Today was the first day of a two day class on the CRM Tech Stack. This is a required class for every CRM developer, I suspect mandatory because our last release had a lot of problems with many applications not meeting 100% of the standards. Not that I blame those groups because the standards have been rapidly changing the last year and it's tough to have to write your code one way and then change it later, or even to know that you're supposed to change it, such is the state of communication in our division.

Personally, I get a couple of dozen corporate emails a day. Everything ranging from internal propaganda (new products and services that Oracle is going to sell) to system status (test database xxx will be down tonight) to important information (all hands meeting Friday) to whatever. It's a lot of information if you take the time to read it all and frankly I just delete most of it with nary a scan through.

Of course, that means occassionally miss an important "make sure your code does this" email. But that kind of stuff shouldn't be sent through email. Really, there should we written standards that developers can reference. But there aren't. Heck the ones that are available aren't all in one place, but scattered all over Oracle. (That's one problem we have, every group has a web site -- usually several -- using their favorite web server and format, since there aren't any web site standards. All in all, really hard to find pertinent information in Oracle, even with our AltaVista search engine.

So it's a wonder that any group adheres to some of the standards in the first place. Usually what they're adhering to are PL/SQL standards we inherited from the ERP Division. Web standards and Java standards are very much in flux and not widely communicated. Come to think of it, I think there's a weekly meeting about standards and we have a group rep in it, but I never hear anything about it. Or maybe I'm just imagining it.

In any case, here I am with a couple hundred other developers and product managers. Listening to different presenters drone on while slides are shown on the screen -- the same slides that we get in a softbound format. At least they occassionally go over more than the slides cover, otherwise it would be truly pointless. In fact, they sometimes have different slides up there as the material was changed between the last session and this one. (There are three sessions: Thursday/Friday, Monday/Tuesday, Wednesday/Thursday, all full. Which means that at about 150 developers a session -- there aren't that many product managers -- we have some 450 developers in the CRM Division, out of 1200 employees. A pretty high developer ratio.)

Unfortunately, the presenters (developers and managers from the Foundation group) use way too many colors in the slides. Especially bad is highlighting one line out of a slide of code, something that doesn't show up on our hard copies. Or using green and yellow to denote different links, again something that doesn't show up. In addition to the two books of slides we have another workbook with the actual procedures and such. All in all not much point in coming here as you can read the material yourself.

But we did get to ask questions. Which reminds me, Chantelle Cooper was there. She's the girl from WCBS. She sat at our table (of about six CCT developers, Simon and I and four people from email) and she seemed to get along well with everyone else. The point is that every time a presenter asked if there were any questions, she'd raise her arm and ask a couple of questions. Some of the questions were warranted (when will this be available, what about those people who can't use this) but most of the questions were beyond the scope of the presentation (why don't we use this technology, why not incorporate this or that standard).

She did this the next day too and I had forgotten just how annoying that is. She just monopolized the Q&A session until they had to move on to the next topic. Patrick, at the WCBS luncheon, opined that Chantelle asks questions for a sort of "look at what I know" reason. That seems about right. Not that she's a bad person. I've driven her home a couple of times and she can discuss subjects and not be so annoying. I guess her work personality is something she needs to work on.

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