Colliding worlds: Development and Marketing

During my career in the software industry I've worked in both marketing departments and in development labs. Now, as a technical advocate, I'm part of the development organisation but I work with marketing.

As a software developer my first reaction to any kind of marketing information, no matter who it comes from,  is that it is likely to be junk.  I wouldn't feel this way if I felt the material was aimed at me and was telling me about tools or products that would help me. But all too often it isn't. And yet, whose fault is that? We, as developers, can't expect marketing to 'just know' about cool stuff we are working on.

Really, development and marketing should talk to each other. And now we do - a little bit :-)

To illustrate the issues for both sides, this is the story of trying to create a marketing message that both organisations were happy with.  We were trying to find an illustration to go with the phrase "Turning developers into superheroes", this was the starting proposal from my marketing colleagues:

What's wrong with that? Seriously, just about everything. This might work if the caption was "Turning salesmen into superheroes".  No developer I know would come to work dressed like that - well, the cape maybe, but the shirt and tie? Forget it.

Development's counter proposal for the image was this:

Somewhat predictably, my colleagues in marketing issued an immediate veto. Underwear on display is apparently unacceptable even if it's worn over the top of other clothes and other underwear is being worn underneath. Actually I don't know that other underwear was being worn underneath, I'm not on that kind of terms with the model. Although I can safely assert that he is, in fact, a real developer.

Impasse.

I spent the weekend 'gimping up' the aforementioned unmentionables and came up with this:

However, I never got to  show it to marketing because they produced this:

which I  like a lot. The use of a QR code was a great idea and the guy doesn't look like a salesman. The image is a bit more "Incredible Hulk" than "Superman" but it works fine.  I'm really happy with this outcome, I think that we've got a much better result by working across an organisational boundary than either of us could have achieved on our own.

Next challenge - depict the benefits of Enterprise OSGi  in the style Marvel comics :-) I will be SpiderWoman.

Install the WAS OSGi Feature pack

It's easy and free - these are minimal (Ubuntu based) instructions for starting with no WAS installation and getting to an installation of WAS with the OSGi feature pack. If the steps aren't clear look at the rather more verbose instructions in an earlier post in this blog :-).

• Install WebSphere 
•  Download from here
• Unzip this was.cd.7000.wasdev.nocharge.linux.ia32.tar.gz 
•  sudo ./launchpad and follow the fairly obvious screens. Uncheck the box that asks if you want additional security.
• Download Fix pack 7.0.0.9 
• Download from here
• The file will be called something like: 7.0.0-WS-WAS-LinuxX32-FP0000009.pak
• Download the SDK upgrade pack
• Download from here
• File will be called something like: 7.0.0-WS-WASSDK-LinuxX32-FP0000009.pak
• Install the update installer
• Download from here.
• Extract 7.0.0.9-WS-UPDI-LinuxIA32.tar.gz
• cd to the top level directory of the installation
• sudo ./install to make it install itself
• After installing it will launch itself and you can go on to install the two 7.0.0.9 packs that you downloaded above.
• Get the OSGi Feature pack from here.
• Download Installation Manager, 1.3.4.1-WS-IM-LinuxX86.zip. (86MB)
• Unzip it
• cd to the top level installation directory
• sudo ./install to make IM install itself. IM will lead you through the next three steps
• Import your WAS installation.
• Install the OSGi Feature pack.
• Launch the profile management tool and augment your profile
• Check your installation
• cd /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/bin
• sudo ./startServer.sh server1
• navigate to http://localhost:9060/ibm/console/ and check that you can see the WAS console.
• sudo ./stopServer.sh server1

At this stage I would normally install the database for the blog sample and run the set up script for it.

•  cd /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/feature_packs/aries/samples/blog
• sudo /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/derby/bin/embedded/ij.sh createBlogDb.sql
• sudo /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/AppSrv01/bin/wsadmin.sh -f blogSampleInstall.py setupOnly server1 ubuntuNode01

Talking about Apache Aries

The number of OSGi related talks seems to be increasing - which can only be a good thing. I'm going to this one tonight and looking forward to it!

I thought I'd look at who was talking about Apache Aries and where for the next month, I'm sure this isn't a comprehensive list so let me know if I've missed anything.

June 2nd - Tim Ward will be talking about JPA and OSGi at Jazoon in Zurich

June 8th - Holly Cummins will be at the Paris JUG giving an Apache Aries presentation.

June 19th (*)  - Zoë Slattery will be at the SAP Inside Track talking about Enterprise OSGi in Apache Aries

June 26th(*)  - Mark Nuttall will be giving an Apache Aries presentation at the London Java Community Unconference.

