Opinions

It’s Not About The Number Of Hours You Put In

8 commentsWritten on April 19th, 2012 by
Categories: Opinions, work/career

There's been a lot of talk on twitter about the 501 Manifesto. Be sure to read it if you haven't, because it's got some very good points, though I don't like the dig at people who contribute to open source since these people are having an ever increasing positive impact on our jobs. Anyways, the manifesto is about being a software developer without being defined by it. I actually think it's a healthy point of view.

I've always disagreed with this seemingly popular point of view or opinion that every developer should spend a lot of time outside of his/her working hours blogging or publishing their code on Github or contributing to open source. Those activities can be important but aren't necessarily so and the people doing them aren't inherently more valuable or important than developers who choose not to contribute to open source software or who don't feel the need to make a name for themselves. I also disagree with the notions that developers who are only involved with software development during their 8 working hours a day must be inferior or that they can't be passionate about it or that they'll never be great at it or any of that other crap that you'll sometimes hear people say.

I know some great developers who put their code out there and/or their thoughts by blogging. I also know some bad developers who put their code out there and/or their thoughts by blogging. I know some great developers who aren't involved with software development outside their working hours. I also know some bad developers who aren't involved with software development outside their working hours. There are good and bad developers on both sides of every situation you can come up with.

I think it depends a lot on what people do during their 8 working hours. Can we really say that developers who work 8 hours a day on challenging projects with strong co-workers in teams where knowledge is passed around continuously are missing out on anything if they don't really spend any other time on software development outside of work? That just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If I look back on my own career so far, I've typically been rather passive outside of working hours in periods where I felt like I was working on cool things, where I was challenged, where I was learning a lot on the job. Conversely, I've always been much more involved with software development outside of work when I was working on things during working hours that I didn't find challenging or interesting or where I wasn't learning anything new. I'm guessing that this holds true for a lot of people, though certainly not all.

Of course, if you're not working on interesting things or continuously learning and improving on the job, it's your own responsibility to make sure that your skills and insights stay up to date. You don't have to put in the effort to do that, but if you don't, you don't really have a reason to complain either when you're not happy with the kind of work that you're doing. Your employer is not responsible for your career and your future, you are.

And if you are working on interesting things and continuously learning and improving on the job, you don't need to pressure yourself to do more outside of your working hours because certain people in the community say you should. A lot of people get involved with blogging and open source with the hope that it'll end up leading to more interesting work in the long term. Who knows, you might just be a step ahead of them already.

Most Valuable Professionals? Give Me A Break.

29 commentsWritten on April 15th, 2012 by
Categories: Opinions, Rants, work/career

I've always been very skeptical of Microsoft's MVP award. Officially, Microsoft's MVP award stands for Most Valuable Professional, but its true meaning is probably closer to Most Valuable Promoter. The quality and integrity of the MVP's you know is probably dependent on the region in which you work. I work in Belgium, and over here the MVP program is, in my opinion, a joke. I'm going to discuss why I think it's a joke but keep in mind that this will depend on your region. I know that there are indeed great MVP's out there who do have professional integrity and true real world experience in some regions, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the state of the MVP program in Belgium occurs in other regions as well.

First of all, let's take a look at an image that Microsoft uses on its MVP page:

MVP image

"Independent Experts. Real world Answers."

This is indeed what the MVP program should be about. It is however the exact opposite of what I and many others in Belgium have experienced. Let's cover the words in those 2 sentences a bit more in-depth.

Independent

Most of the .NET MVP's in Belgium work for a handful of companies that happen to be big sponsors of every important Microsoft event in Belgium. Now, could it be possible that the best .NET developers in Belgium all work for these handful of companies? I highly doubt it. I know a lot of great developers in Belgium and none of them work for these companies. And I'm quite sure that none of those people are less valuable or knowledgeable than any of those MVP's. In my experience, there is hardly anything independent about the Belgian .NET MVP's. Most of them got their first MVP award while they were employed by sponsors or 'strategic partners' of Microsoft. Most of them tout the latest and greatest Microsoft technologies, pretty much unquestioned, even if it means contradicting their statements and positions when they were promoting the technology that Microsoft wanted them to promote 3 or 4 years ago. And they're never openly critical of anything Microsoft-related out of fear that it will negatively impact their chances of being renewed as an MVP. They may not work for Microsoft, but they are anything but independent of Microsoft.

