Author: Jeff Miles

Jeff is a husband, father and computer programmer who loves to read, work out, watch movies, and spend time with his family.

Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in this blog are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. For book reviews, in some cases I have received a free copy of the book so that I can read it and post a review on my website. The advertisements on this site are affiliate links which means if you click on the ad and purchase the item, I will receive a commission from that sale. I am disclosing this information in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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Books Fun Non-Fiction Reviews

Ingredients for Success: 10 Best Practices for Business and Life – Joseph James Slawek

ingredients for successIngredients for Success: 10 Best Practices for Business and Life is a quick little read but packs a pretty good punch. Joseph is the CEO of FONA International an flavor company that creates flavors for the beverage, confection, grain, savory, healthcare, and dairy/dessert industries.

In his book, Joseph outlines his strategy for  business and life based on the parables of the Ten Virgins, Talents, and the Sheep and the Goats taken from Matthew 25. I will not steal his thunder and tell you what those 10 best practices are but I will say that if you were to implement those 10 best practices, you would be successful.

Overall, I thought the book was a good quick read that left me with ideas that I could implement in my life after reading it which is the aim of any writer of a book like this. Joseph has done a good job taking his experiences both working for someone else and running his own company and distilling what has made him successful down into a manageable book that just about anyone with any amount of time can read and glean insight from and does so in a way that doesn’t come across as better than thou or preachy.

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Functions

2013 Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit – Day 3

2013-12-05 08.36.25

Disruptive Fun

The keynote speaker this morning was Ze Frank, the Executive VP for BuzzFeed. He talked about the 3 major disruptions in his life and how they got him to where he was. The cool part about this keynote is that he was able to take his learnings from the media world and apply them to IT and essentially say that the core fundamentals that every company deals with are the same. He shared some beautiful and hilarious stories from his journey and overall it was a great talk. If you ever have a chance to listen to Ze Frank I would definitely recommend it, he is a very insightful communicator that you will have a great time learning from.

Ten Essential Principles of Modern Application Architecture

This session was a great wrap up to all the things that I heard over the course of the summit. The basis was a service oriented architecture, then from there you can build the quick delivery context aware applications that we need to move towards amidst the Nexus of Forces.

Summary

Overall, I thought the summit was a great conference and I learned a lot of things I can take back and begin to push the implementation of at our company. I wish though that others from my company had been here, especially from our integration group.

Categories
Functions

2013 Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit – Day 2

2013-12-04 05.27.32I expected some nickel and diming when I came to Las Vegas but then I realized that nickels and dimes were too cheap…The picture to the left is what my gym was on Day 2 of the Gartner AADI Summit 2013.  I had been told that there was a fitness center available but packed some in room workout capabilities into my suitcase just in case. I was right, the hotel wanted to charge me $25 a pop to use their “Resort” every time I wanted to workout. Thankfully, I packed my yoga gear and DVDs so I was able to get my workout in nonetheless without paying the extra $25.

You didn’t come here to read about my workout though, here’s the good stuff!

UX Design and the Enterprise Architect

Who doesn’t want a little User Experience (UX) with their coffee? This was a really good session centered mainly around the paradigm shift that is coming/in process. “UX is the looming relevance challenge for IT organizations.” How true this is and how irrelevant are so many of our IT organizations. The speaker talked about the paradigm shift that is needed. He mentioned that you can’t just stick lipstick on a pig when it comes to UX. UX has to be the first part of the process and that is the fundamental problem with IT, we are engineers/developers first so we want our processes to be engineer/developer focused. However, when it comes to UX, design has to come first and it is not just aesthetics. It is fundamentally how your users interact with your apps. One key takeaway that I took from this session was with the fracturing of the UX between iOS, Android, & Windows Modern UI it is impossible to use a cross platform UX that fits with every platform so he recommended developing a corporate UX standard that would be standard across your apps and hold true to that UX framework to simplify your development.

