krasicki

There's no there, there.

Executive summary: Cities must change. Sherlock.

You mean, "there's a chance".

I miss Ted Turner

Not your Grand-father's Kawasaki

Never mentions his concern. Devolves into identity politic opinion piece.

It must also be tough for younger executives who are stuck with the idea that someone 40, 50, 60 or 70 is "old", near extinction, and so on.

These are the individuals who are dinosaurs. and they are dinosaurs for being incapable of realizing that employment ages are getting extended due to longer, healthy and vital lifetimes.

This is one of the crises of our time. That is the wholesale reevaluation of what work and careers are, how long they last, the effect on traditional workplaces, and so on. These companies are discriminating out of ignorance and because there is a ground-swell of pressure from younger generations to "move out" older workers so there's room for them to move up.

Shorter work weeks and flatter organizational structures can play a role in remediating some of these issues. But 21st century "life" reality seminars are critical - more so than the dross of diversity trainings.

Be careful not to confuse technical debt with technical entropy.

Technical debt may be nothing more than a prioritization strategy that is either intentionally or unintentionally blindsided by a technical asymmetry of attention to a rate of system degradation.

Smart organizations will throttle the degree to which development performs like an ever insatiable desire to maximize efficiency at the cost of mortgaging away the responsibility for system refreshment.

Just as "fitness functions" are desirable sensors for expiring licensing and contractual renewals so should an enterprise think about and implement ecosystem fitness functions that compare existing system state against the latest industry trajectories. Identifying, recognizing, and rectifying business ecosystem weaknesses will go a long way in preventative maintenance and reduced technical entropy and debt.

Start with Svelte

The Trouble with Tribbles

Svelte

Watch your back.

Because it was a contracting gig I think it was more or less lateral. If it was less, not by much.

You can be even more creative than that.

Almost thirty years ago, my wife and I were in the process of adopting our two sons (now in their thirties). I had defined my career at the time as a Software engineer for hire (consultant). Technical projects, then and now, really require full attention and devotion to getting things done so I had to find a way to step out of that for a while without losing too much money or technical chops.

I found a position as a Technical Writer having Software reverse-engineering skills which was a step off of the more intense technical treadmill. Over time I found that experience complemented my original trajectory as companies are always looking for better communicators.

Given the rate of change, managing your career in consideration to your life goals is worth curating.

The cost of consciousness.

Newsrooms Need to Treat Coordinated Online Attacks on Reporters Like They Treat the News

Factual claims are not the same as fraud. Lots of people consume vitamin supplements. Why? Fraud? No, people believe what they want to believe about products that are legal to sell.

CASE tools were/are no different. You and I have our concerns but P.T. Barnum reminds us, "there's a sucker born every minute!"

The task of unifying and consolidating all of the worthwhile details required in Iconic notation to truly capture the complexity of the thing was never going to be easy nor a finite goal. (e.g. it's a whack-a-mole exercise that doesn't end)

But quite honestly, we are on the same page. If you liken it to fraud - not my monkey, not my circus.

Accenture is but one of many, already mentioned, such consulting firms. The particulars of their unique evolution are unimportant. They bill $43B per year so being "worth" $140B is essentially three years billing. Prospective buyers who want to sell their own by-products more exclusively (say, Oracle, Microsoft, Alphabet,...) look at the price tag as an opportunity to lock in big ticket clients for decades of migration, integration, and insider green-field, money-sink projects.

Yes, consultancies like Accenture are copy-cat enterprises. A few decades ago they truly provided the brightest and the best of off-shore, inexpensive technical labor. But that changed with the H-1B tsunami that followed. The meme that America's social strengths could be used against it were not lost on these now global software powerhouses.

Many of the initial H-1B waves of individuals worked their way into America's corporate C-Suites. The technical waves were followed by well-to-do, class entitlement waves of individuals who co-opted the POC cohort required to satisfy equal opportunity hiring laws.

More recently, HR departments themselves have been out-sourced within the enterprises. The combination of the gutting of full-time technical staff AND the tight coupling of off-shoring to onshore expat cohorts completes the cycle of how Western enterprises were carved out of any capability to develop projects internally. They've been gutted.

In America, citizen POC were left on the outside looking in (aaaaaaaand, here we are in social crisis) in addition to bearing witness to the soft takeover of the corporate management ranks.

The Powerpoint slides are perfunctory. Our corporations are now as technically proficient as many dysfunctional outsourcing countries are at a functional level. The onshore benches represent the warehousing of local candidates to make way for politically and legally correct outsiders.

I think a great test case for these contextualization engines might be to parse a few years of MSNBC coverage of Trump's administration and look for balanced, accurate reporting of -cough- facts.

Ditto with any MSM publication, Washington Times, Fox news, New York Times,...

This is a fool's errand and the queue of fool's volunteering their expertise is staggering.

Exactly. A MSM outlet whose own content is dubious and is no stranger to exercising their own self-entitled "opinions". These opinions could be reasonably construed as slander in a world where an individual could stand up against them in court without going broke.

But let's play along and assume that everybody else's speech is the problem. Citizens don't need MSM fitted, woke muzzles.

