CodEagle

Last week, on the second day of the SDC 2008, I visited these sessions:

1. Deep Dive into Entity Framework Object Services – Julie Lerman
2. Developing Scalable Apps with Google AppEngine – Nik Kalyani
3. WPF Data Binding – Brian Noyes
4. Building a Service Oriented Enterprise System – Dennis Doomen

I will tell you in short what impression each session made on me. read more…

Last week I was performing at a debate about websibitionism. I worked together with another debater to bring some fire to the parts of the program that involved the public in a debate about the subject. If you can read Dutch, you can read more about the evening here.

The first scene involved a job interview. The employer confronted the candidate for the job with information he found on the internet. It involved private hobby’s, so the candidate thought it didn’t matter to the interview. The employer thought it was public, because it was on the internet. And it was relevant according to him, because it involved non-mainstream hobby’s like nudism and playing with trains. read more…

What does a software developer want to know of the Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF) of Microsoft? That is the question that kept me occupied from time to time during the last couple of weeks. Not entirely unimportant, because it came to my attention that a lot has already been written about the SCSF, but these texts did not give a clear impression of it. Not with me, any way, and taking into account all the questions that are being asked about it, not with a lot of other people either. read more…

This week I have been improving the template and content of the blog. On the index page, posts are only partly shown, to give a better overview of the content. A link to the form to add contents can now be found directly under every post. The link around the number to the left, right under the date, can still be used, but was not clear enough for most visitors.

After installing qTranslate (WordPress plugin), making some changes and translations to the template and adding some translated texts to the posts, the blog is now also available in Dutch. Making the translations does not take me a lot of time, I have noticed, and now more people can read it in their preferred language. I have been thinking about also posting in Spanish, but that would definitively have taken too much time…

My eye was caught today by the article Rise of the anti-manager by Leo D’Angelo Fisher. Or, to be truthful, the Dutch version of that, on Infoworld. The main line of reasoning in the article is that currently, managers are not very good, getting worse and that companies should pay more attention to the quality of their managers. The article is of the ‘general and broad’ kind, so I will keep in line and follow the same style.

The writer of the article has made some quite clear observations with figures to back them up and I would be inclined to agree on them. However, there are some things I find lacking in the article. First of all, it does not mention the fact that there are so much more managers nowadays than before. And second, it fails to mention there are so many managers not doing anything productive. Just following procedures, making sure the forms are nicely filled out, etc. Actually, in my experience, a lot of them are just there as a sort of ’filter’ or ’web’ in between people getting actual work done and people with real decision making power. read more…

To make this blog more “my own”, I changed the background pictures and added an icon in the header. And of course the sidebar needed some refinements. But that is it for now. It looks fine to me, so I will be using the blog url from now on when I post at other sites.

The first real content items to follow will probably be translated versions of my blog posts at the corporate website of the company I work for, Sogyo. And maybe a small item about the current course in Prince2 I am taking, together with a group of colleagues. Beyond that, who knows?

If you would like some tips on how to get WordPress to behave how you would like, drop a note.

This is my first post on my very own blog. This will be a blog about things that caught my attention and looked interesting to other people. Mostly it will be professional, but it might contain some side notes about other things of interest. No policy about that yet..

Hopefully it will be a personal and valuable contribution to the world wide web, as that is it’s main purpose. See you!