Building Systems in a Service Orientated Architecture Way
I can really appreciate that building things in a large-scale web system means decentralization. You need to have services, and those services have to be well-defined and walled off so that changes in one service are easily adopted by another, but don't break existing apps. In short - I get it. But that doesn't mean it's easy.
The problem I'm running into today is that in order to accomplish my goals, I need other people to add things to their services so that I can get the data from them and then process it. In the past, I haven't liked this either, but it's typically been the case that I simply figured out how to update that code, and made the changes myself. Alternatively, I just didn't have the external dependencies as management wanted me to build something from the ground up.
It's not that I think these people are bad, or can't do the work. It's that they are required to make progress. It's the difference in working in a large, disparate team, and working in a small, focused team. I like the latter because it means you do very little sitting around, and a whole lot of getting stuff done.
But the flip side is that you're the key man, and there are very few people that understand the project. Like I said, I can see the flip-side.
Today has just been one of those days where I'm doing a lot of waiting for people, and I'd like to be doing a lot of coding. After all, I'm a coder, not a professional waiter.