“Calling all techies! [My wife] lost her contacts on iPhone during her latest sync. I’m restoring from a two-year-old backup, her second-most-recent backup, but wanted to restore from her contacts in her mail system. Unfortunately, she has a Mac but uses Outlook. This isn’t even an option in the iTunes/Info tab. Thoughts?”

Challenge…..ACCEPTED.

First, open up Outlook for Mac and click the Contacts tab. Then click File->Export…. Click the “Contacts to a list” option, then click the right arrow.

You’ll be prompted with a window to save the file. Name it something and put it somewhere by clicking Save. Click the Done button in Outlook and you’re finished exporting.

Now open up Address Book. Click File->Import… and find the file you exported from Outlook. Click the Open button and then you get this:

See that option that says “Ignore first card”? Make sure that’s checked. Now click the right arrow. You’ll be presented with the first contact in the list.

On this screen, for each contact, you can confirm that the fields are correctly mapped. You’ll have to do this for every contact. Or you can trust the import implicitly and just hit OK.

Once you have finished, clicking OK will import the contacts into Address Book and you’re good to go!

I’m going to work for Microsoft. I’m joining the Enterprise Strategy, Architecture & Cloud Vantage team as an IP Development Architect. This role is an enterprise architect that creates artifacts to support the strategy and planning process. (That’s straight from the link, if you are a tl;dr kind of person.) What that means is I draw upon my experience and expertise as an enterprise architect to create high value intellectual property that Microsoft Enterprise Architects, who are in the field at customer sites, can use to help their our customers make complex business decisions.

After years spent in the trenches and in the ivory tower, I realized that what I’m really good at, what I’m really really good at, is acquiring and sharing knowledge. Anyone who knows me will say that whatever I’m interested in, I’m an expert in. It’s a gift that I kind of ignored for a long time because I couldn’t figure out how to really harness its power.

And then one day, I did. But that’s a story for another time.

Scott Hanselman, who is an individual I very highly respect and admire, and now can call a coworker, created this graphic:

I love this graphic. It’s beautiful in its simplicity. And it’s so true. When I found the position at Microsoft, I thought about this graphic. Could this be my dream job? I asked myself. Then I interviewed at Microsoft, and the answer was, Yes.

All of my greatest successes have been in consulting. What I love most is making customers happy. I’m passionate about information technology and business transformation, and it shows when I talk about it. I’m good at it, I love it, and I get paid to do it.

When I discovered the field of enterprise architecture, I realized that I could bring together all my different skills and interests and mold them into something that had real value. And then I could convince other people of that value, either through passionate persuasion or through merit. I was also very fortunate to have some great mentors.

When I read the job description for my new position, I zeroed in on this part:

You should thrive in an environment of ambiguity, and learn whatever is needed to explore a new direction, excel at building creative solutions, and take changes in direction in your stride. You must be eager to learn new techniques and technologies, and have the confidence in your ability to simply "figure it out" when the way forward is unclear.

I felt like it was written directly for me.

What does an enterprise architect do?

Good question. Let me take a little aside for a second.

This article, albeit a little old, gives a really good explanation of enterprise architects and enterprise architecture. Within the EA community, there’s a lot of discussion about the role and responsibilities. Some believe that the EA belongs outside of IT. But the fact is, a good number of EAs work within the IT organization. That’s partly because businesses expect transformation to come out of IT through tools and processes. I have had the most success advising CIOs on transformation through technology adoption and business process automation. If you think about the concept of the Zero Latency Enterprise, it’s wholly dependent upon a successful execution of both IT and business strategy.

That article is a good read.

What’s next?

I’m heading to Redmond next week for orientation and my first week of work. Then I’ll be back in Iowa for the holidays and some planning for my move to Redmond.

After that, anything and everything. I will, as Phil Haack so eloquently put it, drink from the fire hose.

Click through and watch in HD to get the full experience.

Back in the early Oughts, web services and service-oriented architecture were the rage. Microsoft’s .NET and Sun’s Java platform were the de facto tools and technologies that developers and architects used to build complex SOA capabilities. I was part of this wave of excitement, and I was very lucky to have the opportunity to work on an extremely ambitious project in research & development. This project aimed to unify the enterprise services (web services and otherwise) in a meaningful way.

I found some of the code for this project on an old USB stick and recorded a fifteen minute demo, which you can sit back and enjoy. I recommend clicking through to watch it on YouTube, as it’ll be easier to see.

This is the first time I’ve shown Retrospect since 2002, and since it was a project I was enormously passionate about, all the memories came flooding back and I was immediately familiar with it again.

