Software Management on Emad Alashi

Consultant Skills: Self-Confidence

Fri, 16 Jan 2015 05:51:44 +0000

I have blogged before about some of the skills that a consultant should be acquainted with like Story Telling, Knowledge Depth & Breadth, and Having an Opinion, all of which I see very important. But in this post I would not hesitate to say that self-confidence is the single most important amongst them all!

Before we continue, what does “self-confidence” mean? my words of choice would be: “it is the belief someone has about his/her capability of accomplishing something that he/she hasn’t tried before“. Notice here that it’s a “belief”

Consultant Skills: Having an Opinion

Sun, 16 Nov 2014 00:06:35 +0000

This is the third of three posts I’ve written about consultant’s skills, check the previous posts if you like:

————-

We work in an industry where one general problem can be solved by too many ways, each emerges from a different mindset and different circumstances. But also, in this industry there is community pressure, there are “cool geeks” and “cool solutions”, there are “best practices”, and there are hypes and fads.

9 Things I Learned From Skiing

Wed, 20 Aug 2014 10:56:54 +0000

I had the opportunity to visit Mount Buller to do skiing for the first time in my life (thanks to Joshua McKinny), and the experience was UNBELIEVABLE! In addition to the loads of fun I had, I learned some life lessons that can be applied in any field, even software! and I’d like to share with you.

When in doubt, get rid of doubt.
A night before the trip, I was at the shops. I saw this winter warm hat that I thought I should buy, then I remembered I had one at home but I wasn’t sure if I still had it; I remembered one time when I needed it and I couldn’t find it, so I had doubts!
I had to take a decision, something like the following diagram:

Apparently possibility D has a much higher cost compared to any A, B, and C. And the only way to avoid it is to take decision X rather than Y… I chose Y, and ended up with D!
At the end I managed, but let’s just say I was left in an embarrassing situation.
Everything has pros and cons
Between choosing Skiing and Snowboarding, I chose Skiing; the majority of opinions was that Skiing is easier and you have more control, which is better for beginners. But this came with a cost; the boots were horrific to walk with, and I had to carry two sliders and two poles all around! I don’t regret my choice, but let’s say I am a lot more aware that there are cons with every choice we make, the question is are we willing to make the most of it or not.
Listen to the experts
Josh gave us of a long list of advice beforehand; what stuff to bring along, where to get the gears from, what we should expect…, all of which made a huge difference. And whenever you fail to listen you are beaten, I will never forget a scarf when I am at the top of the mountain!
It’s more difficult than I thought
I judged Skiing too early, from the videos and photos I have seen in my life, it seemed too easy! just go in angles and change the direction once you reach the edge of the slope, and repeat until you reach the end. Guess what? Easier said than done!
Skiing literally is sliding on a slippery surface, while you try your best to control sliding; the sliders are long, heavy, and go in all directions, the amount of effort you have to give to control the sliders to go in a certain direction is big, and they don’t just listen! the angles in which you have to position them to accomplish that control is tricky, the pressure on your knees is enormous, your body’s position makes a big difference, and the slightest loss of control of the sliders your body will start wobbling, and you don’t just cross your legs to fix that! Oh and did I mention that there are types of snow, some of which makes things even harder?…ENHALES!
The idea of this lesson, don’t just underestimate and judge too quickly, anything, unless you try it out first.
**You don’t know what you are missing, until you try it. It’s loads of fun!
** Sometimes we are just too lazy, and due to our laziness (or let’s say “comfort zone”) we miss out on too many opportunities. I knew that it’s going to take me a day, and it’s going to be cold, and I have to learn skiing, and was afraid that I wouldn’t enjoy it…but…I pushed myself; I also knew that this is not going to happen again anytime soon and should tick it off my bucket list, let me tell you this: IT WAS AWESOME! Doing it myself revealed many aspect I’d never get from watching a video, the mere speed a human can reach on these sliders is of utmost thrill, let alone the joy when you really start controlling it.
It really made me think of all the things I might be missing due to the same reason, whether it was leisure or career opportunities
You are going to fall, and it’s going to hurt
There is absolutely no escape from falling, unless you are an expert, than you already have fallen plenty of times, and to the surprise, it hurts! I fell so many times: one time on my arm which ended up swollen, one time twisted my leg, and another time was displaced couple of meters away from my slider after it flew off.
These falls were necessary; I knew exactly what to do, and what NOT to do, because I didn’t only “hear” about the consequences, I lived them, and they hurt! So because of these falls I had to learn, because of these falls I became a better skier
In fact pain is part of the fun
The falls mentioned in point 5 were painful indeed, but they also were fun; it breaks the routine of the body, the monotonous experience we go through in our lives, being thrown and twisted in the air, and feeling your body going through a different experience, all of this had its flavor, it might be funny, but it really did (don’t break something while you do that).
But more important than that, these falls also gave a better meaning for success; when I slide for longer periods without falling, the feeling of success I have is deep, and meaningful. If it was too easy that success would taste like…meh.
Following instructions is important, but so is following instinct
I had a lesson by an instructor for I am an absolute newbie, the instructor gave us the instructions on how to stop and manuever, along with some other instructions, and then released us to the wild. I tried to follow all his instructions perfectly, usually I am a good student, but I still kept falling!
Then at one of the slopes I felt like I should be leaning my body in a certain angle, and press with my toes down, it was an absolutely instinctive feeling, not a trial and error thing, and guess what…it worked! the instructor didn’t mention this; maybe because he never really gave it a deep thought, maybe he has been skiing all his life, regardless of the reason, he gave me instructions that weren’t enough, I had to use my instinct that proved highly valuable in addition to the external knowledge.
Most importantly, company is everything
This, my dear reader, was of the utmost importance; Josh and Neil were extremely good company, very understanding, patient with my primitive skiing skills, easy going with suggestions, generous, and full of knowledge that filled the trip with beneficial discussions. All of which allowed me to enjoy things enough to come up with the previous 8 lessons!

