Kashyaps

Technical management has different meanings at different places. The way I see it is by dividing the responsibilities into three categories

1. People management – this is the number one responsibilty for any technical manager. He/She needs to be focused on the people reporting to them and make sure that their needs are taken care of. The manager should always create an environment where the direct reports are the most productive. You should be more downward focused than upward focused if you want to build a really strong team. There is a fine line between being the nice guy and being an asshole. The more closer u are towards the line the better for you.

2. Project Management – if you are in a technical company where you are also resposible for projects then you need to have project management skills. The more details you know about the project the easier it is to run a successful project. Transparency is the key to success. Always keep an open communication and inform everyone of the status as often a possible. If you have the flexibilty follow one of the Agile methodologies.

3. Technical decision maker: this is one of the responsibilty of a technical manager. The more closer you are to technical decisions the better you are at managing people and also better at managing the projects. In my opinion this role/responsibilty is what distinguishes a regular technical manager from an exceptional one.

Today Intellij announced that they are open sourcing the IDE. As usual this was a huge step for JetBrains and was welcomed very well in the development community. I am a huge fan of IDEA and have been using this for almost 5 years now. Its worth every penny in my opinion. I am interested to see where this will end up in the future. One good thing is Jetbrains is still continuing a commercial version and hence the good stuff will keep coming. Now I can afford to download a free version and enjoy the same benefits.

Sorry Eclipse users you will be left behind in my opinion .

I have been playing around with the new server that I have setup. I wanted to enable DB replication and create backup scripts. However, once I had this new server up and running I was trying to figure out what I screwed up since I was able to bring up all the websites locally. Eventually I figured it out. The stupid local DHCP server assigned a different IP address for my server and the port forwarding wasn’t working.

Note to myself. Fix the DHCP issue so that I wouldn’t run into this problem again.

I enabled SEO smartlinks and changed the permalinks. I also rebuilt the sitemap and pinged google. Wanted to see what teh results would be

One of things that I started a while ago was to create a Hudson Jmeter plugin. We have been using hudson for 6 months now and Jmeter along with it. However, there is no plugin available for JMeter. I came across a bunch of people who is eagerly waiting on that.

However, its not as simple as I had hoped it to be. I haven’t been able to spend more time due to some other commitments. I hope to work on this and have some beta version out by end of this year. If you know of someone who is either working on this or would like to help out do let me know.

Maven is an interesting thing to work with and Hudson uses it extensively. I have the basic setup done and started implementing the pluin.

I upgraded to wordpress 2.5.1. Lots of new features available. I particularly liked the way they revamped the dashboard and Site Admin pages. The bulk updates for comment moderation is another feature that I liked. The best one I liked so far is uploading your videos without any plugins(more on this later).Hopefully I can complete the upgrade of all the sites that I host within the next week or so.

For those interested I host the following sites

http://kashyaps.net

http://namakash.com

http://ponnas.com

http://semaphoresolutionsinc.com

http://ramaramaprasad.com

What does REST mean to you and your company? It is better to make this decision well in advance before you build an enterprise system.

I have listed some good articles on REST which I felt gives a better idea on this architecture

http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html
http://www.subbu.org/weblogs/main/2007/10/soapy_rest.html
http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RestTriangle