This is a mirror from my blog post at http://www.jondavis.net/techblog/
Woah, Nelly!
Jon Davis's blog is back up! Last post was .. more than three years ago! Daaaang! How ya'll been?! Missed ya'll! Miss me?
I'm just posting a quick update here to let ya'll know that the gears in my tech world have started turning again, and to update ya'll on what's going on.
You may or may not have noticed that my root web site http://jondavis.net/ went through a couple phases and got stuck with that dorky "please wait" console-ish page. I was supposed to have replaced it by cough .. 2016. It's now approaching the year 2020. What happened? Well what happened was I got a few kicks in the pants. Got myself into some really humbling situations, not the fun kind. Perhaps you might say I got phased out of the software dev community. But I never fully left the software dev community, just stayed in the bushes, so now I'm in high gear phasing back in. I might try to explain ...
A few blog entries ago (this goes back to 2014) I wrote about how I needed to reset things, and how I needed to mull over what was going on at work. So here's a recap on my career path lately up till my previous job:
In 2012 I was hired at Neudesic, a prominent consultancy firm. I dreamed of surrounding myself with smart people I could glean from. It turned out that things were pretty erratic at Neudesic. My first project assignment the client was Microsoft themselves. Prior to my joining they had just canned a project to build a big, beautiful Windows 8 themed web site where developers and other staff would post all-important articles and index them with Lucene.NET. Architecturally it was a disaster, and they canned the Microsoft executive at the same time they canned the project. So my joining the team, they were trying to salvage that project. I worked with them to try to dig into the code, get it up and running, figure out the performance issues, etc., and at some point I flew out to Redmond, Washington to discuss with the local Neudesic managers who were interfacing with Microsoft in person. Then I opened my mouth. I said, "Ya'll are really just makin' a blog. Why not add blog-ish things? Why reimplement Sharepoint?" Suddenly we were all fired. So then they shipped me off to Pulte Homes, where I did some work there, but the architect for that project and I didn't seem to know what we were doing on the user authorization detail and I proved blunt enough that they "couldn't afford" to keep me on after a couple months. So then they shipped me off to California to work with Ward & Brown on the Obamacare / ACA implementation there, again late to the party and annoyingly insistent to "help". But when QA and I asked around where the production/staging servers were, and they realized they apparently missed that part, they canned all their contractors. All 250 of us. So there I was stuck in the Neudesic-Phoenix office waiting for them to call me in. And they did. They laid me off. Like the child-man that I was, I accidentally let them catch me choking. They did say they might be able to take me back in a few months, though, so ...
For the next few months I did some contract work for a local entrepeneur. I waited that out for a while and ultimately I wanted to go back to Neudesic, so ...
In mid-year 2013 I asked Neudesic to take me back in. They did. They brought me back with open arms. It was more awkward for the lot of them than I or anyone anticipated. I'd made myself a reputation for being unrefined up to that point, I'm pretty sure. But anyway, when I arrived (a second time) I noticed that more people, including my former manager, were no longer there. They were laid off too. And I shipped back to Pulte Homes, on another, bigger project. I was up front with them, though, about what specific tools I was unacquainted with, specifically Bootstrap and the like, at the time. They shrugged that off, brought me in anyway. That project was led by--ima be frank here--a really, REALLY bitchy, control freakish, PMS-y woman. I tried to overlook it at the time. I tried to pretend it wasn't so at the time. I'm thinking back half a decade now, and I'm saying it like how I witnessed it. She was horrible. If I ever get in a situation like that again I'll run for the hills. That was awful. She was awful. But anyway, at the time, overlooking that (which I deliberately did), since the lead personality who'd previously been on that project but was laid off was now gone, and I wasn't getting much in the way of introduction, I deliberately, if bombastically, made a ton of assertions and at the same time asked a lot of really stupid, ignorant questions, which ticked off everyone on the team. So they canned me from the team. So that was fun. But what really did me in was I overheard the Neudesic chief developer director guy tell my boss that I "shouldn't be writing software". They assigned me some out-of-state ops role. I should have quit then and there; sure, I screwed up, but I'm a developer, not an ops guy. I didn't last long, and I ultimately did resign.