Did I learn more lessons? indeed, but 9 is a nice number 😉

NOT Another Post About Estimation

Sun, 22 Jun 2014 03:54:09 +0000

I was involved in a project that was given 10 days to finish, the tight schedule was due to budget reasons.

The client explained to me his requirements and then asked for an estimate for details. We stood in front of the whiteboard, broke down the features and then started estimating the time for these features, until we reached feature x.

In my technical life I’ve been beaten by over-simplified requirements far too many times, so as simple as feature x sounded I strongly felt that it might stretch. Subsequently, this influenced my opinion of giving feature x three days, against which the client of course argued back.

On Building Quality Software

Tue, 04 Mar 2014 22:05:22 +0000

The 2nd main cause of buggy software (time pressure is #1), is laziness and boredom.

Every job in this life consists of a “core”, which is the most challenging and most exciting part of the job, and a “chore”, which is the boring and tedious part.
Let’s take a chef as an example; he is an artist whose art is producing quality food, a process that involves mixing precisely-scaled ingredients, perfectly stirred on a period of time, or fried on the grill with an artistic movement…all are actions that the chef consider as crucial part (core) of the process producing the magnificent product of his.
On the other hand, the chef sometimes has to chop onion into xxx-small size of chops, a task that may be really boring to him (I wouldn’t blame him!). Being such a boring task, the chef is tempted to getaway with just xx-small size of chops; after all 95% of the meal preparation is there! So he ships the dish to the customer.
The customer tastes it, he generally likes it, but something is wrong…”ah!”, the customer discovers, “I am chewing pieces of onion!”. He almost rated the restaurant 4.5/5, but just that last bit ruined it!
3/5 is the final rate.

Don’t Just Fit Into The Gears

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 08:55:41 +0000

Most of jobs in our modern world come with a job definition; a list of tasks that is expected from the candidate to accomplish during his/her occupation of that role. Very convenient approach; setting expectations for both parties.

A convenient approach indeed, but extremely dangerous as well! what is dangerous is NOT the job definition, rather the mentality it instills in the mind of the candidate.
The candidate examines the list of tasks, believes that he can do it, he takes the job, and once he starts in the new role he just fits into the gears of the existing environment/process, regardless of how rusty it is, or how inefficient the mechanics of these gears are! The environment or the process, part of which this role is, could be extremely malformed, inefficient, slow, or of any negative attribute you can stamp on a process that is not 100% fulfilling its goal. Just fitting into this system will make you part of this failure! But for innovators and positive influencers this is absolutely not acceptable.

Complicated Software? Or Solving Everything At Once? Message To Product Owners

Fri, 22 Nov 2013 10:23:30 +0000

As software developers, we happen to come across many business problems with various complexity levels. Although this complexity depends on the nature of the domain sometimes, what I have noticed that product owners add a lot to this complexity themselves without a need!

For once, software developers are innocent here; the product owner, the entrepreneur, or the man behind the niche, these people have a very big responsibility on defining the complexity of the system; most of the time, the complexity introduced to the software was because they wanted to solve everything with a button, maybe two!

Consultants’ Skills: Story Telling

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 05:17:28 +0000

You have to listen to two words only before Cristian Prieto grasp your attention till the very end of his talk, even if it was about cats! everybody just goes silent, listening carefully, staring and waiting for more!…and the secret behind it, as I see it, is HE IS A PERFECT STORY-TELLER!
Let’s face it, people like stories; we watch movies, we read novels, even news sounds much more interesting when there is a “story” behind it! it is the nature of humans.

