Carrie used to work for a small team in a large company. For the first year or so, it was her dream job. The people she worked with were smart and creative; she was given the freedom to work on projects that mattered to her; even the company benefits were great. She felt that she [...]
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by Shawn Wildermuth | Comments
Which Platform is Next? All of Them…
First it was PCs. Then the Web. Now it’s mobile. Every developer is concerned about which skills will matter in the next wave. Which platform should they bet on to be relevant? All of them, says Shawn Wildermuth.
3 Things Software Developers Can Learn From Prince Fielder and the Home Run Derby
by Esther Schindler | Comments
This year, Major League Baseball tried out a new — and in my view flawed — way to select which eight players would appear in the annual Home Run Derby (part of the All Star festivities). Instead of the players being chosen somewhere offstage, out of the public glare, this year the MLB folks decided [...]
Top 5 Developer Skills That Will Get You Hired or Promoted
You’ve spent hours honing your programming skills. You would pit your wits against another developer any day of the week. Hooah! Well, except for the fact that some pretty sharp developers on other shores will work for cheaper pay. And that’s true for developers outside of the U.S. too. A developer in India is likely [...]
I Like My IT Budget Tight and My Developers Stupid
Yes, you do. Don’t deny it. You like them stupid. You don’t have the budget, and even if you did, you prefer to have them stupid, because if they weren’t stupid, if they went and got a certification or got trained up on, say, the latest SharePoint skills, they’d go get another job. Which (as [...]
What Monty Python Taught Me About the Software Industry
Life imitates art, and vice versa, but the ways in which it does so are sometimes a little surprising. There are a surprising number of parallels between what I’ve experienced working in the technology industry and what we’ve seen in a variety of Monty Python skits. Don’t believe me? Here’s the lessons the computer industry [...]
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer
by Cameron Laird | Comments
We live in a world greatly informed by the insights and perspectives of Alan Turing. The world where he lived, though, was unsympathetic to much of his person, and ultimately hostile to the point of death. That’s a summary of litterateur David Leavitt‘s biography The Man Who Knew Too Much (MWKTM). He’s right, and he [...]
Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Superproductive Programmer
by Cameron Laird | Comments
Computing in the movies is hard to recognize: Typographical errors are non-existent, crackers break through tested defenses in seconds, and practitioners create twenty-function-point programs in fewer keystrokes than the count of bullets whizzing by their heads. Hollywood portrayals are more rooted in comic-book superheroics than the realities of software development. Except that in programming, superpowers [...]
Software Quality Connection – A New Online Community for Software Developers, Quality Assurance and IT Professionals
by AlexForbes | Comments
Beverly, MA, March 21, 2011 – Software Quality Connection, a new online community focused on the interests of software developers, testers and IT professionals in the trenches, has launched at www.SoftwareQualityConnection.com and www.Facebook.com/SoftwareQualityConnection. The community provides an unfiltered platform to help developers and testers discuss their views with peers and experts, stay up to date [...]
When Bad Software Requirements Happen To Good People
by Esther Shein | Comments
For Michael Feldman, coming up with software requirements is akin to what he quaintly refers to as “analysis paralysis.” Feldman, vice president of engineering at Big Belly Solar, a global provider of waste management solutions in Newton, Mass., says many developers who write code “get so wrapped up in the process of creating the requirements, [...]