Experts

This is a tough one. What makes one an expert? In some fields, people are considered to be experts based on the amount of research they've done. In other fields, people are considered to be experts based on what they've actually done. I don't think I'm going out on a limb here by saying that in the field of software development, what you've done should be more important than what you've researched or read about. In my opinion, an expert in a specific technology should have built at least one, and ideally more than one, non-trivial system using the technology in question and should be able to tell you about mistakes they've made, things you should avoid, and should never use examples that promote bad practices. I rarely hear MVP's talk about things you should avoid. I rarely hear MVP's talk about mistakes they've learned from. I routinely see examples from MVP's that make me cringe. I routinely hear MVP's promote technologies even though they haven't actually built anything impressive with it. I think of a lot of words when I see examples or proposed solutions by MVP's, but the word 'expert' unfortunately isn't one of them. This also applies to the Microsoft Extended Experts Team by the way. I can only question the validity of such a team if it contains people who are listed as experts of a particular technology when I happen to know for a fact that some of those people have never even used the technology they're supposed to be an expert in in a real world project. Let's be honest here: most of the MVP's and the MEET members simply aren't experts. They are people who have a strong interest in a particular (or more) technology and do their best to promote said technology. There's nothing wrong with that at all, but there's a huge difference between that and being an expert in something.

Real world answers

This one cracks me up the most because most of the Belgian MVP's hardly work on real world projects. And when they do, they typically work on "multiple projects" as they like to say it. For anyone who's ever worked on multiple projects at the same time: could you honestly say that your contributions were truly valuable to the end result? Let me put it differently: don't we all know that people generally produce the best results when they don't have to juggle too many things at once and can focus on as few things as possible? You will rarely hear about a Belgian MVP working full time on a non-trivial real-world project. A lot of them get to spend a certain number of paid hours each week on 'community work', which means blogging, writing articles for magazines, creating presentations for events, etc. When they're not working on that, you'll often find them talking on Twitter about pretty much anything but interesting or demanding work. And of course, their employers will occasionally send them to clients for a bit of consulting here or there, or to do a product demo. Unless these guys are putting in 60 to 80 hours a week (which I seriously doubt), I'm having trouble figuring out when exactly they do the kind of interesting work on real world projects that would enable them to provide answers based on real world experience.

It also doesn't help that I've frequently heard rather unflattering stories about these MVP's from people who've worked with them. It's pretty much always the same: they're not invested into the project, they spend too much time 'interacting with the community' and if you let them go near important parts of the code base, bad things usually happen. Now, I'm not the type of person who simply believes everything he hears. In fact, when it comes to matters like these, I generally only believe the stories I hear from people of whom I'm truly sure that they know what they're talking about. And if you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know I'm rather critical and that I set the bar rather high when it comes to that.

Lastly, my personal working experience with MVP's has been abysmal as well. I once worked for a client where we had to get rid of 2 people because of how bad they performed in real world circumstances. One of them was an MVP at the time, and now works at Microsoft as an Evangelist. The other wasn't an MVP at the time, but has been one for a few years now and is even one of the Regional Directors of this region. A few years later, I had drinks with a manager of the company they both worked for and he bluntly admitted that both of them are useless on real projects but that their MVP status was a huge benefit to the company from a marketing and image perspective. Not exactly the image or branding I'd be looking to put out there, but hey, to each his own.

Why On Earth Did I Write This?

For 2 reasons. I think this whole MVP thing sets a bad example to young and impressionable developers who aren't sure what to focus on to advance their careers. To outsiders, these MVP's sure look like they've got a great thing going and it's easy to see how that could impress people who don't know better. There are already quite a few developers who suck up to these MVP's in the hopes of someday getting to 'that level' as well. I'd much rather see these people put effort into learning about concepts that will last them a long time and building skills that are transferable to multiple technologies instead of sucking up to the wrong people, and trying to network their way to more interesting work because the work that results from that is truly mediocre at best. By all means, try to make a name for yourself by blogging and speaking publicly. But do yourself a favor and stay true to yourself and favor quality over quantity when considering the audience you want to target. Hey, it worked for me :)

The second reason is because this whole MVP thing is, in my opinion at least, offensive to the many dedicated professionals who give their all at their jobs as they work on real projects that matter, as they try to mentor younger developers in their workplace, as they try to optimize the way they develop software not only for themselves, but for their teammates and their employers or clients. These are your true valuable professionals.

