Long wires, and how my job is cooler than Gordon's

    (I struggled with where to put this post, because it's kinda diary content, but I also talk about dotnet technology. I've decided to put this one here, but if your interested in more general content than just the .NET stuff and you're only reading the .NET feed (the Aussie .NET bloggers OPML for instance only includes the .NET stuff), then you should have a look see over here).

    Gordon follows up with his first blog post with something I've never bothered to do -- that is, provide a fuller description of what I actually do 9 to 5. I might just correct that now...

    My name is Michael Still, and I work for a company called TOWER Software (yes, we really do shout it). My job title says Senior Software Engineer, and it's mostly accurate. I've heard about companies which have job titles like Distinguished Engineer for staff who have actually shipped successful product, but in a company the size of TOWER, all of our engineers do that every day, so we don't bother. We're based in Canberra, the capital of Australia. We've been around for about 20 years now, but I've only been with the company for about 3.5 years of that. You can find out more about me here if you're really interested in that stuff.

    TOWER produces an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) named TRIM. For the technical among you, that's kinda like a source control system for your office documents. Except it isn't. It tracks changes like that, but there are also about 80 search methods available, ranging from title, to other meta data, to the content of the document, to the author, et cetera. It's kinda like the big brother to SharePoint, in that we do all that SharePoint does, and much more. It's all about large organizations being able to find their information later, and conforming with whatever legal requirements there are in their locality (like Sarbanes-Oxley in the US, and the Archives Act in Australia). Oh, did I mention that we also handle all the security, the LDAP like location stuff for your organization, basic relationship management, and a bunch of other stuff? In fact, the Nova software company that Gordon speaks about is based around the realization that TRIM is really a funky engine for generating your bespoke applications, without needing to reinvent the wheel all the time for things like security and data retention. It's more complicated than that, because TRIM is also most definitely useful in and of itself, but you get the idea. If you have more questions about TRIM, then you should talk to our delightful sales people.

    Why shouldn't you ask me those questions? Because I've never sold a copy of TRIM in my life, and never will. TOWER is a global operation, and have sales and support offices scattered liberally around the world. I work for the headquarters company, which does all of the product engineering, and none of the sales. It's rare for that work to be done in Australia, which is one of the things which makes us cool from an Australian perspective. TRIM only runs on various Microsoft Windows flavors, and is developed in a combination of C++ for the core, C# for some of the newer support stuff, and VB for the older support stuff. If you're a 'lete coder in one of the those languages in Australia, perhaps you should consider dropping me a line and we can put your resume on the mound of people to consider next time we need a body.

    That gets me onto Gordon's job, which is best described by that cliche of herding cats. Internally we run a hybrid MSF methodology, which results in a bunch of project teams being formed to do specific pieces of work. Gordon is a project manager for some of those teams. His job is to make me do the boring things like getting the product done on time, and having nice Gantt charts.

    I've never envied Gordon his job, and it's interesting for him to say that he loves it. Imagine trying to keep a bunch of the smartest, most driven people you've ever met pulling in the same direction. It's hard. Especially when they're not convinced that what you're asking for is the best for the product. I'm sure that most project managers would just throw their hands up in the air and walk away if the first stage of a project was getting the engineers convinced that it is a good idea. Gordon does it well though, which is good as it's that creative tension which makes us so strong... It means that if I advocate something, then I'll d*mn well make it happen, because now it's my reputation on the line.

    (For the Americans amongst us, one of the cultural differences I really notice is that Australian's don't like telling you how smart they are. That should just be obvious, or you're not really smart at all. I'll temper the smart comment above therefore with an observation that I know lots of other smart people doing other work. For instance I always feel inadequate when talking to Tridge. That doesn't mean the TOWER bunch aren't smart though.)

    Anyway, onto the .NET bit of this post... The Nova Longwire stuff is interesting to me as someone who has spent the last six months getting a .NET Web Service version of our COM SDK happening. I'd be interested in seeing what other people have to say about it... Are there competing alternatives that people are aware of as well?

    I guess my biggest concern is that the chatty paradigm used by COM SDKs doesn't map well to the latent, slow Internet style Web Services that people are asking for. It would be ok in a LAN environment (although still slow), but wouldn't be much fun in the wild. How do these tools deal with manging the interface to not suffer from these problems?

    I'll wait for Gordon to come into the office and see if he breaks my fingers for saying all of this...

posted at: 14:19 | path: /dotnet | permanent link to this entry