the audience during the demos. So go to the mini conference Web site, find a mini conference that fits your schedule, and come on out and join us.

Today's blog title: My friend and colleague Doug Tidwell (have I mentioned before how much I enjoy his blog?) recently turned me on to a new band. The Arctic Monkeys are very, very good; great songs, cool lyrics, and very talented musicians. I now have all of their CDs. It just happened that right after I found out about them, they came to Chicago (I live just outside Chicago, in NW Indiana). I took my 21-year old stepson, Mark, with me to see them. Like most rock concerts I go to these days, I was the oldest dude there. When I go to blues concerts, that's a different story. But, I digress. The concert was outstanding, and I've become a big fan. One of my favorite songs is "D Is For Dangerous", which has these lyrics:

D is for delightful
And try and keep your trousers on
I think you should know you're his favorite worst nightmare

I'm not so sure what the trousers bit is about (it's fun, nonetheless), but the phrase "favorite worst nightmare" is just, well, delightful.

Newest new music: Another great band I've stumbled across is The Malamondos. A couple of months ago I ordered a guitar from Eastwood Guitars (I'm a brand new guitar player; right now I know three chords). On the Eastwood Guitars Web site they have a list of artists that (I think) use their guitars, with links to the bands' Web sites. Recently I was looking at the different sites and when I got to The Malamondos site — WOW! Amazing music. Soul-searing rock 'n' roll at it's raunchiest (and I mean that in the absolute best way possible).

I had to have this music, so I ordered two CDs from their Web site. The next day I got an e-mail from The Malamondos guitar player, Van Serpico, explaining that one of the CDs was a CD single, and that the songs on it were also on the other CD I had ordered, and that they just couldn't in good faith take my money for both. In the e-mail he offered to refund my money or to put together a bonus CD of material they had recorded but hadn't released yet. I opted for the bonus CD. (Warning — Don't try this at home; I wouldn't want Van thinking I've abused his kindness.)

Not only do The Malamondos do great rock 'n' roll, they also do great customer service! They are fantastic — check 'em out.

P.S. On the CD that I have, Mr. Serpico states that he plays Hallmark Guitars, which I think are pretty wiggly ("wiggly" = willyfarrellspeak for "cool, but better than cool"). I ordered my youngest son, Jimmy, a beautiful Hallmark guitar (the white one at the bottom of the page) not too long ago. Both of my sons are darn fine musicians, among other wonderful aspects of their characters. Jimmy has posted some of his music on his MySpace page, and my oldest son, Willy, just put up another video of him playing and singing (you can see a little bit of the guitar and amp I recently bought him in the background — if you're thinking I've bought a lot of guitars recently, you're right).

Nebraska and Asia

Here's....Randy!

Hello, Randy Powell back again. Yes, I just got back from a short visit to the panhandle of Nebraska in the beautiful town of Scottsbluff. Local sites along the Oregon Trail include the Chimney Rock picture I took

However, it is "somewhat" different than the sights and sounds in Asia (ASEAN) where I spent time this summer on both vacation and then on business. Several months ago my blog discussed my trip to China and the SOA Lifecycle technical briefing my colleague Lucas Ma Lin and I presented. During this Asian ASEAN tour I delivered the updated and refreshed version of this SOA Lifecycle briefing in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Makati (Manila), Jakarta and then finally in Singapore. My colleague, Paul Coates, joined me in the first 3 cities of this tour and provided customers with his expertise on Open Source technology as well as what IBM is doing in the Open Community space. This message was tightly aligned with the SOA Lifecycle message and generated a great deal of interest with the 100's of customers we spoke with. We work very hard while "on the road" and contrary to those that think global travel is all fun `n games, it can be very tiring. However, on weekends when we're not travelling we sometimes do have the opportunity to relax and re-charge the batteries.

Two hats are better than one

The gray hat is for my current temporary job, that of chief architect on a software development project in Marseille, France (pronounced "Mar-say"). Working on the project is a tremendous refresher on the tasks, duties, issues, and responsibilities of a software architect. And very challenging.

