Robert Stackhouse wrote an excellent article on his blog titled Frameworks as a Means of Creating Transferrable Expertise. I started writing a response in the comments and ended up going off on quite a tangent. Thus, I’ve reposted parts of his article and my responses here, as well as some followup dialog.

It almost seems as if Microsoft and Sun and every other Framework author out there in the world figured out that training people is expensive, so let’s build a framework to reduce the cost of that training. It is much easier to spoon feed people than to teach them to think for themselves. Microsoft even went one step further and said, “Let’s go one better and try to get the poor schlep who doesn’t have 5 years experience to try to pay for the training themselves;let’s create a certification program.”

The alternative to Microsoft and Sun developing enterprise frameworks as large as .NET and Java is to have people still writing buffer overflows and string format vulnerabilities in C/C++. These frameworks have the huge benefit of making more secure code in many cases, as well as making it feasible for companies to even hire developers full time. If they figure that frameworks cut down development time, they are more likely to invest the money in IT in the first place, thus creating jobs for all of us.

I hardly think training is the issue here. If I had to chose between training someone to the point of proficiency in either .NET/Java or C/C++, I would chose a framework in a heartbeat. The time it would take for entry level programmers to learn C/C++ and the figure out how to be secure and develop worthwhile code would be prohibitive at best, and outright unfeasible at worst.

Certifications make sure people have basic skills and can as they claim. It all depends on the difficulty of the certification. I wouldn’t put much stock in someone with an MCP and little experience. Someone with an MCSD however I would give more attention, even if the relative experience wasn’t equal. The same goes for any IT sector – look at the Security+ (entry level) and the CISSP (serious professional).

Why is it that the same people who will ask every friend they have who the best mechanic in town is (instead of going straight to the Toyota dealer) will trust the word of a Microsoft certification over the word of a developer’s brethren or even his own code?

Again, this is context driven. Looking for a mechanic is a personal endevour that is something almost everyone deals with. Looking for a developer for a corporation is a different context entirely. By the same token, did you know that most of those dealerships won’t hire mechanics who don’t carry their companies certifications? Ford dealerships typically require a certification before they hire mechanics.

It again boils down to something akin to “you can at least perform at the minimum level we require, and we can teach you our development culture.” No two software projects are alike, but .NET is .NET, regardless of where it is used.

Granted not every development shop (even some of the ones who use Microsoft.NET) think this way. The only question is: would you rather have an employee who spends all day programing around the framework, or one that knows when to ditch the framework and look for another one or god forbid roll something from scratch?

The ones who know by instinct to ditch a framework for a more appropriate technology have most likely moved up the chain to a team lead position or management. I think we do have the problem of developers moving into management without having proper communication and management skills. We would almost never take a manager and say automatically that they would make a good developer, so why do we assume the opposite is true? Until our industry learns how to justify our software in the same manner that a machinist justifies a new lathe, we will always have this problem. I’ve seen this more times than I care to remember.

I also don’t really think we should be trying to optimize costs at a human level. Why don’t we instead invest in our employees, train them, and who knows maybe even wind up with a person who doesn’t hesitate to think for themselves and a little workplace loyalty in the end?

Again, look at it in context. Cost optimization at a human level goes on in every industry, not just software development. The salesman who sells two contracts a month will be replaced if he’s being compared to salesmen who sell 10 contracts a month. Can you guarantee that training him will ever pay off? This is the whole existance of HR and reorganization consultants. If you choose to ignore this area of optimization the organization may not recover and all the jobs will go away.

…all that being said, I agree that frameworks are not the holy grail. I think fast, core frameworks are the start and extensions to those are the way to go. There are jobs out there completely based on using things like Telerik controls, or Infragistics controls. These are build on top of a nice, extensible framework and they serve a purpose and create jobs. A company that would not be willing to develop that control themselves will be willing to pay for it and talent that can put it to efficient use for their purposes.

We are also still considered in the same boat as infrastructure services, which are not the same as software development. This is a fundamental flaw in my opinion. There are infrastructures (routers, servers, cabling, power) that is necessary AND a cost center. But software development produces “tangible” goods that can be used as a profit generator or at the very least an optimization of processes.

