Bulldozer00's Blog

During the week of January 25-29, I, along with 19 other enginerds will be attending a SysML training course given by Doug Rosenberg of ICONIX. At this point in time, I think the specific course is named “SysML JumpStart Training with Enterprise Architect“. I love the following “no-candyasses-allowed” warning at the bottom of the web page:

JumpStart Training is not a class for uncommitted students or uneasy beginners. Because of the rapid-learning atmosphere, JumpStart Training is ideal for those looking for an intense and highly-focused training course which will get the project up and running, fast!

I’m grateful for the opportunity and excited to attend the course because I’m a big fan of both the UML and its SysML profile. Over the past several years, I’ve been teaching myself at a leisurely pace how to apply these two increasingly important technologies to the software design and specification work that I do.

Because of the powerful and sprawling nature of the UML family, unless you’re an Einsteinian genius, it’s my uncredentialed opinion that you can’t learn UML or SysML overnight. The symbology, syntax, and semantics of the languages are rich and necessarily complex because they’re designed to tackle big hairball software-centric systems problems. Based on my personal experience, I don’t think very many people can acquire a deep understanding of the UML’s 13 diagrams or SysML’s 9 diagrams in 5 days, but you gotta start somewhere and formal training is a good start. We’ll see how it goes.

While surfing the ICONIX web site, I stumbled upon this “MDG Technology For DDS” page (MDG = Model Driven Generation, DDS = Data Distribution Service). Interestingly, there seems to be no equivalent “MDG Technology For CORBA” page on the ICONIX web site. It’s interesting because I’m currently fighting a CORBA vs DDS battle in house. It’s even more interesting in that this InformIT author page states that Doug Rosenberg has previously developed and taught a CORBA class. I’ll be sure to ask Doug about this anomaly when I meet him.