My resume hasn't been posted in a *long* time. Still, every now and then someone calls me looking for an SOA expert to come on board for 2-3 months to help them "do SOA" with all of their existing infrastructure. I've learned not to just go on these interviews, and now insist on a phone conversation up front.

For those who don't know SOA, it's basically glorified object wrapping and making everything publicly accessible in order to reduce reinventing the wheel. It usually requires lots of very expensive software (eg: stuff like WebSphere Message Brokers, MQ, and so forth - or equivalent alternatives) and very expensive hardware on which to run it all. Invariably, most if not all of this needs to be bought and set up BEFORE you get to actually wrap any existing functionality, which means a very long curve before getting any return on the investment.

When I explain to them that very little will be accomplished in 2-3 months, and that they need to consider litany-of-SOA-startup-issues (training developers, analysis of existing and future business needs, governance, provisioning, etc) and the $ize of the inve$tment, and that it makes no sense to bring an expert on board for a short time, they invariably act shocked. They can't understand why these positions go unfilled for months.

I usually tell them to spend some time considering these things and if they're still interested in making the investment in money, time and effort, to give me a call.

To All The WTF Managers Out There: Get a f***ing clue!

 

You do SOA?! Ineed 2-3 months of help doing some SOA. Interested?

Yeah.  There are well documented steps and questions that you should ask yourself before deciding on SOA.  It's all in my book entitled You Don't Need SOA You Dipshit

The manager probably just heard it thrown around as a buzzword and decided it was time to get with web 2.0  But then again some poeple love to do things the hard way (mostly due to short sighted stubborness).  I once met a kid who swore up and down that he did all his .net web coding in pure IL assembler.  it's like working with the bastardized child of c# and assembly.

belgariontheking:

You Don't Need SOA You Dipshit

I completely agree - I learned to do it once because my then-current boss' boss' boss' boss decided to do it for the entire organization, and he allocated the budget and time to do it right. It took two years to get any real traction, and it did pay huge dividends, but most places aren't prepared to put in that kind of money/effort, and there are invariably easier ways of doing encapsulation.

Personally, I like the *nix command line model: lots of trivial utilities that do one thing, and one thing only, really well. Those things haven't changed in about 40 years, and are still the most useful tools I've ever encountered (at least outside of an IDE and intellisense).

 

snoofle:

Those things haven't changed in about 40 years, and are still the most useful tools I've ever encountered (at least outside of an IDE and intellisense).

I favor a claw hammer and a wood chipper myself. Wait, are we still discussing how to convince your boss not to use SOA?

SOA means STD in dutch. So have fun ;)

Daid:

SOA means STD in dutch. So have fun ;)

Yes, but "butthole" is Dutch for "vagina" and "wife" in Dutch is "frightened, twelve-year-old boy". 

snoofle:

Personally, I like the *nix command line model: lots of trivial utilities that do one thing, and one thing only, really well. Those things haven't changed in about 40 years, and are still the most useful tools I've ever encountered (at least outside of an IDE and intellisense).

That always sounds so nice in theory, but in practice, every command-line system ends up with a few central programs which do sixteen thousand things, so that users face a choice between spending way too much time on learning to use the program or else dealing with cargo cult scripts which they're afraid to touch in case something breaks. sendmail is the prototypical example, but there are others (such as emacs). And I do mean every command line system -- go look at the man page for "hdiutil" next time you're on a Mac.

bstorer:

You do SOA?! Ineed 2-3 months of help doing some SOA. Interested?

 

Please to send teh codes for SOA to clueless@outsourced.com

Thnaks! 

The Vicar:

snoofle:

Personally, I like the *nix command line model: lots of trivial utilities that do one thing, and one thing only, really well. Those things haven't changed in about 40 years, and are still the most useful tools I've ever encountered (at least outside of an IDE and intellisense).

That always sounds so nice in theory, but in practice, every command-line system ends up with a few central programs which do sixteen thousand things, so that users face a choice between spending way too much time on learning to use the program or else dealing with cargo cult scripts which they're afraid to touch in case something breaks. sendmail is the prototypical example, but there are others (such as emacs). And I do mean every command line system -- go look at the man page for "hdiutil" next time you're on a Mac.

/bin/true's not so bad. It only has a half dozen options, and it can't read email or post news.

Of course, give it time - I can remember, back in the day when /bin/true had no options. And, even the dynamically linked version was (effectively) statically linked. Last time I compiled a statically linked /bin/true, it was well over 100KB (and that was just int main(){return 0}.)

Btw, this is the Gnu world we're talking about; the BSD and, to a lesser extent, the proprietary worlds don't have this issue anywhere near as much. For example, last I checked (SunOS 5.9), the Solaris vi hadn't been changed except for OS ports since SunOS 4.1.1 as far as I could tell.

tgape:

/bin/true's not so bad. It only has a half dozen options, and it can't read email or post news.

Of course, give it time - I can remember, back in the day when /bin/true had no options. And, even the dynamically linked version was (effectively) statically linked. Last time I compiled a statically linked /bin/true, it was well over 100KB (and that was just int main(){return 0}.)

Btw, this is the Gnu world we're talking about; the BSD and, to a lesser extent, the proprietary worlds don't have this issue anywhere near as much. For example, last I checked (SunOS 5.9), the Solaris vi hadn't been changed except for OS ports since SunOS 4.1.1 as far as I could tell.

[citation needed]

 

The /bin/true on my GNU/Linux machine only takes --help and --version commands (which I think are standard for all GUN apps).  The man page even says it ignores all arguments passed to it. 

morbiuswilters:

The /bin/true on my GNU/Linux machine only takes --help and --version commands (which I think are standard for all GUN apps).  The man page even says it ignores all arguments passed to it. 

Same here, and it only links to libc (probably just for arg parsing and printf),  linux-gate.so (whatever that is, seems like all programs get linked to it), and ld-linux.so (which you need to link to shared libs in the first place, if I remember correctly).  The binary by itself is only about 11 KB on my system, so I doubt that it would be 100 KB here even when statically linked. Where did you compile this?

 

I do agree though about the point with the command line tools trying to do too much.  Have you ever looked at the man page for ls?  I think part of the problem might be from people trying to do hack-ish things in shell scripts, like getting file sizes by using sed on the output of ls (with a bunch of weird options passed to it to make it work just right), instead of using Python or Perl or something else which could do it easily with a single call.

burntfuse:

linux-gate.so (whatever that is, seems like all programs get linked to it)

All x86 Linux programs.  linux-gate.so is actually a virtual DSO that is created by the kernel for the purposes of mapping syscalls to the most efficient interrupt mechanism available on the arch (int on older x86 procs, sysenter on newer). 

tgape:

Btw, this is the Gnu world we're talking about; the BSD and, to a lesser extent, the proprietary worlds don't have this issue anywhere near as much. For example, last I checked (SunOS 5.9), the Solaris vi hadn't been changed except for OS ports since SunOS 4.1.1 as far as I could tell.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEFBR14

morbiuswilters:

(which I think are standard for all GUN apps)

 

Would those be the apps developed by Eric Raymond? 

aristos_achaion:

morbiuswilters:

(which I think are standard for all GUN apps)

 

Would those be the apps developed by Eric Raymond? 

I'd say Charlton Heston. After all, they are GUN apps, aren't they? ;)

danixdefcon5:

aristos_achaion:

morbiuswilters:

(which I think are standard for all GUN apps)

 

Would those be the apps developed by Eric Raymond? 

I'd say Charlton Heston. After all, they are GUN apps, aren't they? ;)

 

 

Eric Raymond is well-known for supporting the Second Amendment as much as the First.

 See http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/gun-linux