Atlassian: How to do Kick-@$$ Software Development

Aside from the proliferation of the term Kick-@$$ (which the speaker tastefully warned the audience about at the opening of his session) throughout the length of this talk (to the point that I finally copied the text to my clipboard and just hit ctrl+v every time I needed to use it in my notes it was happening so often) this was an extremely good session. The premise of the talk was that in the movie Kick-Ass (I haven’t seen it) the main character decides one day that he is going to dress up as a super hero and fight crime…the first time he does though he is brutally beaten up and stabbed and it is not until he forms a team around him that he really starts to Kick-@$$ so to speak. Complete with the full getup (minus the mask – to which the speaker relayed to us that it is not smart to wear a mask in a casino :-), the casino had guards waiting for him at the elevator before he even made it from his room) the speaker lamented the early days as a software developer where he felt he would go out and save the world with software but just ended up feeling beat up and stabbed.  He then talked about Agile and its adoption history and how we are moving into a post-Agile world and companies are struggling to figure out how to deliver software more and more quickly in this new environment. He then talked about the 4 main ways that Atlassian does Kick-@$$ software development:

  1. Build Kick-@$$ things
  2. One Kick-@$$ team
  3. Kick-@$$ Collaboration
  4. Kick-@$$ Automation

Overall, this was a great talk with a lot of cool takeaways the biggest one for me being how intently focused they were on being a development shop more and not growing their non-development staff in leaps and bounds, but enabling their developers to do the testing, support, & design roles by bringing in a few experts that trained their developers how to fulfill those roles.

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

This session was hilarious, though terribly named. Sir Ken Robinson gave an extremely engaging talk about talents and creativity and how they affect our ability to create and re-create our lives and the paths we take. Two key quotes I have from this session are “Whatever you woke up worrying about this morning…get over it! How important can it possibly be in the grand scheme of things.” and “Talent is often buried deep, the challenge for leadership is to create conditions where talent will show itself.” If you are interested, I would recommend watching his TED talks, he is a very engaging speaker and his views on education and the reform it needs seem to be very good.

HTML5 and the Journey to the Modern and Mobile Web

This was a really good background session on what HTML5 was as well as what it isn’t along with the common misconceptions surrounding HTML5. I could tell that both presenters really knew what they were talking about. One key takeaway came during the recommendations section of their session when they said, “If your team has not yet done so, learn HTML5 and CSS3 and emerging modern Web tools.”

Microsoft: Delivering Revolutionary Modern Business Applications with Cloud, Data, and Devices

This one was a good presentation on what is available using Windows Azure for a public cloud provider especially in conjunction with on premise solutions. A key takeaway here is that Microsoft wants to be your cloud provider and they are doing everything they can to make themselves the vendors of choice including giving you options to host non-Microsoft products on their cloud and having easy integration from the cloud to on-premise solutions giving you a truly integrated hybrid solution.

Architecting and Developing Secure Applications

This was a pretty meaty session for 4:30 in the afternoon, but it was a great one! He started out by saying that writing secure applications is a major paradigm shift for so many developers because what they don’t know CAN hurt them. He laid out 3 key issues then expounded on them. The 3 Key Issues were:

  1. Why should enterprises place an emphasis on application-layer security?
  2. Which application security testing solutions can help enterprises develop secure applications and how will these evolve?
  3. How should organizations take a 360 degree comprehensive approach to application security?

I have a ton of notes for all the different sections, but if I were to recommend a starting point for anyone, look at the slide deck (see session title link), then go download the 360 degree approach white paper.

