Information Technology Dark Side

The longer I do this, the more I agree with @dhh If you haven’t seen it yet, you should watch @dhh’s talk from RailsConf2015. In it, @dhh introduces the notion that “monolithic” applications aren’t really bad in and of themselves and rebrands them as integrated systems. As I listened to @dhh talk I realized that […]

[Read more →]

I’ve always had an allergic reaction to metrics in software development. Over the years, lots of people have commented that they find this strange, given my background in manufacturing/mechanical engineering. I’ve never been able to explain why, but the metrics I’ve seen proposed for software development have never felt as genuinely useful as the type […]

[Read more →]

This morning Stuart Cohen (CEO, Collaborative Software Initiative) and I published an open source letter to President Obama, urging him to consider the role open source software will play in the various technology initiatives that are part of the pending economic stimulus. Co-signers of the letter include executives from a variety of companies in the […]

[Read more →]

It’s hard to get fired in corporate IT I worked in corporate IT for a decade before I finally escaped. In all that time, I saw only a handful of people get fired for performance reasons. Sure, I saw people get put on a performance plan and “reviewed” out of the company, but those people […]

[Read more →]

Here’s a common problem in software development: you’re production application has sensitive/personal/private/legally protected data in it that probably isn’t wise to share with everybody and their dog. But, you need to debug a problem from prod, test a database upgrade, verify a new feed works properly, or some other task that would really be a […]

[Read more →]

There’s a soul check room when you join IT management – I turned mine in about four years ago. I kept the ticket in my top dresser drawer for a long time, just in case I ever needed the thing again. The other day I checked for it and couldn’t find it. Then I remembered […]

[Read more →]

Okay, so this is a little bit afield of what I normally write about, since I don’t normally delve into technical issues. Happily, my work life is becoming more technical and this blog is likely to follow suit, so you might expect more tech and less philosophizing in the future. If you don’t know, subversion […]

[Read more →]