Author Archives: Darren Shaw

Thoughts on Professions

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I’ve been spending most of the weekend writing my professions case. Professions cases are used to qualify for certain levels of accreditation within the Professions structure. It is, essentially, an internal IBM qualification. There are different Professions streams for different job types (Project Management, Architects, Software Engineers etc.) and I am in the IT Specialist one, which is probably the biggest one and covers the widest range of people, ideal for generalists like me. As well as a qualification it also acts as a large community, the UK has yearly get togethers for the different streams of professions. While I’m normally anti any kind of qualification/title/status, I do admit to having a level of base respect for anyone with a qualification in the various professions disciplines (ok maybe not the project managers 😛 ), it is done by peer review after all.

The main incentive for people to gain their qualification is that many areas of IBM have it as a prerequisite for promotion. Not all of IBM follow this, which is a problem, but a large enough part do to make it seem fair. People who don’t actually do their cases probably underestimate what a large piece of work it is. I’ve spent two solid weekends on it so far and it’s probably half finished. Your case is really a set of evidence to show that you have been working at a level that is necessary for the status you’re applying for. I’m writing my Senior case, which is the prerequisite (in my area) for becoming a band 8 IBMer (bands are a whole other thing!).

Anyway, here’re some thoughts I had while writing my case:

  • There’s nothing more boring in the world than writing about yourself.
  • As much as you may hate corporate buzzwords, it’s hard not to include them.
  • Personally, there’s too much structure enforced in the case. Some people prefer this, but I’d prefer a blank piece of paper where I could just prove that I reach the required level by writing (or probably drawing) anything I want.
  • Lots of the things I’m most proud of being involved in at IBM are actually the hardest to fit in to the structure.
  • I’m much better at knowing what other people are good at, than what I’m good at.
  • I think blogs could be made better use of in cases, lots of people write more detail about what they’re doing in their blogs, so some easy way of incorporating that in would make sense.
  • I shouldn’t put off writing more of my case by blogging about it instead.

Roo and Darren On Innovation

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Yesterday, Roo and I went to New Place to talk to a group of IBMers about innovation. It was quite odd for us to be back at New Place, both of us had spent two days there in the olden days (1997 and 1998) for our IBM assessment center, to see if we were good enough to work here.

We found the easiest way to talk about innovation is just to give examples of how we work and projects that we’d worked on that we thought were cool. Picking User Generated Content as our theme we showed the trend going from user generated content to user generated applications (mashups) through to user generated universes (Second Life) and how projects we’ve worked on fitted in to these areas. We also talked about how we all have stuff that we’re interested in that we end up spending a lot of our personal time on and occasionally one of these ideas will take off and we can convert it into a proper funded IBM project. Also how we’re very much into trying things out and not worrying too much about if they’ll come off or not.

Of course, Roo’s Second Life demo stole the show. To people who haven’t seen it before, it’s something that always grabs their attention and Roo has become a real expert in explaining the idea and how it relates to IBM.

Deploying Servers

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Deploying servers inside of IBM is fairly easy. It normally consists of finding an old Thinkpad or desktop machine, sticking it under your desk and finding a long enough ethernet cable to reach from the network port across the far side of the office. My trusty 5 year old IBM desktop has happily been running several demos and prototypes over the years. It’s surprising how many people have things like this and still manage to make them reliable.

Lots of cool technology used internally starts out this way and gets moved to the proper internal infrastructure when it proves to be so useful. IBM has been pretty good at recognising this and the internal IT organisation are providing more and more internal hosting options for people with prototypes that they want to demo and try out. Anyone can get a LAMP stack to host their applications internally for free, for example.

e server

Anyway I needed to run an externally accessible test server for some customer work I’m doing and with a very helpful colleague (thanks Dave!) I managed to get the setup I needed using some existing infrastructure. Getting things like this up and running inside of IBM (or any big company I expect) isn’t always easy, legal and security is normally a bigger problem than any technology, but now I know it can be done, it is an incentive to try and come up with some externally facing demos and prototypes.

Eat Friday!

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Where can you sit out in the sun amidst a beautiful country estate and have a full english breakfast and pot of tea served to you for £3? In Hursley’s clubhouse of course. Are you sure you still don’t want that job?

The emerging tech group I work in has started having regular team breakfasts, first Friday in every month from now on. It’s a chance to have breakfast, sit in the sun and talk about work, the world cup, big brother and diet coke and mento chemical reactions.

breakfast

Meet some of the emerging tech team. From left to right: Rachel, Roo, Katherine, Dave, Richard, Pete and John.

