So I was going to title the blog entry “a day in the life”, but all I could think of then was the lyrics to the Beatles’ song of the same name. It’s funny how a song that you know the lyrics to can act as a cue for recollecting much greater amounts of data than most traditional methods of trying to memorize things. If I would have made up songs out of class material while in school, I never would have gotten an answer wrong on a test! (Not that I got too many wrong anyways, hehe)

The point of my meandering today is that being able to remember a long stream of data is incredibly valuable, and would be really helpful in trying to work with products like Sentinel. When you see a good musician perform live in an intimate setting, the most cue you’ll see the majority of them take is from a list of song titles. Lots of times they couldn’t sit down and write out sheet music for you, it all just comes naturally…it flows from their mouths or hands.

I’ve been working on laying the foundation for as many dashboard requirements as possible by trying to build all of the queries and requests and data sources beforehand. It’s a tough job, and one I would compare to recording the drums for an entire album and then going back to sing the song on top of the pre-recorded drums track. You’re doing the same thing over and over, but you have to change it slightly each time so as to allow for something variable to fit over it…a tough task if you ask me. It’s often the drumbeat or an instrumental introduction to a song that is what provides the cue for the rest of the song to come to memory, so having to play just the bat over and over isn’t only monotonous - it’s incredibly challenging!

One of the things I’m learning though is that the more comfortable you are with just laying down the foundation (with music or sentinel), the easier it becomes to create variations on it. Whether or not it’s a long-winded way of saying that “practice makes perfect”, it seems to be true of any task that the more familiar you are with the root of what you’re trying to do, the easier it is to accomplish it. If you’re struggling with putting together dashboards for sentinel, take a step back and look at the foundation of what you’re trying to do. If it were a song, you’d get the rhythm right, and then fill in on top of that. Learn what to take cues from in your day-to-day techniques. While often times you can work backwards from the element you want to display to the tracked object and request that get the data you want, more often than not, you’ll have an easier time if you make sure that the data is available and then try to display it.

In the Sentinel certification course taught by Axway they recommend the inverse approach to what I’m saying. The top-down approach by which you build a dashboard, and then build all of the queries necessary to populate that. In song-writing, it’s the equivalent of writing the lyrics before you have a melody and then trying to back-fill. It might work for you, and it might work often, but imagine if you had the melody in your head before you had to come up with the words…how easy would you be able to come up with the percussion to back that up, or the strings to put the finishing touch on it?

If you build from the bottom up, try building from the top down, and vice versa. See how it feels to do things the other way. You’re still filling in all the blanks, but by changing the order in which you fill them in you’re creating room for the blanks earlier or later to vary.

Talk about a wordy post, I’m exhausted just reading the last sentence!

Regards,

Tony