On six years of blogging

Recently the Blog has completed six years.   A lot of things happened during this time,  buzzwords have come and gone, and the understanding of event thinking has been sharpened over time as the hype cycle progresses.   Looking at Google Analytics' statistics,  the most popular postings in this blog are:

1. On unicorn, professor and infant - a debate about event processing and analytics.  The topic of the relationships between event processing and various kind of analytics (a buzzword by its own right) are still popular and relevant.

2. On family trees - this was an off-topic post, that talked about a passover vacation in which I spent a few days tracking the roots of my family. 

3. On Dave Mayer's keynote in DEBS 2012 - this one is relatively recent, and was the champion of the last year's posts.  It talks about the phenomenon of re-inventing wheels, and in particular, Dave Mayer in his DEBS 2012 keynote invented frames which have large overlap with the notion of context.  

As for visitors - totally over the years more than 150,000 distinct readers have passed through the blog, around 3000 have visited at least 200 times.  The countries with most visitors are (in descending order):  USA, UK, Germany, India, Israel, Canada, Philippines, France, Australia and Japan  (I don't know anybody from Philippines... so will be interesting to get a feedback from a reader of that location).   The cities with most visitors are: London, New York, Tel-Aviv,  Bangalore, Manila, Paris, Singapore, Karlsruhe,   and Sydney. 

The most popular referencing site is the almighty google, but there are also many references from complexevent.com, manning.com and TIBCOblogs.

Next yer's Blog will continue to follow the trends and opinions, and will get deeper on my current work about event modeling - after we'll publicly expose it in ER 2013 (November, Hong Kong).

I always wonder why people are reading what I am writing - but the several hundreds of readers per day encourage me to continue...  although I have been written less recently  ( a matter of mood)..

Reflection on blogging in 2012

The year 2012 is going to expire today,  this has been the first year since 1985 that I have not visited the USA (I have been several times in Europe, though), somehow I don't think this will be true for 2013.

Looking at this Blog,  I had less posts this year (this is post 92nd for the year, the record year was 2009 with  162), but the flow of readers was bigger this year than the previous years,  I recently  came across an article in HBR Blog entitled "If you're serious about ideas, get serious about blogging".   

Looking at the popularity test,  the most read post this year was entitled the pilot decision making process,  which shows that the mental thinking of a pilot is situation driven.  One of the main areas that I have investigated this year is how to make people think in a situation driven way when coming to IT systems, which are dominated by the request-response thinking.   

Another popular post was   not about event processing but the one dealt with the question: Is computer science a science or engineering?   This question was triggered by the fact that my daughter Daphna participated in a science day in the high school she was going to attend (and is attending now) and it seems that while this school has computer science major, it does not regard it as a science.    My opinion is that computer science is neither science or engineering but a thing of its own.

Additional ones are again a more generic post on presentation skills.  This is a  soft skill that I think is extremely important in today's world.  I am putting emphasis in all the courses and seminars I am teaching, my source of inspiration, as I have written is Steve Jobs style of presentation.

Several popular professional posts: 

  On temporal extensions to  SQL 2011.      I am following temporal databases for many years, and the eventual extension to SQL is long overdue.   

On event server as the 21st century application server - following Paul Vincent,  I think we are seeing this shift happens.

Last but not least of the popular post was my review of Dave Maier's keynote in DEBS 2012, where I observed that the fragmentation in research make even distinguished researchers to reinvent wheels.

Let's see what blogging topic will be interesting in 2013 -- happy new year.

On the "end of the engineer"

After writing yesterday on science and engineering somebody attracted my attention to a (not new) very visible  posting by Tom Gillis on the Forbes Blog entitled: "The *End* of the engineer".    Gillis, who labels himself as an engineer who grew up in a family of engineers claims that in the past what the market competition was on better engineering and brings some examples of high-tech vendors who failed due to the fact that others succeeded to get better engineering.    The claim is that it is no longer the case, the differentiation is not in the engineering, but in understanding customers needs (even if the customers are not aware of them),  the ultimate example is the direction that Steve Jobs took Apple whose success was due to the market insights and not to superior engineering.    While engineers are still needed, Gillis claim that now they are not the one who will bring the crucial value, but those who can understand the customer's way of thinking, thus the heroes of the high-tech will be those who have "soft" skills, and the education system has to reflect it -- interesting perspective,  as you can imagine, also controversial, you can view the comments to the original Blog posting, some of them had strong opinions to either side (the author added prefix to the Blog in response)...   Not sure it is the end of engineering -- but I agree that the education for high-tech workers today is not technology only...