Monthly Archive: March 2005

Options

I am currently considering my career options.  After a year working part time I believe I have a very sound understanding of the opportunities and constraints associated with Adult Onset Still Disease and its affect on work. 

Very briefly the good:

  • I have a lot of time for learning and maintaining my expertise (in addition to my formal working day) and for thinking and reviewing
  • This equips me well for advisory and planning roles
  • I work an extended day from home
  • I need to do a lot of low intensity exercise, which also allows me to make phone calls and listen to technical briefings/conferences etc

and just as briefly the bad:

  • I need to work mainly from home
  • I only work between 4 and 6 hours a day
  • I am most suited to longer term work, because of the day to day variability of the conditions
  • I am better working in a supporting rather than leadership role

I have three main options that I am considering with my company:

  • Working within a Product Management team, which is primarily concerned with managing the products and services we provide to customers through their lifecycle.  This means making sure that we correctly …

Service-oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services

Not a particularly challenging book on this subject.  It starts with the basics and never really gets to the guts of developing SOA applications.  However it does a good job of explaining the basics of the standards and key concepts, although it does over use very simple diagrams.  I know a picture tells a thousand words, but in this case some of the pictures could be explained in 10 words without too much difficulty. 

That said I found it very useful and particularly liked the concept maps, that showed how all of the various standards/services related to each other.

If you want a more ambitious book then Enterprise Service Bus by David Chappel, looks promising: