The Immediate, and the Directions
S V Ramu (2002-02-18 : An old internal article)
Timeline Summary
I generally believe in opportunities. Both my history, and of the people I know, seems to assure that it is not the non-availability of opportunities that is an obstacle, but our Expertise, Readiness and Capacity to take it. There are opportunities everywhere, all the time, and in all things. But, unless we take what we can swallow, we cannot be progressing. So, this year, it is in these lines we have to work upon.
Expertise
There are two key areas I'm concentrating upon. One Application Framework, and two, Distributed Project Framework. Undoubtedly, the real basics of IT industry. All our previous experiences show that unless we have analyzed and tested a model for these two key aspects of Solution Engineering, we would be hard pressed latter on in just rectifying our mistakes. Of course these are not completable per se, but we sure must have a solid theme that is dependable and practical. We in fact should make the specification for this, an open development, with enough inputs from us to inflame it. In the spirit of Java, the specs would be incomplete, unless we have some reference implementation. That would be a Modular-Open-Java based Accounts Application, that can be standalone and pluggable. As a hobby, if time permits, I'd be concentrating on compiler concepts (including regex) and Linux.
Readiness
We will be talking more on profitable areas, their long term relevance and interestability, local/distribute developer communities. Practicing with already existing open source projects. And lot more on business models, revenue possibilities and ethics. So by Q4, the ethical and strategic qualms should be settled to a great extant, so that we can just concentrate on getting the job done, at that time. Thus a theoretical and analytical prelude would be a fitting preparation for ensuring business readiness.
Capabilities
The key goal here is to motivate and sustain a distributed community of online developers, with more stress on local developers who would like to learn and contribute from home, after work, and in spite of it. There should be a healthy dose of distributed developers too. Maybe at 50-50%. The idea is to be ready to take up a project by Q4. People have to be novelly trained, to develop and communicate. We have to practice distributed reliable synchronization, meaningful document work, benchmark for quality, relevance and performance, etc.