Home, page 5 of 19

The New New Tool

November 5, 2011 7 minute read

Bob and Alice sit in a cubicle at the end of the floor. For much of their working day they are pissed off. They are forced to do their job using a tool implemented by The Project some years ago. The Tool was an over-complex inappropriate hulk when it was selected. The Tool is made by The Big Vendor. We’ve all heard of The Big Vendor. They market The Tool to many industry segments and have a specialist pre-sales team for each segment...

NoSQL in the Enterprise

July 31, 2011 30 minute read

Welcome to part two. Last time we looked at the experience of getting a NoSQL product accepted in an enterprise environment. Assuming you got through that, the next step is to do something useful with it. Like any tool, you will only get good stuff out if you know how make the best of it. In this case that means not treating it too much like a relational database and understanding the internal nuances...

Freedom from the Tyranny of Schemas

July 30, 2011 14 minute read

Time flies - it was nearly two years ago that I wrote Strained Relationships, an article extolling the potential benefits of NoSQL data stores. My main point then, and now, was that certain features of the new wave of non-relational products looked a promising solution (in part) to improving speed-of-change in large enterprises. Sadly, too many articles in the NoSQL space still focus t...

The Attraction of Laws

June 5, 2011 12 minute read

I noticed last week just how many half-written articles I have queued up for completion. Postwise, the last twelve months has been heavy on ideas but light on completion. Sorry about that. Unless you think my stuff sucks in which case “you’re welcome”. It’s been a very busy period and writing time has been hard to find. But when I look a...

The Secret Sauce

May 29, 2011 23 minute read

Last time, I was talking about what I consider to be the general lack of a crisis in software development. And it got me thinking - if there is no crisis in software development, no inherent flaws in our tools or our methods, then there must somehow be a way to convey the appropriate use of these tools and methods in order that everybody could get it ...