These are very different areas of IT but management still doesn’t separate them. We are getting closer with the advent of seperation between CIO/CTO, but few companies hire both. They are typically considered interchangable by uninformed upper management. Some even still put the CIO under the Finance department because they are seen as a cost center.

I was cleaning house today and listening to the radio (95.1 in BCS to be exact) and I heard a song on the Weekly Top 40 countdown from Jamie Foxx called “Blame It”. The song basically goes about saying that if a girl doesn’t want to seem easy she can just drink a lot, sleep with someone [him], and then blame it on the alcohol. Now, I have a really open mind when it comes to music. I listen to everything from 40′s big band era music to pop, black metal to classical, hip hop and jazz, and yes, even rap. But, in all music (with lyrics), I try and pay attention to the message the song sends.

Now, not all lyrics are that great. I listen to Pantera still and some of their lyrics are definitely questionable. If you want to sing about sex, then do it, but don’t go and tell these girls that they can do what they want and blame it on a substance.

A song by Lady Gaga (Just Dance) saying she’s drank so much she doesn’t know where she is kind of kicked off this tyrade. I can’t believe this is making it into charts and no one is really saying anything about it. I finally had to rant about it now that this Jamie Foxx song is going up the charts.

Maybe I’m aging myself, or I’m wearing the parent goggles, I don’t know. I don’t want my daughter growing up and listening to the off shoots of this music (in 5-10 years) thinking it’s okay to get bombed out, screw a bunch of people, and then blame it on alcohol. I hope I will be a better parent than that in the first place, teaching her to be responsible for her actions, etc. But I remember when I was that age. I didn’t listen to my parents and I did listen to my peers, and the music. I don’t quite remember the music of my generation (the 90′s) being quite so blunt or … irresponsible. Maybe I just had sense not to pay attention to that kind of music and now I’m looking at it from a parent’s point of view.

My, how times change.

Wow. I never thought I’d see the day when the government actually did a full 180 on information disclosure. This article from Slashdot talks about Obama’s directive to all .gov agencies to choose public disclosure more often than not. After 8 years of exactly the opposite I’m sure he’s going to meet some resistance from the entrenched conservatives.

What really gets me is that I watched the inauguration with some skepticism. I said to myself, he talks the talk and his campaign walked the walk, but will he be able to move with agility when he’s actually inundated with information as president? Appearently he’s rolled up his sleeves and gotten to work and I can honestly say that I already feel like he’s done more for the good of this country in his first day than Bush did in his entire 8 years.

Oh and one more delicious bit of information – he’s signed an executive order to close the Guantanamo prison camp. I’ve long been angered at the news reports of the frustrations the detainees and civil rights movements have had in getting these people trials and accurate and timely information. Some of them are guilty and thus should stay in a prison, but they all should have the basic rights to a public and fair trial.

I wonder if he’ll take Sunday off and look at all he’s done… unfortunately he has a lot more to do than a weeks worth of easy decisions.

Okay, so I have mixed feelings about one of the Supreme Courts latest decisions. The NYTimes has an article on the particular case I’m talking about. In a nutshell, a man was arrested due to faulty police records and his vehicle was subsequently searched. The police found drug residue and an illegal gun in his vehicle and arrested him on drug and weapons charges. Before this case it was generally thought that evidence discovered during an illegal search was not allowable in court. In this case, because the police database records were incorrect, I believe the man should have been let go.

I have mixed feelings on this because the guy had drugs and weapons in his vehicle so obviously he was up to no good. However, the power this gives police is above what I think is acceptable. It allows the court to ignore police negligence when they think it’s for the greater good. Why not put faulty records into a whole lot of databases all over the place on subjects the police want to take a closer look at? There should be an open records policy where things like this are out in the open for everyone to see and hopefully correct. The fact that now the Supreme Court has sided with the law on this over the individual’s right to privacy is a bit scary.

