Archive for October, 2008
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008
Too Busy Bailing to Plug the Leak
My last post, Design Fail Patterns, dealt with the ways that people often select the wrong technologies for a project. That made me think of another way I’ve seen projects and people fail.
Cast your mind back to the days of the tall ships, great wooden vessels that plied the oceans under wind power. Imagine one [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Dev Management, Productivity, Programming by Scott Westfall
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
Design Fail Patterns
On every project, there is a phase where you have to pick the essential technologies that you will use to build the system. You need to decide what programming language to use. Is there an available framework? Does the system need a database? If so, which DBMS should you use?
Ideally, this is done logically and [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Programming by Scott Westfall
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
Software’s Cambrian Explosion
I remember when I was first learning to program, back in the early ’80s. There were a handful of mainstream languages. The Survey of Programming class I took included FORTRAN, C, COBOL, Basic, LISP, Prologue, and Pascal. Each of these languages was distinct and served a particular purpose.
You might say that each was well adapted [...]
