holiday retrospective

:)

i'm on holidays. i feel guilty about it too.

i'm feeling guilty about not having any self improvement plans. i have things to do, but i'm at another crossroads.

i was feeling earlier today that i haven't changed for years... my boss resigned on the last day of my work pre-holidays.

that's prompting me to reflect a bit deeper on where WM is headed. as we've clashed on opinions in the past. not that i have any ill feelings against the person. he was an 'enterprise' thinking person. i look at myself and my team members as entrepreneurs. we do what it takes to get it done.

we can do a better job with less resources than spending $MM's on 'enterprise' solutions. i need to put together something like the 'open intranet'.. a very simple way of selling to SOAness of what we are actually trying to accomplish.

i think.. and believe... that we can get it done.

replace intranet

replace all the services

build our own CRM

build our own integration services.

build our own financial reporting system

build our own security management system.

we can do it in a way that is 'more' future proof that what is currently going on.

the idea that we can build something now and reuse it forever is a stretch in most cases. people point at our previous systems and say ' look at that, we can't reuse that'... exactly my point. when looking at the previous system and it's an access/VBA front end developed from 1998-2005, what do you expect?

when have webbys, dba's, c# devs, ops, ba's. we can do it. we already have dedicated people in ops doing 8 hours a day of user maintenance of 'enterprise' systems. bit of a joke to be honest.

i'm hoping that our big bosses give us the chance to pick our new boss. we can drive a better direction.

this was inspired by http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/09/23/adafruit-slides-from-open-source-hardware-summit-keynote-openhwsummit/

in particular the idea in the last couple of slides asking "Why they do Open Source Hardware"

We do open source hard ware...

... to join a community

... what we make will outlast us

... to become better engineers

You always get back more than you give.

Just beautiful...

we need to open the minds of upper management to show that we are capable are being in control of our technology pathways. we can't prove it with how much money you are going to save or give them a value on the cost. we just need to be trusted. at least give us a voice to be heard.