Summary

Overall, it was a really good day with a lot of information. I am almost to the point that I am on brain overload, but I think I have enough left for day 3 🙂

Categories
Functions

2013 Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit – Day 1

2013-12-03 10.49.05I am currently in Las Vegas, Nevada for the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit (AADI). One of my goals for this year with my boss is to get outside the Microsoft bubble that I have been living in for the last several years and expand my horizons. We both thought this conference would be a good fit for that goal. I intend on blogging about this conference similarly to the way I blogged about Microsoft TechEd back in June (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, & Day 4). Before I get too far though, I would like to make a comment about Vegas itself. Vegas is one of those places that I never had any desire to go to. I will say though, from a macro view, the place is beautiful, the grand hotels & casinos that you see as you drive onto the strip are absolutely breathtaking. The picture at the top of this post was taken as I stepped out onto a balcony during an intermission between two sessions. I will probably post at some point about my thoughts when you get up close with Vegas but the short version is that people just seem sad and it breaks my heart.

Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on my personal thoughts on Vegas because that is probably not why you are reading this post. So on to the Summit. On to the sessions that I attended.

Developing a Mobile Development Strategy

This session was a good first session to attend. The speaker went through and laid out all the steps, pitfalls and the things to think about as an enterprise is building their mobile application strategy. One of the key points he made that I thought was great was that you don’t want to just replicate your desktop/web apps on the mobile device. You want to as the question “What does mobile enable me to do that I couldn’t do before? How does it fundamentally change the business process?” While this seems fairly intuitive, you would be surprised at how often the business asks for a desktop replacement app on their mobile device and it is our job as IT to help them figure out and articulate what features they really need on the  mobile device. Another key point that he brought up that I wholeheartedly agree with is that you need to develop a User Experience (UX) practice within your organization and he brought this home with the question “How many times have you had to take a training class for a mobile app?” Your mobile app user experience (and all your applications for that matter) should be intuitive and easy to use. The final point he made that I want to emphasize before moving on is that testing is integral to a sound mobile application development strategy.

Gartner Opening Keynote: Making the Nexus Real

I have never been a big fan of marketing speak and buzzwords. I am much more a fan of speaking plainly and getting to the point. Prior to yesterday, I didn’t really know what the “Nexus of Forces” meant. I didn’t waste too much time figuring out what it was ahead of time because I knew a group like Gartner would make it painfully obvious what it was. I was ABSOLUTELY right, I think I heard the term “Nexus of Forces” at least 300 times yesterday. To be brief the forces involved are Cloud (another buzzword I hate), Social Computing (usually just said as Social), Information, & Mobile. What makes the Nexus is that these forces when combined enhance and build upon each other in such a way that they amplify each other exponentially. Overall, the keynote was really good, marketing jargon and buzzwords aside. I think I could have listed to Daryl Plummer all day long. He is a fantastically engaging speaker that really knows what he is talking about. The keynote went through several case studies of companies that had successfully harnessed the Nexus of Forces to propel their business forward.

The Impact of Nexus Forces on Your Application Strategy

The key emphasis in this session was that your current application strategy is going to have to change. We are no longer living in the environment where software will live unchanged for decades. You MUST change! This was my first introduction to the Pace-Layering Strategy for your applications. The short and simple is that you divide your systems into three layers Systems of Record, Systems of Differentiation, & Systems of Innovation. The Pace part of it comes down to the pace at which those things change or are thrown away. His last takeaway similar to some of the others that I heard was that we as IT need to switch from project to product (app) thinking.

Successful Applications Demand Selfish Software: Only the Paranoid Survive

This was probably my favorite session of the day…his main point was that as IT we need to shift our focus from delivering projects to delivering applications. If you deliver projects you are judged by on-time, on-budget, & met functional requirements (all of which shift in the name of the project) and end up delivering an application that the users can’t stand and all the features that they would actually want were pushed to “Phase 2” which we all know never happens. Instead, we should  deliver selfish apps (not applications) that meet the user’s requirements. The features of selfish software are:

  • Black Belt Defensive Coding
  • Self-Diagnostic
  • Self-Testing
  • Self-Monitoring
  • Self-Reporting
  • Self-Healing (eventually)

The other piece of information that I really liked was that he redefined “Legacy” software as software that is hard to change. I liked this new distinction of legacy.