So now in 2014 I got a very odd and delightfully educational gig with DeMark Analytics. So first of all, Tom DeMark, the owner, is a wealthy financial technician (a term I never knew before) who did what I imagined doing some years back--he studied financial charts and came up with artificially intelligent algorithms that predicted changes in the market. He's one among many people who come up with this stuff, but even so, that's what he did. So now they were building a product for people who could use these financial chart studies--a charting app, basically, with studies being overlaid over the chart. This entailed financial event data being siphoned in to both the back-end engine as well as to the client (the web browser). This is high tech stuff, and the pattern in use was CQRS-ES, which I'd never heard of much less mastered. So here's where it all broke down: 1) We all sat in close proximity to each other. No privacy. All conversations fully exposed. 2) I was hired as a lead, but I was wrong a couple times when I was adament, it was observed by the teammates, and so my authoritative experience as a lead developer was never trusted again. 3) Everyone in the company but maybe four of us was either family to Tom DeMark or close friends of Tom DeMark. It was a nepositic environment. I worked under one of Tom's sons (he was CEO/President), and another of Tom's sons worked under me--well, alongside me, since me being lead didn't work out. He was a bit spoiled. Quick on the Javascript, though, I couldn't keep up with his code, which was charting graphics. Like, at all. So I stopped trying. 4) My pay was adequate (best I can say about it) but my paycheck was cut monthly. Weird, bizarre, and painful. But it was worth it, I was investing in this, I figured. 5) My direct boss was a super high IQ ass. I asked technical questions about the middle/back end from him, like about how Cassandra was to be used, and instead of answering, he'd call everyone over--the CSS front-end developers, everyone. Then ask me to ask my question again. All to I guess humble me? .. Show me that this was "duh" knowledge that everyone would know and understand? So where this went critical was 6) I again used rhetoric. Crap, man. This pretty much got me fired. I used rhetoric! What I mean is, I insinuated, in so many words, that "your explanation sounds vague, and if I didn't know any better I'd say it almost sounds like you said [something obviously stupid]". Except I didn't say it like that, I actually, literally said, ".. you mean [something obviously stupid]?" I really, truly, genuinely trusted that he understood that I was being rhetorical, but this was the second time I made that mistake--I made the same mistake at Neudesic, "I can't read that [Javascript code]", I could, but I was getting at I shouldn't have to stop and read it--and with these guys it was sabotage. A few minutes later after we returned to our desks he threw his hands up and announced he was switching to Java/Scala. "Sorry Jon." Sorry, Jon? So yeah he was basically saying "you're fired, please quit." It took a couple more months, but I eventually did.
So then I work at another consultancy firm. Solution Stream. Utah-based. They seemed to be trying to spread out into Phoenix. "I can do this," I thought. I learned at Best Software (Sage Software) when I moved to Arizona how consultants--consultants, not contractors--work, and bring prestige to the process of coming up with technical solutions and strategies, documenting them, and working them with the clients. But Solution Stream was really primarily just interested in creating contractors, apparently, but regardless, they didn't appreciate what I brought to the table, they undersold my capabilities, the executives decided they didn't like me, and they literally pulled me off a project that the client and my direct boss said I was doing great with and signed me over to Banner Health as a temp-to-hire (fire). I had no interest in being hired as a permanent Banner Health employee. When my temp-to-hire contract ended (the "temp-" part), everything ended. I swore off all consulting firms at that point. No more consulting firms. Never again.
So then I got picked up at InEight. Bought out by major construction company Kiewit, InEight was building a cloud version of their Hard Dollar desktop app which manages large scale construction logistics (vendors, materials, supplies, etc). They had some workable plans and ideas. But things broke down real fast. Everyone who interviewed me quit within the year I joined, and it wasn't hard to see why. 1) They had non-technical people at the helm (senior leadership) making some very expensive and frustrating platform and architecture decisions. High performance software with minimal performance hosting, nothing worked, because they didn't want to spend the money for scaling the web tier. 2) The work was outsourced. Most of it was outsourced to India. Eventually they shipped some of it onshore to another midwestern state. But even onshore, most of their staff were H1-B visa holders. Foreigners. Nearly everyone I was working with was from India. Even after so many people quit, I stuck around as long as I could. But eventually I couldn't stand things anymore, my career path had become stagnant, and I knew I couldn't work with the senior executives (no one could, except people from India I guess). I was about to give two weeks notice, when those senior execs pulled me into a room and chewed me out for being "disrespectful". I was done. Never saw them or anyone over there again. (Actually, that's not entirely true; I have maintained strong friendship with at least one colleague from there. He got laid off a few months after I left. We're friends; we literally just met up this week.)
For the last year and a half I've been working ... somewhere. For now. I came in as a lead developer, but they, too, openly declared me "disrespectful", so I've given up and just been a highly productive, proficient, heads-down programmer. This place, too, is mostly H1-B visa holders from India. I'm surrounded by foreigners. Scarcely a black, white, or Mexican face. It's depressing. I have less and less each year against Indians but my God, let me work with people of my own culture if I'm here in USA, just a few like-minded, like-raised friends, just a few? And now my team is getting dismantled, due to a third party taking over what we're doing. So I'm about to get laid off. If I'm not laid off, though, well, ... 1) as a contractor, I don't get paid holidays, I don't get paid vacations, and that was painful enough, but unexpectedly after my hire it turns out there is a mandatory two weeks unpaid leave during Christmas & New Year's, and that's unacceptable ($thousands of $dollars lost, not to mention depressing since I spend holidays alone, so yes, it's unacceptable). 2) I have been super comfortable, and super complacent, with little to gain in technical growth. It's been ASP.NET MVC with SQL Server and jQuery. And some .NET Core 2.2 and Razor Pages. Woo wee. sigh So yeah, I'm open to change, regardless of whether I get laid off.
