{"id":720,"date":"2009-08-13T16:04:36","date_gmt":"2009-08-13T23:04:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/?p=720"},"modified":"2009-08-13T16:04:36","modified_gmt":"2009-08-13T23:04:36","slug":"becoming-the-non-coding-pm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/2009\/08\/becoming-the-non-coding-pm\/","title":{"rendered":"Becoming the Non-Coding PM<\/span>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve had a couple of inter\u00adest\u00ading com\u00adments on my piece about Cod\u00ading vs Non-Cod\u00ading Pro\u00adject Man\u00adagers<\/a>; in my case it was the way things worked out rather than a delib\u00ader\u00adate choice.<\/p>\n

After my degree in phys\u00adics, and a couple of years of post-doc\u00adtor\u00adal work (which involved some com\u00adputer stuff, of course) I got post-gradu\u00adate dip\u00adloma in inform\u00ada\u00adtion man\u00adage\u00adment that included all the good stuff such as data\u00adbase design, unix sys\u00adtems admin\u00adis\u00adtra\u00adtion, trans\u00adac\u00adtion pro\u00adcessing, C, etc., etc. And then went to work for a small SGML<\/span> doc\u00adu\u00adment con\u00adsult\u00ading house doing, amongst oth\u00ader things, the motif inter\u00adfaces for a doc\u00adu\u00adment retriev\u00adal applic\u00ada\u00adtion, schema design for dic\u00adtion\u00adar\u00adies and encyc\u00adlo\u00adpe\u00addi\u00adas, and oth\u00ader related work. I ended up doing more of the cus\u00adtom\u00ader-facing work, and less of the back-room cod\u00ading, mostly because I was bet\u00adter at it than some of the oth\u00ader people who worked there, good at talk\u00ading to the cus\u00adtom\u00ader and tak\u00ading their require\u00adments back to the developers, and good at trans\u00adlat\u00ading the developers\u2019 con\u00adcerns in terms the cus\u00adtom\u00aders could understand.<\/p>\n

When I got to SoftQuad, the idea was that I\u2019d spend 50% of the time cod\u00ading, and 50% doing oth\u00ader use\u00adful stuff. The oth\u00ader use\u00adful stuff, as is its wont, grew. As an example, when we loc\u00adal\u00adized HoT\u00adMet\u00adaL Pro, I was the one work\u00ading with the trans\u00adlat\u00adors to make sure the strings made sense for the con\u00adtext. I checked the Ger\u00adman ones myself since I speak flu\u00adent Ger\u00adman and worked with a French-speak\u00ading per\u00adson on staff for the French ones. I worked with the Adapt\u00adive Tech\u00adno\u00adlogy Resource Centre<\/a> on ways to make the pro\u00adgram access\u00adible, as well as fig\u00adur\u00ading out the best way to incor\u00adpor\u00adate access\u00adib\u00adil\u00adity check\u00aders to encour\u00adage users to make the HTML<\/span> access\u00adible. I rep\u00adres\u00aden\u00adted SoftQuad on many W3C<\/span> and OASIS<\/span> tech\u00adnic\u00adal com\u00admit\u00adtees, bring\u00ading back the res\u00adults of com\u00admit\u00adtee dis\u00adcus\u00adsions to the engin\u00adeer\u00ading team and try\u00ading to make sure the com\u00admit\u00adtees did the right thing without mak\u00ading it more dif\u00adfi\u00adcult for us to imple\u00adment. I coded demo scripts and taught tutori\u00adals on how to use the macro sys\u00adtem in XMet\u00adaL, but that was the extent of my pro\u00adgram\u00adming. Everything else took enough time that by the time I left SoftQuad after 7 years, the joke was that I owed my boss 3.5 years worth of coding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve had a couple of inter\u00adest\u00ading com\u00adments on my piece about Cod\u00ading vs Non-Cod\u00ading Pro\u00adject Man\u00adagers; in my case it was the way things worked out rather than a delib\u00ader\u00adate choice. After my degree in phys\u00adics, and a couple of years of post-doc\u00adt\u00ador\u00adal work (which involved some com\u00adputer stuff, of course) I got post-gradu\u00adate dip\u00adloma \u2026 Con\u00adtin\u00adue read\u00ading \u201cBecom\u00ading the Non-Cod\u00ading PM<\/span>\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-project-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=720"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":724,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720\/revisions\/724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}