View from the trenches... 1

(my perspective for the year)


I posted earlier on my FB that I have to hand it to my colleague's team for setting the inititative to adapt to the evolving nature of our work tools i.e. techologies, practices. I had played with the thought of wanting to be transfered to his team so I can be involved, since I have also worked on them some years back (jeez, I'm using YEARS now with a big S; talk about vintage & redundant).

Throughout the entire tenure rendered, I have always sought to continually adapt or stay abreast with the industry's continous evolution. At every project, I would seek to recommend time and again (hoping persistence would pay-off) or at least, have the gall to do a little rnd such that we may be able to pick up some usefull concepts that can be put into practice. Or, at least have an understanding of what has been evolving out there in the wild so that; when it comes to us, we're not that lost nor helpless. Or, at least we are continously trying to increase our knowledge base if not for the benefit of our services, we can have it for ourselves.

To be fair (define fair?), the flip side of these propositions are that they may be too shortsighted. i'm only presenting a perspective from a developers point-of-view:
    -New tech,
    -Ease of development,
    -Industry-based development patterns and practices,
    -Up-to-date support and reference from the
    developer's community.
The list could probably go more. My domain at this point is only limited to the scope of what i am paid for, that is to be a Developer. My recommendations for adapting innovations, so-to-speak are confined to the technical aspects wherein the furthest I can reach out to would be looking an entire system's architecture and see what can be improved albiet; design architectures, coding standards, etc.

On the impact it'll have on the organization's LOB; again, they'd be limited to a developer's point-of-view. However; we may be able to up the level, at least see from an Architect's or a Project Manager's view:
    -Ease of development, with newer techs comes more
    advanced development tool. Advanced tool may equate to
    shorter development time or greater
    capacity to address previous technical limitations.
    -Wider developer community support.
    -New technologies, provides facilities to design solution architectures that were previously limited or enhance existing designs.
Once again, the list can be a lot more but we'll just limit them to the above.

I would say it's unfortunate, that despite all the tech's evolution and what they can provide to the value to the organizations LOB, they just do not fall on the PRIORITY list. Priority here, in the excuse that the current tech can still deliver the solutions they intended to. So why reinvent the wheel. The excuse that despite solutions designed to address business processes, the business processes can be adjusted to suit the scope of what the tech can deliver. There is also the issue of the learning curves, where it may be steep. Licensing cost is also a bit of an issue. I guess to the decision makers, it's really a balancing act between what works and what may work.

So, the recourse now ought to be; to continously seek avenues of innovation. The option currently available is to seek them outside the day job, perhaps get a formal training (financial capacity not withstanding). Seek into the developer community, there are a lot of resource out in the internet that can be leveraged into learning material (just be carefull not to go astray). So there should still be plentifull of avenues for innovation. All these would just require: TIME, FREEDOM, COMMITMENT, INTEREST, DESIRE, THIRST, HUNGER and most of all the NECESSITY to innovate...