Select Page
Avoid the Expert Trap

Avoid the Expert Trap

Do what you love. Don’t worry about the rest. It’s so easy in tech to fall in the expert trap and stop learning, only to wake up 10 years later, laid off with no prospects. Over the past years, you became an expert… but… most technologies...
The Holy Trinity of Bad Development Paradigms

The Holy Trinity of Bad Development Paradigms

Here are a couple of really awful ways to build software.  A lot of times, these are dressed up as an “agile methodology” or as a “product management framework”.  Truth is they are just failure states that result in developer turnover, slow...
Avoid the Expert Trap

Software Lasts WAY Longer than You Think

Software lasts longer than you think. Way longer. I got a call a few weeks ago to see if I could update a program I wrote in Turbo C in 1989, when I was in high school. I re-implemented it in ZOC REXX* in 1994. The former client  wanted me to patch the program to...
Resume Driven Development

Resume Driven Development

Agile. Scrum. Waterfall. Test-Driven Development. Extreme Programming. All methodologies for making software that actually work. Some debatably better than others. There is one development methodology that is guaranteed to fail, and cost you dearly in the process:...
Niche Programming Languages

Niche Programming Languages

“What is the big deal about niche languages? I can do all of this with C/C++/C# and besides, most of the stuff being written with that niche language are CRUD apps…” — Anonymous Senior Developer Junior Dev: “Let’s write this new one-off thing with...
Let’s Not Use WordPress This Time

Let’s Not Use WordPress This Time

tl;dr: Go ahead and use WordPress.  So, you need to make a new company website. You ask the team what to use, and get this: Everyone: let’s not use WordPress. The development team wants to use a static website builder and store content as markdown on Github. It...