On Morality: Not-Just-A-Consulting-Monkey

In lieu of the recently uncovered scandals involving the German (US, British etc) secret services - and the respective government officials, I reflected upon my (consulting) engagements:

 

* I deeply mistrust government organizations that keep too many things hidden from their own government. The current „review boards“ (German: Untersuchungsausschuss) are systematically boycotted by the „agencies“ and will surely not lead to any significant result or changed behavior. Documents are destroyed or blackened - officials show no interest whatsoever to uncover wrongdoing.

* Spying on their own citizens without specific warrant violates our constitution, I support appropriate initiatives (reference in German).

* Helping other nations’ intelligence agencies to spy on our own citizens and companies is a serious crime and should be prosecuted. 

* In light of recent and not-so-recent eventy, including everything around heroic whistleblower Ed Snowdon, supporting these organizations is morally doubtful or debatable.

* Investigating or preventing violent crime is required police work, but must under no circumstances be unconditionally extended to the private sphere of all (!) individuals and organizations of a country.

I believe that consultants/architects and developers like myself should start to stand up for morality and *real* compliance to our constitution - and refuse all kind of support for the „secret organizations“ and those parts of our government that is related to them (e.g. the German Kanzleramt).

For myself I therefore decided to refrain from doing ANY WORK for the „secret organizations“, until all of the currently open issues have been clarified (but I doubt that will ever happen, as long as we have to endure political puppets that act as cohorts to foreign governments).

The only exception that I regards morally acceptable would be support for changing-these-organizations-for-the-better, e.g. creating transparency, investigate and uncover previous crimes or supporting reviews.

 

(I re-used the term from the inspiring Martin-Fowler keynote from OOP-Conference 2014)

 

Parallels, Windows, Enterprise-Architect and Retina

in principle, a great combo. With Win-7, Parallels works like a charm, nicely integrated with my Mac, no issues with the high Retina display resolution.

When I used EnterpriseArchitect for some UML modeling, I encountered serious display
issues: diagrams were suddenly scattered with overly large fonts and became utterly unreadable.

So back to virtual machine configuration: Shutdown the VM instance and open the Parallels configuration "graphics" tab. Choose "optimized for retina" mode, as shown below:

Not that difficult... boot Windows again.

Open the "display preferences" page and try the following screen resolution:

That completely solved the issue for me.

innoQ-Fellowship

Seit längerer Zeit haben wir mit dem Gedanken gespielt - jetzt endlich haben wir's
unter Dach und Fach: Seit Anfang Januar bin ich, begleitend zu meiner selbständigen Tätigkeit, zum innoQ-Fellow berufen worden.

Natürlich gab's seitens innoQ dazu eine Pressemitteilung:

Zum 1. Januar 2011 bekommt die innoQ prominente Verstärkung: Dr. Gernot Starke, renommierter Experte für das Thema Softwarearchitektur, ergänzt das Team in der Rolle eines "innoQ Fellow". Er unterstützt innoQ dabei in der strategische Entwicklung und stellt seine Expertise für gemeinsame Projekte zur Verfügung. Kunden können zukünftig aus einer Hand sowohl auf die persönlichen Expertise von Dr. Starke als auch auf das Know-How der anderen innoQ-Experten zurückgreifen.

Eine Verbindung zwischen Dr. Starke und innoQ gibt es schon lange: Neben der Zusammenarbeit in Kundenprojekten hat Dr. Starke zusammen mit innoQ Deutschland-Geschäftsführer Stefan Tilkov diverse Vorträge bei Konferenzen gehalten und das Buch "SOA-Expertenwissen" herausgegeben, an dem neben Gernot Starke und Stefan Tilkov auch diverse andere innoQ-Autoren beteiligt waren. Darüber hinaus sind Phillip Ghadir, Stefan Tilkov und Gernot Starke Gründungsmitglieder des iSAQB (International Software Architecture Qualification Board) und arbeiten dort gemeinsam an der Definition verbindlicher Standards zur Ausbildung von Software-Architekten mit.

simplified my website...

aah - I found the time to simplify my website a bit -
thanx to RapidWeaver I even streamlined the layout in not time at all...

SOA Governance: Crucial Necessity or Waste of Time?

As I occasionally worked on SOA Governance during the last few years, I took the time
to write up this article on InfoQ (did you know that is a great platform?)

From the intro:

The term "governance" has been regularly appearing in IT publications and conferences for some time, but among technical circles, such discussions are often yawn-provoking at best. This article provides a developer-friendly guide to SOA Governance, starting with the general notion of IT governance down through design-time and the second runtime Governance.

I'm eagerly awaiting your comments...

Business-Rule Technology becomes Acquisition Target...

Australian based RuleBurst just acquired Haley Technologies, one of the thought-leaders in rule-based technologies... (announced here and on the JBoss-Drools Mailing list).

A few days ago, SAP bought Indian-based Yasu (provider of the QuickRules BRMS)...

Just in case you're interested in Rule-Engines - might be the right time to invest in those companies... they surely deserve a lot more corporate attention... problem is, most of them aren't public (yet)!

Big Bucks on the Run

Oracle today proposed to takeover BEA Systems for 25% over market price...

I don't know how many millions or billions of bucks they're gonna need - but
it fits into their more than 20 billion dollar acquisition strategy.

These sums are out of most peoples' imagination: 20.000 millions already
spent - and a whole lotta more to come...

Naah - Lawrence Joseph (aka Larry) Ellison has an estimated private fortune of 26 billion - poor chap. One of his best friends, btw, is Steve Jobs.
THE Steve Jobs.

Your job includes traveling?

You sometimes need to travel for a couple of days? Get some inspiration on "packing your bundle",
fold shirts and trousers with less wrinkles. Great idea, its simplicity really impressed me.

Have a look here!

(via lifehacker).

Habits of successful ...

In lieu of Steven Covey's "7 Habits of Successful People", Yuwanda Blackput together a useful collection of seven alternative habits for freelancers. Valid for most entrepreneurs though, not just freelancers!

My (overly brief) summary/adaption/commenting:

1. It's a passion, not just some job. {Write|Design|Program|Model|Work-on-it} every day. Manxy of us freelancers love their work, and spend loads more than 40h/week with it. When asked "what's your hobby", "work" is very often contained within the first three to five answers (my answers are "family, sports, work, food", with family first and the others in no particular order)


2. Market yourself - don't wait for opportunities, create them!


3. Work with more than one client at a time. Lowers overall risk, increases usefulness for a single client as you bring in experience from multiple other sources.


4. Have a niche, sometimes called USP (unique selling point). You may even call it professional hobby, as that's what it is in my case (currently there are at least two of them, arc42 and rule-based-systems.)


5. Have a website. I do not understand freelancers and entrepreneurs in the IT sector who currently do not maintain their own. But there are such folks around...


6. Remain hungry: be consistent marketer. Speak at conferences, write articles, books, blogs open-source software. Ensure the market does not forget about you.


7. Long ago we stopped working 40h weeks. See point 1 - it's a passion. A familiy is always around, so is your enterprise. As long as you feel in control of your life, you're living your life your way, it's ok to work longer hours.


In my humble opinion you should add the following:


8. Maintain active and symbiotic/synergistic partnerships with others of your kind. Treat them as equals and friends, not a contenders. Support their search for appropriate projects - and they will in turn support you.



9. Give away freely. Give your books to your clients and prospective clients, contribute to open-source projects, create free whitepapers and the like. Readers will love it and come back to you, maybe even years later. If your stuff is good, people will remember it! (thx to Jerry Weinberg for this valuable hint!)