Open up your data

June 19, 2012 4 Comments

I’m currently enjoying the IWMW 2012 conference. The theme is “embedding innovation”. I can’t say I’ve overly picked up on that, but really this year it has all been about data. Big, small, linked and so on.

Some of my biggest hurdles back at work are the silos that hold our data. Poor structure and duplication being the most sizeable of the problems. But many of the talks and issues they raised here are about the business silos as much as the problem with data formats, a common example was data stored in spreadsheets. Making this available via XML that can be linked to other information is an issue. Not so much the technical side, but the human process side.

I’ve seen some really good stuff here about opening your data (the safe stuff) up for others to use, even if you don’t have an obvious use for it there and then. An example this morning was the Edinburgh council opening up access to their allotment catalog. They have little use beyond the obvious for that information but by opening it up someone might develop a site or app that can make use of that data in ways not as obvious to the data holders.

A more extreme example I saw was with Southampton and their “data architect” ( or gardener as he calls himself) Chris Guttridge. I attended a parallel session with Chris 2 years ago at the same conference in Sheffield and I have to admit to struggling with his talk on RDFa. However the work he is doing on unlocking some very mundane data and then allowing innovative ways of linking it together is really impressive.

For over 2 years I have been asking our teams to clean up and make more available, the data which is buried in our databases. But although this has had very limited success I think it’s time to start a bigger campaign. I think with current changes that are afoot in my organisation that it is quite likely to give me the opportunity to move forward on this. In fact I am so sure it will happen because I’m just going to do it! No committee of 6 people stalling the project and turning it in to something else. I will open our data to our teams and just show what we could be doing!

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Note to self: Remember this if I ever became a manager

April 30, 2012 Leave a comment

Having read this article that was delivered to my inbox recently I would like to put on record that should I ever become a team leader or manager, I hope that I could look back at this list and tick off more than one or two.

8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses - http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/8-core-beliefs-of-extraordinary-bosses.html

My favourite:

“8. Work should be fun, not mere toil.

Average bosses buy into the notion that work is, at best, a necessary evil. They fully expect employees to resent having to work, and therefore tend to subconsciously define themselves as oppressors and their employees as victims. Everyone then behaves accordingly.

Extraordinary bosses see work as something that should be inherently enjoyable–and believe therefore that the most important job of manager is, as far as possible, to put people in jobs that can and will make them truly happy.”

What’s your favourite one on the list?

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Is there a shortage of C# developers?

April 17, 2012 Leave a comment

I have heard there is a shortage in C# developers, but I don’t understand how or why. Surely the number of IT jobs has shrunk by a similar amount to other markets?

I don’t know what the experience is across the rest of the UK, or indeed any other country, but I am based in the South East of the UK in a pretty average to large sized town and am getting regular contact from agencies about new positions opening up all the time. The real amazing thing is that so many are local rather than London (1+ hour commute) which is not a situation I ever remember being really true for the past 10 years previous.

However it’s not all great news, they predominantly seem to be contract jobs, and often ‘only’ 6 months. Still if you are looking for a position, I strongly recommend filling in your LinkedIn profile. Having done so myself seems to have really made it easy for recruiters to focus in with relevant available positions. In fact I have a strong link in my past with working for an online recruiter and I struggle to imagine how they will compete with free profile and networking services like LinkedIn.

Anyway for those that read this blog, employed or not, it can only be a good sign that there seem to be a growing number of vacancies about.

Update: A link from a friend shows I’m quite possibly not just imagining it
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/from-both-sides-10005031/it-professionals-see-wages-inch-up-10025901/

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Issue Management Software

March 14, 2012 Leave a comment

Okay I’ve managed to crowbar some spare time at work so I can step back and look at what ticket/bug tracking and project management tools we use in our office. Firstly I am not our project manager, but I am the person that looks after our source control and the main person interested in using a ticket system.

