Stepping Up Your Technology Game – Defining Technology Instead of Merely Using It

Once you are leading your career and are helping people around you to transform their lives, you can invest in growing your career by impacting the technologies that you use. This has the potential to transform the lives of millions of developers around the globe and will also help you grow inside your company and give you the visibility to grow outside of your company. This chapter will show you how.

We will discuss the following in this chapter:

• How technology is standardized and what it has to do with your career.
• Identifying technologies and organizations. Learning about your programming language – how it is standardized, the basics, the features, the classes, pre-defined libraries and functions, the threading model, the intricacies of the language, and the ecosystem.
• Getting involved with standards organizations – the conventions and best practices and common...

How technology is standardized and what it has to do with your career

Technical skills are required to participate in standards organizations, but there are many other things you need to know and can learn through participating in standardization activities. One of these things is that there are hundreds of ways of doing the same thing. When you start getting involved in standardization activities and participating in the discussions, you will see this through learning about how others use the standards.

Once there is a standard defined, you will see that your first solution proposal will probably not run in production the first time, and you will learn the importance of testing and writing tests and test automation to enable standards to be widely adopted and used. You will learn that even though writing code for new features and working on greenfield projects is exciting, there is so much more involved in the evolution of a standard – you will need to maintain existing...

Identifying the technologies and organizations

You can identify the standards organizations to get involved with by taking an inventory of the technologies that you are using. Take a look at your development environment and your development stack. Learn about your programming language – how it is standardized, the basics, the features, the classes, pre-defined libraries and functions, the threading model, the intricacies of the language, and the ecosystem.

Learn about the software and hardware you are using. There are inevitably some components that are based on standardized architecture, APIs, and specifications.

Investigate which technologies you might be implementing or using as a solution in the future. There may be technologies you want to use that are based on a standard. Learning about the standard will sometimes take longer than learning about the technology, but once you identify the technology, you can go deeper into learning how that technology is developed...

Getting involved with standards organizations – the conventions and best practices

The first thing you should do to start participating in standards is to determine your role. Will you plan to lead this effort or are you looking to contribute or just to observe? Are you there to monitor, influence, or drive? Is this effort going to be long-term and strategic or a short-term engagement?

As we discussed, there are many benefits to participating in standards – finding out the latest developments, preventing unfavorable or “bad” things from happening, getting cross-industry perspectives on issues, and encouraging collaboration and innovation. Standards activities can influence standards important to you or your company.

There are also perception-related advantages to participating in standards such as communications, marketing, and mindshare increases in the market. Remember that standards participation is a two-way street: standards influence products...

Connecting your company to standards, identifying technologies and organizations, and getting involved on a deeper level

Once you have started contributing to a standardization effort, it is often necessary to bring your company into the effort in order to have maximum impact. Assuming you start as an observer versus a participant in a standards activity, the first thing to do is educate yourself and become familiar with the standard and the organization, as well as how you think your company products currently could use the standard. Review the current discussions and issues to become acquainted with some of the current considerations being contemplated in the next release or version of the standard.

The next step in this process is to have a conversation with your management and discuss some of your ideas about how your company can contribute together. You can also find the contacts at your company to discuss this with within other product or development organizations and also...

Interview

Ed Burns

Q: Hi, Ed Burns. Why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your current role?

A: My current role, as we’ll talk about, is a happy extension of my previous roles.

I work at Microsoft and I am the principal architect overseeing how Jakarta EE runtimes can find a home on Azure. In this role, I work with partnerships with the three main commercial Java app server vendors that are still producing well-used products: IBM, Red Hat, and Oracle. These vendors are responsible for multi-million-dollar accounts in the world of running Java EE workloads. They run critical Java EE workloads for all sectors of the economy, from finance to energy, technology, and communications.

We’ve got customers that are doing all of these things, and they have workloads that they want to continue to derive corporate value from by moving them into the cloud. Moreover, they want to do so in a way that lets them capitalize on the cloud value...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to make a plan to get involved in standards organizations, how to choose a few organizations to participate in to get started, how to join and participate in the process, how to bring the concerns of your company and team into the process, and how to find ways to get involved on a deeper level.

Next, let’s continue the discussion on making an impact in your technical career path by discussing how to build your personal brand and unlock the secrets to being respected and requested as a trusted advisor.