Tim McElligott Blog: Finding the Wow in BSS/OSS

Twice this morning already I have said to myself, “Wow."

It’s sad how infrequently I say that these days in a positive context. More often it comes out like this: “Wow, I can’t believe Blagojevich got off," or “Wow, another child shot dead playing jump rope."

Today’s wows came before breakfast. They were the good kind, the rare kind.

There has been a coyote roaming the yard the last few days, so the dogs can’t be left alone — they are attractive little morsels. So as I stood on the patio this morning acting as a serviceable scarecrow and reading my Kindle, I got to the big twist at the end of Margaret Atwood’s book, “The Handmaid’s Tale" and had to finish. When I did, I felt that twinge of melancholy that comes with the punctuation marking not only the sudden end of a good book, but the end of a new relationship — and I said, “Wow." That’s what I call excellence.

I scanned the yard and the crouching arch of my dachshunds’ elongated spines told me they were not yet through with their business.  And so I hit next on my electronic book and picked at random Carl Sandburg’s “The People, Yes" from “The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry" and got another wow.

The people is a polychrome,
a spectrum and a prism
held in a moving monolith,
a console organ of changing themes,
a clavilux of color poems
wherin the sea offers fog
and the fog moves off in rain
and the Labrador sunset shortens
to a nocturne of clear stars
serene over a shot spray
of northern lights.

You’ll have to read the rest of it for context, but it is, in part, about the resilience of people despite their hard times (written in 1936, much tougher times that we face today — so far.)  They plod, they march on, they take it, yet all the while reaching for the strength of the winds lashing the earth. To them, too, I say “Wow."

Finding unexpected excellence in the world of humans makes for a good day. Sometimes I forget that it is all around me. In the world of technology, specifically software, it is getting increasingly difficult to identify individual achievers of excellence. There may be more excellence in our software world today than ever before, but it tends to come as a collective effort, open source being a good example.

Back in 1845, when George Boole published his system for symbolic and logical reasoning, it was easy to see that there was singular excellence of craft in his work. When in 1951 Maurice Wilkes, Stanley Gill, and David Wheeler developed the concept of subroutines in programs that created re-usable modules and formed the basis of software development, collaborative excellence was already becoming the norm. Still, individuals stood out. Douglas Engelbart’s invention of the mouse in 1964 was a bit of brilliance. And who knew two years later when Les Earnest developed the first spell checker how important that would become for us illiterates.

Remember Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston’s VisiCalc spreadsheet in 1978? Neither do I, but I appreciate their excellence every day.

With every new real-time capability, every new analytics engine and intelligent network element, excellence is in action. The long, slow slog from Automatic Message Accounting (AMA) to policy-based charging, has been one extended example of excellence on display, as imperceptible at times as plate tectonics and just as formative.

Excellence is something we at B/OSS try to recognize formally on an annual basis. To find the best of the best in applied excellence, we need your help. You’re likely in the middle of a deployment, migration, integration or implementation of some kind right now. Take notes. Think about how to quantify or explain the benefits of your activities. Nominate your effort for a B/OSS Excellence Award. Take your time. You have months to put it together. But keep it in mind as you get up every morning hoping to experience excellence.

Just don’t stand downwind from a defecating dachshund as you do it. Kind of ruins the effect.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@vpico.com or leave a comment below.