Loosely Coupled

I would really like to post more often, but frankly, I've been too busy. The New Year brought a change of job scenery and I've been really busy getting up to speed and learning a ton of new things. That's not to say I haven't been writing at all. As I come up to speed here, I'm taking the opportunity to capture what I learn in a development wiki. My new team has a wiki instance in place, but it's been lightly used to this point. I'm a huge fan of using wikis for development . I like to leverage the wiki as a focal point to capture technical ideas and documentation for the team. Most people seem eager to contribute, so I hope it takes off. One point here, we're using the wiki included with SharePoint . It's not nearly as hard to edit as MediaWiki (the Wikipedia wiki engine), but I still prefer MoinMoin (used by many Apache projects). The heart of the software being built here relies on Ontology , and leveraging the data stored in that ontolog...

As the work calendar turns to 2009, it's natural to reflect on the past year. Professionally, 2008 was a very frustrating year. Part of it had to do with the tools I was using, part of it had to do with the project I was working on, and a lot of my frustration was that I felt like I wasn't being heard. Instead of rehashing some of the difficulties I've experienced over the past year, I invite you to read some of my previous posts . So, how do I hope to course correct in 2009? Do More Many times in 2008, I found myself waiting for others to complete some part of their work so I could do mine. Other times, we hit limitations of the development platform we were working on and waited for management approval for how we should proceed. In these instances I often had an alternative in mind for how to proceed, but didn't. I instead hung back and tried to let others do their jobs, make their own decisions, and get consensus on an approach. I regret this approach. I wish I h...