Guest View: The world spinning 'round

By Tom Clement

January 15, 2009 —

My 85-year-old MySpace-using mom saw it before I did. With a knowing look, she handed me a somewhat battered copy of Andrew Grove’s 1996 book, “Only the Paranoid Survive,” with the not-so-subtle suggestion that I read it. As I did, it dawned on me that she was gently trying to warn me that, if this 53-year-old programmer doesn’t get off his duff and pay attention to the changes around him, he could find himself growing old.

Andrew Grove’s book teaches that, if you don’t vigilantly watch out, the fast-changing world will pass you by before you know what’s happening. Every now and then, something happens that fundamentally changes the game. Today, my business, technological and work environments are all in flux.

Business. Three big paradigm shifts are converging on my professional life.

First of all, Facebook and MySpace exemplify the phenomenon of social networking. As often seems to be the case, a younger generation discovered it before the rest of us (well, with a nod to my mom—most of us). It’s a fundamentally different way of communicating that works well in the chaos of our modern world.

Instead of choosing between spamming all your friends with newsletter style e-mails or spending the time to write personal letters to each of them, you just announce things to a community of friends you have identified on a social networking site. While social networking doesn’t preclude more personal communication, its success is an indication that much of what we want to communicate is our own status, interests and discoveries.

For example, my niece Claire is studying in England. We haven’t spoken in over a year, yet we know the trajectory of each other’s lives thanks to MySpace. If you’re a computer programmer (or a parent for that matter), you ignore this phenomenon at your peril.

Next, when Google Maps came on the scene using accessible public programming interfaces, the mashup application emerged. My favorite example is when someone mashed up a database of public toilets with Google Maps to create a cell phone app to help pedestrians with urgent needs in New York City. The basic idea is that when you expose data through the right kinds of interfaces, it becomes possible and even easy to combine data in new, interesting and valuable ways. Although this started with consumer-facing applications, businesses are starting to notice that making their systems mashable enables integrations that were once prohibitively expensive.

Plus, cloud computing—or software-as-a-service—is an emerging model for delivering software to customers. Instead of selling software to businesses and asking them to install and maintain it on their servers, SaaS customers log into an account on the Internet and use a Web-based application to do their work. Their business saves the costs of maintaining the infrastructure; per seat IT overhead is reduced because of economies of scale; and because a customer can try the solution on a small scale before they invest in it, the cost of entry becomes vanishingly small.

So how do these changes affect me as a computer programmer? I guess the truth is that I don’t really know. What I do know is that the who, what and where of software is changing.

My non-technical friends on MySpace all pimp their pages without the help of professional programmers. They won’t cede this customization to experts; they demand the ability to do it themselves. Mashups, which have the potential to provide so much business value at so little cost, are emerging as a whole new kind of application that they can create. And these new applications can live in the cloud, where the new SaaS business model seems to change everything. If I want to stay relevant, I had better learn to make the products I work on mashable by the next generation of workers, and I had better make sure these software services can be delivered on the cloud.

Technology. More and more, people are working on technologies I used to think of as peripheral, and if I stay still, my own skills will move to the periphery. My choice is whether or not to let this happen. A mainframe programmer in the 1970s was at the center of the programming universe. Now, while mainframe programming is still important, few would call it cutting edge.

Technologies are changing faster and faster. Twenty-three years ago, I started working with minicomputers writing C code, and then rode the microcomputer revolution programming in C++ and .NET. It wasn’t continuous; it happened in bursts, sometimes out of fear of being left behind, but more often because a new technology emerged that could help me solve real-world problems.

I’ve always kept up. But now, we’ve got SAML, STS, MTOM, JSON, REST, XAML, SOA, SOAP, AJAX, XHTML, Ruby on Rails and Silverlight. There are tools like Air, Thermo and Blend. So while the business paradigm shifts mentioned above are changing things on the business side of my world, Web 2.0 technologies are challenging my technical chops.

Work. My work environment is radically changing. I’ve been lucky enough in the past to work in a number of fast-moving startup companies. I’ve also worked in larger companies with more traditional waterfall development processes. To my immense delight, management is starting to acknowledge the inherent inefficiencies of waterfall processes, and it is looking to agile approaches to restore the efficiency, productivity and fun that software development can and should be. Today, my team communicates constantly and organically, management accepts and adapts to the changing realities of development, and everyone is far happier than before.

The world is changing in other ways that directly affect my work life. Because of acquisitions and outsourcing, my team is geographically distributed between Colorado, Oregon, California and Ukraine. And since we’re already so distributed, people can work from home because we’re already collaborating using technological means. My company benefits from this, since we can spend less time on the road and more time working. And the environment benefits as we keep more cars off the roads.

Some agile principles, like pair programming, seem to adapt well to distributed development. For example, my experience is that pair programming is actually easier when you’re sharing a desktop using NetMeeting or WebEx than when you’re looking over someone’s shoulder. Others, like daily standup meetings, present new challenges. But as the new reality of distributed teams collides with the business necessity of agile development, agile technology is following close behind. While intra-team collaboration across time zones is still problematic, technology is making colocation less and less of an issue.

All this is enough to make your head spin. The world has changed so much in the past couple of decades. I wonder what it will look like 32 years from now when I’m 85 years old. I look at my 9-year-old son, Keefer, and wonder how the world will have changed for him. Will I be able to offer him any perspective from the arc of my own life?

Tom Clement is senior manager of the Mashup Composer team at Serena Software.

Related Search Term(s): agile, cloud computing, mashups, networking, outsourcing, professional development, SaaS

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