Category Archives: Enterprise Software

Productivity hacks for Architects / Designers / Tech Leads

As per my experience, the biggest productivity hacks for Architects / Designers / Tech Leads are not to decide the variables / class names / loops / scope / data types / exception handling / object relational mapping & so on – they definitely are important and should be done, but so are the below points:

1. Design patterns

2. What is the code for?

3. Functional to technical mapping

4. Solution creation

5. Pseudocode & logic steps

6. Logic of solution for design / programming problems

7. Co-ordination with stakeholders & communication

8. Code review

9. Logic review of programmed modules

10. Architecture / Design thoughts

11. Knowledge updation around tools / products / frameworks usage

12. Time management of developers

13. Task management of developers

14. Solving problems in design

15. Programming standards management

16. Technical best practices management

17. New technology exploration

18. Helping sales, presales & practice

19. Working on POCs, solutions, products and accelerators

20. Updating oneself with the current happening in industry and domain

21. Automation, Security, Testing, Deployment, Continuous integration / deployment, Integrations, Logging, User Interface / User Experience, Application monitoring, Support structure, Clustering / Auto-scaling, Non functional requirements and other such important areas

22. Establish collaboration / teamwork among technical staff working with them

23. Right documentation and knowledge sharing practices

Many get stuck in only programming, that is definitely something we all love and do, but you should be dividing your time as an Architect / Tech Lead / Designer between programming and above tasks equally. Current enterprise softwares are complex and you can’t achieve much without collaboration and above form an important link for productivity in complex, large team projects.

#architecture #design #technicallead #solutionsarchitect

Email me: Neil@TechAndTrain.com

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Enterprise environment software areas – Part 1

Over the years that I have been working in IT industry, I have got the chance to be exposed to multiple enterprise (large & mid sized company environments) level software technologies, products & frameworks. These vary in a big way from company to company and project to project / program to program but overall trend goes in a specific direction. Below is a list of enterprise software areas used by large & medium companies that I have had exposure to. This is part 1 of multi series enterprise software list of articles that I hope to bring out – I would not be able to cover all in one go. This will help students and young professionals who have not had the exposure to enterprise software environment to get an idea about these things and trigger thinking along with exploration. Building a bigger picture will help youngsters to be better architects & technology managers.

  1. Security – End point security, firewall, intrusion detection, log analysis, dependency & library analysis, penetration testing, code analysis & scanning, DB encryption, RSA, JFrog XRay
  2. Application stack: ERP, HRM, Portals, Custom solutions build on frameworks like Spring, Enterprise content management, Scanning solutions, WorkDay
  3. Analytics – Web analytics like Google Analytics, Modelling & reporting software, Data Science products for NLG, R, Python, SPSS, SAS
  4. AI / ML / Neural Networks / IoT: Keras, TensorFlow, OpenCV, Apache PredictionIO, Watson, SageMaker, Google AI, Arduino, Kaa, DeviceHive, Home Assistant, DeviceHub
  5. Mathematical modelling: MATLAB, Octave, Magnolia
  6. Integration – ESBs, REST, SOAP
  7. Cloud – AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Rackspace, SalesForce
  8. Authentication, Roles, Authorization, Web tokens, SSO – OAuth, Open ID Connect, JSON Web Token (JWT), LDAP, CAS, Shibboleth and SAML
  9. Email: Outlook, GSuite, Lotus, Apple
  10. Build, Code management & CI/CD tools: Jenkins, Maven, Ant, BitBucket, GitHub, Artifactory
  11. Code Quality: SONARQube
  12. Integrated Development Environments: Spring Tool Suite, Netbeans, Eclipse, PyCharm, Spyder, Jupyter
  13. Micro-services environment, Containers like Docker
  14. Workflow: JBPM, Activiti
  15. Business rules management – Drools
  16. Automation / Robotic process automation: BluePrism, Automation Anywhere, UiPath
  17. Low code platforms: OutSystems, SalesForce Lightning, Appian
  18. Testing: Selenium, JMeter, Katalon, TestNG, JUnit
  19. ETL: Talend, SSIS, NiFi, Airflow
  20. Web & Application Servers including JavaScript based: Apache Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, Node.JS, NGINX
  21. Configuration, deployment, container orchestration & scripting automation: Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Kubernetes
  22. API Management: APIGee, Postman, Automate, 3Scale, Dell Boomi, Mashery, Anypoint, Azure API management
  23. Infrastructure & application monitoring: Nagios, New Relic
  24. Operating systems: Windows, Linux, Unix, Ubuntu, Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, AIX
  25. Reporting & Visualization: JasperSoft, Tableau, Power BI, SAP Analytics, Kibana, Zoho Analytics
  26. BigData, Streaming, RDBMS & NoSQL: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Hadoop, MongoDB, HBase, Spark, Kafka
  27. Learning: Moodle, Coursera, PluralSight, Khan Academy, Udemy, EdX, Canvas, Google Classroom
  28. Project management full cycle including test & bug management, documentation; JIRA, Confluence, Wiki
  29. Software & Enterprise patterns around integration and more
  30. Enterprise architecture: iServer (Orbus), Archi
  31. Miscellaneous: Load balancers (Hardware & Software), Clustering related software, Ticketing management, Zoom, WebEx, Productivity & office tools for presentations, documents, calculations, Skype for Business

Hopefully this has been helpful and I will come back with more thoughts on enterprise software environment & architecture

Email me at: neil@TechAndTrain.com

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