The About Page
The Site. Me. Latest News.
By Julian Browne on January 1, 2007. Filed Under other
Hello and welcome to the site.
It's not really a blog - I did try one for a while but found it too disjointed to say anything meaningful and I'm also not very good at remembering to post often enough. So I'll be making it up as I go along - publishing articles on IT management, software development, architecture, strategy and all the fuzzy bits between as they occur to me. There are some blog-like features such as feedback and an RSS feed.
There's no threaded discussion option and I have no plans to add one for the time being. I am interested in feedback and opinions, especially if they differ from mine, but I prefer to avoid the "my cat is better than your dog" flame wars that start so easily from seemingly innocuous statements. So please, if you have something to say do drop me a line. I try and reply to every contact, though it does sometimes take a while.
The Site
The site is written in Rails and uses the Bluecloth Markdown plug-in to render the articles into something like HTML, although I have on my to-do list a note to try out the RDiscount replacement for Bluecloth, which apparently isn't quite so buggy. The layout is mine and comprised of useful bits of CSS adapted from people who do it much better than I.
The photos were taken by John Cassidy of UK Headshots.
Philosophy
I carry in my head a kind of unified theory of technology in that I don't see any disconnect or disparity between the highest level strategising and the lowest level coding. Every single activity, conversation or piece of paperwork that exists in an IT organisation should be bent toward making better code that lasts longer and adapts more easily to the demands of the business. Nearly every major corporation has forgotten this. Over the years IT has become more and more populated with unskilled people drawn to the higher salaries and external consultancies have exploited the fears of corporate leaders that they can no longer manage their own IT.
I hope by joining a few dots up with these articles to show that this needn't be the case. Great software is difficult, no doubt, but with a little expertise, experience and careful thought it is possible. Once broken down into their basic parts even the most arcane of concepts can be made sense of and linked to the bigger picture.
The Author
I'm not that big on job titles, so let's just say I work with software and computers. I've had nearly all the jobs there are to have in my twenty years in softwareland, but ended up in architecture and management.
My background is in operations - I was a Unix performance consultant early in my career, then went into development, on to architecture and then to management. Each time I thinking I'd be able to find the source of all the woes of modern IT. My conclusion, for what it's worth, is that it's mostly management's fault. I like the field of architecture best because if you can do it well, and remain thoroughly practical, you can see amazing results.
I left my last permanent job way back in 2007, taking some time off to get into Ruby, Lisp, Functional Programming and Cloud Computing. It felt like a good time to explore some ideas and say some things I'd always felt needed to be said about why IT has seemingly self-destructed in the last ten or fifteen years.
I love software technology and what it can do, and I still have that they-pay-me-for-this? sense about it. But it's hard not to feel worn down by the armies of the incompetent who don't get (grok) it, or just can't be bothered to use enough common sense to get something good done. This is a truly beautiful field to work in. So few understand just how beautiful, and fewer still see the beauty that could be.
If you've really got nothing better to do you can join me on Twitter, although I have to warn you I make less sense on there than I do here.