So, it has been exactly a week since I have been to dotNETwork 5th gathering. This is yet one of my too late events coverage (maybe I should write a long boring post about why that happens lately in as much annoying details as possible!). Let’s hope we have something worth the wait this time …
Intro (No tech – you can skip)
This time I’m talking about the second session in the last gathering. The 1st session was already covered earlier. This session is special to me for two reasons: It was delivered by my of my dearest friends in the field, Mohamed Samy. I know Mohamed four years ago, since He was moving from VB 6 to C#, until he became one of the super guys in the field of enterprise computing and architecture in the .NET in Egypt, being a technical architect in ITWorx, one of the top posters in MSDN forums, and finally getting his Solution Architecture MVP lately (which he tells us a story about). The second reason is that I had the pleasure to see the latest part of his preparations for the session, and it was very interesting to see “the making” as well as “the show”.
Anyway, getting back to the session… The microphone stopped working at the very beginning. Mohamed moved to the middle of the rows and looked like a student leader talking to his fellows. this warmed things up a lot as well. He started warming them up by going really quick on his start as a developer, and choosing to continue in the technical career path (technical lead, architecture) while most prefer to take the manager path (project management, etc). He told us about his MVP how he was so happy to earn it in “Solution Architecture” then having the “Solution Architecture MVP” canceled, and having to choose a product specific MVP award instead. He went for “VSTS MVP” as relatively a bit close to his work, having “Solution Architecture” as a “competency” to the “VSTS MVP” award.
As we got lost in our way to the CIC (Canadian Collage, where the gathering took over), he mentioned that software is like finding the CIC, you ask people you find in your way about the road to go, each gives you a different answer. You need to get to that road and not ask again.
Going more into the session
Buzzwords
Mohamed went through how “XML” suddenly became a buzzword. People tell you you’ll get rid of SQL and Oracle and replace them with XML files. It’ll solve all developer problems, and all this kind of talks. He bough a 1500+ pages book about being “proficient in XML” and he still didn’t understand what XML is really about. This is a buzz, just like the university sign, it tells you go certain way and everybody just follows. Later Mohamed recognized the simple fact that XML is just a text format based on tags that can be consumed within any platform. This is good because it solves communication problems between platforms (say COM from Microsoft and CORBA from Java) that were problematic because of using specific binary formats not text formats that before XML it was meaningful to prepare an entire PhD on communication between such platforms!
From this example, we see that every buzzword is sa