Busy

It's been a busy few months, and many of my side projects have suffered. Fortunately my current project will wrap up in the next couple of months, which will hopefully mean that I'll have more time to dedicate to some coding projects.

Without getting into too many details, I've been working on a data warehouse / reporting project since October, and it has been a very rewarding experience. The client does meaningful work (saving lives), and we're building a system around their operational data. You can't ask for a better project than that!

Website 3.0

With the new year will come a new web site (yeah, that's going to be the third iteration in 2 years... kaizen!) I managed to snag a license of ExpressionEngine (a fantastic, powerful content management system) over the Christmas holidays, so I'll definitely be taking advantage of that purchase.

Mobile Development

Before the holidays came, I managed to mess around with Appcelerator Titanium and built my first iPhone app (for fun, not for sale) and I have to say, it's an interesting platform. I just downloaded Ansca Mobile's Corona SDK, which is based on the LUA scripting language. I'm curious to see how different that one is. Before you dismiss LUA as a language, keep in mind that Adobe Lightroom and World of Warcraft are LUA based. Those apps are nothing to sneeze at. I don't know what it is, but I just can't seem to force myself to go native and learn Objective-C. I think part of it has to do with "growing up" with the Visual Studio model of development. XCode just doesn't click for me. Who knows, maybe my attitude will change at some later point.

I will say this about the abstracted SDKs for mobile development. The big weakness is that they're always playing catchup with Apple on the SDK features, and you're heavily reliant on a single vendor for your app. Apple could easily change their App store rules tomorrow and ban these SDKs. And each SDK has limitations and bugs. Titanium's got a broken iOS Countdown Timer control that is still waiting to be fixed after several months. Corona doesn't seem to support https calls yet, which prevents you from making secure web API calls behind the scenes. Sure, Corona is primarily designed for games, but the built-in interactivity functionality can actually be used to make some interesting business apps. In any case, I'm going to be watching these SDKs closely over the course of 2011.

Cognos 10

Cognos 10 rolled out to a lot of hoopla, but I can't say I'm totally impressed. And being vendor agnostic, I don't have to turn on any "shill mode" in my commentary. In continuing the vein of producing feature-checklist-friendly releases (in all fairness to Cognos, this is a problem with all enterprise software vendors), they have produced an incremental improvement over Cognos 8.

The "mobile" offering that got a lot of hoopla appears (I haven't had a chance to examine the app first hand) to be a simple wrapper over Webkit combined with some fixes in their client code. It is hardly an optimized mobile release. If you look at some of what RoamBI, Microstrategy and others have done, the mobile offering I saw from Cognos 10 is rather weak by comparison. Yet another "feature checklist" over "feature excellence" decision by the development team.

On the plus side, at least you can do bullet charts in Cognos 10.

NoSQL

I've been playing with NoSQL databases since last summer (yeah, I'm late to the party), and there's a lot to like about them. You can argue that they are the contemporaries to the Lotus Domino (I heart Domino, I'm probably the only one left) data store, and I guess they are, without the GUI baggage of the Notes client. The two projects that I evaluated were CouchDB and MongoDB. They're both great databases, and I really love the schemaless nature of these databases. That they speak JSON natively is a big plus in my mind, especially if you're developing web applications.

Macs

So I've done a few Windows centric engagements now using my Macbook as my primary laptop. It hasn't hurt me yet. My toolkit for the client work is still Windows XP running on VMWare (while I have licenses for both VMWare and Parallels, I use VMWare for interoperability with my peers). For many of my non-development tasks, I use Mac only applications, such as iWork and BEEDOCS Timeline 3D. Using Keynote, Numbers and Timeline 3D are actually a major competitive advantage for me. My presentations in Keynote are probably 1000 times more polished than anything you can do in PowerPoint with 1/1000th of the effort. I started using Numbers to build status reports, and I was able to create polished looking reports in a fraction of the time it would have taken me in Word or Excel. I also use Numbers to wireframe report designs (offtopic: are you wireframing your report designs? If not, shouldn't you?) Finally, I use Timeline 3D to present a visual representation of how a project is going to run. It's a great pre-project presentation approach that has a smaller learning curve for your audience than an oversized Gantt chart.

This year, I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and buy an upgrade to Windows 7. I'm not looking forward to all the annoyances associated with the dumbed down interface (don't get me started on Windows Server 2008), but at some point, all of my clients will be on Windows 7.

Buzzwords

So predictive analytics didn't really materialize into any really big win in 2010, and it's still floating around this year. Social BI is the big term this year, with vendors hoping to capitalize on the Facebook phenomenon. Personally, I think it's an empty promise in its current form.

A couple of trends I noticed on B-Eye last year was chatter on Agile Business Intelligence and NoSQL databases. I was amused that someone at B-Eye jumped on the Agile bandwagon about ten years late. Having worked on my share of Agile projects, caveat emptor. While I'm not sure that NoSQL has a place in business intelligence (at least in its current form), at least B-Eye had its (ahem), eyes open, and didn't ignore the technology altogether. MapReduce could find an interesting role in analytics. I have mixed feelings about B-Eye as a news site. It's sort of a guilty pleasure for me, because their content can be so fluffy that it is hard to swallow, but I do like to see what they consider to be topical.

Trends

I predict that R is going to only become more and more mainstream as an analysis tool. I also predict more growth for open-source based BI solutions such as Pentaho and Jasper. An interesting company to watch is SnapLogic, an ETL tool that talks to web APIs. RESTful API integration has been weak at best in all of the mainstream commercial ETL solutions, and I think SnapLogic might be onto something.

The cloud, if it hadn't crossed the chasm in 2010, should cross it in 2011. Amazon EC2 is a powerhouse that companies should spend the time to learn about. Salesforce's cloud offerings (database.com, heroku, etc.) are also impressive. I find it difficult to recommend heavy infrastructure purchases to smaller to medium sized companies, when private clouds are becoming viable solutions.

More to Come

Well, that's it for now. One massive January brain dump. There's some stuff that I have in mind that I'm not ready to talk about (or don't yet have the time to commit to), but here's looking to a great 2011 for everyone.