The phenomenal increase in free and pay-per-usage SaaS offerings in recent years has made it so insanely simple to build new websites starting only with…well, starting with absolutely nothing. In the old days (cue Abe Simpson voice), developing and deploying a new website required the purchase of actual servers, or at least the rental of … Continue reading SaaS means “No excuses”
Category: Software
Yes, your stupid feature is still a bug
Your users are complaining about an unusable feature in your product. It's so unintuitive and impossible to understand that they are calling it a "bug" in many angry emails to your support staff. When the discussion reaches a coder, the issue suddenly gets reclassified as a "badly-designed, but correctly functioning feature". Out of nowhere, they … Continue reading Yes, your stupid feature is still a bug
Hiring awesome software interns
What says "summer is here" more than the nice weather? It's the flood of eager college kids who are keen to get hired for a few months to get some real commercial development experience. The challenge for employers is in the interview process. Because the candidates are both young and inexperienced, it can be tough … Continue reading Hiring awesome software interns
The Programmer Pyramid
Newsflash: some programmers are better than others. OK, I admit that's hardly a revelation. But most companies use a grading structure that can obscure the relative strengths of each engineer on the team. There may be a 20-year veteran with the title Principal Engineer who regularly breaks tests and hacks his way through his day … Continue reading The Programmer Pyramid
The Greatest Software Stories Ever Told
There are thousands of software books out there, from almanacs about assembly language to volumes about Visual Basic. Most of them are dry, encyclopedic tomes that are about as entertaining to read as a dictionary. For the most part, the lifeless character of software books is an understandable consequence. After all, how many ways are … Continue reading The Greatest Software Stories Ever Told
More Than Coding 