Friday, March 23, 2007

Reading a book because someone told me so.

Today I started to read a book by Martin Fowler, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Primarily because I flunked 1 job interview, since they where asking about mostly about "what" questions, not much "how" and "why". I had a hard time answering them, even though I did a lot of big systems before. I even goofed up some simple questions. However my next job interview went well, even gave me a better offer. The panel from this interview where more interested on the "how" and "why" things. They didn't look for me to answer all the terminologies correctly, I was even given a chance to use the whiteboard to further explain.

I was however curious to read the book, as one of the guy in the first panel told me to read it. As I have discovered I knew a lot of the patterns, however I was not aware of them. The book is pretty ok, especially the fact regarding to identify patterns so it can easily be communicated with other developers.

First thing that I learned about being a good architect. There is no concrete architect role, however one is needed to communicate to people outside software development that role is for a person that thinks beyond the code.

Monday, March 19, 2007

What does it take to be a Software Architect?

I am not sure how this is becoming a fad now. foo + Architect = big bucks. I know there are some good people out there that have the Architect title, but some are just jargon heads. I think the best combination is to be a good decision maker and broad technical knowledge that knows how to speak the jargon.

I think I have worked on the technical and decision making side of things, however I think I got my head too deep into making things work that I got left behind with all this jargon stuff. I think I better read some more books, rather than reading more manuals and code.

I wonder what would I need to be a REAL good foo Architect...

Friday, March 16, 2007

Keylogger shown on TV news, gives cut and paste as security solutions... how secure.

I was watching some TV news show, TV NZ's Close Up. It was talking about keylogger, what news I thought. Anyway its good for folks not in computers to get them more aware. It wasn't really bad, its telling how do keylogger works and how easy for net cafes to have one installed. Then it came to the part on how to secure yourself from it... you bring a flash drive with a file containing your username and password. Then cut and paste your username and password. Wow what a secure and great solution, how the heck this got passed the editors or even the so called security expert they interviewed.

The special should appear below, on the March 16 show.

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/497100/1025745

If there one thing that is worse about security problems its proposing solutions that are false and gives false security sense.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

First Post

Finally after years of lurking around, even working on a few blog code. I am now a blogger! Not sure why blog never really appealed to me initially. Hopefully once I start blogging it becomes a continuous one.