Part 3: Offshoring Is a Business Model—Not a Cost-Cutting Exercise
“Startups build for scale. Consulting firms often build for speed—until they hit a wall."
I’ve seen it too many times.
In Part 1, I explained why consultants get laid off even when revenue is good.
In Part 2, I showed how a hybrid offshore-onsite model gives companies more time before resorting to cuts.
Now let’s talk about what many leaders get wrong—when and why they introduce offshoring.
Because here’s the truth:
By the time you’re scrambling to “cut costs,” it’s already too late to build culture, delivery maturity, or trust offshore.
That’s not offshoring. That’s damage control.
No more flickering of my 4K external screen
Finally after many years of frustration, managed to stop the flickering of my 4k monitor when it was connected to my surface book. Turns out that the setting in Edge “Use graphics acceleration where available” was the culprit. As soon as I turned it off, I think the built-in Windows algorithm that decides to switch the graphics card, stopped doing it and now, I have a peaceful screen helping me focus on building Semantic Data Model.
Currently reading: Flirting with Stocks by Anil Lamba 📚
Part 1: Why Am I Being Made Redundant? Understanding The Consulting Business Model
When I asked my friend:
“Do you know the business you’re in?”
He paused, then said, “I’m a data scientist. Why should I worry about that?”
That’s when I realised: most people working in consulting don’t actually understand the business model they’re part of. They’re brilliant in their domains—data, design, software, delivery—but they operate without context on how their company earns revenue or why layoffs really happen.
Making Git Bash, SSH only GIT Remote, Pageant dance together
Given a SSH only GIT Repo, was unable to git clone the repo, despite my public key being successfully stored in the remote repo’s authorization_keys file.
The git clone command invoked from within the git bash kept prompting for password, but could not authenticate for some bizarre reason. Thought it could be some proxy issue. But no, was able to ping successfully to the server hosting the git repo.
Then came the saviour. Pageant.exe, which gets installed when PuTTy SSH client gets installed in windows. Pageant runs on the system tray and serves like a vault of .ppk keys. After adding my ppk to it, was able to successfully connect to the server using putty. Then I thought git clone will also work. But No. Apparently an environment variable GIT_SSH pointing to plink.exe (found within the putty installation directory) is needed. After adding that, I was able to git clone the repository without it prompting me for a password.
Getting started with SaSS, Foundation, Compass on Windows, for PHP web application development
My friend wanted to get started with using Foundation for an upcoming Greenfield project. The trouble is Foundation comes in two flavours:
- Foundation3 with default CSS
- Foundation3 with SCSS (Sassy CSS, which is the syntax used by SASS – "Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets". SASS is an extension of CSS3 which brings familiar programming concepts to CSS like variables, nesting of selectors, functions aka mixins)
The Compass framework does not have a Windows Installer. It is only available as a Ruby Gem package, which means we have to install Ruby for Windows first. After this, we follow the following steps to get Compass with Foundation:
Start Command Prompt with Ruby (Run as Administrator)
Cross-Domain, Ajax Fundamental understanding
I had promised my students that we would implement a “Find nearest XXXX” feature in our on going project. I was doing this for the first time and thought it would not be difficult. But, most of my time while preparing for the class, I was frustrated.
I could not come up with a WCF Web Service (hosted on Visual Studio’s development web server eg., [localhost/MyService...](http://localhost:1234/MyService.svc) ) that could be invoked by Javascript on my website (hosted again on Visual Studio’s development web server eg., [localhost/MyWebsite...](http://localhost:9876/MyWebsite/Default.aspx) ).
Due to time constraints, I abandoned the WCF Service implementation and went in for the ASP.NET Ajax Page Methods
It’s only after reading this nice article, I understand the mistake I made or the way the cross-domain web requests work.
Mash-it Up with ASP.NET AJAX: Using a proxy to access remote API
ASP.NET MVC1.0 installer and VS2008 AddOns
Today I tried all things in vain to try and install ASP.NET MVC 1.0 on to my machine and it just kept failing.
Possible causes, upon Binging focused on conflicting Visual Studio 2008 addons. Among the list of such addons, I had PowerCommands. But, despite uninstalling it, mvc installer complained.
Then I begun uninstalling other possible addons (not listed in the mvc installer readme file). The first to go was SlickEdit gadgets.
Lo and behold, the MVC installation was successful.
Another Foray into Functional Programming
VS2010 beta2 has come with F#. Not that I was not interested in Functional Programming before. I’ve had a go at Erlang nearly 6 months ago and must say that I loved it. But the prospect of Functional Programming with .NET CLR (or rather DLR) definitely gives F# a special place.
