Home, page 19 of 19

The engineer that wasn’t there

April 10, 2007 1 minute read

I’ve never been that easy with term software engineer. I use it, and have been proud to have been one in my career, but it’s the connotations that come with the word engineer. Real engineers work, for the most part, with physical, mathematically predictable issues. They build roads, design machines, bridges, skyscrapers, operate lathes. Like software projects, engineering projects overrun in time and cost, but that’s because human beings, with their posturing, politics, aspirations and games...

Are You Sitting Comfortably?

April 5, 2007 2 minute read

How is it that you can sit through a film, even a fairly tedious one, that last ninety minutes to two hours, and yet frequently become arse-numbingly twitchy less than ten minutes into a PowerPoint presentation? I grant you, even fairly dull movies are vastly more interesting than most presentations on SOA governance, but should they be? You get paid to do something during the day that for much of the time you (hopefully) care passionately about, and yet when someone else wants to get a mes...

Seeing the Spoon

April 1, 2007 7 minute read

This article is something of a preface for all other articles and, as with other posts, will be updated from time to time. The intention for the site is to create a kind of holistic view of what can be done about the current malaise in software development. That there is a problem is in no doubt. If you work somewhere that experiences a multitude of difficulties in making your business...