Hugh Bin-Haad Relational Algebra and its implications for NoSQL databases With the rise of NoSQL databases that are exploiting aspects of SQL for querying, and are embracing full transactionality, is there a danger of the... 01 April 2016 4 min read
Simple Talk Editor The 2015/2016 Simple-Talk Awards Once more it is time for our readers to vote on the top nominations for the Simple Talk Awards. Here we list the top nominations... 22 March 2016 5 min read
Richard Morris Clive Sinclair: Geek of the Week Although most of the geeks of the IT industry are famous for their software, it was the geeky entrepreneurs that changed society by bringing cheap... 21 January 2016 9 min read
Olaf Lewitz Continuous Delivery: Building a Culture of Trust Effective team-based software development has more to do with the organisation than the technology. Teams that must cooperate are most productive when there are high... 12 January 2016 13 min read
Simple Talk Editor The Boardgame of Office Politics Sometimes the stress of interdepartmental friction within organisations can get on top of you, especially between the business and IT when the going gets tough.... 17 December 2015 6 min read
Richard Morris Chet Ramey: Geek of the Week The BASH shell is the most popular UNIX command-line scriptable shell. It became the inspiration for PowerShell. As with so many standard components of the... 14 December 2015 10 min read
Richard Morris Philip Greenspun: Geek of the Week Philip Greenspun is probably best known to other geeks for his Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad... 14 July 2015 19 min read
Joe Celko SQL Style Habits: Attack of the Skeuomorphs Although we like to think that our programming techniques are progressive and in tune with the bleeding edge of software development practices, too often they... 14 July 2015 13 min read
Devyani Borade Think You Can Be a Software Tester? We all use software, and we all find it alarmingly easy to find bugs in it. Does that mean that we have a natural talent... 29 June 2015 10 min read
Adam Bertram Questions About Devops that IT Pros are Too Shy to Ask DevOps isn't a particular technology, nor a job role. It is more of a software development method, initiating originally from system administrators, that promotes ways... 29 June 2015 10 min read
Dwain Camps Software Engineering: Just How Immature is it? "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" by Robert L. Glass has become a classic of Software Engineering as cherished as 'The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on... 12 June 2015 19 min read
Mike Fal DevOps and the DBA Michael Fal is a huge advocate of automation and many ways it can improve the lives of developers and DBAs alike, but you can't just... 08 May 2015 11 min read
Devyani Borade Developer-Tester Relationships In a development team, there are times when the relationships between developers and testers can become strained. How can you turn this potential conflict into... 06 May 2015 11 min read
Richard Morris Alan Cooper: Geek of the Week Alan Cooper helped to debug the most widely-used PC language of the late seventies and early eighties, BASIC-E, and, with Keith Parsons, developed C-BASIC. He... 15 April 2015 14 min read
Richard Morris Swizec Teller : Geek of the Week Why do programmers work best at night? Is this related to the idea that drinking alcohol improves cognitive ability? Is programming a young person's game?... 09 April 2015 10 min read
Richard Morris Conrad Wolfram: Geek of the Week Conrad Wolfram is the 'younger Wolfram' of Wolfram Research, the company behind Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica. He wants to transform the way in which we engage... 06 February 2015 10 min read
William Brewer IT Compliance and Software Development What is IT Compliance and is it really necessary for contemporary Agile applications to be constrained by the requirements of compliance? William Brewer argues that... 06 February 2015 14 min read
Matt Hilbert Going to Extremes to Release Bug Fixes and New Features XP is no general panacea; but for the right team, and for a product that needs to release bug fixes and new features as fast... 06 January 2015 6 min read
Dan Appleman The Salesforce Platform: The Return of the Citizen Programmer The current popularity of the Salesforce software development platform has taken the industry by surprise. The current IT culture favours the esoteric, yet here is... 14 November 2014 8 min read
Matt Hilbert Does NoSQL = NoDBA? There's a joke doing the rounds at SQL conferences and seminars: three DBAs walk into a NoSQL bar and leave when they can't find a... 21 October 2014 9 min read
