The Cost of Waiting for Feedback in Software Development
Do you know how much longer it takes a developer to fix a bug detected 3 weeks later instead of on the same day?
A variety of (dis)information
...musings on software development and other rather tech things...
Latest posts
Those are not 10x engineers you’re talking about
There s been a lot of discussion on Twitter recently about so-called 10X engineers. Here s the tweet that started it all: Just to make sure you’re on the same page: a 10x engineer supposedly provides extraordinary value to their team and organization. Now, this has resulted in dozens of jokes, memes, people wondering if these engineers [ ]
Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
A trained eye can often spot unfriendly software a mile away. It’s just like forming and making a first impression when you meet someone new. Apparently, this takes about one-tenth of a second.
Enterprise Software Acquisition: What’s Missing and How to Fix It
Enterprise software isn’t user friendly. It’s often so bad that it costs you time and money, on top of an already hefty price tag. Sure, ‘user friendly’ is one of the requirements, but no salesman will admit that their software isn’t. And you often can’t really put it through a ‘trial’ in advance, because it [ ]
Everyone uses Java/C# and Oracle, why choose something else?
If the tech guy (or girl) advises going for a less common technology, and something goes wrong, he’ll get blamed. Why didn’t you use Java/Oracle/IBM like everyone else does? And you can be sure that something WILL go wrong sooner or later… and this guy knows it. He knows he has a mortgage, kids that have [ ]
Your Developers Aren’t Bricklayers, They’re Writers
This article got voted Best Everything Else Article of May 2015 on CodeProject. It trended on Reddit, where it generated an at times heated discussion. If you have ten programmers, the best one is probably at least five times better compared to the worst one. No shit. Define better: he works faster, produces less bugs [ ]
Generating a twitter OAuth access key – the semi-manual way
[UPDATE] Apparently someone at Twitter was listening, or I m going senile/blind. Let s call it a combination of both. Instead of following all the steps below, you could just login with the Twitter account you want to use on http://dev.twitter.com, register your application and then click Edit Details on the application overview page at http://dev.twitter.com/apps. Next [ ]
MODx character encoding
Ahhh character encodings. Don t you just love them? Having character issues in MODx? Then probably the MODx manager character encoding, the character encoding of the site itself, your database s character encoding, or the encoding MODx/php uses to talk to MySQL isn t correct. The Website Encoding Your MODx site s character encoding can be configured in the [ ]
The hidden cost of interrupting knowledge workers
The November issue of pragpub has an interesting article on interruptions. The article is written by Brian Tarbox, who also mentions the article on his blog. I like the subtitle: Simple Strategies for Avoiding Dumping Your Mental Stack . Brian talks about the effective cost of interrupting a knowledge worker , often with trivial questions or distractions. [ ]
Twitter gem – undefined method `stringify_keys’
Have you been getting the following errors when running the Twitter gem lately ? /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/httparty-0.4.3/lib/httparty/response.rb:15:in `send': undefined method `stringify_keys' for # (NoMethodError) from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/httparty-0.4.3/lib/httparty/response.rb:15:in `method_missing' from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mash-0.0.3/lib/mash.rb:131:in…