ثلاثاء عمان التقني – الذكرى الثانية

Sat, 05 May 2012 08:39:08 +0000

ثلاثاء عمان التقني لمن لا يعرفه هو لقاء تقني يعقد كل أول يوم ثلاثاء من كل شهر، يتناول مواضيع مختلفة في كل مرة تحوم كلها حول التقنية و استخداماتها، يتم فيه استضافة متخصصين في موضوع تقني معين يطرحون آراءهم في أهم المستجدات في الموضوع المختار أمام جمهور كبير من المتحمسين. يقوده طليعة من الشباب الفطن الجاد.

The Magical Effect of Simple Encouraging Words

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:16:14 +0000

Recently I had to go through some health checkup that included tests for my eye, one of these tests required from me to keep my eye open for a long period of time concentrating continuously into an extremely strong and annoying light.
During the test I kept receiving encouraging words from the examining doctor every couple of seconds: “Bravo Emad! very good concentration, keep it up, that’s it”.
Even though it was a simple task and me being in my 30’s!… I still had a strong feeling that I was doing something right! and that I should keep doing what I was doing, to give more effort no matter how annoying and hurting this intense light was; and all of this was due to his words! the more he encouraged the wider I opened my eye and concentrated.

Interviews with Jordanian Microsoft Guests

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:08:00 +0000

During the last quarter of 2011 we have hosted two amazing Jordanian Microsoft guests, Yousef Al Khalidi (Distinguished Engineer), and Ayman Dahleh (Development Manager for the Global Experience Platform group), who happened to be having their vacation here, they generously accepted our invitation to deliver sessions here in Jordan despite their busy times.

The community recorded these two inspiring interviews with our guests through which I can see how close achievements can be.

Microsoft’s Support

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:21:34 +0000

Couple of days ago I tried a key I acquired from Microsoft MSDN subscription to activate an Office installation, the activation didn’t work for some reason, so I filed a ticket, and I thought to myself “Oh great! now I will have to wait for ages until such large corporate like Microsoft would answer my ticket!”

“AmmanTT: Developer Edition” presentation and slides

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:46:14 +0000

It was a very interesting event “AmmanTT: Developer Edition” which took place last Tuesday; the team did a very good job putting it together, it is really great seeing this great effort put into such fruitful events; moving the community steps forward, so thank you AmmanTT team, you rock.

Hereby I post the slides I presented in my talk:

Software Life Cycle, Humans & Code

Speaking at AmmanTT: Developer Edition

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 10:58:22 +0000

I will be speaking at “AmmanTT: Developer Edition” next Tuesday 6th of December 2011. Never heard about AmmanTT? quoting from their About page:

Coming to you on the first Tuesday of every month is a 2-hour event that brings industry experts, local technologists/engineers, entrepreneurs, idea-generators and just about any enthusiast together in a casual setting to meet and learn from each other

I will be talking about the real-life side of the software development life cycle, and about the overlapping between Process and Humans in the cycle. So mark your calendars, I will be very happy to meet you there.

Brilliantly Simple Code Sharing

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 20:19:11 +0000

Today I was looking for a fast way to find the index of a nth occurrence of a string in a string, so I found this very simple and intuitive site on which you can find and share .net extension methods, the website is http://www.extensionmethod.net Dah!

I couldn’t find what I looked for, so I shared my solution here; the website made it crazy easy to share this! Something I definitely would add to my log on how to create wonderful websites, simple and effective.

Code Sample Should Be Clean

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 15:21:46 +0000

The other day I needed an ASP.NET MVC grid control, and I have always heard about Telerik’s ASP.NET MVC Extensions and the great tools they provide, so I decided to give them a try.

So I followed the installation guide step by step, and prepared my code to use the extensions; I added a reference to the DLL, added the scripts, etc… and I thought I was ready to test-drive it.
I opened Telerik’s sample website which showed the control and below it the code sample that made it work, innocently enough I did what any other developer would do to try out the sample code: copy and paste it in your page and then build. To my surprise there was an error in the View; it didn’t recognize an Extension method called “Configurator”!

Stressful Situations Make You Stupid

Wed, 12 May 2010 07:16:19 +0000

Today we came across an interesting issue at work: we have two teams A and B who interchange API calls. Team A needed an API from team B to process a business that is owned by team B of course. The signature was like the following:

public OutputEntity MyMethod(List listOfIds);

It appeared afterward that this method was very slow, and the client was already very upset about the low performance, which consequently caused big pressure on the teams by the superiors to enhance the performance.
After investigating the issue, it appeared that the list of ID’s sent as input consists of some ID’s that do not need to be processed, this criteria of “not need to be processed” is a business owned by team B, done by using properties of the entities these ID’s represent. So the solution to this issue was one of the following:

If Crashing Gracefully Is Nice, Recovering From It Is Awesome

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:54:31 +0000

Last Saturday we had a SharePointSaturday event here in Jordan, in which I had the pleasure of interviewing Joel Oleson and Michael Noel for DotNetArabi.

