oDesk

Vladimir Uncategorized ,

oDesk is a great time-saver. You know what oDesk is, right? It’s a site where you can hire somebody to do some job for you. Some job that can be done remotely, like code writing, web site creation, QA-ing your code, editing your blog post. Go to their website and learn more about what kind of help you can get.

“But, why would I hire somebody when I can do it my self?. I can edit my blog post. I can create web site. I can test my application“. It’s a question that doesn’t have a single answer: what is going to be – time or money? Sometime it’s money, and in this case you test your application yourself before launching it to your customers. But, sometime it’s “cheaper” to pay somebody to test it so that you can concentrate on something more important. I’ve just recently read a comment about a person who was gladly hiring somebody to do a job that would take him only an hour to do, even it would take a hired person 8 hours, because at the end of the day it was “cheaper” in a long run. So, sometime you can “delegate” something to somebody else and this way free your self for more important tasks (including spending more time with you family or exercising more, or just doing nothing and recovering after a tough day/week/month).

I’ve first heard about oDesk site in a book about Micro ISV. So, when I needed to build a team for a startup (with limited resources), I’ve turned to oDesk. And it was very successful experience. Not without challenges, but successful. Not only I’ve had people from around the world helping me to build a new product, but I was paying a fraction of what it would cost me to have a local team.

Ok, I hear you: “Another advertisement of a cheap offshore job market. Give me brake. You don’t know what your are talking about”. Well, as a matter of fact, I do know. Because I did it, with success. And I’ll follow up with what helped me to use offshore team effectively. Note that, offshore teams may not be an option for you – one of my friend who is CEO and founder of his company told me that in some cases (when the software will be used in a high-level security areas) it’s not possible to hire people outside of US. But I think it’s more an exception than a rule.

So, does it mean that the only way to use oDesk is in case of a business? Not at all. You can use it for some personal projects as well. Just remember that you pay you $$$ for your time, time that you can spend with your family, grow you skills or just relax. You can always make some $$$, but you can never buy some extra time. Unfortunately.

And here is how I’ve used oDesk for my personal need. I’ve had this WordPress-based blog hosted with another provider. It was free with my domain hosting, but I was not happy with the performance. I know, that it doesn’t really matter because nobody reads my blog :), but still I was unhappy. So, when Microsoft introduces WordPress hosting on Azure (I was doing a lot of development on Azure that time), I’ve decided to switch (BTW, the performance is much much better on Azure). So, did I know how to transfer my WordPress blog from one provider to another? Of course, not :). Can I do it myself? Absolutely. I can learn easily (there are tons of blogs about how this can be done). But, before moving on, I’ve decided to check what it would cost me if somebody else do it for me. After a quick search on oDesk I’ve found a nice guy in India who can do it for me under $50. So, what’s it going to be: $50 or a day of my life? It was a very easy choice for me (your mileage may vary :)). A few days later I’ve had my blog transferred to Azure. Yes, I’ve spent a little bit of my time to help the guy (just sharing some details, providing credentials for him and doing some securing clean up after the transfer), but it was much less time if I would do it myself.

So, next time when you need something get done, may be oDesk is you friend 🙂

 

So you want to be a software architect

Vladimir software

There are many opinion about what software architect does, what skills are required and whether we need them or not. I’ve been in this role for a long time (20+ years), even before I’ve “acquired” the “official” title. I was lucky because a year after the graduation I’ve build the whole application – gathered requirements, architected, designed, coded, tested, operated the application as well as provided customer support. Since then most of my life I was building the complete application rather than working on its pieces here and there. And that’s how I’ve learned it at the first place.

First, let me be clear – I think that architect is required and important part of any software team or “part” of you if you are a MicroISV. And it doesn’t matter whether this person is called architect or engineer or he-knows-how-to or somehow else. There should be someone who knows how to build the whole building, not just superbly paint a single room.

So, some of my thoughts about the skills that good architect needs as well as pros and cons of this role.

Skills

Know how to do it yourself

I think that if you cannot sit down and write the whole application that you are designing yourself, there is a very slim chance that it will be designed properly, because when you design/architect an application, you actually write it in your head.

E2E knowledge

Architect has to know it end to end. From understanding how the business works to the work of customer support and everything in between (requirements, design, development, QA, operation). Without this knowledge it’s difficult to build application that will add value to its users, will be delivered on time, have a reasonable cost and will make the team happy. And this leads to the next required skill.

Side note: why did I put team happiness in this list? Long story short: in a long run happy team makes great product, unhappy team – crap.

Compromise

Meeting these requirements (value for the customers, time to market, cost and team happiness) during the whole lifecycle of the product is difficult.

  • Should the product quality be sacrificed to ship it on time? 
  • Should additional development effort be allocated to make a tool for operation team which will make operation easy? 
  • Should some components be build in house or purchased?
  • …..

Architect faces these questions every day. And the quality of the final product depends on his ability to find optimal solution – find a win-win path.

Keep it all in your head

You should be able to store the whole application in your head. You may not remember all the details, but overall layers, tiers, components, data and execution flow as well as storage design is a must. Application is a composition of multiple pieces (layers) and without seeing the “whole picture” it is difficult to build well balanced application. E.g.: design of particular database tables may be perfect from a DBA perspective, but will require a lot of unnecessary and badly performant code in data access and business layer.

Review code fast

High software quality is not only guaranties the happiness of your customers (functional quality), but also how fast you can deliver new features (structural quality). If your application has 0 bugs, but code is ugly and architecture resembles Winchester House, then there is no way you can add functionality fast. But how can you ensure high structural quality? Yes you can have all these static code analysis toolsin place and they help. Too some extend. But the only way to guaranty a high structural quality of your application is to review all the code. “I don’t have time to review all the code that is checked in?“. Yes you do. It takes 30 minutes to review regular check-ins of a 10 developers team. If you know how to do it right and if you teach your team to write good code (I’ll share my experience later). 

And don’t fool yourself – sooner or later you will review “that” code, because when it breaks one day badly or prevents your from adding a new functionality without total rework, you will have to review & clean it up. So, better do it daily when it’s easier to spot a small problem and fix it early.

BTW, if you know a better way to ensure high structural quality, please let me know.

(To be continued)

Beauty of dynamics

Vladimir software

I’ve never liked the out keyword. I know, it’s personal, and you are welcome to disagree with me.

The TryParse pattern happens quite often. My preferred approach is wrapping both return values into an object. Or use KeyValuePair. But it’s not an elegant solution for my taste.

That is one of the reasons I liked seeing Tuples in C# 4.0. But still … not elegant enough. Here comes dynamic. I worked with dynamic languages since … well, long enough. But it didn’t “click” with C#. But today, I was doing some code where I wanted to return an instance of the anonymous class. Something similar to this:

 return customerList.Select(c => new {Id = c.Id, Name = c.Name});

And I’ve realized that there is a nice way of handling this situation (as well as TryParse pattern) the following way:

 private object GetNew() { return new { Id = 5, Name = "Joe Doe"; }; }</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">[TestMethod] public void Get_anonymous_object_with_dynamic() { dynamic newObj = GetNew();</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">Assert.AreEqual(5, newObj.Id); Assert.AreEqual("Joe Doe", newObj.Name); }

So, I’m quite happy with this solution … for now.