Via a re-tweet of this that I saw this morning; An interesting blog post from 2009 about why Lisp failed in the marketplace. Now I don’t want to talk about Lisp, or Java, or anything language specific, I want to highlight this statement, which was what was in the tweet, from the post: Employers much [...]
This is why I don’t trust off-shoring of aircraft maintenance. The same reason that poisonous substitutions are made in toothpaste or cheap lead paint used on a children’s toy; it’s the whole idea of taking something based in complex skills and knowledge-based engineering and buying on price, which ends up in a business environment like [...]
Why Steve Jobs mattered | Bob Lewis: “Nothing about the iPod, iTunes store, iPhone, or iPad was safe. Jobs focused on upside potential, not downside risk. Like the great generals in history he preferred offense to defense. As for excellence, he insisted on it in the technical as well as general meaning of the word. [...]
Run IT as a business — why that’s a train wreck waiting to happen | Bob Lewis: “When IT is a business, selling to its internal customers, its principal product is software that “meets requirements.” This all but ensures a less-than-optimal solution, lack of business ownership, and poor acceptance of the results.” (Via Bob Lewis [...]
http://www.allaboutagile.com/the-value-of-stable-teams/
Got this email from Apple’s Me.com service today; from MobileMe <MobileMe@insideapple.apple.com> date Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 13:02 subject Upgrade to the new MobileMe Calendar by May 5, 2011 Upgrade to the new MobileMe Calendar by May 5, 2011 Dear MobileMe member: On May 5, 2011, MobileMe will transition completely to the new Calendar service [...]
Whatever else you do, give yourself a chance: Rename every project, initiative and strategic program in your organization to reflect the business change goal instead of the system name: Sales Force Effectiveness Project instead of Salesforce.com Implementation; Evidence-based Decision-making Initiative instead of Business Intelligence Implementation. The impact is surprisingly large. – Business change methodology gaps | [...]
Many of us hear this phrase in our workplace. When you hear it, what you’re really being told is that the company is afflicted with one or more of the following: is afraid of change not interested in improvement has a rigid top-down process development style doesn’t care what you think I think the greatest [...]
Oh … now I get it, courtesy of Errol Morris, who made the Oscar winning documentary Fog Of War, among many other excellent films, who explains in this New York Times interview with David Dunning (part 1): DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make [...]
Most developers familiar with agile methods are familiar with the idea of the spike. A spike is a time-boxed task that concentrates on clarifying the unknowns in your project. Usually these are technological (“can this be done with this technology?”) but they are also sometimes in the area of the business domain (“is this a [...]