Monday, July 24, 2006

Fox Forward

I'm speaking at the Fox Forward conference in Alpharetta, Ga in mid-September. Not sure of the crowd or the reception. It's nice, though, to support community efforts. Yaa-haw!

Updated: Stupid-ass me had the conference name wrong. Sorry, Kevin!

Monday, July 17, 2006

OK....forget management ... let's talk Sedna

I never followed up to my previous post. Why? Mainly because I'm too busy practicing it to preach it. My main management philosophy is this:

Treat others with the respect and consideration they deserve. Enable those who work for you to use their talents as efficiently as possible without bureaucratic bullshit. End of story.

Pretty simple.

Anyway...onward.

I dunno; I'd have thought by now that enough folks had gotten the discrete message that Sedna is not VFP 10 or even 9.5. And it's not. It is an add-on to VFP to leverage some cool new stuff in newer MS technologies.

One of the mantras of Sedna is not to crack open the VFP9 binaries because that introduces risk. Therefore, a lot of potential functionality is lost, however, this decision makes sense in terms of the strategic direction of VFP as far as MS is concerned.

For years we've all heard Fox is dead, right? And it never died. One of the reasons for the Sedna project name was the implications of an undead Artic princess.

And it still won't die no matter what MS does. I think at this point we have to realize that our use of VFP is independent of MS; if you haven't gotten the message that VFP is not important to MS after this length of time then I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

H0nestly, MS is not abandoning the VFP developer, though. Take a close look at LINQ technologies.

We might have lost the battles ... but might win the war! LOL

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Coming Soon: Gonzo's Rules of Project Management

I have been doing more project management than coding or anything else over the last 10 years; my time at MS was about 50% testing and 50% management. And now I'm managing a midsize development team pursuing a very aggressive release schedule and it's exhilarating.

I'm distilling certain maxims from my experiences and will post them RSN. Stay tuned.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Missiles and the Fourth of July

We launch a huge rocket on the 4th and the world cheers...North Korea does and the world shudders. Someone has to do something about those insane folks north of Seoul.

The problem is: what? The U.S. tried to get an agreement in place in 1994 involving aid in exchange for a promise that they would give up nuclear ambitions. Yeah, that worked. Now they seem hell-bent on perfecting missile technology which poses some threat to us but a huge threat to South Korea and Japan.

They are so isolated and so inward, what do you threaten them with short of military action? And if you do that, those crazy fucks may obliterate Seoul; they have about 100,000 artillery pieces aimed there.

Ponderous.