The project is extremely interesting and we're currently in the business analysis and scoping phase. I'm working on defining all the technical aspects of the project, from hardware requirements, to development tools and technology choices, overall architectural models, across the entire software delivery lifecycle. And I can't tell you how much my experience with our briefing content on the Rational Software Delivery Platform has helped me ensure that I've got it all covered. The Rational SDP includes a set of tools that support all roles involved in software development. And process guidance from RUP is invaluable for understanding best practices in all aspects of the delivery lifecycle.

I'll be back soon doing my briefings on hot technologies, like application security. In fact, we'll soon have a community space devoted to that subject here:

developerWorks community topics

Stay tuned and I hope to see you soon.

Executive Platinum...in July?!?!

looks like i'm next on the chopping block list for adding an entry to our wonderful blog here. so, i should probably start with the obligatory picture of myself:

i'd like to send a big thank you to everyone who helped me out with the eclipse and testing events in china, korea and taiwan. especially Rebecca Cui, Lucas Ma, Robert Law, Jodi Chen, Sunjin Lee, and Stanley Kwong. without your help, i probably wouldn't have made it to a single venue ;-).

personal record (aka title explanation): our team does quite a bit of travel to deliver these events and evangelize our new products and emerging technologies to developers around the world, and i just reached the highest milestone (executive platinum) with one of the airlines i fly on 28 july. last year, i didn't arrive at this milestone until early september, so i felt the need to share.

need something to look forward to in august? college football starts 30 august, and i couldn't be more excited. it has long been my favorite sport and my team, the Texas Longhorns (also my alma mater), should be a force to be reckoned with this season. hook 'em!

A Thousand Times Better ?

Hi, my name is Chris Nelson, and I’m one of the presenters of the developerWorks Live briefings. I’m also the lead for the topic on Effective Software Testing. As you can see from my picture, I’m what you might call a Veteran of IT (there are of course some less flattering descriptions). My background is that of a developer and architect, and came to IBM late in my career. Frankly I’ve had a blast. It is somewhat ironic that I now have the lead on Testing – some from my past developer days would consider me part of the problem (motto – it compiled, ship it).

What I have seen is that how software is developed has changed dramatically since I first started (wrote my first program in 1968). I’ll skip all the old war stories, and focus on two things that I think have a dominant effect on how software is developed today –development team collaboration and complexity of the application.

I suspect that just about every person involved in development has had the thought – “What the bleep (supply your own word) is this idiot doing here?” Back when I started, you just yelled that thought across the room, and you got an answer (usually as irreverent). You can still do that today, but your team now is just working on stone number 1392 of the anti-chamber of the great pyramid. Most of the time you have no idea who the other people are chipping away at other stones. This loss of casual collaboration with the whole development team makes things much more difficult, and time consuming. A lot of effort today is in trying to mitigate this – particularly I think in the Eclipse platform: one IDE to learn and a platform for any tool. We can’t quite yell across the room, but I can see if I need to anything the whole team is working on including the logs and results. Its lets us resolve issues quicker and better.

The other major factor I would like to comment on is complexity of the final application. In the late 70s and early 80s, applications that ran businesses, wrote our memos, and entertained us worked quite well in machines with 500 KB of memory or less. Today, 500 meg is becoming tiny. A simplistic look at this says that size and complexity has increased by a factor of more then 1000. If you don’t believe this, go write your version of “Hello World” using your current language/development environment and take a look at the size of the executable along with the call trace of all the functions that get invoked.

But that’s just code complexity. Now developers have dependencies on the operating system, middleware, language libraries, legacy code, code from people on the other side of the planet, and code from partners, competitors, and venders. Today, we don’t even know what idiot to curse at; we just have our “favorite” operating system to rail at.

The biggest weapon we have for reducing complexity is standards – things we agree on. Java, XML, .Net, web services, J2EE architecture, HTML, Eclipse are examples of things we know, and depend on. We learn them in school, and they give teams a common understanding and vocabulary. Other common ideas or concepts help us; service oriented architectures, agile programming, and processes to control complex development (we call it Governance.

I think IBM is a strong leader here, and that makes me feel good about what I do, and what I say when doing a briefing. I hope I get a chance to see some of you on my travels, and if you read this, come on up and say Hi.

