Blogging for the New Year

Foster Hardie — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:56:24 GMT

For 2009, I've resolved to start participating and giving back to the technical Internet community. For years I've been searching (even before Google - gasp) for technical info online, and selfishly (or mercifully, depending on your point of view) withholding the bits I have to offer.

As a brief introduction to me, I am one of those multi-hat types. Depending on the job, I spend anywhere from 30-70% of my time doing hands-on technical work (including coding, but also configuring all the knobs and buttons of enterprise frameworks and packaged apps). The other 30/70 is spent on requirements, strategy, management, architecture, etc. My latest role is largely hands-on until my team gets big enough to pull me into more of a strategy/architect/manager role. As such, I’m playing a bit of technical catch-up as my last role as Director of Software Engineering at a large company pulled me more in the other direction.

The technical task at hand is to integrate and streamline a collection of the 19 siloed commercial business applications that my company depends on. At a high level, the effort is categorized in 3 basic buckets: Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and UI consolidation (no industry acronym for this one that I know of). Though there is certainly crossover, these 3 business goals are being implemented using 3 Microsoft purpose-built solutions: SQL Server 2008 suite (SSDb, SSAS, SSRS, and maybe a little SSIS), BizTalk, and SharePoint. Most of my hands-on experience is with SQL Server, so the learning curve for BizTalk and SharePoint is steep.

The content of my blog for the foreseeable future will be about my journey as I first deploy, then maintain this assortment of technologies. I will do my best to post useful solutions that, while perhaps not the best possible, will be my best as I strive for the right balance of speed of delivery and long-term maintainability.

I look forward to learning from your feedback and hope I can offer a little guidance to anyone on a parallel journey.

Foster