02Apr 2018 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Buggy Whips 2.0

DevOps, Professional Development
I recently found myself rereading a very old blog post of mine, from the very beginning of this blog, discussing Buggy Whips. I'll save you the long read, I was learning new tech, it made me second guess my working assumptions, I was curious if I was manufacturing a buggy whip while watching an automobile drive by. 2008 to 2018 Well, I'm still here. In fact, Feature Driven Development has disappeared from the lexicon and the project that it was introduced to took years longer than anticipated, performed horribly, and had to have a major redesign and rework to be fundamentally functional (all after I left the old organization). So, my fears that database design was a thing of the past were just that, fears... right? Yes and no. Here…
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28Jan 2015 by Grant Fritchey 8 Comments

Oh Look, A Horseless Carriage

Professional Development
Never forget, we're making buggy whips. And everybody we know drives little buggies and they need our buggy whips. We've got a special talent, a unique knowledge set, and it's fulfilling a defined need. So we're all set, right? Well, other than that Stanley Steamer over there. And maybe that Ford. Oh, and there's a Grant. I worry about this stuff all the time. I know SQL Server. Before that, back in the day, I worked on Paradox, PAL & OPAL. I learned and programmed in Visual Basic, Java, C# and .Net. I've made sure that I've explored, let's see, Hadoop, Mongo, MySQL, and others, structured and unstructured, relational and non, you name it. Why? Because, I want to keep an eye out for the automobiles that are going to ruin…
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01Aug 2008 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

A Horseless Carriage?

Misc
I've talked before about my concern that I'm manufacturing buggy whips.  Jason Massie over at StatisticsIO has posted a pretty convincing argument that cloud computing could be a horseless carriage coming down the road. Effectively we're still looking Diesel's first engine, but that could mean it's just a matter of time. As Mr. Massie points out, the speed of change in IT is one heck of a lot faster than in other parts of the world. So, when you do finally see that Stanley Steamer roar by, belching smoke and going half the speed of a good horse, don't laugh and point. Someone is spending time & money on that thing and they're not buying your buggy whip. Clouds are just like any other major technological shift (ORM anyone?) that could…
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21May 2008 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Buggy Whips

nHibernate, Object Relational Mapping
I just spent two days learning about project management and the Feature Driven Development methodology from Jeff De Luca. He's a fascinating and informative guy. He's actually going to be running a project and mentoring a bunch of people where I work. It's going to be interesting times. I expect to learn a lot. Why buggy whips? What the heck do they have to do with FDD? Nothing, directly. A big part of FDD is the development of business models. These models can, and usually do, directly correlate to objects/classes in code. Because of this, object oriented methods are, not an inherent part of FDD, but certainly easily automated and used by those designing and developing systems in FDD. Buggy whips? I'm getting to it. Mr. De Luca has spent…
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