What’s your Tech Stack?
I have been assigned a “little buddy” at work to become my replacement — do you think they know something? This is the first move toward redundancy in quite some time, so maybe so.
Anyway, so I started asking some basic questions of this guy to assess where to start with the transitioning. Unfortunately, my initial questions included Spring Framework, MVC, servlet, but all received negative responses. And then when I got up to draw on the whiteboard I asked if he knew UML. Negatory.
Its not his fault, of course, but I started thinking how hard it is to replace someone like me. I’m sure this will come off arrogantly, but I don’t mean it to be. The fact is, at my level, I know lots of stuff. And you can’t just parachute a warm body into place and expect a replacement in two months. I’m basically going to have to build this guy from the ground up.
So it led me to wonder what our tech stack is. And so I started to draw it out for him just as a means to highlight what we needed to cover and why we needed to meet daily from now on. In no particular order, here are some technologies and tools that I deal with. And I’m sure I’ll leave some obvious ones out:
Java, JSP, JSTL, Freemarker, Spring Framework, Acegi Security for Spring, EhCache, Tiles, Sitemesh, Log4J, Ant, RegEx, JUnit, HTTP, SOAP, XML, XHTML, CSS, SQL, Bash Scripting, Solaris, Windows, DOS, Intellij, Toad, Subversion, Test Director, Inquira, Sun One Web Server, Apache, WebLogic, Alteon, Visio, Oracle, Firefox, Firebug, IE, Siteminder, CAS, SSH, Telnet, AppGate, SCP, UML, RSS, Checkstyle, JCoverage, etc.
I’ve left out the obvious ones like Word, Excel, and Outlook.
Looking at the list that I know is probably woefully incomplete, I can’t help but think that most management and most business folks grossly underestimate us. So its no wonder, they deal me a newby.
For my Rails and Ruby audience, obviously there’s a slew more elements that I could have added, although the cool thing about Rails is that your tech stack compacts quite a bit as has been pointed out by many before me.