Its very common for software developers to be asked to build some software that is a straight port of an old software package, or to faithfully model (i.e. completely identical to) an existing process that the customer has. This is a huge mistake – try to avoid these projects. I hold that if the customer [...]
Thursday, February 4, 2010
There’s been lots of discussion the past six months about the fate of MySQL under the ownership of Oracle. Now that the purchase of Sun is complete, I’m much more concerned about the fate of the excellent JEE platform Glassfish. For example some people think that superior technology will prove to Oracle that Glassfish is [...]
Thursday, November 19, 2009
An interesting Wall Street Journal article, “Why You Can’t Use Personal Technology at the Office”, came my way courtesy of a Linked In group discussion this morning.
In terms of the article, I agree it has been my experience for many years where I have faster/better personal technology than my workplace. At one place we had [...]
Every now and again we get some customers who expect that they can get a custom website, portal, or services integration done by looking at a vendor’s “out of the box” experience. This can be very frustrating for us, as we need to get into their heads that no platform will delivery any website, portal, [...]
Monday, September 14, 2009
Peter Newton, “Director of Marketing” at American Express Australia Limited ABN 92 108 952 085, really likes Russian Mafiosa. Or maybe it’s Chinese Triads, bikie gangs, or maybe some local spivs operating out of a small rented smash repair shop near Beenleigh. Perhaps all of the above. Look at this email I got in my [...]
Johanna Rothman on agile adoption for the organisation:
Agile requires the discipline to move projects through teams. Multitasking is nuts in agile. Moving team members around to have the “best” specialist available for a particular team is nuts. Performance reviews for individuals is nuts. Managers have to change everything they do, if they want to move [...]
Many developers will have heard this term used as a justification for buying all, or most, of an organization’s IT infrastructure from a single vendor. And it is, like most of these idiotic aphorisms bandied around IT management, a complete crock of excrement. It’s the sort of thing that salesmen must tell credulous IT management [...]
Strange IM conversation came my way the other night, whilst discussing some code a team I led wrote at a previous workplace, I think it highlights some crucial factors Oracle bring to the Enterprise Java World:
anon 9:04PM
[about that code]
crazymcphee 9:05 PM
well, it WAS perfect … CRAZY perfect
anon 9:06 PM
lol… no doubt it even spans [...]
I spent last Monday and Tuesday at the JAOO conference in Brisbane, and I have a couple of things which I want to say I thought interesting. (‘JAOO’ btw, because I see people asking about it on Twitter, is pronounced a bit like “yow” but with the “j” from German/Dutch like “jah”).
Firstly, I found the [...]
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Tagged agile, jaoo, methodology, profession, scrum, test first, tools, xp
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Once, the CEO told the software team I was in working on in regards to a proposed feature … “Basically the feature’s ROI has to beat the cash rate. If I can get a better return by leaving this million dollars on deposit at the bank then I owe it to my shareholders to do [...]