IEEE Software’s publication of “Celebrating Peopleware’s 20th Anniversary”

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 [...]

ICSE peopleware panel session

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 [...]

Tom DeMarco’s observation on Wiki Terror

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 [...]

Tom DeMarco’s recommendation of “Games with a Purpose”

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 [...]

The Next Web: Kevin Kelly’s Keynote

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 [...]

The Tenth Cutter Summit Conference

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 [...]

Sayonara Powerpoint

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 [...]