July 1st - Andrew Osbourne will run a Blueprint tutorial at the OSGi Users' forum based on the implementation of Blueprint in Apache Aries


* These are both unconference style events so although presentations have been offered there is of course no guarantee that they will be delivered. However both events look pretty well worth attending whether there is Aries there or not :-)

Women's appointments

A couple of weeks ago I was helping my mother move some furniture and found a newspaper from Saturday December 23rd 1967 which had been used as drawer lining. I skimmed through it and eventually found the "Women's Appointments" section.






Of course you would never see anything like this in the UK now, not since the sex discrimination act in 1975. The weird thing is that I would not have seen anything odd about this section in a newspaper in 1967. In fact, I applied for a job in 1973 as a lab technician for a chemical company and was not even mildly annoyed when they wrote back and said the job was only available to men. It makes me wonder how much I accept now without thinking too much about it.

Thirty five years after the act there are clearly still things wrong in the UK. For example, why do so few girls go into computer science? For any teenage girl with a flair for maths it should be such an obvious career choice. My daughter obtained her degree in computer science last year and is very happily working for Assanka in London. However, I suspect that she might never have followed that route if I hadn't worked for IBM. It's also probably true that I wouldn't have pursued a career in science if my mother had not been a doctor. How long will it take to push through enough role models to even things out? Generations?

It's not all bad though, my son is a dancer and currently touring with Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake. I cannot imagine what would have happened in the the 1960s if a child of intellectual middle class parents had insisted that all he wanted to do was dance.

Reflections on Open Source Jumpstart #GDCOSJ1

When you work on an Open Source project most of your communication with colleagues will be through the mailing list or maybe on IRC. This works great 90% of the time but I think everyone understands that occasionally it's really helpful to meet and talk to the people you work with. Traditionally this has happened at conferences, for example ApacheCon, EclipseCon and so on.

That's fine for people that are established committers - but what about people who want to start? Those mailing lists are pretty intimidating aren't they? Then when you do screw up the courage to write a note sometimes it never gets answered and you don't know why not. Or sometimes people don't read your question properly and answer something else. It can seem very unwelcoming. Initiatives like GSOC do a good job but they also miss the face to face element.

It was just because of this that we decided to run Open Source Jumpstart. We wanted students to meet committers face to face, just once. It's amazing how many of those getting started barriers can be broken down with one day's work. It would be great if any of the students from Saturday carried on working on Open Source projects - however, even if they don't, in that one day's work bugs were fixed in every project and students learnt about how code is developed.

There isn't much that's more satisfying than bringing two groups of people together and seeing both of them get something out of the experience. Have a look at the Meetup to see feedback from the event.

Open Source Jumpstart #GDCOSJ1

Yesterday's GDC Open Source Jumpstart was amazing!

Thanks to all the open source projects that came:

1. Apache Aries
2. Apache Harmony
3. Apache Tomcat
4. Apache Tuscany
5. Apache Wookie
6. Citrine
7. Ikasan
8. Impala
9. PHP

You guys worked so hard all day!

Thanks to all the students that came along and fixed bugs, wrote tests and documentation. Well done! I can't believe how far people came (from Edinburgh in one case) - you represent the future of software development and it was great to meet you.

Thanks to IBM for letting us use their wonderful Southbank location and to the IBM Innovation Centre in Hursley for providing the food. The Innovation Centre have some great (free) resources for students, if any of you missed the links, here they are again:

1. Mydeveloperworks - all sorts of resources for creating groups, wikis etc
2. Student portal - competitions, stuff about jobs etc
   

Finally - thanks to Barry Cranford for being a continual positive inspiration and to the rest of the GDC organising committee for pulling yesterday's event together.

Yes, I really think we might do this again!

Apache programmers study Leech Farming in Ireland

For the last three days I've been in a Youth Hostel in rural Ireland with a bunch of programmers. Sounds like hell? Actually quite the reverse. It was probably the best 'unconference style' event that I've been to. So many things made it work - here are a few:

• Beautiful countryside (most of us did a couple of hours walk on Saturday)
• Everyone staying overnight for two days - no splitting up to go out to different pubs/restaurants etc
• The weather - yes, it was sunny - in Ireland - in April - for three consecutive days.
• Great mixture of projects, people, talks and coding time.
• The only use of PowerPoint was in 'Presentation Karaoke' - a right and fitting use for PowerPoint. This is where the Leech Farming came in.
  

Thanks go to Noirin Shirley for the organisation, not only for doing the normal hassle stuff (booking the hostel, organising the food) but also for roping in her husband to collect us from Bray station and persuading her parents to turn up with home baked bread on the last day.

Here is a shot of Andrus Adamchick at breakfast on the last day - just to give an idea of what the place was like.



These events are somehow much more satisfying than the huge, expensive conferences. I come away feeling that I've learned something and met some great people. I'm looking forward to the next one already.