Every other week we sit down as a company and do what we call a Lunch and Learn. Basically, one person researches a topic, does a little presentation over lunch, and then we discuss. Yesterday was my turn and it was awesome. Not the “that’s amazing” awesome, but more of the flat-tone, blank-expression awesome, which gets followed by an awkward silence.  

I think a little background information is in order. Last December we embarked on a project unlike any other. The budget, no problem. The timeline, no problem. The technology, awesome… The production environment for the site-to-be consists of WebSphere Portal Server, DB2, and LDAP.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not implying that this is an awful set up, I just had an initial shock of “Wow, these are some heavy duty pieces of software for the web site we’re building.” In all fairness though, WebSphere Portal server does have some nice features that are hard to find elsewhere.

Back to the Lunch and Learn. My goal was to make connections between Foundation (what we already know) and WebSphere Portal Server (what we will soon know). At some point during my presentation, after several awesomes, it became obvious that Foundation was a bad choice for drawing parallels. Let me put it this way: WebSphere portal is a huge chunk of software that only a mother could love, in this case IBM. Awesome…

I should probably explain more of what I mean by awesome. IBM has this stigma of being a huge life-sucking corporation with bulky software. This isn’t true at all, and I know several people who work at IBM who are all very nice people. In this case, awesome doesn’t mean “IBM? Well there goes my soul.” What it really comes down to is that IBM as a company provides products, and WebSphere Portal Server is a product that produces websites through configuration. Radiant Core, on the other hand, provides services, and Foundation is a tool for building websites. During the presentation each flat-tone, blank-expression awesome, followed by an awkward pause, was just our minds taking one step closer to this realization. Once we made that realization, and stopped trying to think of WebSphere Portal Server as Foundation, things went a lot smoother.   

Shifting our mindset to work within the confines of another company’s product will take some effort, but in the end I think it will do Radiant Core some good. As we work through this project we’ll be doing a lot more Lunch and Learns, and lot of reflecting on building a site versus configuring a site and where we would like Foundation to eventually fall on that scale. Over the next couple weeks, I’ll be posting about everything we’ve gotten out of this project, from how we approach building software and websites to the importance of writing readable code. Check back next week and I’ll have more to share.