January 31st, 2007
What would you say if your manager suddenly confronted you and said, “Quick! Tell me the three most important things that our software industry needs to do in order to bring about a substantial improvement in software quality! Just three things!“? Of course, if you don’t work in the software field, you wouldn’t know what […]
January 29th, 2007
First impressions, from conversations with a few software engineers and managers, and a day-long visit to one large high-tech company: Japanese software developers probably work longer and harder than their American counterparts, but they are still frequently regarded as “second-class citizens” by their hardware-oriented peers and managers. Because they work so long and so hard, […]
January 21st, 2007
Throughout the 1990s, pundits would pop up every year or two and proclaim that the venerable COBOL and FORTRAN languages were “dead,” and that programmers listing those languages on their resumes would soon find themselves on the unemployment lines (consider, for example, Edsger Dijkstra’s pithy remark, “COBOL is for morons.”) I’ve been guilty of making […]
January 18th, 2007
I didn’t think I’d have a chance to get started reading and reviewing Dreaming in Code until next week, when I embark upon a 14-hour flight to Tokyo (click here to see an amazing HDR, or “high dynamic range,” photo of Tokyo, and be sure to click on the full-size image; thanks, BoingBoing!) But the […]
January 15th, 2007
I can’t remember where I first saw the reference to Dreaming in Code: two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and one quest for transcendent software by Salon.com’s Scott Rosenberg, but I ordered it from Amazon right away. How could you not order a book with a title like that? How come you didn’t open […]
January 6th, 2007
Computerworld is a traditional IT trade journal that has been around throughout most of my career in the computer field; as far as I can recall, it began churning out weekly issues somewhere around 1970. On January 1st, Computerworld published its survey of the “hot skills” that CIO’s and IT executives will be looking […]
November 30th, 2006
I was in a business meeting a few days ago, listening to a senior executive present his company’s strategic plan for 2007. One of his goals is to establish a new and interesting division of the company as a “thought leader” in its market segment.
Even though it’s a somewhat fuzzy phrase, most of us would […]
November 26th, 2006
I posted a review of Bruce Taylor’s new book, Working Among Programmers, on Amazon’s web site this evening, and it occurred to me that people might find it useful to see the commentary here, too. And since Amazon’s primitive user-interface for creating reviews apparently doesn’t allow images, HTML formatting, or hyperlinks (c’mon, guys, get with […]
November 8th, 2006
The first workshop session that I attended today focused on “Enterprise 2.0″ — i.e., the use of emerging (Web 2.0) technologies as a freeform mechanism for collaboration and getting their jobs done. The session moderator was Paul Kedrosky, who began the session by observing that collaborative tools have been around forever, and that aside from […]
October 24th, 2006
I’ve added a couple links to my Web 2.0 mind-map. You can find it in the “downloads” section of my main web site at www.yourdon.com/downloads, or you can simply download the 7.1-megabyte PDF by clicking here.
Here’s a summary of what I’ve added to this version:
On the “Conferences” branch of the “References” page of […]
