TEAM Zarate Tarrani Notes From the Field

It's a beautiful, sunny day in Tustin, California and as soon as I turn my notes from last night's surfing into an entry and post it I'm going outside to enjoy the day.

My travels last night took me to a number of interesting weblogs, all of which impressed me because of the excellent writing and wealth of technical information each contained. My first stop was Shane McChesney's Skipping dot net log. This weblog is set up as a discussion page and three major topic sections:

1. Book Reviews
2. Linkfests, which contain comprehensive collections of links and information on:
   • Extreme Programming
   • Jabber
   • RSS
   • SOAP
   • Weblogging and Content Management
   • XML-RPC
   • Zope
3. Tools (Linux, MySQL PostgreSQL and Python)

The interrelationships between and among the linkfest topics are shown in the SDN Content Web Map that Shane has taken the time to devise. There's no doubt that this weblog and associated content are pro-open source. The site's name, skipping dot net (skipping .NET), speaks volumes about Shane's approach - something with which I wholeheartedly agree.

Although the site that supports William Oellermann's outstanding book, Architecting Web Services, is not a weblog it is an important resource to web architects who are seeking information about web services architecture. Since Linda and I have each written a review of the book on Amazon I won't rehash it here. What makes Mr. Oellermann's site so valuable is the way it seamlessly augments the book by providing up-to-date source code, a web services test environment so you can actually test services that you've written, and PowerPoint presentations that cover a few of the book's topics.

Mark Pilgrim's weblog is a gem. If you're a Python developer Mark's site is a springboard to his online book titled Dive Into Python. If you're someone who admires a person for baring their soul while imparting wisdom and inspiration, then you'll get spiritually recharged while reading some of Mark's entries. His A lot of effort went into making this effortless essay stands out as one of the most touching and inspirational pieces of writing I've read in my life.

Joel Spolsky's weblog is another treasure trove of information and ideas. I bookmarked his The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code entry and found one nugget of information gold after another in his archives. If you're interested in copyright and intellectual property issues (among other topics) you'll like Zimran Ahmed's weblog. I especially enjoyed his succinct and articulate writing style and wide range of topics covered.

Linda and I have stopped posting about Doug Kaye's book here because the most appropriate place to discuss the book is in the book discussion forum that Doug has going. Any posts here will only diffuse the discussion, and ideas will get lost in the confusion of parallel discussions of the same topic.

Finally, Linda encouraged me to post more here about the work she and I have developed jointly and independently on service level management and integrating applications and service delivery. I think the best place to post that information is in our IT Operations Management Forum, which is hosted on Delphi. This will allow for interaction if anyone is interested in those topics, and will leave this weblog less cluttered. On that note I'm off to enjoy the day and get some sun.