The co-opting of internet providers to mete out draconian terms of service that strip the individual of their freedom to express ideas needs to be criminalized.

whytaka 5 hours ago [–]

what makes Twitter qualified to pass judgment?

Liberal fascism is profitable

Yet another woke, disingenuous click-bait post

No. UML was not a fraud. It's a modeling language that abstracts, using highly specific iconic vernaculars, numerous technical views of interest relating to software development.

By definition, that task was never going to be an easy nor mutable exercise. If fraud existed it was in the marketing of the CASE tools UML was embedded in. The claims and expectations were wholly orthogonal to software engineering practice of that or any time.

If memory serves me correctly, mainframe commercial development projects routinely failed or required as much budget and time to complete at anticipated delivery as when they had initially started. The white-collar blame was assigned to the quality of development.

The push back legitimately was the assertion that requirements constantly changed (and how could they not?). The self-anointed gurus of the time responded by creating smoke and mirrors solutions that largely manifested themselves in exclusive, eclectic, and proprietary modeling languages. The predictable collapse of that circular firing squad set of methodologies spawned UML under the bastard thumb of IBM (Rational). Big investment means and meant exclusive, profit-driven ambitions, not fraud - self-serving, big money investment.

The client community was drowned in error rate charts, line-of-code (LOC) costs, and business baby-talk illustrations of before and after CASE development anticipated savings.

This form of techno-magic ponzi scheme is still being played Agile-wide. Once the client makes a sizable investment in the pixie dust they will never admit it was a waste of time and money.

And, just for the record, there were critics, sensible advocates, and sober analysts who were ignored, slandered, and whose careers were rougher had they not bothered.

Design a notation based on existing norms to whatever specificity you deem adequate).

I like process boxes with four sides.

Left side takes input, the right spits output.

Top side takes constraints, rules, or links to specs.

Bottom accepts triggering mechanism, temporal/sequential constraints, polling, and other controls.

Complex Processes get decomposed down to autonomous objects that can be programmed as desired.

Many of the stripped down existing iconic notations can be similarly instrumented to be useful. Be your own guru.

Agile is a refinement of Waterfall. I think of it as the white water rafting SDLC of waterfall.

The minute sticky notes in swim lanes and informal diagramming were replced by heavyweight, middle-managers (-cough- "agile coach") - waterfall is back.

Rational is one factor of many that brought IBM to its knees -(WARP-OS2) being a contemporary.

This is an understated truth about most iconic notations let alone anything instrumented into a CASE tool. That is that the Agile movement introduced a meanness and immediate gratification factor into the very idea that modeling software was useful or necessary. Concepts as simple as an input arrow going into a process would enter from the left of a circle or box and the output would exit from the right were the object of debate and ridicule.

Why bother? Skippy, the agile programmer, had already coded something up that happened to feature the end-users favorite color.

Eye candy always trumps rigor and deliberate modeling of components.

Formal notations didn't stand a chance.

I worked on a number of CASE tools and worked with them. You will NEVER see any diagrams describing the tools or how they were built.

Eating one's own dog food was not part of the road map.

Before you erase, you always take a snapshot.

I think there's an important distinction to be made as to the "goal" not of CASE tools but of iconic notation.

Iconic notations exist to describe all manner and form of reality and technical specification.

The first "goal" of UML was to eliminate and consolidate the free-range software development notations. And that was something that could have turned into something useful.

UML's attention turned to code generation and no-code paradigms that will take generations of refinement to ever be useful in complex environments. Diagramming notations were contorted to serve the goal of code generation instead of programmer utility.

The consequence was that programmers were denied anything personally useful about UML and instead were saddled with a soul-sucking, task master of a tool that never fulfilled the business community's no-code expectations. The kicker was that now the development staff needed to untangle the no-code, generated code to make it work. What's to like?

Back that truck up a bit.

CASE is a label for a set of tools that augment software development. Its not a "goal", it changes and morphs over time.

Every major computer and software house would develop something useful that would inevitably attempt to extend itself to control the entire software development life-cycle of activity. Even clients either pledged allegiance (vendor lock-in) or created their own Frankenstein SDLC mutations. All of this thrashing was used to insulate themselves from new or alternative ideas. And with the advent of personal computers all that stuff began a rapid entropy. All the "exclusive" iconic notations were in free fall.

And with that free fall, the realization that every diagram was tightly coupled to the next and that every neglected update to any diagram corrupted everything to follow - a big ball of systems design mud debt that was more cost effective to jettison than remedy. Couple that with the timely corporate reorganizations and layoffs and a perfect storm of costly obsolescence eliminated any taste to do that [UML-ish systems capture] again.

This never precluded the usefulness of subject diagramming at all but the costly CASE tool overhead simply evaporated except in low accountability government environments or deep pocket goliaths.

OTOH, CASE in an uncredited way still thrives in smart IDEs and Dev/Ops utilities that constrain the opportunity for non-conformant code to get deployed. Broader design issues remain.

CASE, in fact, did theoretically work. In practical, sustainable terms it could not.

The more accurate failure is in the attempt to create an iconic notation that could ever be broadly disseminated and practiced confidently in the eclectic and unpredictable programming community.

The best. Sufficient, easy to use, ubiquitously available.