Core Content Only

I was reading "OMG… Ford Motor Company Admits They Are Just An OEM" over at Bex Huff's blog and I started thinking about the concept of OEM. I suppose developers act in a sort of OEM capacity every day.

I take jQuery and make it part of a larger solution. I might throw in some JSP. Perhaps I will use a little JDBC. And maybe I will decide to run it on a Windows platform. There, now I have covered the gamut from "free" to "for pay" and rolled it into a single solution. Now I wrap it with support, you know, so I can say I actually provide something more than a software dating service.

So far this does not seem like too much of a stretch to me. Let's go one level further down the stack and get a little more fine grained about our OEM discussion. Something further down than say products or projects and talk about methods and classes.

If I was a fairly new guy/gal (I'm a guy, and I don't plan on switching, not that there is anything wrong with being a gal, but I was trying to be PC, and how about we just move on, ok?), and I wanted to create a component that added a new navigation element to the menus in Content Server what would I do? Well, I AM new right, so I do not have this memorized. I hit google.com, live.com, pick your poison. I happen upon a recent article by John Sim, right about here. John talks about and shows code illustrating how to accomplish this task. I think finding, acquiring and making this work in your overall solution is a skill.

Let the flames begin. Some people call this a copy-monkey, no brains, couldn't figure it out for yourself, code PLAGERISM, etc., take your pick. That's all fine and dandy. I call it a skill. If I can get a person in an interview to demonstrate that they can exercise several avenues to find solutions, acquire and adapt these previous solutions into our current problem set and produce results for my paying customers I will hire that person every day of the week. Oh, and some people also call this ability to draw on previously solved issues something else…what is that…ah yes, experience.

I think this post was sufficiently random so I guess I will call it a day.