Observations

1. It gets lonely on the top. If you don't have any good connections with the upper level, you are lonely as hell.
2. You can, but its intrinsically quite difficult to be friends with your stall. The respect dictated by the employer/employee relationship somehow prevents it from happening...
3. apply 2 to 1 and there you go
   

7 Habits of Highly efficient People

A great statement here that I like:

"It is motivation that gets you started, habit is what keeps you going!"

So how can we define habits?

As we grow older and wiser, we also change our outlook in terms of how we perceive our self's and others in terms of dependability.

• Dependence - the paradigm of you. You take care of me, I blame you...
  

• Independence - the paradigm of I. I can do it, I am responsible...
  

• Interdependence - the paradigm of we. Together we will succeed...
  

In order to become more effective we need to balance the production of desired results and our capability of the same.

In effect its all about balance short term gains with long term goals.

We are responsible for our own effectiveness, for our own happiness and ultimately for most of our circumstances...

Pretty much, you are the results of your own actions :)


The 7 habits defined

• Proactivity
• Begin with the end in mind
• First thing first
• Think Win Win
• Seek first to understand, then to be understood
• Synergize
• Sharpen the saw- become better, keener and more efficient

Have a nice day :)

Pursue your dreams baby...

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." - Albert Einstein

I have been thinking lately about what drives us humans to pursue things. We all have dreams, issues or tasks that we very often don't do anything about even though we know we should. Its almost like the threshold is to high, the risk to great or our priorities are all screwed up.

Its always there, the feeling that something should really be done about this, but not now...

"Lets wait, It can always be done tomorrow"

We postpone this thing we want/need/must do in order to preserve our sanity until its unbearable. Why? I mean how often really do we suffer from this limited form of cognitive dissonance?

Its stupid!!!

The Boss

So we have all had them one or another time. The Boss. We either hate them or love them. Here are am listing two, I think, extremes that I have come across..

Which one are you and why do you think?

• The evangelistic motivator

• The Brutal enforcer
  

From a tactical point of view they both gets things done. But strategically, how does it all pan out?

The Brutal enforcer with his super pragmatic no-nonsense attribute does not stimulate to do things because you want to but because you have to. Its all about governance by fear. In the long run this personality trait will never succeed because people will be worn out. Fear of speaking ones mind, fear of making a mistake or appear less skillfull totally violates the idea of collecting feedback which it so important in order to successfully run a business. The Brutal enforcer is creating rules for anything and everything. He is the killer of creativity. He is never happy and rarely complements on a good work done. Luckily there are not to many of these people in leading positions very long or if own the company you are working for you smoothly switch to a new department/company real soon :)

The Evangelistic motivator is on the complete different side of things. He is there but not there at the same time. He is leading by example. The way he teaches is not to say DO THIS, but stimulates learning by asking things like WHAT IF and HOW COME? Basically this personal is interested in things outside the problem domain you are working in. He is interested in you. He puts people in the center and allows for synergies to happen by gently presenting the vision or goal and not enforcing anything. He trust that the people he has hired are up to the Job as they all passed the interviews they had to go through. Unfortunately there are not to many of these people available as this skill is very difficult to obtain. This is something part innate and part trained.


Conclusion
Even though the work must be done it cannot be done on the basis on governance by fear. The system will eventually break down.

It is so important to have good personal skills. You need a great EQ in order to motivate and stimulate people to do things. This way you create synergies by getting so much more that just the work done.

The responsibilities of a software architect

After having been working as an software architect in various companies for 10+ years I would like to offer my humble opinion in this matter.

I like the idea of conceptual grouping of what we do when developing software. RUP defines 4 such groups that can be used to describe the various phases a software project can go through.

• Inception
  
• determining whether its worthwhile going through with the project
• setting up prototypes
• gauging the complexities
  
• Elaboration
  
• gathering most significant functional requirements
• building candidate architecture and functional skeletons
  
• defining the non functional requirements
  
• setting up the project (defining standards etc. etc.)
  
• hiring people, etc. etc.
  
• Construction
  
• implementing more functionality and features
• gathering more requirements
• changing requirement and implementation if needed
  
• Transition
  
• finalization, making battle ready
• releasing
  

We can think about software development in this way:

1. There is a need for computer program to be implemented, and the reasons can be:
   
• economical (we need to save money or make more money)
• human (as a tool, visualization, training)
  
2. Try to define what we need this computer program to do for us
   
3. Try to come up with the best possible way known at the time to do this, best here can be:
• fastest
  
• most elegant
• cheapest
• most compliant
4. Commence with implementation following some kind of process, best practise here:
   
• iteratively
• incremental
• use case/scenario/story/task/feature drive

Some tools and principles that I have found that will aid in this activity:

1. Continuous integration
2. TDD
3. Refactoring
   
4. Scripting languages
5. RAD
6. Separation of concern
   
7. Issue tracker
8. Wiki (with support for active discussions)
   
9. There is no substitute for skill and experience!
10. Communication and feedback
11. KISS
12. YANGNI
13. Code reviews
14. Curtness, humbleness and mutual respect
15. Managing expectations
16. Avoid rather than detect problems but handle gracefully when so
17. Collective ownership
18. Delegation is a great way manage time
    
19. Open source tools of all kinds...
    

Here are some of the responsibilities I would expect from a software architect in short form:

• Requirements gathering and synthesising
• System architecture - servers, routers bandwidths and so on
• Nonfunctional requirements - capacity planning, scalability and performance conformance
• Application architecture and design coming from some kind of analysis based on the above
• Setting up project and hiring people
• Setting up candidate architecture and skeletons
• Establishing coding guidelines and standards
• Establishing project methodology and process
• Deciding on tools for development, communication and management
  
• Training people
• Documentation
• Analysis, Design and Implementation - Hands on!

These are some of the attitudes I think a software architect should have:

• Enthusiastic
• Evangelistic
• Humble
• Clear and to the point
• Agile
• Pragmatic
  

The architect is the driver, the leader and the motivator. Without a good architect there can be no supper tomorrow :)