Town Hall: Enterprise and Application Architecture Best Practices

This was a great session for me as the Application Architect for Phillips 66. When I took the role I took it knowing that it was a very amorphous/undefined role and that between my supervisor and I we would be determining what my role included. After hearing this session, I was greatly encouraged by the fact that the path that Mike and I have laid out for me and my role seems to be the right path…I seem to be doing the right things. The particular interaction that I felt particularly encouraged was in regards to how Solution (Project/Technical) Architects and Application Architects should interact and overlap which we seem to be doing right at Phillips 66.

Trinity Millennium Group: Getting to Cloud – From Legacy to Agility

This session was probably my least favorite and I probably should have left early…I really didn’t get much out of this session. It was another rehash or what Legacy 2.0 was and how their company upgrades applications for their customers.

Gartner Keynote: Business Outcome-Driven Enterprise Architecture: A Quantum Leap in Delivering Value

Even though I don’t currently operate in the Enterprise Architect role within our company, I am part of our companies EA infrastructure so I wanted to hear what EA was supposed to be or rather what it should be. This session was a very good session to attend for this information and I recommend that anyone in the EA role within their organization review the slide deck and if available watch the video.

Summary:

Overall, this was a great first day. You can’t expect every session to be riveting and life changing, but I did learn a lot from the first day and am looking forward to Day 2. Other than the snafu with the conference organizers not ordering enough lunches for everyone this was a very good day.

[I was one of the people who missed out on lunch but found out too late to do anything about it so I went 12 hours between meals…makes for a very crabby Architect, let me tell you and is probably part of the reason I fell asleep during the Trinity Millennium Session :-)]

Categories
Books Fiction Fun Reviews

Fatal Tide – An East Salem Trilogy Novel by Lis Wiehl & Pete Nelson

fatal tide.cover I really have to stop picking up series in the middle to end of the series. After really liking the Heart of Ice – A Triple Threat Novel by Lis Wiehl I figured I would give her another shot and picked up Fatal Tide. I picked well. Even without the background of the first 2 books, Fatal Tide doesn’t disappoint. Fatal Tide picks up with Reese, a 17 year old student at St. Adrian’s academy being ambushed by demonic beings trying to bring about a dark prophecy and just ramps up from there. The main characters Tommy & Dani have been opposing the demonic forces since the first book and the battle culminates in Fatal Tide.

I was impressed with Heart of Ice and was also impressed with Fatal Tide. Lis Wiehl weaves together a compelling action with great spiritual overtones. I would recommend reading the other two books in The East Salem Trilogy first, but even without them, Fatal Tide does not disappoint.

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Faith Family Fitness Fun Functions Random Thoughts What's up

I don’t have birthdays, I level up!

birthday-level-upFor those of you who know me, you know that the month of October is pretty crazy for my family…we have 4 birthdays during the month of October, including mine… I have decided that I’m not going to see it as a birthday though. I loved video games growing up and my favorite one was Final Fantasy (I still have it on my Gameboy Advanced). Final Fantasy was a role playing game where your team of four Warriors of Light, each carrying an orb representing one of the four elements, travelled the world defeating the enemies that were keeping the orbs dark and thus saving the world. Like most role playing games, as your characters fought battles and beat enemies they gained experience points. When they had accumulated enough experience points, they would “level up” which would result in them becoming stronger, more intelligent, and for those with magical abilities, more magical abilities. I made a decision this year when I had my birthday, I would no longer see it as getting older. I see that every day in the new gray hairs in my beard and hair that greet me anew each morning and the hairline making that slow, painful march towards the back of my head. What I want to focus on is this, “How did I “level up” with regards to Faith, Family, Fitness, Fun, & Functions?” After thinking about it, here is what I have come up with. This year I leveled up in the following ways:

  • Faith: While I have always tried to have an active devotional life, this year, I figured out what works for me. Thanks to the Bible App, I have found plans that work for me to get a good dose of the word (almost) every morning. I have always tried the route of reading through the Bible in a year, but most of the time it just wouldn’t sink in the way I wanted it to, the chunks were too big. This year, I started with a Joyce Meyer devotional plan and a Billy Graham devotional plan that were offered within the Bible App and I love it. I get a daily dose of Word along with the opinion and insights from people I greatly respect. In addition to this, I have been listening to the Church on the Move podcast on a regular basis. A few years ago, my in-laws bought me a 160 GB iPod and I filled that sucker up…I have sermons and podcasts going back to 2009 from Church on the Move and I figured out a nifty little trick on my iPod to be able to listen to them in chronological order so what I do is just start the first sermon and the let them go while I am working, mowing, or doing other things…it is awesome!
  • Family: Our family continues to get better and better. Caleb is reading like a champ and his teacher says he is just doing amazingly. Carrie is blossoming more and more each day. Abbie is coming full force into her personality and it is amazing getting to know this little fireball that is our third child. Mandy and I are more united than we have ever been, we don’t even fight over finances anymore :-). That is huge! The interesting thing about our finances and the stress it used to cause and how we resolved it was that it was one small change that we made to how we budgeted that got us on the same page and revolutionized how we communicated about our finances. It wasn’t a huge revelation, it was tweaking the way one piece of our finances was represented on our budgeting spreadsheet that helped us see exactly where we were with our money and with that one little clarification, we got it and we were able to see things eye to eye.
  • Fitness: If you have been reading my blog or known me for any length of time, you know I struggle with my weight and have been trying to lose weight for a long time. This year I had a revelation in how to structure my workouts so that they were actually doable. Previously, I had been trying to do P90X either in my morning or in the evenings but with 3 kids and running a business on the side I was very sporadic in my workouts and wasn’t seeing the results that I wanted. I tried working out at work by running on the elliptical but the frustrating thing was it took me 45 minutes to an hour during work to get a 30 minute run in, then I remembered that our workout facility at Phillips 66 has a pool…light bulb…if I go down and swim for 20 to 30 minutes, it only takes me a minimal amount of time to get from work to the pool and from the pool back to work…bingo…and the pool is open enough in the morning that I an get there almost every day because I can almost always find 30 minutes to get down to the pool. By getting consistent with the pool workouts it took the pressure off me trying to get an hour workout at home so I was able to cut my lifting routine down to 30 minutes a night which makes it so much easier to do.
  • Fun: The big win for Mandy and I this year was that we took the kids to Disney World. While that was the highlight, we have also tried to make sure that we do something fun on a regular basis. We just recently had a staycation where we went to Incredible Pizza, the Tulsa Children’s Museum, and had a movie night. We have fun. We also like to win and right now Caleb’s soccer team (the one I coach) is one win away from being undefeated this season. Carrie started dance lessons this past summer and absolutely loved them.
  • Functions: I hit a major career milestone this year. The interesting thing about it was that it came with very little fanfare through an IM from one of my co-workers and I didn’t even realize it was that much of a goal for me until I hit it. In my side business I also have a major announcement coming very soon which will be very cool for us and become a great avenue of blessing for us in addition to my main job at Phillips 66. I need to keep quiet on these things right now but will let you know as soon as I can.

Overall, this has been a great year, I’m looking forward to how I will level up next year and what God has in store for me and my family. Sound off in the comments below with how this year has been a great year for you!

Categories
Books Fiction Fun Reviews

Afloat by Erin Healy

_140_245_Book.852.coverAfloat follows the inhabitants of Eagle’s Talon, a spectacular floating community, as they deal with a series of events that threaten to tear apart everything that they hold dear. Masks will be torn off, relationships tested, and faith restored.