Again, the flip side of this fence is that if you are doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, right? It’s the principle that the government operates for the people, by the people, that I think is being slowly but surely being taken away from us. This guy should have been released, the weapon confiscated, and the drugs destroyed. However, he’s now serving 27 months in prison because a county clerk made a mistake and a court decided to ignore the negligence on behalf of the police.

As an IT worker if I do something that accidentally exposes sensitive records I’m held accountable for the mistake. Why does our government have the right to get away with this?

As a web technology person, I sign up for a lot of online accounts. Everything from personal photo sites to online banking, security wikis to open source projects. Recently I decided my password security was not the best because I only had about 8 standard passwords I would use across all my website accounts. I based the complexity of my passwords on the danger to myself if the site were compromised. A wiki compromised in my name wouldn’t be so bad so I’d use a medium security password. My online banking, however, would be pretty bad if compromised and has a very secure password.

I decided to mix things up a bit and started looking for a way to make all my passwords complex and find an easy and secure way to keep track of them all. A collegue of mine recommended KeePass and it’s just what the doctor ordered. I keep my KeePass installation on a thumb drive that is encrypted with TrueCrypt and use a very secure password (> 50 characters) for both systems. KeePass allows me to group my accounts into categories so I can easily identify the accounts for which I’m looking. It also allows me to generate random secure passwords for new accounts when signing up for things.

While it is somewhat a hassle to learn these new passwords over time, it is much more secure that I am not using the same password across multiple sites. And if all else fails, I can open KeePass up from my thumb drive and unhide the password temporarily to remind me what it is.

I recommend this for everyone as it’s much more secure that the typical sticky note under the keyboard trick, or allowing your browser to store your passwords (I still do this for the less security sensitive sites, but not for online banking). Best of all, it would take a really long time to crack the encryption set on my thumb drive (and then the second level of security with KeePass itself). If I ever lose my thumb drive or it gets stolen, I will have ample time to reset all my passwords. I of course keep a backup copy of my KeePass database, but I’m not telling you where!

Best of all, both KeePass and TrueCrypt are open source projects, so anyone can download and look through the source code. In general, this makes them both more secure because more people can find and fix flaws in the design. They also both use the latest in encryption technology to ensure that your information is as secure as possible.

TechRepublic’s Sanity check blog recently posted an article titled “Is Microsoft for grown-ups and Google for kids?” I posted a reply this entry because I think there is value in both. Go read the original and then read my reply reposted below:

I would choose to work at either given the chance. I think they are both great companies and they both still have a good chance at innovation in their arenas of choice. If antitrust weren’t such a big issue I would like to see some collaboration from the two groups – developer “swapping” is a good way to do that under the covers, whether the two giants know it or not.

As for the perpetual beta, I’d like to think that is a design choice. When a product goes from alpha to beta, the developer is left in a state of mind where “this is okay and it’s going to work, but my work isn’t done. There’s more to be had here.” When a product ships into “release” mode, it’s all about bug fixes and QA and the developer gets into the mindset of “oh this is a major product I have to fix bugs now – push that innovation to the shelf.”

When was the last time you saw Microsoft push out an awesome feature into a shipped Office product? Or even a major web based product such as Hotmail? Google lets their developers continue to innovate without the pressure of “shipped” software. If you choose to trust their developers to fix their software and add innovative features, then Google is the ship for you. If you’d rather wait around for Patch Tuesday for 2 years and then get a “new” release of a product – that you pay for again – which is really just 2 years of patches and a face lift, Microsoft is a better bet.

I enjoy Microsoft’s development platform a little more. The .NET framework is awesome, and the development tools are top notch. Google is pushing their ideas and advancements, but they are using other people’s languages to do so (Python, perl, JavaScript, etc). I like to take advantage of both and use Google’s APIs in .NET projects. I get enterprise level language and IDE tools, and web enabled data APIs and services.

For example, I’m working on a map project right now for the college for which I work. The project code itself is written in .NET, makes called to Microsoft SQL Server and PostGRES (with PostGIS) databases, and uses WCF to offer all of the API calls in SOAP services so others can build on our work. However, I’m using Google’s Maps APIs because they are innovative and recognized. We can push out a single service layer API that we use in Google Maps, Google Earth, and Flash for Maps APIs.

