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 buildin...
This short series started with Planning the Plan, an article that tried to put into context some of the roadmap and planning activities that take place before projects get approved and started.
I suggested using the McFarlan Matrix as a way of categorising potential projects so that they might be more likely to deliver benefits in lin...
By any measures, Edsgar Wybe Dijkstra was a remarkable man - one of the worlds undisputed leading computer scientist at the end of the 20th century, inventor of an operating system called “THE”, that could have come straight from the script of one of the Airplane movies (“does it run on THE? The what? The THE.”), long term chairman of ...
Substitution is the simplest way to encrypt a message. You take the original (plain text) message and swap each letter for another randomly chosen one from the alphabet. So, for example, if we swap s->z, e->y, c->h, r->p and t->x then the word secret becomes zyhpyx and to the uninitiated this may appear unbreakable unles...
Business software is generally used to optimise processes so that they run faster. Competitive advantage for companies can come from doing the boring stuff better as well as doing the new things other companies don’t do. But if we look at a process end-to-end it can rarely be optimised all the way through. Often what ...