On the long winding road home from Amsterdam yesterday, I heared this story on the radio. I heared it, and went on the quest for a personal opinion. Result: NONE. Since it has been a scientific social project to share the news and see how media has trained us all to have an opinion about everything.

"Exercising the right not to walk" -- Charles in the movie "Dead Poets Society"(fun to read all the quotations again, and see the movie in front of me again)

11:40:25 AM    

Martin Fowler's new book "Patterns of Enterprise ApplicationArchitecture" was brought to my attention at the conference as well. Thegood news seems to be that we're now in good company for having doubthsand second thoughts on the EJB thing. The bad news seems to be that hison-line patterns catalog is now shortened down to a teaser refering tothe book-pages :-(

11:14:31 AM    

Seems like people are reaching the heart of the matter while I was showing off at a congress. Not surprisingly my shared neurons got to note down most of my sentiments on the matter...

Making room for my typical difference in style I'ld like to answer the remaining question: "How to discriminate between smart and 'average' ?" (That average word really stinks btw)

See, at this conference there were 30% less attendants then last year... And looking into the list the conclusion was that the large consulting firms and integrators were the ones absent. Contrarily to Werners believe this obviously show "they already know everything" :-) Their customers that did show up (and are outsmarting them fast) told me that they are getting free consultants nowadays: 2 for the price of 1 since it costs more to need to invent some sensible research topic for the other one they couldn't sell.

Just maybe: Being smart == daring to share and see your opinions challenged. (I would NOT take being able to install / run / extend oss project xyz as the true smartness-qualifier).  Remember perception is reality? The smart guy closed up in his room, is not bound to make a difference in anyones perception. See, OSS is just about showing off :-)

9:29:19 AM    

Another day at a conference... Yesterday I heard Ron Tolido tell the story about this Mystery Winchester House of the Spirits in California. Apparently some Sarah, widow of Mr. Winchester (the one who made the improvements to the guns and made enormous wealth out of it), got haunted by the spirits of all the people killed by any winchester rifle. The only way for her not to be driven to madness (maybe a bit too late though) by these ghosts was to keep on extending the house with different rooms, side ways, traps and mysterious corridors to confuse them.(By the way, much of this reminded me of The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende).

The great move Ron made in his speach was to draw the parallel with software architecture and how it tends to be mysteriously extended as a defense mechanism from software engineers: saving them from madness inflicted by the ever haunting spirits of unsatisfied customers and end-users :-)

By some coincidence my talk at the conference went further onto the building parallel. I think my explanation of the ReST architecture style actually did get through and opened some eyes.

Interestingly Ron's point was that the times of top-down design and architectural complete building plans are over (and not to be returning) With the advent of grid computing, ever more bandwith and evolutions of the smart-dust kind he foresees the advent of biological-like computing systems where the overview and control factor will reach zero. Welcome Matrix :-)

*update* Another one of Ron's references: Play the game of simple things building up complex systems. (He had some biological examples as well: ant and bee colonies.)

9:14:18 AM