Internationalised URLs

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One of the web projects Rob and I are working on at the moment has some internationalisation requirements that are pretty key to its success. The standard user-application interactions aren’t that problematic, there’s some things to think about encoding/storage wise, but it’s a well understood area.

The tricky bit is that URLs are ASCII only. You can encode non-ASCII characters and handle things in the application to make it look and act like it’s coping with different character sets, but this only really works if you think of a URL as a pure reference, that isn’t containing any information in itself. For web 2.0 type applications (and when using REST), this doesn’t really work as the URL contains information in itself. If you want a piece of information referenced by a URL like http://mysite/user/page1 making that URL make sense in languages not using ASCII is hard.

Content 2.0 at the RSA

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I was at the Content 2.0 conference yesterday. The main topics of discussion were around user generated content. Some of the content moved a bit too much in to marketing for my interests, but overall it was a good event. As you’d expect there were a couple of notable bloggers there, including Hugh McLeod from Gaping Void, who talked about how blogs had impacted businesses he’s involved with.

Marc Canter talked about some ideas in his new social networking project, People Aggregator, about how social networks need to be more open and let the user’s control their own data. Bradley Horowitz gave a great talk on Flickr and how it’s philosophies were being adopted by the rest of Yahoo! All of the people writing on eightbar are happy Flickr users, so it was good to get a bit of an insight in to them.

I thought Jamie Kantrowitz (from MySpace) was great, mainly as it’s the first time I’ve heard someone mention The OC in a geek-centric environment. She came under a bit of attack for the way MySpace locks in their user’s data, but I thought she countered that well. I think MySpace targets a different market than a lot of the social networking sites. It was interesting how she talked about successful users on MySpace are those that improve a conversation, rather than simply disagreeing or agreeing.

Main themes of the day included: microformats, myware, attention data, implicit ratings, people-like-me, control and measurement. I think they recorded the event and podcasts of the content should be available soon.

James Governor’s Web 2.0 and Wine Meetup

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Roo, Rob and myself have just been to James Governor’s (agenda free) wine and technology meetup. It was good to actually meet James after having a few blog interactions with him and reading a lot of the stuff he writes.

There were some pretty cool and interesting people there, some with their own companies, some from Microsoft and Adobe who all just kind of talked tech. It was in a slightly unusual place, half off-license, half wine bar, which was actually a lot nicer than it sounds. I’m sure Rob will explain their high tech, RFID enabled bathroom.

I had a good conversation with Ben Watson, Group Manager for Enterprise Developer Relations at Adobe. I’ve used Flash in lots of projects and our group have had quite a lot of experience with both Flex and Laszlo. We were in agreement of both the good and bad uses of Flash and it was great to get their perspective on how their tools fit in with web 2.0. He’s definitely someone who’s really in to technology and he reminded me of our own Rod Smith in some ways. I’m hoping to get him to come visit Hursley soon.

It was a fun evening, but I had to shoot off home early as I have an early flight to catch tomorrow. I’m sure Rob and Roo will fill you in with anything I missed. It got me thinking we really should try and organise something like this around Hursley too.

H T the X

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This week the Hursley Technical Exchange (HTX) is running on site. Hursley runs a lot of external events for customers, schools and universities, but this is one for the IBMers working on site. There’s all kinds of talks and activities run by IBM people and also external speakers, such as Simon Singh, Robert Llewellyn and the people behind Hawkeye. It’s something similar to Google’s Tech Talk series, but all squashed into a week.

Lots of Hursley bloggers are contributing to the event. This morning Roo and I ran an innovating with Lego session, then Ian talked about Situational Apps and Richard Brown presented on WebSphere Process Server. Later in the week Roo is also giving a Web 2.0 pitch.

It looks a pretty good lineup for the week. I was somewhat disappointed to find that the Hawkeye people hadn’t set up any cricket nets in the house as I fancied having my bowling action analysed, but it was pointed out that maybe having people smash cricket balls around isn’t the best thing to do in a listed building.

New EightBar Theme

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When we first setup EightBar we didn’t spend much time on the theme. I’d quickly put something together so that we could the site live but I never really liked it. Last week I saw this picture Roo had put up on Flickr. It turned out it was actually Mrs Roo who took it, but I loved it. It seemed perfect to use as the base for the EightBar, so he’s the first version of a proper theme for our site.