More over, the most familiar IDE of Visual Studio is simply wonderful. I must admit, I’ve not yet started doing my katas on F#, partly because the functional programming concepts need to be ingrained before moving ploughing ahead. So, watched a couple of interesting videos tonight.
How to use Ninject IoC with ASP.NET MVC
The following are the detailed steps to use Ninject IoC with ASP.NET MVC
Download and install TortoiseSVN
TortoiseSVN is a Subversion client that allows you to manage source control tasks from within Windows Explorer.Download the source code for Ninject from google code
The Ninject source code is hosted in Google Code website. To download the code to PC, we will use TortoiseSVN. Before that we need the URL of the repository. This is available in the following url:TIP: Copy/Paste Columns to Multiple Tables in SQL Server
Here is a tip I discovered today while at work. I had earlier postponed the addition of common columns needed for all the tables (columns needed for auditing purposes like AddedDate, AddedBy etc.). But, the time had come now to type in and set the properties for columns on all tables one by one. I finished adding these columns to the first table. When on the second table, my laziness kicked in and wanted an easier way to do this mundane task. So,
- Opened the design of table1 using SQL Server Management Studio.
- Selected the last 4 columns.
- Ctrl+C.
- Opened the design view of table2
- Ctrl+V
Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow + Dynamic Prototyping
One word: Incredible!
The Background:
I’ve got the privilege to work on a Greenfield project which involves:
- Collecting and Analysing Requirements
- Web Application Designing (not Graphic/Web Designing)
- Implementing
- Testing
- Deploying and Going live
Remote access of SQL Server from Host Machine
I use Vista running on a Virtual PC as my development environment (I used to use WinXP, but then came along Windows Azure which required either Vista or Win Server 2003). The usage of SQL Server Management Studio on the Virtual PC was slowing down the system. So, I wanted to use my Host Operating System to access the SQL Server using SQL Management Studio. By default the SQL Server engine is configured to minimise the surface of attack. So, remote access to the sql server engine is also not enabled.
To access remotely, the TCP/IP protocol needs to be enabled, using the SQL Server Configuration Manager.
Start SQL Server from Command Line
I run a Virtual PC with Vista 32-bit as Guest operating system for my software development purposes. This VPC is quite slow despite taking measures to shut down various background services.
For reasons beyond my understanding (and me not willing to investigate on it), whenever a MMC console window is opened, CPU usage spikes to 100%. It was frustrating to to start SQL Server Engine by going to the services.msc console. So, I found a way to start SQL Server service from command line.
Please click on above image to see the command in clarity.
LINQ-SQL Nuggeting
On my recent project, I had to help my co-developer get an understanding of LINQ-SQL (Yes, I am aware that LINQ-SQL has been shelved by M$).
I remembered the brilliant MSDN Nuggets that were produced by the evangelist teams here in Microsoft UK. These were helpful short videos organised by tags based on technology/interests. They are even now hosted in MSDN UK web site. But, they have a search facility instead of the earlier tags/categories. I generally don't lend myself to searching on MSDN despite it insisting "live search" with green coloured attractions. So, felt a bit disappointed at the difficulty in locating nuggets for a specific technology/interest.
I just opted to view all the nuggets by Mike Taulty. Eventually picked up the list of nuggets for LINQ-SQL that might be of immediate help to my co-developer.
- Introduction to LINQ-SQL
-
Understanding Data Context
-
Mapping Schemas to Classes
-
Inserting data
-
Deleting
-
Updating
-
Joins with LINQ-SQL
-
Working with NULLs
- Understanding When queries execute
-
Deferred loading of related entities
-
Querying wth Stored procs
-
Updating with Stored Procs
- Transactions
Hope that helps my friend to get up to speed with this project.
Tapovanam - application design and architecture
In redesigning and redeveloping Tapovanam's (my friend's organisation) web site, I want to put in place a good architecture. The following are some of the considerations:
- A multi-tier design (mainly to separate presentation code from business logic)
- Support themes in presentation layer to switch designs easily at later stage.
- Object oriented business logic layer (BLL) (with business objects)
- Data access layer (DAL) to be independent of underlying database (to switch databases or even use XML files as data store at a later time)
- Data Transfer Objects (DTO) to pass data between BLL and DAL
- Maximum use of Data Binding at the presentation layer
Web client software factory - Hands-on-lab
Having decided on giving the WCSF a try, I had a pretty smooth experience with installing WCSF.
