Adventures in home working

Richard draws simillar conclusions to me

Myself I am ecstatic that Avalon and Indigo are going to be available to both Windows XP and Longhorn clients. Why? Because this might signify the resurgence of the thick client applications and also make the deployment of those applications simpler with the subsequent release of one click deployment. No longer will I be shackled to the confines of a web browser but rather I will be freed to create a rich user experience like the “good old days” and thereby increase the number of available features to each application I create. The fact that Avalon is going to be released to a wider audience means applications that were once awkward to deploy over the web will now be easy. Forget the marketing hype this is a great leap forward for the smart client developers

I was really disappointed when I heard that Microsoft were dropping WinFS from the initial release of Longhorn.  Then I read a bit more and listened to Jim Allchin, (the Group Vice President for Platforms at Microsoft), talk about the logic and sort of started to get excited.

Exited! That may seem a bit strange, until you realise that this indicates that Microsoft is actually starting to think responsibly about the needs to real businesses.  

“We’ve heard loud and clear from customers that they want improved productivity, easier deployment, increased reliability and enhanced security, as well as the many innovations we’ve been working on. We’ve had to make some trade-offs to deliver the features corporate customers, consumers and OEMs are asking for in a reasonable time frame,” said Jim Allchin, group vice president of the Platforms Group at Microsoft. “Our long-term vision for the Windows platform remains the same.”

Let’s take a look at what was really announced:

1. Microsoft are going to ship Longhorn in 2006.  This gives corporates, developers and ISV’s something to plan around
2. Microsoft are going to ship Indigo, (web services infrastructure), and Avalon, (Under experience), on XP and Windows 2003 as well as Longhorn.  This gives developers a much bigger target market, (more than 100M), for their applications and provides Corporates with a much more seamless migration as they can migrate to the latest applications on Windows XP, and then run them on Longhorn.  Of course they could take the opportunity to migrate to Linux but that’s another story.  For more on what this means for developers Microsoft have an Open letter to developers and a updated FAQ
3. Microsoft has finally realises that the WinFS story needs to be a client/server story for corporates to take notice.  Its interesting that they have seen this as an issue worthy of delay though as the home user market is huge and would have been a good test bed for WinFS.  I suspect that the real reason they dropped WinFS is as follows:
1. The Office Team needed to ship a new product that would work on Windows 2003, XP and Longhorn and they could not afford the distraction of creating a Longhorn WinFS enabled variant given its relatively tiny market.
2. Other developers faced the same issue, no market
3. So WinFS would ship with no applications to speak of except the Avalon shell.
4. By delaying WinFS until the server side components are available, say 2007/8 the target market for WinFS, (which may be Longhorn only), is 2 years of PC shipments/upgrades.  I am not sure how many that is but let’s say 50M, that’s a pretty good market to got after.
5. Because WinFS ships in beta around the time Longhorn ships in production developers then have a great upgrade opportunity.  Avalon/Indigo enabled application 2006.  New WinFS enabled application 2007/8.  If the application takes advantage of ClickOnce deployment then upgrades should be easy.
6. Microsoft continues to state its commitment to WinFS, find more on WinFS here
7. Finally developers will like this because the risks are much reduced, WinFS enabled applications will be built on top of a ‘hopefully’ stable operating system.  

Tim Huckaby, CEO of Interknowlogy, a consulting firm and Microsoft partner, said the staggered release could bring benefits to developers. “They had this one giant, completely new operating system. Now, they’re making it a little more modular, which makes it easier–almost like a phased approach,” he said.

It’s also interesting to note that the Open Source community believe they will be able to clone Avalon, Indigo and WinFS very rapidly in the same way that thousands of man years spent developing the .NET framework was cloned by the Mono project.  The time taken to create the code being a small fraction of the time to define the requirements, create the specifications, educate the market etc

having just posted an Article on the topic of too much abstraction, (too conceptual in my article), its quite a conincidence that the next article I read is The Secrets of Great Architects posted on MSDN, about the extact same topic.  Here is a short extract:

All great architects have mastered the ability to conceptualize a solution at distinct levels of abstraction. By organizing the solution into discrete levels, architects are able to focus on a single aspect of the solution while ignoring all remaining complexities. Presents techniques for applying levels of abstraction to IT solutions, and compares this to other engineering disciplines

Read both and you should have a good balenced view!

