This is interesting: Getting Crafty: Why Coders Should Try Quilting and Origami I’ve never done any quilting (I’ve a sister who’s excellent at that), but I’ve done origami since forever. In fact, origami was a way to explain to other people what I did for a living. I’d start with a 6” x 6” piece [...]
There is an interesting conversation thread on Slashdot asking “What practices impede developers’ productivity?” The conversation is in response to an excellent post by Steve McConnell from 2008 addressing productivity variations among software developers and teams and the origin of “10x” – that is, the observation noted in the wild of “10-fold differences in productivity [...]
The Logitech webcam software installer doesn’t seem to know what to offer. QA and testing. Still important. Related PostsOf Diamonds, Lamborghinis, and Liberal Arts Degrees Frameworks, theoretically speaking… Free online education opportunity from Stanford University LinkedIn and Dunbar’s Number Cargo Cults in Management
Reading Michelle Symonds’ article “Why Project Management and ROWE Don’t Mix” and Jody Thompson’s response, “OMG. WTF? Pt.4” left me with one conclusion. Symonds is more focused on solution whereas Thompson is more focused on selling ROWE. They both make valid points and I’ve used – even relied on – aspects of product and personnel [...]
In a conversation focused on the value of a liberal arts education in today’s economic and social climate, a classmate took the following position: The problem lies in the social aspect of non-traditional schools and an example of this would be the Colorado School of Mines. Mines is a very tough engineering school that focuses [...]
Interesting article: A Boom Time for Education Start-Ups The dollar amounts mentioned in this article are impressive. The growth even more so. But what is particularly interesting is the formula. Start with a large bowl of fresh Internet Add 10 years of Moore’s Law seasoned hardware advances (broadband, wifi, “stuff in the cloud”) Add millions [...]
If you’re of the opinion password protecting your smartphone (or dumb phone, for that matter) is a nuisance, go read this article: Most Finders of Lost Smartphones Are Snoops These are pretty compelling statistics in favor or securing your smartphone. And this experiment only involved smartphones that were “lost”. It is a safe assumption that [...]
Here’s one for the geeks. I had need to collect a running total in SQL. There are plenty of good examples for how to do this when the records are in a single table. But there were few examples (that I could find) for how to do this involving joins on multiple tables. In my [...]
QA and testing is not easy. Those who do it well deserve good pay. Those who don’t, can make life interesting for a company in unpleasant and embarrassing ways. Case in point: I subscribe to a company, called HomeAgain, which provides lost pet recovery services for people who have micochiped their pets. It’s inexpensive and [...]
“Trust, but verify,” goes the old saying. Fished, no doubt, from the same pool of wisdom that includes “caveat emptor” and a school of other supposedly common sense quips that nobody seems to follow when it counts. When it comes to critters that land in our inboxes, the smart practice would be to “Distrust until [...]