The February-2008 release of WCSF does not use the Enterprise Library 4.0. It uses Enterprise Library 3.1. Although, the EntLib 3.1 is sufficient for WCSF-Feb'08, it just feels good to have and build upon the latest version. It took a few careful steps to get the WCSF working with EntLib 4.0. And even after that, at times, the guidance packages generate code that still uses EntLib3.1. This is not a major problem because I was able to re-reference the projects to the latest EntLib 4.0 assemblies.
The foremost concept to understand is the Modular structuring of the Web Application.
Then comes the understanding of Model-View-Presenter pattern. It took a while for me to figure out the role of Controller.
There is also the concept of a Service that gets consumed by a Controller. This Service has nothing to do with Web Services.
In fact, there is much more fundamentals to understand than I could discover in the hands-on-lab sessions.
The best resource (and by far the best writing) to explain concepts related to WCSF is Simon Ince's blog series. His posts made me understand the purpose of WCSF and have also inspired me on the various architectural considerations.
Excluding vwd.webinfo from adding to VSS from VS 2005
When I have a ASP.NET WebSite (NOT WebApplication), I notice the presense of vwd.webinfo in my VS 2005 solution. The problem is the annoyance when it shows as a new source control item. (with a plus sign next to the filename). So, when ever I do a “Pending Checkins”/“Checkin”, it is included as part of the pending items.
At the moment I am taking care to uncheck this file and then do the checkin.
But, it would be nice to have tell VSS to exclude this file (or set of files) from trying to add to VSS.
I’ve also thought about “exclude from this project” option in Solution Explorer within VS 2005, but then it adds a file called vwd.webinfo.exclude and then this shows up in pending checkins once again.
Using the VSS client, there is a facility to include FileTypes. To my surprise, the *.webinfo was not included but still the VS 2005’s VSS plug-in tries to add it.
I’ve never managed to get an solution to this problem yet. Hopefully something might turn out at a later time.
Learning to Program the Ruby way
Well, it should not to be mentioned under this blogspace. Nevertheless, for the fun sake of it, I started to learn computer programming (now that it’s been nearly 8 years since I wrote my first proper computer program using C ). A friend of mine introduced me to a book he was having as a gift to his dad (who is starting to program). This book is titled ‘Learn to Program’ and it should be sufficient to say that it belongs to the ‘Pragmatic Series’ from the Pragmatic Programmers.
The book is amazingly interactive. I laughed and smiled while learning to program using this book. The author has done a commendable job in writing this book in such an lucid manner.
And what can I tell about Ruby? From One-Click Download and Installation upto using the SciTE editor, everything was simple and neat. Not a single problem. The language is also very very light in appearance and does a good job. I am loving it every day. Looks like after a long time, the need for learning a language for fun has really brought some fruit. Ruby is fun. No doubt! I don’t have current plans to use it for my projects. But, I may consider it to create website using the Ruby On Rails MVC Web Framework.
From VSS to CVS; From CVS to SVN
Hmm…..After VSS came CVS and now after CVS it’s time to try out SVN!
Yesterday, I was finally determined to make my machine a build system(with WinXP SP2 Pro) for which I had to install and configure CruiseControl.NET. For which I had to install VSS. Then I thought of CVS (because, I was comfortable with CVS way of doing things for the past 1 year). Oh…then I thought of SVN (because, SVN is to be a compelling replacement for CVS).
The best part of SVN is the availability of the free e-book which is quite exhaustive. I was indeed more happy to read the TortoiseSVN e-book because it gave detailed steps to install the SVN Server and not just the TortoiseSVN Client.
Since I did not have Apache Web Server in my system, I prefered the SVNServe type of SVN Server which listens on port 3690. With that I had my svn server setup but before running the server, I read a piece of information in the book which said that the svnserve.exe can be run as a windows service using a wrapper called SVNService. Without much thought, I tried running the svnserve as windows service.
But, to my despair when I tried to view the repository which I had just created using TortoiseSVN, I could not find the repository using the repo-browser of TortoiseSVN. Something has gone wrong somewhere….After 30 minutes, I started to suspect the SVNService wrapper. So, instead of going to that level of abstraction, I decided to run the svnserve manually using command prompt. And lo there was Windows XP SP2 in action asking my permission to unblock the port 3690. Phew! that was a relief. After unblocking it, I reverted back to SVNService.
There ended my initial adventure with SVN which was quite less exciting than my earlier ones with CVS and TortoiseCVS. I am expecting the real thrill when I start using ASP.NET application with SVN.