In my past I’ve been a heavy user of TFS. I thought it was brilliant back then and I wish I could use it now, but the market situation and the sector I’ve moved in to demand I look at free or existing platforms first. On top of that the organisation I’ve moved in to didn’t use source control before I started here so having brought that in, whenever I choose a new product or platform to adopt I need to keep in mind if it can be shared with those ‘down the corridor’. Many of our sections programmers do a lot of non-Microsoft based activity too so currently we use Subversion(SVN).

Currently we have:

  • (Visual)SVN
  • Trac
  • CruiseControl.net

I’m currently scoping out:
TFS 2011 – technically this is sort of out of the running. It doesn’t suit all the other departments perfectly. However there is a parallel with the people more keen to adopt the work process changes I’ve proposing and the MS development work so it’s not a total no-go. Also my project manager likes MS Project and so the integration between products here is a really big plus. Downside is that there is an ongoing licensing cost, although very much reduced due to our educational discount.

Trac – we already have it and it is used by so many. What I did hear about when asking for help on Twitter (thank you WANDisco, Codesion and Collabnet!) was about a project that WANDisco are working with called Bloodhound. This looks like a great extension to Trac from what I can see. My only complaint that I have is that it doesn’t seem to be ready yet! I’m still very much interested as WANDisco provide the very impressive uberSVN which I have been trialling alongside our VisualSVN installation. It could easily become a replacement.

Redmine – This one I found through searching for Trac alternatives. It looks really neat and is definitely still in the running. I haven’t properly trialled it yet though so I need to pull my finger out.

Collabnet TeamForge – This looks amazing. It was a bit fiddly to install, and it comes with some baggage with its setup, but it looks great if a little heavy at times. I’m 3 days in with trying this and the hardest part seems to be like TFS, where do you define a “project”‘s boundaries. Our main ‘product’ is a university website with several applications sitting on there. I wouldn’t like to think that each of those app’s deserves its own project of the scale that seems to be aimed at in Teamforge so it leaves me wondering if a “Website” project is sufficient.

IssueNet (Intercept) – Our institution has already bought this software and thanks to a friend at work we’ve realised that although originally intended to cater for the engineers and the various help/service desks, it actually handles bug tracking, source control integration and project management features (including MS Project integration) out of the box. A chat with the manager of that department is on the cards ASAP!

So there is our shortlist so far. Do you know of any other tools that offer:

  • Source Control integration (SVN)
  • Ticket system
  • MS Project integration – or a replacement for it

If so I’d love to hear from you.

Danny

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Visual Studio 11, TFS 11 and .Net4.5 Beta

March 1, 2012 Leave a comment

Visual Studio 11 beta is available for download

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/en-us

I haven’t had the chance to install it yet so if anyone has any comments then please leave them!

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Thankyou for following

March 1, 2012 Leave a comment

A quickie, just to say thank you to all those following my blog. My number of visits has in February is double Decembers figure so it’s nice to know someone is actually finding some value in what I write.

I have a couple of big posts that I’m waiting to be happy with. They are from the Improving Things series and something on personal development. These are being held up by all the more developer focused posts I am enjoying putting up.

If anyone has suggestions on something they’d like to see me write then feel free to contact me or leave a comment on here.

Danny

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Pluralsight, free for leap day

February 29, 2012 Leave a comment

As you might know from an earlier post, we have a Pluralsight subscription at work and I am a big fan.

I don’t get half as much time as I would like for watching these but every one I’ve done so far has been well worth it.

According to this blog post it looks like it’s free for all of Feb 29th, quote:

“For 24 hours, starting Wednesday February 29, at 12:00AMEST ( 05:00 UTC) the Pluralsight library will be wide open. You will be able to watch as much as you can in 24 hours!

No need to register. No need to provide a credit card.
The entire library is completely free for this one day.“ 

Note: I am neither sponsored, endorsed or probably even liked by the Pluralsight team!

Danny

 

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