In November 2007, Bruce Eckel gave a commencement address at Neumont College of Computer Science in Salt Lake City. He published it shortly after and titled it “The Mythical 5%.” It’s a good speech about what it takes to be a member of the top 5% of software engineers in the world who are 20x more productive than the other 95%.
That is a pretty astonishing statistic. If it’s true then companies in the UK...
Last time I talked about the origins of the architecture of the modern web and how it is what it is because people like Tim Berners-Lee and Roy Fielding radically decomposed the problem space into its stable, long-living, constituent parts. These parts are the constraining building blocks of REST and the web.
The design for the web came off the back of some visionary work by Va...
In late 2011, I was asked to talk at a conference on digital trends. I didn’t have anything prepared so hastily suggested the topic “100-Year Architecture,” thinking that sounded clickbaity enough to get people to show up and I could fill in the blanks later. I did though have one thought in my head to build on - the 10,000-Year Clock being built by the Long Now Foundation - which I hoped mi...
A lot of businesses say they want to be ‘digital.’ And I think when they say that they mean two things:
(A) they want to create an end-to-end suite of slick apps for their customers to enable them to self-serve, have a great experience, develop some love for the brand
(B) they want a delivery capability to make that happen, which must therefore include a good smattering of highly-motivated clever people wh...
This is stating the obvious, but it’s still worth stating - whatever ambitious vision a company has, and whatever obstacles might stand in the way of that vision, you are infinitely more likely to achieve that vision if you can create and nurture a thriving culture. You can have the greatest strategy in the world and still fail because:
Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfa...