Mainfram Reality

Milan Negovan has released an updated set of cheat sheets for Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax 1.0 library.Download Cheat Sheets (PDF format)

Jessica Livingston has just published a book of interviews with 32 technology company founders called Founders at Work. She is a partner at Y Combinator.One of the interviews is with co-founder of Fog Creek Software Joel Spolsky. Joel is famous for his great software development blog Joel on Software. The interview has actually been published and can be accessed here:http://www.foundersatwork.com/joelspolsky.htmlJust recently I’ve posted the Service driven IT companies and the future post on this blog and it has a similar tone to opinions of Joel Spolsky. I agree with his attitude towards software consultancy business and my goal is to run my own software company and a lot of principles Joel outlines in the interview have been on my mind for some time. It is nice when someone with experience puts it so eloquently.

Official Website:Australia on Rails May 2007

2007 will welcome the inaugural Australia on Rails conference to Sydney. The conference will take place over two days and will provide a platform for education and exploration of the Rails platform as well as Ruby, AJAX, Scaling, web 2.0, user centric web development and design. Be sure to register soon as only a limited number of seats are available.

SapphireSteel Software have released Ruby In Steel, a Ruby development tool for Visual Studio 2005The features include:

• Editing
• Debugging
• IntelliSense
• Ruby On Rails

My entire career I’ve been making most of my living working for service driven IT companies. The model is well known, clients require custom software, IT company develops the software and installs it. Most of the time, that is the entire picture, I’ve worked for companies that provide training and maintenance on top of developing the software, but rarely anything more then that. All these companies sell is time, hourly charge for different levels of expertise.The service driven IT companies, because of the nature of their entire business model very rarely venture into research and development. From my experience most of these company re-invent large parts of each system every time. This is due to lack of technical leadership and direction since the entire company business model is sales driven, to sell the little hourly bits of time at some cost.Over the years I’ve grown more and more impatient with these types of companies, because innovation is not part of their business and there is no interest in such activities. No common sense would dictate that if innovation is fostered, the services driven company will be able to provide the services that take less time to complete and there cost less for the clients. I am yet to work for a company that has this attitude. To give an example, I’ve worked for a medium size IT services company on a large government project. My position on the project was that of an Software Architect. Basically I introduced a framework I’ve developed on top of the Microsoft .NET framework that made the entire development process less painful (especially on a large project like that one was) and much faster. After the project was finished, my contract with the company expired and even though I have introduced a lot of my own intellectual property there was not a slightest move to reuse the framework on other projects, or any interest in the framework from senior management. With the onset of Web 2.0 startups and companies embracing change, especially with collaboration applications, which most of todays big enterprise applications are, the services based companies will have to innovate or perish. There has been some talk around that the current Web 2.0 bubble will burst, I hope the old style service driven IT companies go. They do not do any service to their clients, the fees are too large and the products are almost always second grade.