NBC Universal
Company Summary
“NBC Universal is one of the world’s leading media and entertainment companies in the development, production, and marketing of entertainment, news, and information to a global audience.”
Yup, and it’s owned by GE. I figured, if I work for any company in Los Angeles, it might as well be a film studio. So I found myself working for the Enterprise Architecture group of NBC Universal right on the Universal Film Studio lot (and yes, I had access to the golf carts and could cruise through the entire lot and all the sets).
Technology Keywords
RUP, Rational, EJB/JBoss, Struts, Oracle, Hibernate, ClearStory DAM
Projects
As part of the central architecture group, we oversaw the technical design of all custom development in the company, and that was a lot. All development work was performed by offshore companies, also called GDCs (global development centers). The organization is strongly RUP-driven and all software architecture work is done in UML with Rational Rose.
I am very familiar with UML1 and I have been known to sprinkle it throughout my documentation. I personally prefer to use it in a more agile way — in whiteboarding sessions or to document central aspects of an architecture. Not in a strong forward-engineering fashion.
The architecture group had defined a very centralized architecture in which all projects shared a common database (for data re-use) and a pool of common domain objects and DAOs. While this looks like it would save time and money at first glance, it did quite the opposite. As a matter of fact, the core components were continuously modified by the project teams which broke a lot of things. Also, shared data only works if the reader/writer problem has been sufficiently solved and everyone has the same understanding of the concepts that are being stored (e.g. project A might have a different understanding than project B about what a “Media Object” is). Naturally, this led to a lot of problems.
Some of the projects I took part in during my short time at NBC:
- Introduced Hibernate into the core framework (it was using plain JDBC and resource-based transactions prior)
- Introduction of ClearStory digital asset management for the stills photography group (mostly an out-of-the box implementation)
- Reviewed a ton of UML diagrams
- Cruising through the lot with a golf cart
A combination of too many bad UML diagrams and the constantly good weather and palm trees which I couldn’t get used to led me to the conclusion that I needed another drastic move: New York.
1Still my favorite interview question: What’s the difference between aggregation and a composition
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