How can you use Ted? If you're looking for inspiration, here's a few ideas: He can help you keep abreast of the latest changes, help your team grow, provide his expertise on your large-scale vision, or rescue a project in danger, among other things.
Keeping up with the advances in software development is tricky.
Heard a lot recently about a particular tool, approach, or technology that seems to hold a lot of promise? Reluctant to adopt something for fear of getting burned? Just want to know what’s in the pipeline from Microsoft, Google, Oracle or IBM, and want to know how it might affect your development team’s bottom line?
We spend time tracking new stuff. We can't predict how everything will turn out, of course, but we can save your team time and money by taking what we know of the tools and technologies in the industry, and either applying those tools and technologies to your project, or explaining them and working with you to decide when, where and how they can best be piloted within your organization.
If you’ve ever asked or said to yourself:
The skill of a team is often directly proportional to that of their coach. Does your team have a coach?
We offer onsite and offsite mentoring services, on just about every technology in use in the modern enterprise (.NET, Java, Ruby, Node, NoSQL, Big Data, and a few others you may not have heard of before), as well as on the use and practice of agile development practices. Get started in the smartest, most practical, most pragmatic way. Let us answer your questions on the spot. Spend a day, a week, a month, or more, or work with us to figure out how much time you need and when you need it. We can help make your next project a success by providing guidance on all aspects of architecture, coding, deployment and maintenance. Let us mind-meld with your team to produce outstanding results.
Typical mentoring experiences vary, some lasting a couple of days, and some stretching on for months. Here are some common scenarios:
Mentoring services can cover systems and enterprise architecture (look at the big picture, how will it all fit together), application design (what is the best approach to a solution), technology strategy (make the best use of the chosen tools/technologies), and/or deployment (rolling it out in your environment, minimizing pain) for the architects and management executives. Mentoring services can also include developer-focused services, providing a resource for questions, tool reviews, and design discussions or code reviews.
Is there another topic of particular interest to you? If you have questions about an area we don't specifically mention, please contact us. If there’s a technology you’ve heard something about but don’t have the time to consider if or how you might use it, contact us--we also conduct research projects on behalf of companies, producing prototypes and analyzing its potential benefits and drawbacks to a particular organization.
Sometimes, a project is in trouble not because of the people involved, but because the architecture is too complicated... or not complicated enough. Getting a software architecture right is not trivial, and too important to trust to people who haven't "been there, done that" across a variety of platforms and software tools.
Not sure? Ted is the guy who invented the Architectural katas, specifically as an exercise to allow architects to practice their craft, and as such he's been reviewing architectures on a regular basis (usually at a half-dozen or so workshops, each doing six to eight such exercises per) for close to seven years. Nobody else has that kind of architectural review experience.
Getting ready to kick off a huge new project? Want the eyes of somebody who's been in the industry since computers were too large to fit in your lap and still ran with only 640K? Getting the right architectural guidance is the first step, and keeping the team on track with those architectural principles is the next step.
Not sure? Ted is the guy who invented the Architectural katas, specifically as an exercise to allow architects to practice their craft. He created the kata exercises, and for each one he's come up with three to six solutions based on various architectural constraints (sometimes arbitrarily imposed simply to challenge himself). If there's anybody in the world who knows how to offer architectural guidance, it's him.'
It's a fast-changing technology world. It's a world changing faster and faster thanks to technology. The changes themselves are creating new changes and challenges. What's new; what's old, what's tried, what's true, who knows? Trying to keep abreast of your business and the technology world at the same time is nearly impossible. So don't try; leverage someone who knows the technical world inside and out, and can talk to non-technical people about the important things to them: brand, market penetration, revenue, position, market dominance, and more.
Should you buy that startup, or not? Should you acquire that technology, or not? Will that team you're looking to bring in based on their open-source work be successful in what you want out of them, or will things start to fall apart once you go to scale? Let's take some time and do a due diligence review, which can consist of some or all of the following:
When a project drifts into danger, how do you bring it back under control? While there's no one-size-fits-all rescue plan that solves every endangered project, it often follows a pretty similar curve: Listen, Act, Measure. Listen to find out where the key problems are, Act to reduce a little pressure on one of those areas, then Measure to see how the project responds. When you've seen as many projects as Ted has, it's actually not too hard to spot the problems, know how they've been solved in the past, and slowly bring a project back under control.
Published on 01 February 2022