Salma Saad

My son took a bite of his hamburger and immediately exclaimed "it's too spicy!" I knew there was no spice in the burgers (okay there was some black pepper) as I had made them from scratch. I ate some myself and said, "See, not spicy". He took a long hard look at me and then he said "YOU don't think it's spicy, because YOU are not a kid!" Yes I am not a weirdly picky kid who loves seaweed but won't touch his hamburger. I am just the exasperated parent trying hard to figure out the most efficient strategy to getting from a defiant to a compliant five year old. I do realize that to get there I'll have to exchange him for another kid. As a technologist I suffer from the fallacy that others (adults and five year olds) will see things from my point of view and easily get on board to follow my lead. I might get really excited about something but my audience will not get o... (more)

Loving Your Work = Losing Out on Life?

Many companies, particularly consultancies believe that anyone who works an eight-hour day is a serious slacker. In my opinion, having people chronically work excessive hours is a sign of poor management. In this article I will share my thoughts on what we should and should not be doing to avoid letting demanding client work take over our lives. I started thinking of this issue while working for a previous employer. Lets call them IniTech (If you’re not a geek and aren’t familiar with Office Space, I apologize). At Initech, I learned how not to manage projects and people. Some ... (more)

Feeling Valued as a First Line Manager

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 m... (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)