Although it is necessary to deliver a software project on budget, to schedule, to the right quality, it isn't, by itself, sufficient to ensure success. It has to be be what all the participants expect and want. To achieve all this requires a balancing act, with tradeoffs and compromises, but it is great when you get it right. Dwain gives advice from hard-won experience.… Read more
Phil's dread of Powerpoint sales presentations is already known to his readers, but we've never before heard the story of how an intern in his team gave them the necessary insights to find a cure for their unfortunate tendency to doze off, and convince them that they were charmless geeks.… Read more
In which Phil finds himself in a place of work where, despite his penchant for insulting or upsetting senior managers, he survives purely due to his ability to distill complex IT documents into one-page strategy papers… Read more
In IT, it is difficult to measure individual productivity, and it is particularly difficult to determine whether a project manager for a development project is 'pulling his weight'.… Read more
Could it be that, if you adopt Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, then much of the bureaucracy of team-based software development becomes redundant? It is an intriguing idea which has led to a creative experiment.… Read more
Interviewing for a database position is a careful game of give and take. Knowing what to expect and how to prepare for your interview is important, but it's only half the battle. You'll also need to ask questions to see if the job, and the company, is a good fit for you.… Read more
When developing software, it makes sense to 'fail early, fail often'; to become aware of mistakes quickly and to learn from them. This means being able to deliver software as early in development as possible. This makes it easier to gather opinions and promote discussions with the people who would want to use the application; and then respond to the feedback. … Read more
Bill Baker had a considerable influence on the way that SQL Server evolved to deliver reporting services and business intelligence. Until 2008, Bill Baker headed the Data Warehouse Product Unit within the SQL Server product development group. His team designed Analysis Services, Integration services, Data Transformation Services and the Admin tools that ship with SQL Server. … Read more
PowerShell has radically improved the ease of monitoring and adminstering Windows-based servers, and automating routine processes. The visionary leader of this project is Jeffery Snover, who is now Lead Architect for both Windows Server and System Center Datacenter. … Read more
Alex Payne worked on developing Twitter for three years. When he started, it was a small side-project: When he left, it had become an international cultural phenomenon. Since then, he has worked with several early-stage start-ups. He has been researching a book on the history of programming languages, and is co-author of a book on Scala. … Read more
Bertrand Meyer, the author of 'Object-oriented Software Construction', renowned teacher, and designer of the Eiffel programming language, believes in simple elegant computer languages. Java, C# and Python all owe much to his pioneering work with Eiffel. He was also deeply involved with .NET from the outset. … Read more
Meredith Ryan - DBA at the Bell Group -was elected by judges and the SQL Server community as the Exceptional DBA of 2012. So who is Meredith, and how did she become a DBA? What makes her exceptional at her work? We sent Richard Morris to investigate.… Read more
If you're a technical professional, it is a good idea to belong to a professional association. There are several to choose from, and they all provide benefits. It is worth checking what each of the associations state as being their primary goal, before deciding which ones are right for you.… Read more
Instead of waiting until the end of a project to ask 'what worked and what didn't, why not use regular retrospective analysis as part of the development process to find out what is, and isn't, working, and learn from the conclusions there and then?… Read more
In order to make progress in your career in IT, you need to actively plan your professional development rather then allow others around you to control it. For anyone in IT, the task of learning new skills and technologies is part of your work: and you can do it right where you are, in your current job.… Read more
When looking for a suitable Geek of the Week, we wondered whether a suitable candidate might be the man who pioneered structured programming, invented modular programming and who wrote one of the first languages with features for Object-oriented programming. Yes, for a second time, Niklaus Wirth, gets the accolade of 'Geek of the Week' and shows that he is still the radical thinker with strong view about computer languages.… Read more
Ron Gruner helped to crate some of the best of Data General's Minicomputers, and then co-founded Alliant, producer of the first parallel supercomputer that was able to decompose programs to run them in parallel. He then became an internet pioneer, who created the successful Shareholder.com site, and is now working on Sky Analytics for benchmarking the costs and expenses of law firms.… Read more
Jenkins, formerly called Hudson, is an open-source server-based Continuous Integration tool that works with all the major Source Control Management (SCM) tools including TFS, and can even script in PowerShell. It is clever software written by a clever geek, Kohsuke Kawaguchi.… Read more
James Hong was one of a generation of entrepreneurs who fell into the role almost accidentally by creating an application purely for their own age-group. Unlike many others, James has learned from his experiences and has become a successful advisor to, and investor in, startups, Here, he gives sage advice about surviving in the technology business.… Read more
A deceptively simple solution to a business-re-engineering problem can beguile companies into selecting a compromise that doesn't actually meet all their needs. Simple is great, but not at the expense of functionality. Some IT solutions are complex because the problem is complex, but they can be made conceptually clearer… Read more