In this manner, I get enterprise tested code such as the Enterprise Library on the backend, and cutting edge front-end code from Google. It really is an awesome combination, and I hope to blog more about the project as it progresses.

Another thing to note about the project is that I’m using a lot of open source utilities in the GIS technology sector. Again, taking the best of all possible solutions instead of a vendor specific solution seems to work best for me. I could have gone with .NET, Microsoft Live, and ASP.NET AJAX, but I don’t htink that’s the best thing to do. Microsoft backend code, Google’s web APIs, and OGC’s GIS standards are what works for me.

John McCain is blatantly trying to hijack Barrack Obama’s campaign branding efforts.

I’ve heard of brand hijacking before. For example, when Red Bull spent millions of dollars to brand themselves in the United States as an “energy drink”, only to have Monster, and even Cocoa Cola come in behind them with cheaper, bigger drinks, and steal their thunder. Now, that’s not to say Red Bull has lost their luster – they are considered the high end energy drink – the kind of thing you mix with good vodka in a bull and goose. But the damage was done.

Now John McCain and Sarah Palin are on their way to doing the exact same thing to Barrack Obama. Obama built a very successful campaign around the “Change” brand, and now McCain is running ads championing himself as THE agent of change. In essence, he is stealing Obama’s campaign ideas because his own ideas are not working, and would not work in this political climate.

So first he tries to steal Hillary voters with the Palin pick. Now he’s trying to steal Obama’s campaign slogan and thunder.

I think the ultimate reason for this is that he knows Americans are tired of the Republicans and their crap, so he has to steal the Democrats thunder to get anywhere in this election. And he has nothing else. His policies on tax reform and health care help the rich, and do nothing for the poor who need it. His technology policy of keeping market competition as the main factor is also not likely to help the country from bleeding tech jobs and innovation to other parts of the world.

For this voter, this is not going to work, but it’s going to push me into action. I’ve stayed away from politics on this blog, even though I’m very adamant about this election. But I think enough is enough. Call McCain out for what he is – a thief. If he can’t even find a single novel idea to run his campaign on, but instead resorts to stealing another person’s idea, what does that say about his ability to make good decisions for our country?

Maybe it’s true that the Republicans have drank their own kool aid. Maybe enough rich corporate executives – who live for their bottom line instead of their customers – have finally bought their way into a political party enough to actually drive it’s ideas completely.

For the sake of this country, I really hope the American people wake up and don’t stand for this. I can’t imagine having that mentality drive our country for another 4 years. We will be the laughing stock of the globe.

It would speak to our education system and how decades of bad decisions there have left us with this – a society not able to discern intelligent innovation from stolen ideas. A society not able to tell a lie from the truth – I’m taking aim directly at the numerous false claims made by the McCain campaign against Obama.

It would speak to our fickleness because we would have forgotten who originally brought us the message of change. Americans are so easily swayed from one minute to the next. McCain probably could have gotten even more swing voters by picking a running mate from a popular TV series.

It would speak to America’s character and the fact that you can lie to our face and if you put a great big “innocent” smile in front of the lie, we’ll buy it outright without thought. We should not be that America anymore.

My final thought is this – we put a president in office 8 years ago who had little more than an acquaintance with Washington and national politics. He was the governor of a bigger state than Alaska, and his daddy was President once. But he was in reality a miserable failure. That, obviously, did not make him a good leader at all. And yet, here we go again.

We’re looking at possibly putting a man into the White House who has a better chance than most in the past of not making it through his first term. And right underneath him – as the media likes to say “a heartbeat away” – from the highest power in our country, is another inexperienced state governor. Except this one is much further out of touch from the rest of the country than the previous, follows fundamentalist Christian values that most of the country does not, and lies blatantly through a smile. She may think that’s okay for her children and possibly even her state, but it is not okay for our country.

If American could just pop some Ginko Biloba and remember why we as a nation are in the situation we’re in, I think they may deem the McCain/Palin ticket a crime against the US.