Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

How important do developers think that being a good communicator is in advancing their careers and being solid citizens in their workplace? Not enough of them in my opinion and too many rely on technical skills to drag them over the line. Communicating effectively with peers, business analysts, subject matter experts, departmental heads etc, is more than 50% of the job in many instances and when a developer cant do at least 50% of their job effectively, then the question needs to be asked, how valuable are you really to your employer and fellow team members?

It doesn’t really matter where your from or who you work for, its vastly important to speak clearly and demonstrate understanding of what’s expected from and by every one who contributes to a team effort. Now from time to time I have worked with people who were not the most effective communicators and it’s always been my advice to spend every bit as much of your time and effort in developing your communication skills as your technical ones - absolutely no excuses.

The best ideas will never be accepted without understanding and with poor communication comes poor understanding, so any developer who thinks they should tidy up their communication skills or wants to move into a leadership or management position within IT / Software development, then for heavens sake work on your communication skills and spend some time developing your ability to articulate your ideas and understanding. So how do communication problems exhibit themselves to begin with and how does one know that there is an issue to deal with?

Some of the Signs

• Does your manager, CIO, CTO (your boss) often relieve you of duty when it comes to presenting an idea to others? This assumes that your boss is still giving you the credit, but not allowing you to present.
• Are you having to repeat or rephrase your ideas constantly when expressing them? This assumes that the other parties are not limited in their abilities to understand.
• Do people interject before your finished explaining your point of view? This assumes that the other parties are not selfish enough to bulldoze over you with their own ideas.

What Can I do?

Find your weaknesses and work on them. If you don’t feel able to articulate well enough then read more and study the style of expression and increase your vocabulary. If your presentation suffers from lack of confidence and does not ‘throw to the back of theatre’, practice speaking with your partner or friends or in front of a mirror and work on projection. It’s even valuable to seek professional help if your language skills need improvement. When you hear or read new words that you don’t understand or know, look them up in a dictionary and learn them. Join a public speaking group or a debating team. There are many things you could do and this is not an exhaustive list, but if this shoe fits and you do nothing, well then nothing will happen and nothing will change! John Bennett also has some interesting ideas on the subject as do many others - so seek and ye shall find.

Some of the most visible Service Bus (open source) frameworks around in the DotNet community, utilise MSMQ as their choice of queuing technology. MSMQ usually gets a look in as both a store and forward mechanism and endpoint in those cases. Most would say that the options in the choice for a queuing technology are somewhat limited when it comes to being free and hence we see MSMQ fit the bill here more often than not.

It strikes me however that SQL Server Service Broker IS an option in solving this problem and in doing so we might gain some nice value added benefits . The objections to using SSB in architecting SOA solutions are generally that a multiple SQL Express Service Broker peer solution isn’t possible and that the alternative of having to use Standard or Enterprise Editions might be cost prohibitive (depending on your organisation). This complaint presupposes our intention would include using SSB features such as Services, Conversations / Dialogs etc and that ALL the messaging infrastructure would be taken care of by the out of the box SSB feature set.

Some other possible improvements on the MSMQ scenario are less friction in deployment, backup and administration, not to mention the benefit of having an instance of SQL Server close to applications that might actually be smart clients.

I feel some of my spare (?) time being lost in following this thought and moving it to code!

I am going to start off with a post that, well isn’t quite going to be in the spirit of what this blog is generally going to be focused on.

We as developers or technologists in the DotNet space (or others) can be weighed down with the demands to keep up with the latest advances in our arena. The drivers for keeping up often stem from a ‘perceived need’ however sometimes they are also grounded in real concerns, and I am now beginning to understand the difference. We also tend to give tech alone too much importance in how we think and behave, something that Udi really made more concrete for me recently. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I am now spending four weeks of annual leave getting over an illness, rather than frolicking through the fields and I can put it squarely at the feet of poor lifestyle. The lifestyle I speak of is one that developers will recognise and so I take this opportunity to begin this blog by saying, “don’t forget to smell the roses!”. Learning should be a life long goal but remember to breathe & spend the time required to keep your engine tuned and running clean fuel (metaphorically speaking).

As far as future posts go, my plan is to speak from time to time about the pressures of keeping on top of the tech explosion coming out of Microsoft and trying to make sense of a lot of it, with respect to how it affects the life of developers, architects and even CIO and CTO’s. I am also going to give fair amount of attention to the elements of tech & design that I am finding useful (and distracting and useless) in running a custom development shop.