There's my life story for the last seven years. Stupid, depressing, awful, I've been awful, I've let myself screw myself over time and time again. So here is my new strategy.
I have no one to blame, even where I've whined and complained, I have no one to blame for my life's frustrations but myself. It's part of the maturing process. I've embraced my learnings and I will carry on. I will try to let go of the past, but I only repeat and document them here because I have learned from them, and perhaps you can, too. What do I want in my career path? I miss the days when I was an innovator.
Tooting my horn -- my legacy
You guys remember AJAX? Yeah? I dreamed up AJAX in 1998 when IE4 came out. I called it "TelnetGUI". Stupid name. Other people came up with the same idea a few years later and earned the credit.
You guys remember Windows Live Writer? Yeah? ... Total rip-off of my PowerBlog app, down to detail. You could say I prototyped Windows Live Writer before Microsoft started working on Windows Live Writer. Microsoft even interviewed me after I built PowerBlog, because of PowerBlog and its Microsoft-minded inspirations of component integration. Jerk interviewer was like, "Wait, you mean you don't know C++?! Oh good grief, I thought you were a real programmer." Screw you, Microsoft interviewer. LOL. Anyway, Windows Live Writer came out a couple years later. Took all of PowerBlog's fundamental ideas, even down to the gleaning the CSS theme and injecting the theme into the editor.
You guys remember PowerShell? Yeah? I prototyped the idea in or around 2004. I took the ActiveScript COM object, put it in a C++ console container, spoonfed some commands where you could new-up some objects and work with them in a command-line shell, suggested that the sky's the limit if you integrate full-blown .NET CLR and shell commands in this, and showed it to the world on Microsoft's newsgroups. Microsoft was watching; I planted a seed. A year or so later, PowerShell ("Monad") was previewed to the world. I didn't do the dirty work of development of it, but I seeded an idea.
You guys remember jQuery UI? Yeah? I cobbled together a windowing plugin for jQuery a year or two before jQuery UI was released. It was called jqDialogForms. Pretty nifty, I thought, but heck, I never got to use it in production.
In fact there's a lot of crap in my attic I recently dug out and up over at https://github.com/stimpy77/ancient-legacy. (It really is crap, nothing much to see.)
And, oh yeah, you guys remember Entity Framework, Magical Unicorn Edition? I, too, had been inspired by Fluent NHibernate, and I, too, was working on an ORM library I called Gemli [src]. Sadly, I ended up with a recursion nightmare I myself stopped being able to read, development slowed to a halt, and then suddenly Microsoft announced that EF Magical Unicorn Edition, and I observed that it did everything I was trying to do in Gemli plus 99x more. So that was a waste of time. Even so, that was mini-ORM-of-my-own-making #2 or #3.
All of these micro-innovations and others are years old, created during times of passion and egotistical self-perception of brilliance. What happened?! I think we can all see what happened. My ego kept bulldozing my career. My social ineptitude vanquished my opportunities. And I got really, really lazy on the tech side.
My blog grew stagnant because, frankly, career errors aside, my bold and lengthy philisophical assertions in my blog articles were pretty wrong. Philosophies like, "design top down, implement bottom up". Says who? Why? I dunno. Seemed like an interesting case to make at the time. But then people at meetups said they knew my name, read my blog, quoted my article, and I curled up and squealed and said "oh gawd I had no idea what I was writing". (Actually I just nodded my head with a smile and blushed.)
For the last few weeks I have spent, including study time, more than 70 hours a week, working. Working on hard skills growth. Working on side project development--brainstorming, planning. Working on fixing patchy things, like getting this blog up, so I can get into writing again. It's overdue for a replacement, but frankly I might just switch over to http://dev.to/ like all the young cool kids. OH HAI!!
Tech Things I Am Paying Attention To
.NET Core 3 is where it's at, .NET 5 is going to be The Great .NET Redux's great arrival. However, the JVM has had a huge comeback over the last half-decade, and NodeJS and npm like squirrelly cats have been sticking their noses in everything. Big client-side Javascript libraries from a year or two ago (Facebook's React, Google's Angular, China's Vue) are now server-side for some dumb reason. Most importantly, software is becoming event-driven. IaaS is gone. PaaS is passe. Kubernetes is now standard, apparently. Microsoft's MSMQ is so 1990s, RabbitMQ so 00's, LinkedIn's Kafka is apparently where it's at, and now Yahoo!'s Pulsar is gaining noteriety for being even more performant.
My day job being standard transactional web dev with ASP.NET/jQuery/SQL has made me bewilderingly ansy. If I want to continue to be competitive in complex software architecture and software development I've got to really go knee deep--no, neck deep--in React/Angular/Vue on the front-end, MongoDB, Hadoop, etc on data, Docker/Kubernetes on the platform, Kafka on the data transfer, CQRS+ES on the transaction cycles, DDD as the foundation to argue for it all, and books to explain it all. I need to go to college, and if I don't have time or money for that I need to be studying and reading and challenging myself at all hours I am free until I am confident as a resource for any of these roles.
Enough of the crap reputation of being a wannabe. Let's be.
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