Julio’s Musings Around Columbia County, New York

I thought I would have gotten into the habit of blogging regularly , like everyday. Alas that has not happened yet with all I am doing which sometimes seems like it is always filling out one paper form or another. Lets face it what has automation and computers truly done for us other then sometimes helping us consume our day with one or another type of administrative work. Since Administrative Assistants are largely a thing of the past and who is actually going to do it for your personal life unless you are child , this grunt activity seems to be what we actually living for.
Anyway, this is probably a half baked rant about why I have not been able to blog on a daily basis.

Actually the form filling is being done for a host of exciting developments for myself. One for instance is the completion of my second Bachelor’s degree. Way back during my youth I decided to go for a Bachelors in Computer Science and Mathematics. It was a redundant BA as I already had one but I figured what I would learn and the actual confirming piece of paper would serve me well. I completed all of the requirements for the Degree except for those College specific general requirements like a Gym class and an additional English Comp. Class. I was not able to complete those 2 fundamental requirements as the act of living and making a living trumped pure academia. Fast forward a decade or two and I still have the desire for the “piece of paper” validating the investment in time and knowledge acquired. The gym class is no longer a requirement which is natural given 300 pounders are now the norm instead of the exception and in place of English I have a diversity class requirement in the Africana and Puerto Rican Studies Department. I decided to sign up in the spring semester 2010 for the Africana/PR class which is an intense reading and writing class. The first day of class was beautiful as the crew from “Revolution Books” sold the course texts in between a speech around class struggle and such. Revolution Books is the publishing wing of an avowed Communist Organization based partly in New York City (Where else!). At least the political slant at my beloved CUNY ( City University of New York) has remained consistent over the years from my original studies and degree and now that I know better it should make for an intense rapport during the actual class. Of course not so intense the Professor holds it against me during the grading process. The class professor is charming as well. Maybe half charming. When I asked about how to get reading assignments when a class is missed, I thought she was going to have a heart attack right there in front of us all that I could possibly miss a class. Well I have to miss a class and her suggestion of becoming a buddy with someone (a half clueless 18 year old) to get the assignment is dead on arrival. I will just read the entire course material which are presented by a short story anthology and a book of poems. Not a big deal! So far what I have read, (Collymore,Wickham,Marquez and Arenas) have been excellent except for Marquez’s one sentence “The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship”. I just can’t deal with a 5 page run on sentence even if that is the way we think and the short story is basically a stream of consciousness.
The pimply faced student at the Computing Center was helpful or as helpful as he could be telling me it would take about a week to get my Hunter ID so I could avail myself of the campus wireless network. Given the fact this is something that can be setup or revoked in seconds in a relatively well run Private business, the good is they have wireless which is not something they had back when I was there originally, the bad is academia still has this lack of appreciation for time like we treat it in the real world. At least for the first few days, looks like it is Starbucks Wireless or sufficing on smartphones.

As I was working during the time of the New York Jets Playoff game on Saturday January 9th, 2010 (working on the computer that is) I decided to experiment with Google’s Realtime feature and a query of New York Jets. Of course I could have turned on the radio or streamed video of the game but I wanted an apparently less intrusive medium.



The screenshot is a point in time during the second quarter. I was impressed with the performance of the stream , most of it coming from twitter of course but also interspersed with a few from Blog/WebSites (Yahoo Sports). It wasn’t realtime as listening to it on radio or watching it on Television but it had it’s own charm as apparently most of the “tweets” were from New York Jet fans which was gratifying. The stream actually had the unintended result of ripping me from my concentration on work and plopping me in front of the Television to watch the remainder of the game in the conventional way. Listening to the broadcast with the un-biased play by play and color commentators I longed for the pure biased passion of the people who were inadvertently part of the realtime stream. There has to be a marriage somewhere in this. Watching sports is an emotional event whether you are rooting for your own team, rooting against a team you dislike, or just have money riding on the outcome (probably the most emotional circumstance).

Outsourcing is not a new topic especially when it comes to Software Engineering. I remember at the beginning of my own career ; the dinosaurs
represented by the mainframe applications and the developers that maintained them. Overwhelmingly Cobol/CICS applications , some of the applications were already a generation old (a human generation that is). Though these applications ran business critical functions, they were not in active development or even active maintenance until the Y2K hysteria took hold as the year 2000 approached.
Taking the little maintenance that was needed to keep the applications operational and packaging them for support overseas with cheaper labor made sense unless of course you were one of the Cobol developers who quickly saw their opportunities dry up. Anyway, with little to no change, tightly controlled operational environments, well defined and documented interfaces, few public facing expectations from mass market consumers and little competition, moving support and maintenance halfway around the world had minimally discernible effect on reliability and correctness of the systems and in many if not most instances had the attendant positive impact of reducing cost.

Fast forward to the world of today and the past decade with the ubiquity of the Web as we know it. Even though a website is more then it’s visual design (sorry Designers) just think of what the rate of change is for the typical website. The domains may stay the same but the user experience is constantly mutating and websites, save for portals have a life-time measured in months, not years. With this type of change, bifurcating development/design/product between far flung timezones creates challenges that though ameliorable, come at tremendous high costs that wash out almost all of the desired “cost” benefit of outsourcing to a longer unit labor rate locale. For anyone that has ever worked on a website, the idea that a visual design is ever final is a mirage. Instead the comps (when you have those) are a development starting point. As the development proceeds and the site takes on sufficient mass, constant revisiting of how the development site looks, feels and operates in a semi real environment drives what changes need to be made to the previous “final” set of design/product requirements. Try to manage this scenario when for example you have perhaps 2 hours of overlap between India and the Eastern Time zone of the United States which during part of the year is 10.5 hours difference. Though the changes come from realtime, usually co-located folks interacting with the current state of the site, the folks remote who are usually the development team are not part of that interaction. Before they can actually adapt they need to reset and understand what the changes are about. Given the small daily overlap between widely divergent timezones , you introduce a large amount of latency as the overlap is used to recalibrate an understanding of what the site is supposed to do now and then you have to wait another day to see how good the understanding was based on the work product from the remote team while you were sleeping.

Next Installment – What Of Web Development can benefit from Sourcing remotely.