I'm sure I'm gonna get a lot of flak for this post, but honestly, it won't really make any difference to me. The people who'll be offended are people I'd rather not work with anyway. And of course, I feel quite confident that I'll rarely, if ever, have to deal with these people in a professional setting since I'm primarily interested in interesting and demanding work :)

Microsoft And Open Source: Hoping For Better Collaboration

4 commentsWritten on April 9th, 2012 by
Categories: Opinions

By now, you've probably all heard that Microsoft is moving to an open development model for ASP.NET MVC and some other ASP.NET projects. Even though the source code of ASP.NET MVC has always been available under an open source license, its development followed a closed development model. This meant that outside contributions weren't possible, nor were we able to follow the actual commits in the MVC source code repository. With the recent announcements, this is no longer the case and I think this is fantastic news. It finally enables collaboration between Microsoft employees and people outside of Microsoft on a strategically important Microsoft product. This is good for Microsoft as well as the open source .NET community.

I hope that this newfound appreciation for Open Source within Microsoft will lead to another huge improvement in collaborative development in the open source .NET community. While Microsoft is now open to accepting contributions from the community, it would be a tremendous step forward if Microsoft would also contribute to other prominent open source .NET projects in the future. In the past, we've seen numerous open source .NET projects become popular and widely used. And unfortunately, Microsoft responded to some of those projects by producing their own libraries and frameworks that basically do the same thing. Except that, for most of those projects, they never quite matched the quality of the open source projects they were inspired by. If only all of that effort spent on duplicating already existing libraries would've been spent on improving what was already there, the entire .NET community would've been better for it.

I'd love to see a Microsoft that works with open source developers and encourages them, instead of trying to duplicate their efforts whenever they feel they need to provide their own library or framework for something that's already covered by a superior open source alternative. These duplicated projects only alienate people that at one point were passionate enough about the .NET platform to work on improving it for free, in their spare time. These are the people that Microsoft needs to cherish and nourish instead of competing with them. Microsoft has shown some interesting signs of better understanding of open source development and collaboration in the past year or so. Here's to hoping they take that critical next step as well.

Thoughts On Learning New Things

8 commentsWritten on March 11th, 2012 by
Categories: Opinions, work/career

Jef Claes published an interesting post about his preferred way of learning new things. There's one part in the post that I don't entirely agree with:

I like to believe learning should be a hands-on activity as well. Basically, stop consuming, start producing. Don't get me wrong, I do think there is value in reading blog posts (I might be slightly biased on this one), reading books and watching videos, but I find that this value is marginal compared to what you gain by actually doing it.

Hands-on activity (producing) is certainly a very important part of any learning process, but I wouldn't go as far saying that the value of reading books/blogs (consuming) is marginal compared to that of producing. In fact, I believe their value to be pretty equal. I've seen too many people who start producing simple things, and then think they've got a pretty good grasp of the technology they're using and then move on to producing more complex or bigger things without actually knowing enough of the technology they're using to support the more complex or bigger scenarios. The results certainly aren't always pretty and I'm sure each and every one of you has seen this scenario unfold with at least one developer you know. Probably more than that even.

I think in a lot of cases, people start the producing phase perhaps a bit too early and then in their enthusiasm of seeing things working sort of skip the more boring consuming that could've benefitted them a lot. Once you've started producing, you need to keep consuming regularly. A tremendously valuable part of any learning experience is getting feedback and insight from minds that have more experience with a given subject than yours. If you're lucky, you can get this from your coworkers. If you're not that lucky, you'll need to find other sources and books, blogs, videos, user group meetings, etc can be a great way to fill that void. And even if you do get to learn a lot from your coworkers, it never hurts to learn more from the experiences of others outside of your immediate circle, if only because their situations and constraints will differ from yours as well.

The other very important part about consuming is really getting to know the technology you're trying to learn. I've always found it very important to at least get an idea of how things work internally within a technology that I'm using. You certainly don't need to know all of the implementation details but just having an idea of it can really help you avoid a lot of problems once you need to use a technology in a more advanced way than in your initial experiments. Most importantly, it should give you better insights as to whether you're using the technology properly, which unfortunately isn't always the same as getting something working. And as a bonus, you'll probably learn about features you won't immediately need but knowing that they're there can save quite a bit of time and effort later on. Just imagine the improvement of the signal-to-noise ratios that you'd see on mailinglists, forums, and StackOverflow if everyone took the time to get a better grasp of the technologies they're using.

