The new gig I started in December as the company's technical architect ("technical" to make the distinction that it's not "information architect") has been an interesting experience for me thus far. My experience at Insurance.com was excellent in so many ways, because the processes were entirely sol...

I was recently talking to a company about their development team’s adoption of new technology, frameworks, and the overall sophistication of their projects.   During the conversation, the IT manager made several comments about wanting to become a more “completeâ€� development shop. Thi...

I don’t know about you, but a great way to learn a new technology is to start using it. But to even start using it, it helps to be able to look at a real-world running application built on that technology. Combine that with source code and a walkthrough, and I think you have a winning combination....

All software has bugs. I don't care if you're Apple, Microsoft, IBM, or a smaller, leaner ISV. Your software has bugs in it. Once you accept this fact, that into each software product a little crap must fall, it becomes clear that what differentiates one software development organization from anothe...

On Learning Curves, I read a lament about calculus students having a hard time putting their skills into practice on some basic word problems. This line stood out: They can do the calculus. The algebra slays them. Of late, our CS faculty have been discussing a programming corollary. Students have pa...

How do you debug a movie? Before I get too old and forget, here is the story of one bug that I had to find when playing King Kong in the Xbox HD DVD player. It concludes with yet another reason I am so glad we’re not doing a Blu-ray player. The HD DVD team originally wrote the player software for ...

I've gotten lots of feedback, much of it asking "what's the alternative?" to using beans and getters and setters. I'll make a deal with my skeptical readers. I'll argue the negative, with examples, if they argue the affirmative. In other words, you show me some places where you can't get around usin...

With the popularity of “Social Networkingâ€� it is becoming a popular feature to make it easy for user to Bookmark/Share blogs, articles, etc that they read online.  Since this feature is not built into Community Server, you have to implement this yourself and it really is not hard to do.&nbs...

During a recent discussion with a friend (hi Brian) i had an epiphany. Well, actually it was just a series of realizations that should have been obvious long ago. The series was this: most mobile applications have a server component web services are the most obvious way of exposing server components...

Joe Gregorio prompted me to take a second look at O’Reilly’s “state of the market” report for books on programming languages. Of particular interest to me is what they report on Ruby: We reported last year that Ruby had grown nicely, had passed Perl and Python, and was knocki...