Mike-O-Matic

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 […]

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. […]

So I was talking to a friend last night and an interesting topic came up. Granted it was 2:30AM, and I am hopped up on DayQuil because of a cold, and generally don’t sleep enough anyway. But I’m still pretty sure it was interesting.
We were talking about living passionate lives.
Both of us are […]

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, […]