The Sylvia Park Architecture chat was today, bit slow to start with, but not
a bad turn out with 9 of us in the end.
First some stats:
| Number of people presenting at teched | 1 (Alex James) |
| Number of people going to teched | 3 |
| Number of people going to codecamp | 7'ish |
First off I asked the question, should you open source
software that is key to your business, sparked by a recent conversation with
and old business partner who's been considering open sourcing the product I
helped develop for him - mostly because the business makes money for
deploying/consulting/configuring the software more so then licensing it, and the remote chance of other people using/promoting etc. the product couldn't hurt the companies profile.
This sparked a bit of a debate, and certainly a few of the
people developing products in the group had some opinions.
- It's not a matter of make the source available
and they will come, you need to actively construct a community around your
product.
- You need to make all the communications for the
project visible.
-
If you cannot communicate the vision for your
product clearly, you'll never get traction with the community.
- By and large you’re better off focusing on
making money, there's a long lead time before OSS projects gain traction.
We then moved onto something a little more hands-on, talking
a bit about Rhino ETL - I ran through my experience so far (personally I'm liking it a lot) and the feedback from others was that SSIS does about 98% of what
you need, with the customization work required for the other 2% taking as long
as the rest of the project! I could see
RhinoETL being a great little swiss army knife for a lot of data-related projects
in the future, especially with its target support.
Keith's question was asked, when is PeterB going to start blogging/bliki'ing... not any time soon I believe was the response, as he requires some kind of alter-ego... Along the same lines we also briefly talked about the decline in blogging, and what “good”
blogs people read among all the noise that's out there today... Technology-savy VC's came up in the conversation, such as Paul Graham (of "hackers and painters" fame).
Tagging & tagging file systems were next on the table
(like Alex James's XTend which got a mention) and Peter noted that the upcoming
service pack for Vista should make it a lot easier to organize data via
"piles" i.e. dragging documents without an author over a pile of documents
by a certain author will assign the author to the anonymous document.
The key point/concern was that these kinds of tasks
must not make search operations harder i.e. Categorization should never penalize
search operations.
Talked a little about BDD or Behaviour Driven Development,
this struck a chord with Peter who has been doing something very similar with
existing clients, though I'm not sure I articulated the Analysis side of the
BDD very well - there's a nice BDD introductory post on the
DanoNorth.net blog.
In my mind at least BDD is all about ubiquitous language – I
see it as the central tenant of BDD, where energy and
thought is put into keeping the business level parts of corporation or company
in-line with the development/software/solution parts - tying it all together with a common
language/vocabulary.
Digging in deeper we have some software frameworks to help
with BDD testing:
Roy Osherove recently posted a nice "look" into
the use of BehaveSharp too, worth a look.
On a similar note Test Driven Development cropped up, with the interesting question of just how you could "force" or "lead" someone through the process of developing test first (without just having them watch a screen-cast) ... easier said then done I think was the consensus.
Also briefly covered was Lightspeed 1.0 and the announcement of the versions/pricing
came up... Some of us were intrigued by the model-based pricing structure :)
Incidentally Like the container tutorials series I did, I also index these blog entries (and some general information about the Sylvia Park chats) on my wiki.