As an Architect myself I found Joel’s thought provoking article titled “Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You” very interesting.  The article is all about the tendency of some architects to abstract problem to such an extent that it’s no longer useful.  This is how he gets started:

When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending each other spreadsheets, and they realize that there’s a general pattern: sending files. That’s one level of abstraction already. Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also “send” requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method on an object is like sending a message to an object! It’s the same thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it’s getting really vague and nobody really knows what they’re talking about any more. Blah.

In my personal experience I have seen three types:

1. Architects who can not think in concepts at all, these guys really struggle to have any debate unless they already have the engineering solution in mind, and that’s a real issue when you have anything complex to figure out.  It’s also a problem when you are trying to talk to customers, especially business customers, who relate to concepts more than technology.
2. Architects who can only think in concepts, and very convoluted and complex ones at that.  These same people tend to use BIG words when small/simple ones would do just as well.  Their diagrams are often a joy to behold but not to understand.
3. Architects who wished they were still engineers, at least half of the time, that’s me.  I hope that’s the best sort and that I am not too scary, (although a few people have said I am, but that seems to be more passion, enthusiasm and drive).

If you are an Architect, please read this article!

One of the downsides of being half engineer though is that I am often accused of being too complicated and writing documents that are too long, so I will stop now!

I admit I have written a business case or two in the past that included saving paper.  One actually did make the savings it claimed, but the other like millions of others resulted in more paper usage.  There is a good article on the topic on the Bloor blog IT-Director.com.  But what caught my eye was this:

So why in these cost conscious times isn’t anyone bothering to pursue this line! Well there is no golden result; the beneficiaries are spread all over the cost centres that use the floor space. The floor space seems to be nobody’s real concern once you have it. Accountants hardly have the energy, experience and drive to get this particular show on the road when there are easier pickings in telling cost centres to reduce their numbers or capital items in their annual budgets.

What Michael has hit upon here is the same reason that Personal Productivity has dropped off the agenda within most enterprises.  No one owns it, and the benefit is widely distributed.  I wrote about this in a previous article.

Back in 2001, I was given the opportunity to create my own team.  It was a great opportunity and I pulled a team of about 30 people together to work on Architecture and Systems Integration projects in the Infrastructure arena.  We hit upon a slight problem though we could not find any space within the existing company buildings in the area.  This presented us with another great opportunity, work from home, or find and design our own office.  This is the story of how we designed our Office and what we learned.

1. At the time, (and still today), my company designs its offices by giving a guy with Visio a template desk and char and an outline of the office and asking him to cram as many desks in as he can.  We actually have a few show case offices where they go to the other extreme, but we had no where near that budget.
2. Starting with a very small budget and a very traditional culture we set about our search and found a large empty space not far from one of existing buildings.
3. We spent our budget with great care.  For example we restricted fixed networking to the outside walls, and invested the money we saved buying everyone laptops and wireless cards, (70% of us had laptops already).
4. We purchased tables, instead of desks, which were much cheaper and allowed us to fund loads of conference rooms and break out areas
5. We encouraged everyone to bring in their books and magazines from home and created a fantastic library
6. We didn’t allocate people desks, rather we allocated teams clusters of desks that they could organise as they wished.  This increased our utilisation and freed up money to allow us to get a great coffee machine, electronic whiteboards and projectors
7. We did not wire the office for phones, we purchased a load of cheap DECT, (wireless phones), which fitted in great with our flexible environment.  We spent the money we saved on phone lines and wiring to buy everyone a mobile.

You get the idea.  The resulting office looked a bit like the following diagram.  I say a bit like because we changed it around all of the time.  This was dead easy as everything was wireless and the tables were easy to move.

The environment was designed around zones that provided support for the following working scenarios:

• Need to sit and read, research  etc
• Library Space, comfy chairs, book cases and magazine racks etc
• Need to sit in a corner and work on your own
• Hot desk, small desk areas with fixed networking connections
• Need to work collaboratively
• Collaborative space, tables that can be arranged flexibly, whiteboards and projector screens for design reviews
• Need to discuss privately
• Traditional ‘conference’ rooms
• Need to do builds
• Tables to reduce desk clutter, Virtual Machines used for build development prior to targeting specific hardware
• Need to demonstrate and undertake design reviews
• Demonstration room, two projectors, electronic whiteboards, demonstration stations
• Labs and server room
• For use for ‘dog-food’ and concept development lab facilities

We had a cunning plan around utilisation as well:

1. We bought a whole load a storage trays and put them on every table block and filled them with every kind of stationary item people needed
2. We provided laptops to everyone so they had no excuse for needing paper files
3. We put coat racks all around so people did not take ownership of chairs
4. We provided everyone with personal storage, but not at the desk.  After a month people hardly every used it, they got so used to keeping everything electronic.
5. Because everyone was wireless and no one had desks people just sat and worked in the environment that suited and with whoever they needed to.  This was almost always possible because there was always space available because we under utilised it.  In a traditional office everyone has a desk, and that desk is only actually used 50-60% of the time, (holidays, meetings, off-site visits etc.

