Salma Saad

You were an individual contributor and you were good at your job. Now you're a manager and you've stopped producing something tangible. So what good are you? Why would your team respect you? Aren't they better at the work than you are? The manager job description has a concrete list of things you should be doing. These include some very important activities such as conducting reviews, suggesting training etc. Personally, I need more than what's in the job description to feel like I am providing value to my team. In addition to managing I also need to lead. Leadership is an art more than it is a science and best learned by example. I am going to take a shot at explaining what leadership means to me by using the example of my father. He grew up poor in India. He lost his own father at an early age and his twin brother to small pox barely surviving the illness himself.... (more)

Be Nice and Share - Ten Tips for the Shared Services Team

Sharing software and services across teams poses many challenges. At the minimum, each team will have its own agenda and release schedule and will be largely unaware of each other's day-to-day work. Sharing becomes even more difficult in cases when the teams are geographically separated from each other or when they work for different companies. In this article I will go over communication, automated builds, testing, documentation and other topics to facilitate the sharing of code and services. Background My younger son received a new football for Christmas. Soon enough I heard th... (more)

Custom Debugging with WebLogic JMX

Maintaining complicated legacy applications is a challenge, which is often made worse by lack of documentation, nonintuitive design, and coding practices. Unfortunately almost all software developers will find themselves with such an assignment at some point in their careers. In the case of any application that utilizes a database, it is very useful to trace SQL statements generated by the application. Such a trace would help with profiling performance bottlenecks, debugging errors, and in facilitating the developer's understanding of the business processes associated with the a... (more)