Wednesday, March 30, 2005

The End of the Road, Toad

It's not really the end, just the end of this particular contract, and the end of my independence...

April, 2005, is a big turn for me. Since my client wasn't able to indicate if I would be extended, I looked around a little bit in the market. I found things that really surprised me.

I decided to apply for positions in Atlanta or the South East. Since I live in Florida, regional travel would provide me with a higher quality of life.

I did interview with several companies, including a company that I really admired and really wanted to work for (uh guess who).

But, after completing the interviewing process with them, I was exposed to some processes (lack of) and other cultural issues that I was not expecting. Rather than offer a position in Atlanta, they offered me a position in Virginia that would require a relocation from Florida. I turned them down even though it was the dream job with the dream company.

A job I applied for but never expected an answer from actually took my breath away. They offered me things I didn't even think about. I was amazed at the professional processes that steered the interview process.

Unlike the first company I interviewed with, this company had their fingers on the pulse so to speak. Once I accepted their emailed offer, I clicked on a link to fill out all of the papers. And, then I signed them with a digital signature.

I will start with a big five consulting firm in mid-April as a webMethods Architect.

I will continue to plug away at this consulting blog, although the focus will be a little different.

Thanks to everyone who helped me get here.

Cheers,

Ray Moser

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Trilateral Agreement - The Impossible Happened!

As I mentioned before, I'm working at a sizable Federal Agency in the Washington DC area. The contract is big and I'm a small fish on this farm.

During the last month or two, several of the contractors have brought in teams of webMethods people. Some are obviously more advanced than others. This is the dilemma.

There is nothing better than direct experience with webMethods.

Very experienced webMethods consultants usually have an uphill battle with the other teams trying to gain buy-in to various architecture components.

Having several years of java experience helps, but doesn't prepare one to advise on large integration projects. Ditto for ASP, PHP, .net and other technologies. I have senior .net architects dictating to me architecture based on something other than my experience can relate to.

SO, in my uphill battle to reduce the number of integration points, packages, etc., I have this serious uphill battle.

Then, yesterday, the impossible happened. Either I wore the senior architect for the project down, or he had a mental collapse. He agreed to everything that I wanted to do across the board without comment.

With this agreement, I turned to the other two contractor groups who immediately got on the bus. Trilateral Agreement!

With glee, I returned to my cube, revamped my code to support (yeah, you guessed it) enterprise-wide transport documents. So, rather than having a request and response document for each message, I will have ONLY ONE request and ONE response document for the entire sysetm.

And, instead of having an interface for each document, I will have a single interface into the system. This interface will determine payload and redirect the request to internal flow services.

The long-term benefits include faster integration of future messages, easier debugging, and less-complex security models. The current project does not include the use of TN or Broker, but now I can say without any guilt that it would take MINIMAL efforts to institute broker messaging and a moderate amount of effort to replace the single integration point with Trading Networks.

One Notch on my belt.

Google-A-Rama

Well, it seems that Google likes me. I Google'd myself today and received more than I expected.

The usual webMethods-L Toolbox stuff from 2002 came up. Also, my old eZine articles pop up from wmusers.com.

What's was very surprising to me, is the number of links to this blog from other webMethods Aficionaodos like Mark Carlson. Look up WM WebLogs on the right navigation on Mark's site.

Here's another site that has a VERY nice list of technologies. It's worth a book mark:

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/WRJ?subid=6505542

At any rate, my head has inflated to twice it's normal size. Not bad for a Wednesday.