September 2004 - Posts

• The Architect and the Developer

  Shall I tell you what to do and how to do it, or shall I rather steer your thinking, enthusiasm and curiosity in the right direction? As Systems Architect, I have tremendous influence on the analysts, designers and developers around me. I can refuse to sign off their design. I can start nit picking and alienate them from me. I choose not to. I choose to be a mentor, guide and motivator.   I love to see the light of insight in someone's eyes. I love to listen to them as they start on a journey of exploration and experience. The best of all is the realisation that someone who a year ago hated his/her job, now loves it and embarks enthusiastically into strange waters.    Development can be pretty boring. I believe that we should find the route of creativity (but keep to the standards!) in everything we do. This way we will think laterally about problems and solutions. Boring work can become exciting and fun. Our enthusiasm is contagious.   I see this happening around me (regardless of draconian smokebreak rules). I feel good about it. In a small way I contributed. I am not architecting systems. I am architecting the attitudes of the people responsible for those systems. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Posted Sep 21 2004, 10:30 PM by tina with 1 comment(s)

• The Good, the Bad and the really Horrible

  What a day! Thanks to the dev community it ends better than it started.   The Horrible An e-mail was sent to everyone detailing the bad image IT personnel create by idling about all day having smoke breaks and from now on we will only be allowed to smoke at 10:00, 13:00 and 15:00 for no longer than 15 minutes! There was a lot more to it. Good grief! I am a professional, I am passionate about my work, I actually get paid to deliver, not to sit at my desk (or so I thought). What more can I say, for the first time in ages I'm speechless...   The Bad Hmmm...come to think of it, after the horrible, nothing could be bad.   The Good It is not merely good, it was brilliant. I attended the Cape Town SADeveloper session. Was I impressed! Deon really knows his stuff. His presentation was interesting and even I understood his code.  After Deon's outstanding presentation, another really good thing happened. Some students also attended the session. I chatted to Yolanda and Winki (if I get the spelling wrong, forgive me). They are eager to get involved in analysis and hopefully we will see them around again. I could talk to them about a pet topic I have and will soon spend time on namely why are women so scarce in IT. The best was when I got home and saw the warm welcome I got from the bloggers. Wow! I did not expect this. Thank you from the bottom of my heart and my husband’s bottom too. Oh, no that is not how it goes. Whatever.. After a welcome like this, who cares about the petty mindedness of micro managing, incompetent megalomaniacs?!   I'll keep on blogging. Next time I'll dump my mind on my experience around the collaboration effort between SAArchitect.net and SADeveloper.net. It is a great effort and worth having a look at. What a day! I have a warm, fuzzy feeling and am ready for my last cigarette for the day. Oh, I missed my smoke break...   Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Posted Sep 18 2004, 09:57 AM by tina with 4 comment(s)

• Please use plain English!

  Maybe I'm not clever enough, but I get highly irritated when I have to translate what I read or hear into plain English. Neither the other person nor I have bad English, but we definitely do not speak the same language. I still remember the definition for language from my Linguistics 101: “Language is an informal contract between the speakers to attach the same concept to the same sounds.“ or something like that. This was a long time ago. So, if you speak English that is not accessible to your audience, you are breaking the contract. You might as well speak Gibberish as far as your audience is concerned. You alienate your audience for two reasons. In the first place you make them feel stupid. No one likes to feel stupid, so they will assume you do it on purpose to look more clever than what you are. Secondly, people get very tired of listening to you, because they have to perform mental gymnastics. They switch off (OK, I switch off). You might as well be talking to the trees. No one is listening anymore, they are either too involved trying to figure out what you said five minutes ago, or their language centre went on strike. When we try to convey information, we should use plain, clear language. Convoluted sentence structures and high vocabulary will stand between you and your audience. The more complex the idea you want to convey, the simpler the language you should use.  Now I will have some energized bovine lactation and fall into the welcoming embrace of Morpheus... (I'll have a mug of hot milk and go to sleep)     Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Posted Sep 16 2004, 09:59 PM by tina with 6 comment(s)