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Dan Naglehas replaced Rory Kelly in the Professional Development Committee.

Today, Leonard Sitongia announced that he will not be the chair of Best-Practices Committee, nor he will participate in any other SEA Committee anymore.

Please join me in thanking Leonard for the great job he did in helping SEA and Software Engineering at UCAR moving forward. We wish him all the best.

SEA demonstrated that Software Engineering at UCAR can be fostered. We are looking for volunteers for the many activities we plan to do in the future. Please contact me if you think you can contribute

Hi,

I was a part of the SEA in the early years, when I was a software engineer in CISL.  I left CISL to return to my astronomy roots, and moved back to HAO.  But, I still do a lot of software engineering, and consider that a significant part of my role here.

When I started in CISL, I looked around and talked to people about languages in use and best practices.  I didn't find a lot of coherence and being in the only SE in a group, I was pretty much on my own to decide on my best practices.  I defined my practices for how to start a project, using use-case-driven design, web and paper documentation, design and development reviews (mirrors are helpful when looking over my own shoulder).

Later, I joined the group that Leif was in, and we worked on defining practices for the group.  I disagreed with some of it, but we had collegial conversations.

I understand that Leif chaired the Best Practices committee and they produced a report.  That's great news.  I'm now going to step forward to be the chair of the committee.  I'm thankful for the work which the committee has produced.

One of my first tasks will be to transfer that documentation into this new SEA site.

Next, I hope to survey SEs to find out where their interests are regarding this committee.  Depending on the outcome of that, I hope that there will be support for continuing the Best Practices work.  I think this can be of great benefit to people here who are new to the SE role.

BTW, I ran into Leif at a cosmology club meeting last night.  He chuckled when I told him I would become the chair.  Nice Cheshire Cat smile.

Please do give me feedback at any time, through comments in this blog or via email to me at sitongia@...

On 2010 December 16th we'll have a townhall meeting at 3pm in the CG1-1210 South Auditorium . There won't be any SEA seminar in December.

Agenda:

1. Seminar, Classes and Forum balance for 2010 -  short talk from the Seminar, Professional Development and Knowledge Management Committee chair
2. Vision and plans for 2010 - short talk as point 1 above
3. Large Q&A and discussion secion. Topics that we'd like to cover:
   1. how is SEA and its chairs doing?
   2. any suggestion, request or discussion of topics for Seminars and Classes you'd like to have in 2011
   3. are we striking the right balance, or (say) you would like to have more "internal practices", more "hands on" or more "talks from luminaries"?
   4. any suggestion for Knowledge Management?
   5. current SEA chairs are all in CISL - in fact they are all in CSG. Are we biased? Do we represent and satisfy the needs of the whole organization?
   6. current committees are all made of zero of one person. Is this a problem? Would you like to volunteer a little of your time in SEA?
   7. is there anything else SEA can do for you?
   8. any other business

Minutes of the meeting available here.

You might have noticed that the seminar list had a glitch: only the latest video showed up. We've just fixed the issue.

Please let us know if you discover any problem in this website, have any idea about it, or just about SEA in general.