Bloggin', bloggin', pretty mama don't you tell on me

So — it gets decided that it would be a good idea to have a blog about the developerWorks Live! briefings written by the folks that deliver those briefings. And, to make it easier on us (after all, we are busy guys — and unfortunately we are all guys), we agree to split the duties amongst several of us. My friend Jeff Miller and my boss (also friend) Randy Powell have done their entries and now it's my turn. And I feel like a deer in headlights. What to write about, what to write about?

Writing. Has anyone else noticed how bad most business writing is (said in my best Andy Rooney impression)? Not books and articles by well-edited authors, but e-mails, and reports, and, yes, blogs. Every day I see terrible grammar, lousy sentence structure, ill-formed paragraphs — the list goes on. I'm no Shakespeare of business writing, and I'm sure there are those that find my writing quite atrocious, but I do try. To me, it seems that much of the business writing I read is written by those that don't really try.

I've become convinced that the blame for all of this bad writing can be laid squarely at the feet of PowerPoint. I came to this conviction from attending a seminar held by Edward Tufte, Professor Emeritus at Yale University, and reading this gentleman's books on visualizing and displaying information. In particular, his pamphlet The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint demonstrates how the use of PowerPoint leads to very poor communication and almost zero transfer of knowledge. He includes in this pamphlet a wonderful parody: Abraham Lincoln using PowerPoint for the Gettysburg Address. I highly recommend this pamphlet, and if you're still not sure you want to spend an entire seven dollars to purchase it on just my recommendation, read Philippe Kruchten's review in the IBM Rational library.

While Tufte's issues with PowerPoint are focused on presentations, I think that all of this very, very poor communication using PowerPoint atrophies any writing skills that we have. We are so used to bullet points on a slide, we've forgotten how to construct a decent paragraph.

At this point, if you've ever attended one of our briefings, you have to be thinking "who is this cat to badmouth PowerPoint when he makes his living delivering PowerPoint presentations?" (by they way — my name is Willy Farrell). I'm not saying all PowerPoint presentations are bad. And I'm not saying the PowerPoint presentations we use in our briefings are perfect. But we do think long and hard about how we put our presentations together. And we are always working to improve our delivery styles. Let us know how you think we're doing by attending a briefing and providing your feedback, or leave your comments here on this blog. We welcome your input.

Today's blog title: I'm a big fan of the blues, and one of my favorite pre-war (WWII) bands is The Memphis Jug Band. The first line of their song "Stealin' Stealin'" is "Stealin', stealin', pretty mama don't you tell on me" and I've loosely paraphrased it here to acknowledge that I'm stealing the "Today's blog title" idea from my good friend and wonderful blogger, Doug Tidwell. His blog is a must-read if you want to stay current on XForms, Service Component Architecture (SCA), Service Data Objects (SDO), and lots of other good stuff. It's also a must-read if you like to laugh — he is a very funny guy.

Summertime and the livin' is easy: We usually don't do very many briefings in the summer months (northern hemisphere). We've found that people are too busy having summertime fun to attend a briefing (skip work and stay indoors?!?), so we use the time to refresh our briefing materials and also to create new briefings. Keep an eye on the briefings page for our newest briefings, but also think about attending a briefing you've attended in the past — there are usually new things to be learned.

Welcome to the dWLive blog

My team is lucky enough to have the opportunity to travel and it's always interesting no matter where we are. Not only is it interesting to see new places but we constantly learn from our audiences and hopefully spread wisdom in their direction. We cover many subjects related to software delivery, including open source software, development and testing products from the five IBM software brands, software for managing development projects, and much more.

One of the most challenging things about the job is answering questions. Audiences don't want to hear us say, "I don't know." So we try to learn as much as we can about subjects and speak about technology from our own extensive experience. Imagine not being able to answer a question while on a stage in from of 670 developers and architects in Bangkok. Or having a demo go south in front of a room full of hot software developers in San Francisco.

It's a definite challenge just keeping up with technology ourselves. So we spend a lot of time keeping our own skills sharp. We write our technical content and do much research to make sure we have quality technical information to offer. We build demos that we do for audiences and we often record them for playback over the Web. In fact you can find many of our demos here.

And you can learn about all our technical briefings and find ones near you right here.

In the coming entries here you hear stories from the briefing presenters on our team and read more about the developerWorks Live briefings. I hope you'll stay tuned!


May 31 2007, 02:45:53 PM EDT Permalink

Tech Briefings - World Touring: China May 2007