Initially, I was very excited to review Afloat. I had previous experience with Erin Healy with her collaboration with Ted Dekker on Burn. I quickly found however that what I was drawn to in Burn must have been due to Dekker’s influence more so than Healy’s. Afloat just seemed to be missing something as I read it. I can’t say that it was a terrible book, i just found it lacking. I just felt that things could have been tied together a little easier. My recommendation on Afloat is that if you have the opportunity to read it, go ahead, I just wouldn’t go out of my way to get my hands on it.

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Faith Fitness

Anderson Silva/Chris Weidman – Pride Comes Before the Fall

I don’t know if you are a fan of UFC or not, but I am becoming one. I have watched a few of the Pay Per View events with friends and I am finding that I really enjoy watching them. That aside, last night’s fight between Anderson Silva and Chris Weidman had and awesome biblical lesson associated with it. Watch the video below, then read my commentary.

Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. – Proverbs 16:18

Before last night, I hadn’t seen any Anderson Silva fights, but before last night he was the reigning middle weight champion since 2006…meaning he had gained and held the title for 7 years…he had a 17 fight win streak going. For all intents and purposes, he was unstoppable. He had even fought up a weight class and won there. He also apparently had pretty bad habit of taunting his opponent. You see it a little bit in the video above but prior to what the video shows, he had been taunting Weidman pretty bad. Then Weidman connected and the champ fell…

I went into the fight wanting Silva to win, but after watching how prideful he was I wanted him to lose. That’s what happens when you become prideful, people start cheering against you. You hear the stories of the humble underdog who over comes, people always cheer for the humble underdog, including God.

God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. – Proverbs 3:34

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want God opposing me, I want God on my side, which means I MUST walk in humility.

Time for a little self reflection, are there any areas that you are proud? Where you need to be more humble?

Categories
Books Fun Non-Fiction Reviews

Book Review: I’ve Got Your Back – A Leadership Parable – Biblical Principles for Leading and Following Well – Dr. James Galvin

ive got your backThere are several leadership books on the market now, this one however takes a different approach. There are two sections to this book and the author gives you the option to read either section first. The two sections are a story about 4 young adults as they are mentored in their leadership abilities by an old war veteran and former missionary. The second is an explanation of a biblical theology of leadership.

I do not want to give too much away, because I want you to read the book, but I will say I thought the book laid out a very good explanation of how true leadership is about following well. Leadership and followership are two sides of the same coin, you can’t be one without the other. Most leadership books out there will focus on the tips and strategies for being a good leader, but I think Dr. Galvin hits the nail right on the head in that even as a leader, you are still a follower, so the key is to learn to follow well and by intentionally following well, you will know what it takes to be a good leader.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to know how to be a better leader, but I would recommend it as a read for everyone because we can all learn to be better followers.

Categories
Books Fiction Fun Reviews

Book Review: Babylon’s Falling: The Story of Belteshazzar, Also Known as Daniyyel by William G. Collins

babyon's falling

I love this genre. Some of my favorite movies are Gladiator, Braveheart, & The Patriot. Some of my favorite books are The Mark of the Lion Series, & the Sons of Encouragement Series. The reason that I love this genre so much is that it fills in the gaps for me, it gives me a sense of what the people who lived these lives went through. I know that they are fiction, but when one of these authors approaches historical fiction, they usually do so with reverence for the historical part of the narrative and do their homework in such a way that they are able to fairly accurately fill in the gaps. Some people get really angry when books like Babylon’s Falling are written because they feel like it takes away from the biblical narrative. To each their own I guess, but I love the genre so when I was offered the chance to review Babylon’s Falling I jumped at the opportunity.

Babylon’s Falling starts off with Daniel and his friends on their way to Babylon at the beginning of the captivity. It follows his rise in rank through the empire and ends with his return to Jerusalem. I don’t want to get too much into detail because I want you to read the book. I am not a biblical scholar by any stretch of the imagination so take my analysis with a grain of salt, but I think the author took great care in staying true to what really happened during the biblical narrative and stay true to the source material. Overall, I felt like the author did a great job in writing this book and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and would definitely recommend it to anyone, especially people who like the historical fiction genre.