A Technical Manager's Perspective

One Year at MIT

I just pasted my one year anniversary at MIT and wanted to share my thoughts. I am really happy with my role and my team and still feel lucky to have landed this job. The work is much more "Java Applications" focused as opposed to my previous positions that were server and data center focused. At times this has been a real challenge for me but now I have a much better understanding of all components and can usually help to identity and resolve problems quickly.

One of the biggest challenges was getting comfortable with kerberos and x509 certificates. The majority of our applications use dual factor authentication and single sign-on, and it all starts with the kerberos x509 certificate that is passed to the application. The kerberos ticket is read, authenticated and then passed on the the sso module which pulls out the username and verifies that username in a separate LDAP module. At first I was lost when trying to debug some of these problems but now I understand sso and feel very comfortable troubleshooting these problems.

Another challenge that I have not mastered is JAVA. From the Application Server perspective and the ear/war file deployment perspective, I have a good understanding, however from a ant/build perspective, I need to learn so much more.

Another change in focus for me is in the Open Source space. The Technical Architects at MIT is always looking at Open Source as a way of not getting locked into a proprietary solution, and I have started to drink that cool-aid. I do think that it is always good to focus on the best products for the solution, however with so many open source examples in use today at MIT, it is hard to justify an expenditure for a closed proprietary solution over an open solution. One great example of this is our move off of Solaris onto Linux RedHat Enterprise server. This will not happen overnight, however as new servers are deployed on RedHat as opposed to Solaris, we will reduce our total cost of ownership greatly and not loose any of the functionality offered by Sun and Solaris.

Technorati Tags: MIT,Open Source

The Social Web

The Social Web, Social Media, and Social Networking are all terms to used to describe sharing, communicating and collaborating on the Internet. These terms are used interchangeably by many who have embraced social communication and collaboration on the Internet. This new social adoption is part of the evolution of the Internet and is predicted to grow as the social tools get better and more people realize the value of this new method of communication.

Statistics on Wikipedia show that there are a lot of people participating in the social web. Wikipedia has a list of social networking sites and their registered users, and the number of registered users is staggering, however I am sure that there is a lot of overlap between social networking sites and I question the percentage of active users to registered users on each site.

I am a registered user on Facebook, Linkedin, Plaxo, Friendfeed, Twitter, identi.ca and Flickr and I am active in the Social Web community. Think about all of  the people that you know who do not use the Social Web. There is a much larger percentage of folks that do not use these tools when compare to those who do use these tools. To many folks, using email and searching Google is the extent of their online existence.

When I think of my immediate family which includes 25 individuals ranging in age from 16 to 73, 21 of the 25 have access to email, 6 of the 25 have facebook accounts, but other than the six using Facebook, I am the only one using Social Web tools. My son Kevin, is one of the six on Facebook, and Kevin and his friends use Facebook as their main tool for scheduling and communicating with friends.

I have spoken to Kevin about some of these web based tools with the idea of expanding his circle of acquaintances to include others with the same interests. However, all of his friends are on Facebook so he is not interested in leaving or experimenting with other tools. Facebook works for him as it does for a lot of people.

My preference is Identi.ca, Twitter and Friendfeed. I do not follow my tweets all day but I usually touch base in the morning, at lunch and in the evening. When it's time to check email, I also check my tweets.