From Integration to Billing

airG

I'm a couple of weeks into not doing the Integration Team Lead role, and it's amazing how much more time I have (mostly due to the sudden drop in the number of meetings). So what am I doing now? Billing Team Lead! So basically instead of managing all of Integrations and Billing (about 14 people total), I'm only managing 5 now. And I'm designing the architecture for our new billing platform.

The only meetings I attend now are billing related, and wrapping up a few things on the Integrations side - or things that just require someone who knows where things are, regardless of the team they manage :-). Coming up to 5 years at airG, I'm one of the few who knows where all sorts of weird things are, particularly with the older systems.

Billing

Billing is an interesting topic (to me anyways). We've done a lot of work on it over the years (integrating billing with carriers), but to design a cohesive platform that supports all sorts of new features, capabilities, reporting, etc., takes considerably more up-front thinking.

It's also an interesting mix because while we do a lot with wireless carriers, and we could just model our billing directly on how most carriers do theirs, it doesn't quite fit. We're essentially a mobile web-based social network. Our backend is more Web 2.0 than carrier (if that makes sense). We move fast, we change, we adapt and we're always being chased by our competition. That pace is reflected in our backend - it has to adapt quickly, sometimes to radical changes going on in the industry. Carrier-based systems...well, they're not noted for their rapid pace ;-). So while we can get ideas from how their systems are designed, the implementation tends to diverge to make use of our strengths and the nature of our business.

To refresh and improve my knowledge, I've been studying architecture - from the simple book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know to Beautiful Architecture to my current read Software Architecture in Practice. They've all given me ideas, though I think a large part of what I get from them is being put into the right frame-of-mind that's needed while trying to design something. If I were sitting down to code a specific section, I think I'd be better off reading something like The Pragmatic Programmer, again, to be in the right frame-of-mind.

Google

On the note of how quickly things change, there is a recording of Google's I/O conference (http://code.google.com/events/io/). The video that shows them demoing 'wave' shows how email should (and likely will) be. if you've ever wished that email really allowed you to carry on a conversation, include real-time chat, display videos (and I don't mean as attachments, I mean embedded right into your email), and other features, then check out the coming Wave.

Mac

So I've had my MacBook for a little while now. Dam it's sweet :-). A unix core with a consistent GUI? Yeah! Recently what I found surprising is that it can see and communicate with my Dell Axim x51v (PDA) via Bluetooth. Why is that a big deal? Because the Axim runs WinCE, and uses Microsoft's ActiveSync (under Windows). Or more, it tries to, but ActiveSync is a piece-o-crap that only works some of the time. I HAVE TO USE MY MAC TO SYNC TO MY WINDOWS PDA!! Microsoft = EPIC FAILURE.