April 14th, 2008
I’ll be in Detroit on Tuesday, April 15th, giving a presentation on “The Politics of Metrics” at the “Software Best Practices” conference. If you’re not there in person, you’ll miss all of the clever jokes, subtle explanations, question-answer dialogue, etc.; but you can download the 1.5-megabyte PDF version of the presentation by clicking on the […]
January 19th, 2008
Every couple of years, my friend Tom DeMarco turns the computing world upside down with a new book. Sometimes he writes alone (see, for example, Slack: getting past burnout, busywork, and the myth of total efficiency and The Deadline: a novel about project management). Often, he writes with our mutual friend and colleague, Tim Lister […]
November 7th, 2007
I’m participating in a “Software Best Practices” seminar in Albany tomorrow (click here for details on future venues of this seminar, hosted by IT Metrics & Productivity Institute — including Ft. Lauderdale and Austin next week), and I’ll be giving a talk on the “Top Ten Software Engineering Ideas.”
To download the 20.5-megabyte PDF of the […]
September 5th, 2007
Back in May, I participated in a panel session at an ICSE conference in Minneapolis — before the bridge fell down, and before its airport men’s room became so notorious — in which we celebrated the 20th anniversary publication of Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister. My report on that panel session can be […]
May 29th, 2007
I had the great honor and pleasure of participating in a retrospective panel session on peopleware last week at the International Conference on Software Engineering (aka ICSE 2007) in Minneapolis, with some of the luminaries in the software field: Fred Brooks, Barry Boehm, Tom DeMarco, Tim Lister, and Linda Rising. The panel — celebrating the […]
August 14th, 2006
My friend Tom DeMarco, a software guru and co-author (among other things) of the highly acclaimed Waltzing With Bears, commented on the blog that I wrote a couple days ago about Wiki Terror:
“There was a much more public proposal made last year that would address this same issue in a crowd-sourcing approach, though not a […]
July 19th, 2006
My friend Tom DeMarco sent an email note this morning to a few of his colleagues, in which he made several eloquent points about History, Culture, Science, and the Nature of Man (at least as it pertains to the IT industry), as a preamble to recommending an article by Luis von Ahn in the June […]
July 9th, 2006
Having just returned from Amsterdam yesterday, I’ve got a pile of mail and chores that I should be working on. But I wanted to record my impressions of Kevin Kelly’s keynote presentation at the “Next Web” conference while my memories are still somewhat fresh. Bottom line: if you’ve been feeling jaded, skeptical, or even cynical […]
May 7th, 2006
Damn! I thought that I was going to be the first to blog about the upcoming Cutter Consortium Summit conference, but I see that my friend and colleague, Michael Mah, has beaten me to the punch with his own posting. Well, that’s okay: it’s a sufficiently important conference to warrant several different perspectives on the […]
April 25th, 2006
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away — the summer of 1987, to be precise, in the little village of Water Mill, New York, where I was spending the summer — I somehow found out about a small company called Forethought, which had a Mac-only product bearing the name “Powerpoint.” For someone […]
