// archives

The Industry

RSS feed for this section
This category contains 47 posts

Rails Testing, TDD, BDD, and Competitive Advantage [Not]

By michael ⋅ June 26, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Finally made it up to the two chapters on testing in the Obie Fernandez book ‘The Rails Way’. This is one of the best programming framework books I have read. Concise, clear, balanced. Up to now it was only the database chapters that were a wee bit presumptive about the depth of knowledge on the […]

Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup Report June 3, 2008

By Michael ⋅ June 5, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Another month, another MeetUp. It is nice to be able to share my excitement about all the exciting things happening on the net with 300 or so other people for an hour and a half every month.
This is the time of year when it is too warm for buildings to run heat and too cool […]

The Hardest Thing About Software Development Is…

By michael ⋅ May 29, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

[besides funding it] … is….
Variable and Method (and Product!) Names?
I used to think it was choosing the perfect variable and method names. Naming is certainly harder than the implementation of 98% of all the methods out there. For awhile I just tried to pick a very clear, yet lengthly, de-facto description of what the method […]

Salaries plunging? Students shunning IT? U.S. loosing its technical edge?

By michael ⋅ May 29, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Job market weirding out?
Maybe there is a pattern here?
When students see that they can make as much or more being a plumber or an electrician or MBA than going into a field that requires more brain power and training, and in which the big companies (MSFT, Google, etc) doing the hiring are bribing [aka lobbying] […]

Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup Report May,6 2008

By Michael ⋅ May 7, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

This month’s New Tech MeetUp played to another overflow crowd. It seemed to start closer to 6:00 this time, as opposed to 6:20 last month - or maybe it was just that I had decided to come later, arriving closer to 5 minutes early instead of 15 minutes early.
Before the meeting there was held a […]

The family that ‘user tests’ together…

By Michael ⋅ April 26, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

… is a lot more effective than stakeholders that user test together.
At least, that is our recent experience after 3 decades of ‘user testing’ with stakeholders (including target end-users).
Perhaps it is because they had no previous experience with the app. Or perhaps it was because they weren’t trying overly hard to help… or hinder. They […]

The CSS Paradigm

By Michael ⋅ April 26, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

CSS has been on my mind lately, in a big way [when you see our next product, you will understand why :-)]
We have all the books: The Eric Meyer books, Zen of CSS Design, etc. etc. and last and best Transcending CSS [best because it is the least evangelical].
I have yet to hear one good […]

The Guerrilla Methodology: Approaching the Situation

By Michael ⋅ April 3, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

The first step is to study the situation on the ground.
How many processes are currently in place. Which ones have been successful? Why? Which ones have failed? Why?
It has been traditional to blame the management and/or software staff for any and all failures - holding the methodological processes sacrosanct. Properly applied, They Can Not […]

The Guerrilla Methodology

By michael ⋅ April 3, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

There is a lot to say on this subject, and this will just be a gentle introduction.
We have seen a log of methodologies come. We have seen a lot of methodologies go.
Where to they go? They go into the Guerrilla Methodology Toolbox.
Top-Down, Bottom-Up, Step-Wise Refinement, Flow Charts, Structured Code Reviews, Nightly Builds, the multitudinous versions […]

Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup Report April 1, 2008

By Michael ⋅ April 2, 2008 ⋅ 2 comments

With a date like April 1, right there in the title, just how serious can this be. But it wasn’t all fun and games.
This was the first meetup that Neli and I attended. Previously, I’d miss yet another meeting and I would poke around on the net looking for a writeup about what happened, what […]

« Previous — Next »

Categories