Mike-O-Matic

Look, I love databases as much as the next guy.  Maybe even more.  Ok, definitely more.  But this needs to stop.
Databases are not a valid integration point for applications.
I have seen this in virtually every place I’ve been and it’s a problem.  Everybody loves the database because we all understand it.  It’s easy.  It sits […]

Back in DC I worked at a place that attempted to make developers interchangeable.  This makes a lot of sense; you want redundancy on your team if someone gets sick, takes a vacation, or leaves the company to go raise yaks for fiber-harvesting in Nepal, or instance.  It’s also helpful to prevent “siloing,” that thing […]

“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 […]

Last week I had a little rant about the next big language, and it really got me thinking. Why don’t we have a better way of building form-based, database-backed websites?
Yes, I know. We have tons of ways. PHP, JSP, Perl, Python, ASP.NET, Ruby. HTML, Javascript, CSS. Dojo, AJAX, Script.aculo.us, […]

Stevey Yegge has quite a few thoughts on what will constitute the Next Big Language. First, he warns people not to try to build it.
People are always asking me to comment on their new programming language they’re designing. I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty funny, given the general trend of […]

Redmond (January 30): Microsoft, a local software company, today launched a new computer operating system which they have dubbed “Windows Vista.”
Bill Gates, the founder of the company, forecast wonderful things for the program. “We have spent many years developing Vista, and believe it is very competitive with the other systems on the marketplace. […]

Many ideas make sense theoretically, but start to look a little more suspect on closer inspection. Database abstraction layers, for instance.
Beautiful concept: Write to an API that lets you move your code quickly from one database to another without needing to rewrite. It’s especially good if your current database isn’t very feature-rich, and […]

So recently I’ve been dusting off the old Java books. It was my first professional language back in the startup days, and I remember loving her once. The gentle way in which you massage real-life things into methods and fields. The way the API designers seemed to think of everything, at least […]

Admittedly, I am new to the whole Agile thing. If you’ve been indoctrinated already, please feel free to poke holes in the following commentary.
Recently, a place I have been working at has decided to add some Agile elements to the team’s development process. As they are currently a Big Design Up Front shop, […]

Web services are just about the coolest thing ever if you are trying to bring together a bunch of different systems that don’t seem to speak the same language.
Whether you are into SOAP, REST, (personal favorite) XML-RPC, or some other variant, they have matured to the point where they are point-and-click easy.  Codewise, you usually […]