I also had to fix numerous bugs to get it to work in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. As I navigated through the code, I felt a little sad. This project was abandoned, and the original server holding its source code (mercilessly housed in Visual SourceSafe) has long since been scrapped. The guy I worked on it with left EDS years ago, and the patents we filed lie dormant, never to be granted.

Retrospect does some amazing things that were really ahead of their time, like interface introspection, code generation, interactive code development in a graphical environment, service orchestration, and more.

Looking at the code really showed me how much I’ve grown as a developer, and how much I even knew back then. The architecture uses the MVC pattern, there’s a hearty attempt at separation of concerns, and the object-orientation is ambitious, if not wholly effective.

Now I need to find my new passion.

The chief engineer’s requirements were basic and simplistic: create something that tracked substation construction materials, like clevis joints and copper clad steel earthing rods. That was it. So that’s where I started, and I built a fairly simple Microsoft Excel 5.0 workbook to track everything. It was called Requisition Purchase Order Information, or REQPUROI for short. (Yeah, my creative naming skill was 1/300 back then.)

Not an actual screenshot of REQPUROI, but the same version of Excel.

As I learned more about the business and worked with the engineers, I added more features to REQPUROI. I listened to their complaints about their workflow, understood how they did their jobs, and figured out how I could make their jobs easier. I learned Visual Basic very quickly. Eventually, that Excel workbook could effectively model the cost of creating a substation in terms of the material costs. Further, it let the engineers identify opportunities to improve the design with a net reduction in construction costs. My eventual goal for it was to integrate with AutoCAD and the supply chain to track in real-time what materials were at the service center and determine what purchasing power the utility had in negotiating orders for more clevis joints and copper clad steel earthing rods. But instead, I was promoted into IT and my career took off.

I was nineteen years old.

Since then I’ve worked on some really cool stuff, the most recent of which was Future Health eConnect. When I started at Future Health, the company was still selling its legacy product, written in Visual FoxPro, called Virtual Office Suite. The president told me in my interview, “I have a vision of a new product, and I want you to build it.” So I did, with a lot of help from some great people. I hired a UI designer who worked exclusively on the Mac and iOS platforms, and we worked side by side for two solid months to come up with the design aesthetic and user experience for eConnect.

And now I can look at it with quite a bit of pride:

There is so much of me in that product, in its visual design, its layout, its features, the way it’s delivered, the user experience. There’s a lot I wish I could improve, but I know that it’s in great hands. I don’t want to go on and on about how great eConnect is here, so head on over to the YouTube channel to see some of its features. Go ahead, I’ll wait here.

Today I was thinking about REQPUROI and I wondered aloud what it would be now, all these years later, if I were still working on it. Some ideas I would have loved to be able to do back then:

• 3D visualization of the materials with callouts for individual components
• Direct integration with AutoCAD so the engineer could see the components that make up a deliverable piece of equipment
• Integration into an ERP system for supply chain management
• Export of materials lists for the as-builts, so the engineers could verify that the materials were in place post-construction
• A mobile version of the application with multitouch exploration of the materials and inventory
• Product lifecycle management capabilities so the engineers could see opportunities for reuse of materials post-extraction and manufacturing
• Utilization of ISO 10303 for exchange of information between REQPUROI and CAD/CAE as well as Product Data Management systems, internal and external

The possibilities are endless. The budget would have to be!

As an aside, I’ve always had a certain fascination with PLM. When I was at EDS, they owned Unigraphics, aka UGS, now part of Siemens, and I often daydreamed about what it would be like to work on PLM software. A few years later, I authored a proposal for Microsoft to use PLM in the development of the Xbox, but it went nowhere.

All of those bullet points up there are ambitious, to say the least. But that first one, hmm, that one’s interesting. In fact, Future Health eConnect has that feature. In the Subjective Note, there’s a 3D body diagram that allows the user to specify points of interest on a 3D model and annotate them. Here’s an example:

What’s really cool about this is you can rotate the 3D image, and the annotations move along with it, into and out of view:

I can’t take credit for this. That goes to the brilliant graphics engineer on the eConnect development staff. I just think it’s amazing and the functionality has a lot of other practical uses. It’s quite a bit more exciting than a clevis joint:

But the applicability is still there.

Can you imagine building something like a rocket and having a model of the rocket with all of its components, and the components’ components, all the way down to the nuts and bolts, and if you are missing any one of the components from a bolt to the ignition button, it’s indicated on that model? You would have a visual representation of the materials needed to build that rocket from start to finish, along with a printed report of the bill of materials, with integration into the supply chain, integration into the PLM tools, integration into the flight engineer’s laptop and the safety engineer’s iPad, integration with the factory floor systems for construction, with all of that available in a dashboard in the back office. The vice president of production development could say, “We’ve improved the time from design to test by a factor of three.” The vice president of manufacturing could say, “We reduced the cost to manufacture a rocket prototype by 11% over last year.”