When I start with learning new libraries or frameworks, I usually start off by reading most (and often, all) of the official documentation of the technology before I even get into building something myself. If I want to learn a new programming language I'll look for the most recommended books for that language and buy one (or more, if I wasn't satisfied with the first one). I won't even start using the language until I've gone through the book. Once I feel like I've got a pretty good theoretical grasp of the technology, I start building something with it. I also start looking for good blogs on the technology and subscribe to them. I'll also start following influential people of the technology on Twitter. And I just continuously try to soak up as much knowledge as I can from people who're doing more impressive things with the technology than I am. At first, you might not understand everything they're talking about but after a while, things just start clicking and you're getting a really good grasp of things. None of this is a substitute for learning from producing, but it certainly is an incredible addition to it. And one that makes a world of difference, IMO.

How Do You Pick Open Source Libraries?

22 commentsWritten on January 16th, 2012 by
Categories: Opinions, Software Development

I'm currently looking into which library I'm going to use to handle authentication in a breakable toy project. Now, despite it being just a breakable toy, I want to do it with as few constraints on technical quality as possible because I want to maximize the learning experience I'm going to get from it. That means I don't just want to quickly put something together that just works. I want something that works, but that would also hold up in real world scenarios, even though the project will at best only be used by myself. Which means that I'm going to be picky about any libraries that I take a dependency on, just as I would if this were a project that I'd be getting paid to work on.

So as I was browsing through a few possible alternatives for my authentication needs, I started thinking about my thought process when evaluating libraries/frameworks to use. I generally base my decision on the following items, listed in order of importance (to me):

  • How well does it work for my scenario? If a library satisfies all other items on this list, that certainly doesn't mean it's an automatic lock. How it works and the impact it has on my code is definitely the most important factor.
  • Popularity. I've noticed that I let the number of watchers/forks on sites like Github influence my opinion. If a project has many watchers and many forks, odds are high that there's a relatively large group of happy users as well as people involved with the project. It also increases the odds that the project will be around for a while. Of course, inactive Open Source projects often remain available as well but if nobody's working on it, I'm not exactly tempted to take a dependency on it. Log4net is a notable exception to this, obviously. But when a project has a lot of people interested in it, or better yet, contributing to it, it's a good sign that you'll easily get help if needed, it's only going to get better in the long run and that it might get forked should the original developers stop working on it. As the author of an Open Source project that doesn't have a lot of watchers/forks (Agatha), I'm aware that my point of view on this is rather hypocritical but hey, it is what it is.
  • Code quality. I don't have the time to do an in-depth review of the code as I'm sure most of us don't do either. But I do like to glance over the code to get a general feel of the quality of the code. I focus mostly on the clarity of the code and also keep an eye open for sloppiness or downright WTF's. I guess the questions I'm mostly trying to answer when doing this are: "is this code I'd like to try to improve or fix if I need to?" and "how easy would it be to debug this when I need to troubleshoot some non-obvious issues?".
  • Location of code and issue tracker. A lot of people will probably take issue with this, but I consider it to be a major plus if the project is on Github. Not just because of my personal preference of Github, but because they truly encourage people to collaborate and contribute to projects and they make it very easy to do so. Also, the site is fast! I cringe when I have to look over issues of projects on Codeplex because it's just terribly slow. And the UI doesn't come close to that of Github either. I've heard that Bitbucket is pretty similar to Github, but I've never even looked for projects there. In any case: I want to be able to download the latest version of the code at any time, or of a particular branch if I need to, as easily as possible. I also prefer an issue tracker which is fast, responsive and easy to search. It doesn't have to be Github, but those 2 requirements are important to me.
  • License. If it's GPL, I don't use it. Also, I check whether or not a commercial license needs to be purchased when you want to use the library/framework in production. Pay attention to dual-licensed projects because that Open Source license might not apply to commercial/production use!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Did I miss any important factors? I just quickly put this post together so it's likely that I missed some good ones :)

« Older Entries

Meta

Recent Posts

Categories