Re: XSLT Hello World - outreach

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 6:10 PM, Liam R E Quin <liam@xxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, 2014-03-27 at 15:45 +0000, Ihe Onwuka wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 2:42 AM, Liam R E Quin <liam@xxxxxx> wrote:
>> > On Thu, 2014-03-27 at 01:39 +0000, Ihe Onwuka wrote:
>> >> Step 1. Encourage people to use XRX or some approximation thereof for
>> >> the prototype or PofC of their application.
>> >
>> > How would we do that?
>> >
>>
>> Guerilla tactics.
>>
>> Talk directly to the people who have ownership of the problems they
>> want solved .
>
> There are an awful lot of people.
>

There is an awful lot of opportunity.

>
>> You try and get in at the prototype and PofC stage before the IT bods
>> have had a chance to over-engineer anything and to stay under the
>> radar of the risk management programme. It helps if you can come in
>> within the budgetary discretion of one or a few people.
>
> Yes.
>

You overcome their objections by pointing out something suckier that
they already do or were prepared to do. This is again easier to do if
you are not dealing with an IT person as you are less likely to get
drawn into a holy war and you can get away with what would otherwise
be heretical.

Address performance objections by saying that your X-Fu system doesn't
need to be on the critical path - it can be used to create
extracts/feeds for the systems that do.

If they want to use JSON - "So you'll be wanting schemas and a
standardized query language then won't you".

Evangelize the idea of just-in-time data formats for some systems.
Don't commit to a data format until the information is needed then
transform it into it's required form. Yes it will be less performant
but you will achieve better systems integration/interoperability and
won't ever have to reverse engineer a lossy data translation due to an
up-front committment to a one-way data format.

Finally work on XUpdate or whatever it is that is going to perform
that role so that it is as natural, obvious, familiar and standardized
as SQL Update.