I overheard this term mentioned in a podcast by Anne Thomas Manes and for a minute I thought it might actually be the name of a real WS spec. The WS* specs are a horror shop of standards gone wrong. Every time I start reading up on the newest WS* spec I just end up with a spinning headache.

This is a pretty narrow post, but a few people might find this useful since I’ve been frustrated by the preview function in MarsEdit, a fairly popular Mac blog editor, with WordPress. WordPress by default assumes you want new paragraphs if you bother to hit return twice.

Unfortunately, with prior versions of MarsEdit it just smashed everything all together in the preview window which made proofing the layout on a longer post pretty annoying. Now you can just switch the Formatting pulldown at the bottom of the preview window to Convert Line Breaks and everything has line breaks again in Preview. You can pull down the beta here.

It’s not a super fancy feature rich blog editor, but that’s exactly what I’ve come to like about it. You just pop it up, type in your post, and send it off. The interface is very similar to composing in pretty much any email client, so it’s very familiar.

I’ve been debating on whether I should pursue an MBA at this point in my career. I’ve even gone so far as to attend an informational session at the local UC. I’d like to eventually take on the challenges and headaches of being a CIO/CTO, and obviously there is some value to having an MBA.

Some quick research pulls up the following:

About 25 percent of the members of The Working Council for CIOs have MBAs.

So apparently it’s not critical for my future statistically. Still there is the lure of academia, possibly working with a great professor on interesting research, fellow students allowing for some great networking, and forcing myself to branch out on the business side.

Still there’s a lot of other factors such as:

• My wife just finished 3 years of law school and it’s nice to have two incomes again.
• We already have school loans to pay.
• We have two small children who need a lot of attention.
• I already have one advanced degree.

The convincing factor to put it off into the future is that I’m already a software development manager and I love my job even with the headaches. So if I was a developer and I wanted to move ahead it might be a lot more compelling to take on the debt. I still need to branch out more on the business side, but I did several stints in professional services so I’ve seen quite a few industries and worked on projects in them. I’ve also done pretty much every IT role including architect, PM, business analyst, QA lead, and sysadmin.

And anyway I feel a little old for it. All my friends who’ve gotten MBAs did it a few years back generally without kids and sometimes without significant others.

Whether by personality or just experience I’ve always leaned towards decision making by consensus. Most recently, I’ve been employing the consensus approach with 5 of our senior java developers working to define our development guidelines and practices. That means we don’t have some really exact list of standards, but where we do come to agreement the guideline is a lot more enforceable than one decided strictly by management or a single architect. Even worse an architecture consultant selected by management who never has to deal with the results of their mandated ‘best practices’. Anyway apparently I’m not alone as this is the policy at Google:

Strive to reach consensus. Modern corporate mythology has the unique decision maker as hero. We adhere to the view that the “many are smarter than the few,” and solicit a broad base of views before reaching any decision. At Google, the role of the manager is that of an aggregator of viewpoints, not the dictator of decisions. Building a consensus sometimes takes longer, but always produces a more committed team and better decisions

Probably explains why they have three major languages in C++, Python, and Java instead of insisting on a single one.

I hold a semi-regular development practices meeting where we cover all sorts of topics to get to an eventual consensus among our senior developers. The topics range from using maven versus ant to where to put curly braces. A few managers are attending now including a VP, but it hasn’t seemed to dumb down the dialogue yet.

Today we decided a few things:

• We’re going to continue looking at maven on new projects.
• We are holding to our current coding standard with curly braces starting on the same line as the declaration and the ending bracket on its own line. (We did have an impassioned argument to the contrary from an experienced Delphi developer who’s very used to the starting bracket on a new line. His compromise is that he can format the code the other way and then just reformat before checking in to CVS.)
• We need to decide on a central wiki.

We actually have a wiki solution for putting up developer documentation about admin and configuration tasks with JBoss or Websphere. One of our developers got the wiki bug and got JSPWiki installed and running for our group. There was a lot of activity at first and then it seemed the wiki was in danger of drying up and dying. I’ve seen this happen before, but recently just this week two of my developers decided to put some new workaround tricks up on the wiki.

In the meeting one of the developers described how it had been painful in the wiki to add a code sample since they ended up having to insert non-breaking spaces on each line to indent the code. So if we pick a new one they really want it to be easier to use, preferably with a semi WYSIWYG editor. And they really want it to be nicer looking and easy to break up by projects.

The output of this was I ended up with an action item to look into Confluence. After dinking around with the demo site, I think it fits the bill pretty well, especially with the new semi-WYSIWYG interface they’ve added for the 2.0 release. And it has tons of separate spaces that you can create for anything you want. So I’ll probably install the 30-day trial next week.