Jay Littlepage: Life In Balance?

Growing up with the Olympics

While growing up I played every sport I could, and followed them all avidly on TV and radio. The Olympics were a big deal - nothing that was going on in the world that couldn't wait for two weeks of competition and comraderie. Some of the innocence was gone forever after Munich, and with every positive drug test it's one more step away from the idealistic memories of my youth (particularly in my favorite sport, track and field - in which I unfortunately no longer believe anything I see or read).

But still - every 4 years the family was glued to the TV, and all talk at school, or at work, was about the previous day's events.

While I was a track guy I really got into the winter games as well. I've don't think i've missed a downhill final starting with Jean-Claude Killy in 1968. While i'd root for the USA some of my early heroes were speedburners like Killy and Franz Klammer. I also remember exactly where I was in 1980 when Al Michaels' made his "Do you believe in miracles" call. I was working as a bar attendant at Harold's Club in Reno, and as the game went on I spent more and more time in disbelief watching the little tv in the casino break room as history unfolded (just for the record, none of the bars I was working ran out of ice, booze, or condiments). I still get chills anytime I hear the call.

Last night was the Men's downhill. Even though I was disappointed that neither Bode Miller nor Darren Ralves came through (what was up with changing skis, then changing again right before the race?) watching Antoine Deneriaz (who?) toast the field by .72 seconds on the last run of the day was a real highlight.

But today in the office? No one is talking about the Olympics (except Hal Stern). And where was the next generation of Littlepage? She watched part of the games, but by the end of the downhill she was in another room, watching "Grey's Anatomy". Oh, well...

Where was SOA when I needed it?

There was an interesting package of stories in Network World today, one of which featured Sun's own Greg Papadopoulos, on "the future of software. All are quick reads. All 5 stories talk about the move to software as a service, and 3 of the five hone in on SOA as the means to that end.

Which made me think back to my IT career. I spent the first 20 years of my professional career (as opposed to my pre-professional career pitting peaches and tending bar, among other things) in IT, starting in in aerospace. I was part of the industry as we progressed from batch to client server to n-tier, from mainframes to minis to workstations to PCs to thin clients. One of my first jobs was writing an interface to the Aerospace firm's MRPII system, written 15 years earlier in RPGII. "Interface" is probably too strong of a term - no one really understood the core of the code (we did not have source nor documentation for large portions of it) so what I really did was carefully determine what could be fed into the beast as input to get the output we needed for a new set of systems - without breaking anything. As far as I know some recent college graduate is still doing the same.

While in IT at Sun a considerable investment in time and architecture was invested in the information highway, a publish and subscribe mechanism which was ahead of it's time - preceding helpful web service standards such as xml, uddi and bpel, and preceding the enabling capabilities gained from solutions such as Sun's Composite Application Platform Suite. The information highway did keep us from writing point to point interfaces between what was then hundreds of systems but it was complex to maintain, and because it was proprietary it was eventually abandoned.

In both examples the IT organization I was in was dealing with the tension between a dynamic business, static systems, and limited resources. Rewriting everything was a non-starter. Integrating proprietary interface methods into the core of our ERP system made it very difficult and expensive to upgrade. IT is never "done". An IT organization taking more of a "pac-man" approach to component change, replacing applications exposed only through web services, is going to have the flexibility to stay up with the needs of their business - whether the systems are internally facing or external facing - while avoiding the upheavals of large, "big bang" systems migrations.

IT could be a fun place to be again...