Why is Sam on the bleeding edge?
Anonymous asked a real good question on my last post that I think I need to share my answer with all of you.
Well Sam, have you ever thought why you're always on the 'bleeding edge'? You see to me, if you're a trainer, you need to "sell" to your customers. But if you try and earn a living and get your customers working with good and stable software, you shouldn't be pushing the latest. Then of course there's the MS evangelist, who just pushes everything MS whether good or not, whether original or copy. Just add some buzzwords, throw an MS in front and there's "cutting edge" technology for you.
I hope one day this all slows down for the benefit of all.
Here is my response:
SamGentile said:
Thanks for the comments. Personally, I'm on the bleeding edge because thats what excites me and pushes me from stagnation. It's made me a better INETA speaker and Architect over all. For instance, I got on the NGWS/.NET bandwagon in 1999. I bet my career on it and when .NET shipped in 2002, I was a great 2 years ahead of anyone which landed me great consulting gigs at Microsoft, Groove and others. Its the way I drive myself but its also what keeps me excited and not bored.
A great Architect designs for the next 12-18 months, implements for the next 6 and the last 3rd of their job is to see the "Big Horsey" picture 1-3 years out. I try to combine all three because my employers demand a three-headed architect like that and write it into my job description. In terms of "selling", I *never* sell anyone anything whether Microsoft or otherwise. I take my moral and technical responsibility *extremely seriously* and only make recomendations based on business needs and requirements and knowledge of a particular technology. Technology for technology sake is just a geek excersise. Its only when technology satisifes business needs that its worth anything. Thats why I practice Agile: to keep it grounded in real business needs.
In terms of what we use at my job, I did *not* decide any of it. Every technology we use (Indigo, etc) was decided well before I ever joined. Since I had a couple of years experience with the Indigo SDR program, I felt that they made the right decision. That decision has been proven many times over in all the money we are saving with SOA and Indigo. If we had to implement all this with COM+/ES or ASMX we would have never made our schedules. By using this "bleeding edge" technology we saved thousands of dollars. To be exact, it's not quite bleeding edge as we have a Go-Live license and total support from Microsoft and specifically the Indigo team with which I have been working with three+ years now and helps us 100%. This is a one-time confusion with the releases and not with overall strategy or products. I hope this helps with your valid questions.
September 30 2006
samgentile
Filed under: Personal
Tagged as: work, wcf, soa, software-architecture, ineta, microsoft, mvp, net-framework-3, windows-communicationfoundation, personal-growth
