random ramblings

I have been thinking about the level of control one should have on team and project without being a control freak. It is said that with a good manager, people will not feel like they are being managed. One idea that stuck to me from the book Peopleware is, you put a person on a job and if you trust him with it, don’t try to second guess and rob him of the chances to make decisions. There are couple of types of managers – those who came up the ranks and know how to do the job and those who don’t know the nitty-gritty of their team’s day to day job. If you think you know more about how to do something than your team member, how do you control the urge of doing the job yourself instead of teaching them how to do it without actually doing it? If someone else is taking 10 days to do something that would take 1 day for you, can you grit your teeth and let him or her go through with it and learn? On the other hand, one downside of having a manager who don’t know or don’t hav...

I attended a java user group meeting yesterday. Topic was State of Aspect oriented programming. 20% of audience had used aspect oriented programming in their projects. Compared to the demos given using Ant, JaaS, AspectJ, Sping, Log4j etc, I felt like a barbarian who still use System.out.println(“I am here..”) for debugging and Notepad for coding. I am convinced that these tools or methodologies increase programmer productivity, code maintainability and durable design. But how many actual customers who pay for IT projects understand or even care about using these? Then again I guess it is not a choice to be made by customers, but by the programmers. That leads me to next question:- there are so many frameworks, tools and patterns out there. I got involved in one open source project in Sourceforge to get an insight about open source, but had to drop out because of the pace at which people with various strengths (specialists) collaborated. I think the question is beyo...