Phew! That was a close one! Now that we are safely past the Black Friday/Cyber Monday rush and can finally breathe again, I’d like to take a few moments to discuss this momentous day. If you are an online retailer or any busy website for that matter, it’s common place to plan for a day [...]
Read MoreThis article was recently dug up by our very own Chris Lamothe and directs some pointed criticism at frameworks. The post is still amusing even though it is now six years old. The article is still relevant and I think acts as a measure and challenge to developers as to how far (or not far) [...]
Read MoreThere’s no shortage of analogies for software development: gardening, building a house, assembly lines/factories, cooking, running, candle making and so on. Specifically, I mean the part of managing software development that deals with process, clients, communication, risk and other high-level concerns. It struck me recently (on a run along the bay in beautiful Bostonia) the [...]
Read MoreA while back I had the opportunity to use RightScale during the development of a system that processed very large amounts of web analytics data. RightScale is a layer on top of Amazon AWS that, among other things, allows you to define roles for each type of server that you need. These roles are used [...]
Read MoreI have an adverse reaction to retail stores, which is strange for me to say considering how long I’ve worked in retail, but as a customer, I have very visceral reactions to almost any store where someone walks up to me at random and asks me if I need any help. Surely I do need [...]
Read MoreIf you’re at all involved in the gaming community, you’ve probably caught wind of Sony’s latest fiasco, but in case you aren’t up to speed, the Playstation Network, Sony’s online component to their console ecosphere, has been down for seven days and counting. Initial reports began to circulate, purely on speculation, that this was the [...]
Read MoreHow to price your application in the App Store is a difficult business problem to solve — but it’s not difficult to figure out that nothing is more attractive than free. Studies have shown that people behave irrationally when confronted with a free option, and will make choices that break an otherwise predictable pricing curve. [...]
Read MoreIt’s a hard sell to say, “Code is art”, especially if the buyer has never written a line of code in their life. I don’t deny that there is a high degree of truth to this assessment, but I just as easily see the disconnect. Art is bound to the notion of ambiguity, strangeness, and [...]
Read MoreTesting, and specifically test-driven development is a methodology which few developers fully embrace. Automated testing is inevitably viewed as something that can be done last minute once an application is completed, or it’s considered too time consuming to be done at all. What most people don’t realize though, is that over the lifetime of an [...]
Read More#10 The Agile Manifesto Before a certain group of industry giants got together and came up with the Agile Manifesto, the software development world seemed stuck in a rut where every lesson learned resulted in parts being tacked on to some already bloated process. It was taken for granted that the mature state of any [...]
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