As you can see, I’m very passionate about this.

At the utility, once a substation’s construction was completed, a team of engineers would inspect the substation. This process is known as an “as-built.” On the as-built, an engineer would visually inspect various items at the substation, enumerated on a checklist. He would use a spotter scope to look at the parts that were out of view or high up. The engineer tech would have a printout from REQPUROI and check off each item that the engineer confirmed was built as expected.

I imagine in a modern version of that materials tracking system, the engineer could use a handheld device, like a Droid or iPhone, to zoom in on the items and capture images, which could be analyzed on the device against a preset list of expected data points. Each substation would have its GPS coordinates stored in the tracking system, and each constructed component’s image could be geotagged. Back at the office, the data that was downloaded from the device into the main tracking system could be analyzed and spread out into the ERP system, the CAD system, and more.

With that capability now, in 2011, what can we do in 2021?

So on that Tuesday, I erased our existing whiteboard and created a Kanban board. It had 5 columns: Next, Analysis, Development, Acceptance, and Released. I explained how it worked to the CIO, and he liked it a lot. So did our QA person and the other developer. When I expanded on it a bit and talked about personal Kanban boards, people got really excited.

The next day we presented it to the team as a whole and everyone embraced it. We set our work in progress limits for each column and got to work. Several hours later, I saw that we had exceeded the posted WIP limit for the development column. I brought this up to the team, and it was agreed that one of the items needed to be moved back to the backlog so that the priority could be properly respected.

At first, I felt like I was choking everyone on process, but the truth is, that sort of rigidity is what our team needed. Tasks were moved en masse before the Kanban board; they’d sit in Doing forever and then magically appear in Done one day. With our new board, we can see the stories flow through the queue, and tasks aren’t posted at all. Instead, tasks go on the developers’ individual boards. Remember: we only have two developers, and we’re on specific projects, so we don’t share tasks. If we do need to share tasks on a project, our individual boards still make that possible because we sit near each other.

Being agile doesn’t mean doing anything you want and justifying it by saying, “We’re agile.” Being agile is about doing what works best for the team, enabling the team to deliver quality projects within an expected timeframe, and consistently & predictably produce results. The board isn’t there to be ignored and manipulated. It’s there to set expectations and give everyone an equal chance to succeed.

The Scrum Master I hired at Future Health when I was the CTO taught me something very valuable shortly after he started: there’s “doing” agile and “being” agile, and the difference is not subtle. I’m trying to help my new team be agile. I’ll expand on that in a future post.

My current team is working against the odds to succeed, and I have a lot of confidence in us. We’re changing the entire organization, one story card at a time.

That’s just common sense.

Sometimes, and this is especially true when you work for the same place for a long time or you are a consultant, your job crosses several domains. This was certainly the case for me at Future Health, where I was the CTO but also a software architect, developer, and project manager. Ditto for HP, where my job title was generic and I spent nearly 10 years doing dozens of different things. For certain jobs and employers, I want to put the focus on my development skills, and for others, the focus is on my management skills, plus everything in between.

So when I started my job search, I had several different versions of my resume. Each copy had the “Standefer_Resume_” prefix, and then the job appended, e.g., “Standefer_Resume_CTO” and “Standefer_Resume_Architect.” This got unwieldy after a while, especially as I had to cut-and-paste significant portions of my resume across different versions.

Then it hit me: this is a problem that version control solves. I already have git and Mercurial installed on the machine on which I write my resume(s), so I decided to use Mercurial. I chose Mercurial (also known as hg) after flipping a coin. I’ll write a version of this using Git if you really want me to.

If you don’t have Mercurial installed, download it from the above link. The whole process is super easy.

The first thing I did was create a directory to store my resumes. Then I initialized a new Mercurial repository in that directory. I like to use the command-line, but TortoiseHg makes this process really easy too.

For this example, I’m going to create a simplified version of my resume and then use Mercurial to control the different versions of it. The base version of my resume contains my job titles and high level functions for those titles.

As you can see, it’s a fairly generic resume. I’ve listed three job titles, CTO, Enterprise Architect, and Enterprise Architect. This resume very succinctly captures a high level of what I’ve been doing for the past 10 years or so.

I saved this as Standefer_Resume.docx in the C:\Resumes folder. You can use anything you want to create your resume, but I highly recommend using a file format that is text instead of binary. This will make merging the different versions of your resume much, much simpler.

So, looking at my resume, you can see it doesn’t really have a focus. If I apply for an enterprise architect position, the hiring manager may be put off by the loose summary and the prevalence of my CTO position. So, I need to create a resume that focuses more on my enterprise architecture experience and highlights the EA stuff I did as a CTO. For this goal, I’m going to change from my de facto title of CTO to a functional title of Chief Software Architect.

