Thedwick

Maybe it’s my (ancient history) background as an EMT, but I like to use medical metaphors to describe some common themes in software projects. If you liked my post on application guarding you might like this one, too.

Many of us have been on a project that seems to be alive with frenzied activity, but none-the-less isn’t going anywhere. To me, this sounds so much like the medical condition ventricular fibrillation that I’ve decided to dub the project version of it “Project Fibrillation.”

When someone has a “heart attack,” what they are actually experiencing is ventricular fibrillation. Their heart hasn’t stopped beating–quite the contrary their heart is alive with frantic electrical activity. The real problem is that the electrical activity has become uncoordinated such that when some cells in their heart muscle are squeezing with all their might, other cells are simultaneously relaxing. The net result is their heart expends a great deal of energy but doesn’t actually move any blood anywhere, kind of like a three-year-old wildly kicking in a swimming pool when learning to swim. All the frantic heart activity quickly uses up energy in the heart muscle and since blood isn’t moving properly that energy isn’t replaced. This negative feedback cycle quickly leads to cell death.

Sound like a project you’ve worked on?

Projects that are just getting themselves into trouble can enter fibrillation if they are not careful. A fibrillating project is one that spends much more energy on non-productive activities than it spends on productive activities. For example:

I am pleased to announce a new partnership between Thedwick, LLC and GridGain, a leading, open-source cloud computing platform. With this new partnership, we now have even greater insight and access into the cloud computing world, which should help our emerging technology and research offering help clients even more than before.

GridGain firmly believes “that grid computing technology is reaching the point where it will make a transition from one-off and expensive solution to ubiquitous technology available for the project of any size and complexity” and we are proud to be a part of making that vision happen.

I’m pleased to announce the first alpha release of a SQL tool I’ve been using to reverse engineer applications and find out what SQL is called from what code: jdbcGrabber, the JDBC wrapper for SQL analysis.

With this tool, you can sniff SQL as it passes through your application and see stack traces of where it was called from. Its pluggable architecture allows you to also inject your own, custom monitoring code with a minimum of fuss.

Try it out and, as usual, please let me know if you have any feedback or improvements.