The Podcast that Brady and I did at the 2008 ESRI Dev Summit has been posted online for posterity.  It's posted on ESRI's Speaker Series page here under the 'Interviews with ESRI Business Partner's Category'. Here's a link directly to the MP3 file. The chat covers the obligatory "what we do" marketing speak up front and then we chat about trends we're seeing in the industry, where developer demand is moving, and some of the kewl stuff we were taking away from the conference.  All without sounding like complete idiots I thought...whew.  Anyhow, it's out there so have a listen...

In my RSS aggregator, I've been seeing a lot of talk on the role of an architect in the IT industry. Periodically there is a flurry of commentary out on the web generally revolving around the question "What is an architect?" Alan, a technology evangelist over on the MSDN blogs, references a recent article in the Architectural Journal discussing the role of architects in software development. Additionally, Tom Hollander provides his thoughts on the role, duties, and primary competencies of architects in the larger development project. In some sense, the need for discourse on the nature and value of architects on a dev team indicates that folks are still having trouble quantifying the value of a solution, enterprise, infrastructure, etc. architect in their organization. This is of particular relevance and concern to me...because the "a" word is in my job title.

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So we've been doing some upfront design work for a client who's managing their dev processes using RUP. Technically we're in the elaboration phase and we've had a need to do a bunch of sequence diagramming for some implementation briefs. First off, let me say that after having a whole stack of sequence diagrams to do, I'm just about done with Visio. To get things to go smoothly in Visio we had to download some third party UML 2 templates here, which is no biggie really, but the constant random formatting changes when moving things around and the ridiculous semantic errors despite an apparently correct model have caused significant hair loss or greying on my team.

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