I forgot to mention my favorite quote from Alan Cooper's keynote today: "Building software is like walking through a minefield. It's really quick as long as you don't step on a mine."
At last year's developer summit, I was quite impressed by the quality of the keynote speaker. This year's speaker was Alan Cooper, author of "About Face" and "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum." He had quite a few interesting things to say, although not all of them I agree with.
Much of the material in the talk was lifted from books by Peter Drucker and Paul Glen ("Leading Geeks"). The talk was interesting, and at least a little controversial -- especially considering that I was sitting between two agile advocates.
Some of the interesting thoughts:
- software is replacing people as the primary point of contact with your business; the UI you present is analogous to the body language, stance, attitude of the people that used to be client-facing (Cooper)
- software now touches all aspects of business; therefore software management is now more important strategically than finance, manufacturing, shipping, etc (which Cooper now suggests are essentially hygienic)
- the true worth of a corporation is held in off-balance-sheet assets... the "people, technology, information, processes, corporate culture, brand recognition, management capability..." (Drucker)
- "The critical feature of a knowledge workforce is that its workers are not labor, they are capital. And what is decisive in the performance of capital is not its cost, but its productivity." (Drucker)
- geeks create a meritocratic subculture, based solely on technical skill, which they will value above all else; "The top geek commands influence and respect, not power" (Paul Glen)
- conventional management structures, with manager who understand neither geeks nor the challenges they face, force geeks to lie to management to keep them happy (Cooper)
- "developers" can be divided into interaction designers (what to build), design engineers (how to build it), and production engineers (built it on time, according to plan); each group is motivated differently, and should have separate career paths (Cooper)
It's been an interesting couple of days in Palm Springs, California, the site of the 2008 ESRI Developer Summit.
1300+ developers descended on the city. Not all of them are "developers" in the traditional sense. Many of these people started as ESRI product users, becoming experts in ArcObjects by using them. They started extending GIS products, and now they're developers... often without background or formal training in software development.
This may well explain the unsatisfyingly basic preconference sessions. The session on "
Introduction to Planning, Developing, and Maintaining ArcGIS Applications" would have been better titled "
Software Development 101." Far too much emphasis on basic software development life cycle, not enough emphasis on GIS-specific concerns.
The second session, "
Introduction to ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Engine Development," was similarly targeted. After spending far too long on re-learning the basics of UML and how and why interfaces are used, I wandered out of that session... and promptly remembered why I enjoyed this conference so much last year.
ESRI has 250+ members of their development staff here. While I may not always agree with what ESRI does (indeed, often I don't!), the people in the trenches are professional, polite and passionate. They know about the problems out there, and are committed to finding solutions.
Allan Laframboise (a fellow Canuck, who I was delighted to meet last year), Evan Brighton, Eleanor Davies, Laurene Koman, David Cardella and many more have been willing to listen to my issues, and have invariably found the holes in my knowledge or logic, and gently rectified them so that I could get on with making things work right.