Last week, I read a post at High Scalability talking about getting research out of academic environments. There is a lot of technology that starts as academic research, but there is a problem with some research being adopted by other technologists. That post has a very good explanation of why: Over the years I’ve read… Read More New Technology Success Depends On Adoptability
If you talk to a programmer, almost all software sucks, even the programs they wrote a few months ago. This is typically due to changing technology, increased knowledge or even a market shift. The software you wrote may have been a good idea when you started, but does it serve the correct purpose now? Even… Read More Re-Engineering In Agile Development Can Just Be Refactoring
By now you have heard about the controversy surrounding WordPress and Thesis, the premium WordPress theme. Matt Mullenweg has previously expressed his disapproval of premium themes and plugins that are used with WordPress. His defense is that WordPress is licensed using the GPL, and anything that runs with it should be as well. Things have… Read More WordPress And Thesis Can Argue, But What Does The License Say?
This post is inspired by a question on LinkedIn but I felt required a full blog post to really explain the answer. There are plenty of companies that still develop their applications using the traditional waterfall model, or even a complete lack of formalized processes. This is somewhat surprising considering the amount of information available… Read More How To Succeed With Scrum When Your Company Is Anti-Agile
Recently, I have been looking at various APIs again. Social media sites like Digg, Twitter, Facebook, etc, add new features to their API all the time. Working with these APIs is fairly easy, especially when you are using a library to do much of the work. Because of this, I have a feeling that we,… Read More Developers, We Still Need To Pay Attention To HTTP Responses
[UPDATE] The original survey can be found at this link at Electric Cloud. Electric Cloud, a leading provider of software production management solutions, completed a survey of software development professionals (developers, testers and managers). One of the major leads in the results was “the majority of software bugs are attributed to poor testing procedures or… Read More Survey Says: Developers Think Testing Is Failing
In case you weren’t paying attention, Google announced a few things yesterday. You have to admit, Google knows how to make announcements and they made a bunch. That link has a nice summary of most of the releases, and you can go to many of the major tech blogs to get a good feeling for… Read More Google Yells “Enterprise Developers, Enterprise Developers!”
I had been planning to write this post for months, but I never got around to filling in the details. However, Louis Gray wrote about the difficulty of learning to program for all of the different platforms. I figured that it was the perfect setup to this post. Louis explains the problem nicely: While in… Read More How Do You Learn To Program On All These Platforms?
A few months ago, I wrote about process rarely fixing the real problem. I remembered that post because of an issue that was reported to me, and Tac Anderson wrote a timely post about the same idea. He phrases the question a little differently by asking if you are solving problems or fixing problems, and… Read More Are You Treating The Symptom Or Solving The Problem?
As a software engineer moves throughout their career, they take on more responsibilities. Some of these responsibilities are mentoring junior developers and assisting others that may be having problems. Mentoring is thrown around in many conversations when dealing with senior level professionals. It is assumed that people know what to do when it is mentioned.… Read More Software Engineering Task: Mentoring and Assisting Others
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