At the end of Joel’s valuable interview, which can happen only in a life time, I stopped the recording by hitting the “Stop” button, simple. Surprisingly, instead of stopping the recording, Audacity just froze! I could hear myself screaming inside “NOOO!!!”, I guess even Joel heard that! the whole machine stuck that I had to force it to a Hard Shut down.

Communication Skills Session at MSP – Jordev

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:24:03 +0000

I just finished a session about Communication Skills one-to-one for the MSP program with Microsoft and Jordev. As I promised the audience, here are the slides shared on the very good site SlideShare:

Communication Skills one To one

View more presentations from Emad Alashi.

“Growing Software” book review

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:03:35 +0000

I have been reading this book Growing Software by Louis Testa, and I consider it the book of the year for me.

The book is a about how to create a robust successful software; starting from assembling your engineering team, to having a flourishing company with successful software product/services and happy customers.
If you are a new Development Manager, or already a Dev. manager who is in a small company growing fast, this book is for you.

Nice Development Tools

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 08:48:19 +0000

Sometimes development tools can be very tempting to a degree that you just want to open the IDE and start hitting those keys. Though it’s not always within the IDE; here is a list of development tools, without specific order, that are just so sweet and pretty crucial to teams opt for best development environment!

Basics Of Successful Communication

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:32:20 +0000

It’s a waste of time trying to explain how important communication is in life, whether it is at work or personal life. So I will start immediately in group of points I find it to be basics when it comes to successful communication in general, and verbal communication in specific.

Here is the list of actions you need to take in order to explain your thoughts as clear as and descriptive as possible. I tried to put them in their proper order considering the communication process, though they can overlap:

Technical Team Leader…Who Is Not

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:19:50 +0000

When I started this blog my goal was to make it a technical one, in which most posts would have code, samples, screen shots, architecture…etc. This was the primary goal, though it is totally fine with me to talk about software life in general.

The issue is that I get the ideas of my posts from my real daily life, which is mostly code challenges at work. I do write code in my leisure time, but for sure it is not as thorough as the thing at work.
And since I haven’t posted any technical stuff lately…the simple conclusion is I DON’T SEE CODE ANYMORE!

Get On With It!

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:56:35 +0000

When we started gathering requirements from the charity organizations for Bunian, it appeared that there are other kinds of people who benefit from the charity organization; there are “needy families” whose father is still alive but can’t sustain their families, and “students” who can’t afford their study.

So Bunian needs to support all these Beneficiaries in smart way; we solved the problem by creating the IBeneficiary interface. But the problem is that in order to get out with the best solution ever (damn perfectionism!), we kept coming up with different solutions, and overriding them with other solutions every once in a while, and this kept going like forever!

Importance of Documentation

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 11:25:15 +0000

Lately we have decided in Bunian to move on to NHibernate 2.0, and the contributor assigned to the move started out, only to send an email one day after: “THERE IS NO DOCUMENTATION!’.
We had errors as a result to the move which couldn’t be fixed without a documentation explaining why this happened.

After searching for a while, we found two resources of the new documentation:

a wiki help that is hosted on Google Knol:
http://knol.google.com/k/fabio-maulo/-/1nr4enxv3dpeq/21#
Not really appealing to be used extensively; no smooth flow between chapters, frames dazzle the eyes, no table of contents, but surely a great step forward for a documentation that is maintained by the community

The Story of a Winning Frog (a story we all know, and few comprehend)

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:42:12 +0000

If you don’t know it:

Once upon a time there was a group of little frogs, who decided to go through a competition to climb a tower. The tower was high and difficult, and no one of the spectator frogs believed that any of the tiny frogs can make it to the top.

Little frogs started climbing, while spectators yelling:
– “oh my, it’s too high…I don’t think they can make it!”
– “they are too young, how possibly can they reach the top?! that’s insane”
.
.
Shouting and yelling continued, while the little frogs surrendering one by one, except for this one little frog who kept going and going, climbing up further and further more. Surprising everyone, that frog made it to the top and he won the race! well…the only reason for his success that…HE WAS DEAF, he simple couldn’t hear the negative shouting of the spectators!

Successful Meetings Is The Responsibility Of All

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:02:24 +0000

Through all the meetings I had in my life (the voluntary and the professional), all meetings shared key points that made it either successful and constructive, or a complete disaster and waste of time!

These key points can be summarized into:

Meeting is conducted to achieve certain target , a solution to a problem, Keep the focus on that goal
Time is valuable, and the participants will be very annoyed when they see their effort and time is wasted on a subject different from the one they originally agreed to sacrifice their time for. if the meeting was anything except resolving the original subject, it is a failure.