Information Technology Dark Side

Last night a good friend of mine named Ken Martin passed away. Ken had been fighting cancer for several years and was in the final stages of his battle. I like to think that he greeted death with relief from pain and joy from reunion with two of his sons who preceded him and also [...]

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Eighty Percent Done Feels Like Twenty Percent of the Way There We’ve all been there. The project is 80% through and all the pieces that were built separately are finally starting to get bundled together. The back office gets connected to the service bus, the service bus gets connected to the web app, the web [...]

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Jared Brown is a developer who has run his own consulting business, CriticalPath, since 2007. He’s been featured on Techcrunch and CNN. His iPhone apps, Quick Shot and Pixel Perfect, have been downloaded over 500,000 times. He recently launched Talentopoly.com, an invite-only network for programmers, designers, and IT professionals. Follow him. The human cloud is [...]

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User demos are a great way to get early feedback on the direction of a feature that is under development or has been recently finished, but they can very easily become dreaded interactions between customers and developers if a few simple ground rules aren’t observed. Developers need to be clear about what is and isn’t [...]

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In a few weeks my family and I are going to move to the Chicago area. This is a big deal for us – we’ve lived in the Indy area for almost 9 years and we’ve loved every day of it. We are going to miss the friends and family (some biological, some adopted) that [...]

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About six years ago I found myself in the middle of a major crisis. An enterprise service bus that I had designed and built was falling to pieces in production. Performance was going through the floor and it was shutting a major part of our business down. The CIO gave us his office as a [...]

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People burn the Book of Mormon all the time, and it doesn’t even make the news. The last time I saw a Book of Mormon burning actually make it into a newspaper was when a church in Wisconsin decided to burn the Harry Potter series of books, along with other “heretical” books like the Book [...]

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I’m noodling teaching a 3 or 4 day rails workshop. Here are the topics I want to cover: Rails Basics REST Plugins/Gems (will_paginate) Deploying with Heroku Authentication Testing Localization/Globalization Mobile Print I think the course will be based on my demo app, daibatsu.heroku.com – over the course of 4 days we’ll build out the app [...]

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TroopTrack isn’t “hard-wired” to Boy Scouts. It has an admin interface that I can use to create a unit type (currently Cub Scout Packs and Boy Scout Troops), define achievements for each unit type (Pins, Badges, Belt Loops, Etc), roles, training, positions, etc. Over the past two years, I’ve had a number of ideas for [...]

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I’m Running Out Of Things To Hate If I were to give a name to the “theme” of the work I’ve been doing on TroopTrack for the past year or so, I would have to call it “Getting Rid of Things I Hate.” Here’s what I’ve been doing: Making controllers restful Making the user interface [...]

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