Occasionally crazy analogies pop up in my head. Sometimes these ideas don't make sense to anyone but me. Let me know if I've gone off the deep end.
So I was thinking what it was like growing up when I didn't have a microwave and how useful that tool is. Then it occurred to me that as useful as it is, there are things I would never put in the microwave. Take for instance a turkey. Perhaps it is possible to cook a turkey in a microwave, but why? You can cook toast on a gas stove as well, but a toaster just seems more appropriate. When playing chef, each tool provides a specific value. Turkey in the oven, toast in the toaster, and butter melting in the microwave.
Stretching this thought into a conversation on technology, I'm reminded of a term Neal Ford is credited with: The polygot programmer.
Why is it that developers and programmers pick camps? Why does an organization limit their technology choices to one or a small handful? When an organization says they are a "Java Shop" or a ".Net Shop", what I hear is "We only use microwaves to cook here". In many of these shops they are doing with code what can be equivalent to cooking a turkey in a microwave. They can get it to work, but it doesn't taste so good!
Blogs
View all Blogs >>
-
Creator of Tapestry and HiveMind
-
Creator of Mochikit
-
Editor of DevZone for Zend Technologies, Inc.
-
Principal - Easy! Designs, LLC
-
Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.
-
VP of Developer Relations, Curl Inc.
-
Author, speaker, software engineer focused on user interface design.
-
Group Program Manager for the Atlas Team at Microsoft
-
CEO of Relevance
-
Lead Developer of the Jetty Open Source Servlet Server
-
Project Lead, Dojo Toolkit & Director of R&D, SitePen
-
Chief Technologist at Saven Technologies
-
Microsoft Architect Evangelist based in Michigan...
-
Technology Director/Senior Architect @ Sun Microsystems
-
Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.
-
Senior Software Engineer at Near Infinity
-
Tech Lead of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT)
-
President and Co-founder of Humanized
-
Lead of Spring Web and Creator of Spring Web Flow
-
Vice President of Technology at Gomez
-
Director, User Interface Engineering at Netflix
-
Sr. Java Developer @ Navis
-
Author of "Groovy Recipes" & TDD Expert
-
Creator of Script.aculo.us
-
Author of Graphic Java and co-author of Core JSF
-
Co-author of "The Zen of CSS Design"
-
Creator of Rico & Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo!
Cooking Chef vs. Polygot Programmer
Posted by:
Ken Sipe
on 10/18/2008
5.0 rating out of 2 votes
Ken Sipe's complete blog can be found at: http://kensipe.blogspot.com/
About Ken Sipe
Ken Sipe is a Technology Director with Perficient, Inc. (PRFT), IBM's largest service partner, where he leads multiple teams in the development of solutions in the SOA, Web 2.0 and portal domains, on both the Java and .Net platforms.
Ken was the founder of CodeMentor, where he was the Chief Architect and Mentor, leading clients in the execution of RUP and Agile methodologies in the delivery of software solutions. He is a former trainer for Rational in OOAD and RUP, and a CORBA Visibroker trainer for Borland. He continues to enjoy providing training and mentoring in all aspects of software development.
Ken has a deep need to be highly diversified. Ken often works with IT executives on high-level strategic roadmaps, currently geared around service oriented architectures (SOA). Ken also likes to keep his hands "dirty" in the code, which has him on a regular basis, pairing or otherwise producing code. Ken is regularly requested by clients that know him to "rescue" projects, either through the streamlining of processes or the rapid production of code.
Ken is a certified JBoss developer and is a frequent participates on open source projects. Ken is currently interested in the growing maturity of SOA solutions in the open source space, such as the ESB solutions like ServiceMix and Mule, or rules engines such as JBossRules.