First things first. I need to commit the base version of my resume to Mercurial:

What I’ve done here is added the file to the repository using hg add, then committed it using hg commit. The last line, hg branch, shows that we’re on the default branch, which is built into Mercurial, and for our purposes represents the default version of the resume.

Now I want to apply for that enterprise architect job. First thing I’m going to do is create a branch for it, like so:

As you can see here, I created a branch with a name (EnterpriseArchitect), committed it, and now I’m good to go. Let me just confirm that I’m in the right branch and my file is there:

Ok, now I can open the resume and edit it. I’ll just change a few things to make it more EA focused:

There, that’s a bit better. (Remember, this is just an example, so don’t nitpick on the details here.) Now it’s time to commit this to the EA branch.

When we look at the repository in TortoiseHg, we see the details of what we’ve done so far.

You can see that we have two different branches, default and EnterpriseArchitect, with the commit messages. Now let’s do something kind of cool. Let’s say I want a version of my enterprise architect resume for a specific employer, so I need to add in my C# knowledge. Easy enough, I can just create an EnterpriseArchitectMS branch. Ok, done.

But what I’ve realized is that I really need this in both of my resumes because I really want to highlight my development skills.

What I’ll do is make the change in my default version and merge it back into the enterprise architect version. First, update to the default branch using hg update -C default and then edit the resume accordingly.

Now my C# stuff is in there. Commit it, then update to the EnterpriseArchitect branch. Now we’re going to merge the default version into the Enterprise Architect version. I used the command hg merge default and Word popped my resume open with the changes tracked.

Now what I need to do is accept the changes I want and reject the ones I don’t. If you look closely, you can see the additions we made to the EA resume, as well as the “Wrote code in C#” change we made to default. This file is a merge of the two versions. I’m going to accept the changes and save the document.

Now my EA resume has the “Wrote code in C#” part, as does my default resume. Save the combined result and commit the changes.

Let’s take a look at the repository in TortoiseHg now.

You can see that we added C# skills to the default branch and merged it back into EnterpriseArchitect. The other branch we created, EnterpriseArchitectMS, isn’t going to be used after all, so we’ll close it with hg commit –close-branch.

After a while, you might have several different versions of your resume all stored in their own branches. A quick look at hg branches shows mine:

That’s pretty much it! I simplified things quite a bit but the concepts are pretty clear. Feel free to email me corrections, suggestions, or questions at rob@standefer.com or comment here.

I’m taking a week or so off before I start a new position, and I’m using the downtime to explore Ruby on Rails a lot more (and relax, of course). Last night I went to the Iowa Ruby Brigade meeting downtown and watched a very good presentation on getting started with Ruby on Rails, presented by my friend Levi Rosol (founder of ScoreYard and Craft.ly). Levi’s work is inspiring because he comes from a .NET development background and learned Rails on his own, and made not one, but two different applications that are startups in their own right.

I’ve had a project bouncing around in my brain for a couple of years, and I never really got it off the ground. That’s not all bad; the time I’ve spent waffling on building my idea has resulted in a simplified design and feature set, which means less development time and a simpler elevator speech. Yesterday I went over the idea with Zoe and she helped me identify a couple of areas that I will focus on in the next several days.

Today I will get a Heroku account set up, sign up for a new GitHub account, get the development environment configured, and build version 1.0 of the landing page. Then I need to start thinking about a name.

That may be the hardest part of the whole thing.

When people ask me for advice on how to enter the software development biz, I always tell them, "Find a project and build it, preferably something you’re passionate about." One of the new people on my team has never had a programming job before, but he built a complete application on his own time that is pertinent to his interests. In doing so, he learned how to be a developer. Now that he’s on my team, we’re able to coach him and grow his skills.

I don’t always take my own advice, but I also don’t feel passionate about building something like summerofrob.com. That’s a site that serves a purpose, and while it would have been great to become a better Rails developer by building that site with it, it would put the project itself at risk. After all, what matters most to me is having the site available when Summer of Rob starts.

Most of what I learned when I started my career were from doing my own thing. In fact, my first professional development job came about from writing a bunch of Excel macros for a really complex spreadsheet (auspicious, I know). I just kept learning and learning because I really wanted to be a software developer, and nothing was going to stop me. My macrolust even cost me a job once. I had added BEEP statements to a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet macro and my coworkers thought I was playing a game, so they reported me, and I was fired. In the grand scheme of things, that worked out just fine.

I still feel that spark of passion, but it’s often tempered by what needs to be done. Case in point, summerofrob.com. Yet, I find opportunities to create new things and learn new things, and they’re not always related to software development. Now I look at myself and say, "What’s next?"