We got a great culture going as well:

1. Everyone was involved in the initial design and the re-designs
2. Everyone liked the facilities and the flexibility
3. People collaborated much more
4. Teams designed their own environments and working practices
5. People relaxed a lot more and did more research in the breakout areas
6. Do not disturb areas were created for people needing to do quiet work
7. We showed a lot of visitors around, and everyone took pride in this and it helped to keep the place tidy
8. Even though we cost less than average everyone was much better equipped
9. We had team meetings in the big conference area every week, and we funded the food from savings
10. We held a children’s party to say thanks to the team, and used the office.  The kids loved the eWhiteboards and we had two DVD movies playing on the projectors.  We had the biggest pass the parcel I have ever seen with about 40 kids!
11. We ran a tuck shop and gave load of cash to charity
12. We created an automated sandwich ordering system
13. We bought loads of books and everyone was encouraged to learn and develop
14. The team was led by technically savvy managers, with project managers working in a supporting role.   

 It was probably my best team leader experience, a great couple of years!

Having been a loyal user of Radio Userland, with all of its quirks, for 6 months I have finally made the switch over to blogmedia who host the blogware platform.  I did a trial switch over to typepad a month or so ago, but it did not go too well and I decided to stick with Radio.  But yesterday I ran out of disk space on the Radio Userland server and it went like this …

1. So without any notice in my event log, I see that uploads are failing because I have used up my 40MB allocation.  40MB seemed a huge amount for text blog entries, but apparently radio has lots of different renderings and archives it maintains.
2. I thought this should be easy – tidy up – but this has proven almost impossible to do cost effectively
3. So I thought I will get more disk space, but it’s incredibly expensive.  For the same price as I pay for 80MB of space on Radio I can get 1 GB on blogmedia.

I really was not keen to change, because of the effort involved but I was so annoyed last night with trying to free up disk space, (still not resolved 18 hours later!), that I did it.

I made a list of the features I missed in Radio:

1. I wanted to be able to create secure areas, multiple authors etc
2. I wanted more control over the layout
3. I wanted more disk space, I have 1GB now, I used to have 40MB
4. I wanted FTP publishing
5. I wanted better search
6. I wanted better usage statistics
7. I wanted an easier to remember url
8. Radio performance was dreadful
9. There were too many bugs in the client, and I disliked the delay between publishing locally and getting the file published on the web.  So I wanted to go web based.  I still wanted the option to use a local client, so blogger API support was needed.

In the end I chose blogware for the software, and blogmedia for hosting.  I didn’t have much time to make the decision, but I have not regretted it so far!  I has taken about 3 hours to move the data over!

It seems that in an analysis of the expressions on Olympic medal winners faces on the podium the happiest people won gold, then bronze then silver. It seems that the people who won bronze were thinking “I nearly didn’t get a medal at all”, whereas the silver winners were thinking “if only I had tried that bit harder I would have got gold”.  I then got to thinking about how I think in these terms and it goes something like this:

1. I always think about the worst that could happen.  I think through the worst scenario but while I am doing so I look for something good that could come out of it.
2. I don’t dwell on this worst scenario though, I am quite a positive person so I quickly accept it as a possibility, and then assure myself that its fairly unlikely and move on.
3. If it’s a repeat of some event that happened in the past I try and remember something good about that event as well.  
4. Any outcome from that point onwards is then better than the worst scenario that I have already accepted as a possibility, but then set aside and not worried about
5. If the worst does happen, the “something good” immediately pops into my mind and get me on the road to lifting depression.

This little process is very rapid and automatic, and I never really designed it its just a pattern that I ended up adopting.

To give you a little example:

1. I might loose my job
2. I think of all the things I would have to give up
3. I think of all of the extra time I would have to do things I enjoy, how I would have more time with my family etc
4. I think of when I was poor living in £12/week flat with almost know heating, broken windows and a bed made from an old door.  I met my wife that year, used to bake bread most days, and spent a lot of time down the gym!
5. Ok so now I have accepted that I might loose my job, I stop worrying about it and get on with doing my job.  If my thoughts for whatever reason return to the “loose my job” theme, it’s the positive spin that comes to mind quickly and lets me move back to a positive frame of mind.