BBQ

We had a party the other day at my company.

I had a guy come up to me and tell me that his team was crazy. They were working on Java with Linux. He said they were even using Cygwin.

Cygwin on Linux? I was confused.

Cygwin, I thought was a way to have emulate the Linux shell on Windows.

I attempted to clarify but I had two people in agreement that I was nuts. Then they said Cygwin is perfectly fine on Linux if you don't mind it running without the IDE. I'm like ... what IDE? Then they said that it's a good handler of source control.

I just went to the cygwin.com site and my initial definition is about right. There IS Cygwin on Red Hat. It's all about porting Linux apps to Windows. Cygwin/X apparently is doing the X Window thing on Windows.


No one would explain it to me though. I figure that at least they must have heard of my version of Cygwin.

Preview

Is it more important to have a developer who understands sales? Or is it more important to have a salesman understand development?

I'm taking a good look at how software consulting works.

The hierarchy of a consulting company (not too much from a regular software company) is:

Sales
(Technical Sales)
Account Manager
Program Manager
(Architect)
Team Lead
Lead Developer
Senior Consultant
Junior Consultant

Sales - does the immediate pitch of the product
Technical Sales - pitches the technical side of the product
Account Manager - performs high level assistance of the service
Program Manager - overlooks the health of the project in relation to deadlines
Architect - overlooks the overall technical architecture of the project
Team Lead - matches the technical implementation to the architecture to the specs
Lead Developer - does the implementation of the architecture
Senior Consultant - developer with imaginary importance
Junior Consultant - developer with no importance

I define these levels because to execute a large-scale successful product requires a good level of management between the two. In certain cases, no management at levels.