Frenching away in New Orleans

I had a choice, the Jazz Festival or a week earlier check out the Local Music scene at The French Quarter Music Festival. I checked out the schedule of events, the Jazz Festival had some familiar names, the Frenchie..none, but they were the local talent from Louisiana...so the balance was already swinging towards the French. I checked out air-tickets and accommodation, they were not materially different. The FrenchQuarter festival was free. Nobrainer... French Quarter here we come
And what a festival it was!!

Got up at 4 am on a 12 th of April, a Thursday morning caught a delayed flight from Chicago to Dallas at 6.30 am. Nearly missed making our connection from Dallas to New Orleans (but the music dogs were with us!!) and we finally reached New O at 10:30 am.

Took a bus to the Days Inn on Canal Street. By 11:30am - glorious day, I was sipping my first beer and watching a band called Billy Luso & Restless Natives. The lead vocalist had his daughter come up to the stage and sing with them- a 6 year old girls- and did she have style:).

The Festival was spread across 4 main areas.
- The Woldenberg River Front Park which was a series of stages right next to the Mississippi River
- An old US Mint house (unfortunately did not make it to any of the groups playing there)
- Jackson Square: Which had these brilliant artists all displaying their paintings all around
- Bourbon Street: Thou shall yield and be tempted

This festival was surely one of the high points of my stay in the US so far. Listening to Jesse Moore sing "Its gonna be OK" made you believe it would be.

By 7 PM I had had some amount of beer a heady mix of Blues, Rock, Jazz and Zydeco and I was ready for the nighttime.

Night's were meant to be at Bourbon Street. Beer and other cocktails are "to go" at this place. After having dinner at a quite place (yes they exist even on Bouborn) we hit the bars for some loud rock music and beads of course, now I did not flash my potbelly but we managed to get some chucked at us anyways:).

By early morning when we hailed a cab to go back, the cab driver after dropping us safely to the hotel, thanked us for coming to the Town and supporting the local music and rebuilding of the state. That people is the beauty of New Orleans.

Everywhere there is the spirit of "we are in this together and it is up to us...but appreciate what others are doing:)"

The next day the weather decided to be like software estimates (ahem!!) unpredictable..and it got cloudy...but the spirit remained. I met a colleague and her husband, one of their friends (a wiz on the mouth organ) was performing, made this performer more real. We were invited to a Bday bash the next evening, but we had already bought tickets to Tequila Sunrise, an Eagles covers band that was performing at the House of Blues. Don Henley was a 14 year old kid whose voice still had to break-in but he had the beat on the drums and definitely the hairstyle.

All in all a good evening of music.

Next day we headed out to check out some swamps. I learnt that the difference between a Swamp and a Marsh was that a Swamp had trees.

Our tour guide was a swamp ranger, but all animals that we spotted were discussed more from a perspective of which menu item they would form an ingredient of than anything else- so that was informative but pathetic.

We got back in the evening on to Bourbon street and had a cyclone and a Hurricane. There is nothing much you can do once you have these. So Rest In pieces

Music by the ear

I have been in Chicago for the last month or so. The city is known for its Jazz as well as Blue's bar.

Last evening I was at Chicago Blues, the music was raunchy and the rifts plaintive. For someone who is as uneducated about music as I am, but who loves music and its inate ability to change moods, the choice between going to a Jazz bar Vs a Blues is easy to make.
If it is a choice to be made it will always be the blues. Jazz is too sophisticated for me. Blues is full of soul and is down to earth. I get a sense that you need to have a finer appreciation of how music gets created and be a musician yourself to appreciate Jazz. That is not to say blues is simple, it is just easier on my senses to appreciate it.

It is the kind of difference I see between Carnatic and Hindustani classical. To me Hindustani is more melodious than Carnatic. Hindustani is for the consumer of the music, Carnatic seems to be for the creator.

After 4-5 larges of Makers Mark, Badri and I spoke about this. Badri by the way is far more smarter and knowledgeable than I am and so obviously gave me examples of sophisticated blues and down to earth Jazz:) and started asking me questions to which I had no answer, and then graciously said- "you win". I did... I continued enjoying the blues

A Tale of Two Models

Various names exist for the delivery model which allows companies to create software in multiple locations.
The simplest avatar of this model has work distributed across two locations, one of which is usually the client location. This model also has different versions, there is a Thin Client and a Thick Client version.

In the Thick Client version substantial development takes place at the client site whereas the Thin Client version is skewed towards majority of the development taking place at the non-client location.

In the early days of multi-location development, the prime driver was often perceived (both by service providers as well as customers) to be "Cost" more specifically reduction in costs and hence the thin client model is what most of the organization specialized in.

This I think had an impact on a couple of things,

- the choice of a delivery approach, given that the thin client model
and its inherently limited client interaction- (suprisingly having limited client interaction is still seen as one of the differentiators in the IT industry but thats another tale for another day),

the tendency was to spend a portion of the time (which was limited) to gather requirements and then be shooed away to go and magically design and create software... sound familiar?

- the 'sophistication' of services that companies (again customers and service providers) believed could be provided (with adequate certainity of delivery) using this model and approach, led to a slow but certain 'commoditization' of services being provided.

The Thick Client model was driven primarily by a belief that Software is meant to 'add value' to business and not just automate in the hope of reducing costs through increased efficiencies. This model is inherently geared towards richer customer interaction and consequently has the canvas to provide services which are increasingly sophisticated. Doing this however required a different mindset and approach to software creation, which leveraged the availability of the customer to shorten feedback cycles. In short be more Agile

I must meet Vardhan from DNA and thank him for all the rock groups he has managed to bring into Bangalore. I grew up in the 80's listening to some of these bands. It was not too easy at that time to imagine that you would see Uriah Heep live or Mark Knoffler playing live. At that time my reasoning was more to do with branding of the Indian audience to this music. My reasoning was that these bands would not even know that they had a fan base in India. Which was probably true in some cases. I guess the breaking down of walls around the world helped in getting the word out to these folks on the demand in India

Later when DNA started getting these bands into India one started to hear about the thousand ton equipment that they lug around just so they can do a show which lasted a couple of hours. I wonder how many folks listening to Knoffler croon Romeo and Juliet thought about all the effort which went in to getting the infrastructure setup so one could experience this:)

I recently read an article on Joel's - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html)

which outlined a role 'management' needs to adopt in software companies. The article encourages 'management' to take on the responsibility of creating what they call the 'Development Abstraction Layer'. Essentially allowing project teams to concentrate on what they need to do - create excellent software solutions to business problems, and taking away all the 'noise' associated with providing them the infrastructure to do so.

Getting by with a big 'Yelp' from my friends

For a while I have been a sniffer on various blogs. My friend Chaman (also works with me) gave me a wake up call on blogging, and consequently this is my first blog entry.

One of the many fun parts of working with the company that I work with (ThoughtWorks) is the push you get from folks around you to do stuff you have never done.

I joined this company because I had had enough of consulting at 20,000 feet above sea-level, mainly looking at the "whats" and moving on to another what while another team came in and thought about the how's. You keep doing this for a while and the lack of O2 at that height finally gets to you and you long for terra firma.

Thats all for today