Mike-O-Matic

“Refactoring.” The very word sends chills down the back of many a software company executive. Sort of like “delay,” “overrun,” or “paternity.”
Refactoring is scary because it means that you will be paddling in place for some period of time, and those sexy new features that the business team wants are going to either […]

Workplace culture is an important part of a company’s identity. A positive culture lets workers band together and persevere against the longest odds; a negative one makes each day seem longer than the last and leads to resumes hitting Monster and Dice.com faster than you can get people in the door.
So we all know […]

Great read over at Creating Passionate Users. Kathy Sierra laments how employers so often try to get employees passionate about the company when they should instead be focusing on how to get them passionate about the job they do.
The company should behave just like a good user interface — support people in doing […]

So the Vista launch has come and gone, and the good and bad reviews have both started to pour in. In addition to the comparisons to Windows XP, many of the reviews look at how Vista stacks up against Apple’s Mac OS X. This makes sense since the Apple OS is Microsoft’s only […]

Ok, I admit it.  I’m a little jealous.
Apparently, Kevin Rose had Digg.com built for $200.  Or $700, or $200 plus a $1200 domain name, or 5 Big Mac value meals, supersized, depending on the source.  In any event, it’s the steal of the century.
After reading though the comments on the article, I am surprised by […]

Interesting article at Coding Horror the other day. Jeff contends that shipping software isn’t enough to be a successful software developer, you also need to write stuff that people actually use.
A smart software developer realizes that their job is far more than writing code and shipping it; their job is to build software that […]

Thought-provoking article over at Venture Beat today. The author, Joyce Park, points out that there is a substantial gender gap in the computer engineering field since few girls seem inclined to tinker with computers on their own time. Her primary assertions are as follows:

Almost all of the male engineers I know report childhood […]

In my IT career I have sometimes been a little difficult to work with. While I am very friendly and jovial away from the coding terminal, something changes once the project begins.
I form opinions about a problem quickly, and become resolute in them until someone can produce enough evidence to convince me otherwise. […]

There is an article over on TechDirt regarding social networking darling Facebook.com. Amongst the interesting bits:
It was reported earlier this week that Yahoo was prepared to shell out up to $1.62 billion to buy Facebook, based on the inflated expectation that it could generate a billion-dollar profit by 2015. Apparently Yahoo’s offer of $1 […]

I have found it. The secret to how you can be responsible for nothing, accountable to no-one, and rich beyond all imagination. CEOs will kiss your feet. Big Tech Firms will fetch you coffee. Starlets will, uh, return your calls.
It’s simple.
Just be Gartner, Forrester Research, or IDC.
(Note: The name of […]