This is serious. The United Nations’ World Food Program has been hit so hard by skyrocketing grain prices that it may be forced to cut off some food aid to the world’s poorest countries, while the United States is planning to turn record quantities of corn into automotive fuel. Cereal grain import prices for the world’s poorest countries are...
How would it be like if our sales-person shared a few hours of his time acting as an observer on implementing a user story with one of the developers? What if our HR manager set aside a part of her Monday to watch a developer troubleshooting an application or setting up a deployment script? If software development is at...
These images have been glued to my brain since I first saw them. A masterpiece by Jeff Patton that rang lots of bells. via Obie Fernandez.
via FocusShift Via reddit, and from there to the best quote I read in a while:”Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.” – Joel Spolskey. The quote is highly interpretive, but, to a great extent it bears the truth.
Obie Fernandez, the author of the now de facto Rails book, The Rails Way, have recently launched HashRocket, a Ruby on Rails consultancy with a unique business model: Your application in 3 days or your money back OK! That money-back part is of my imagination. The reason I’m writing this is the “great” message on their homepage. BUILDING A...
This has nothing to do with comparing 8 different frameworks. It’s just to tell the horror story of one of our down-the-drain projects. The client came with an old product that he needed to add new features to. The product does, what is best described as CRUD operations. Nothing challenging, nothing difficult. It maintains a set of data for...
I just need to get something off of my chest. Some of the companies that I’ve worked for/with, rely heavily on their clients as the only true measure of performance. They would take client satisfaction as a reflection of how they themselves perceive their operations and businesses. This is just plain WRONG. Unless an organization have the established mechanisms...
Pat Eyler from On Ruby has notified me that I won his Holiday Blogging Contest. My entry for generating a Rails site map was apparently the best Rails how-to in those posted. It won me 3 books from Apress.This is my first online win EVER, and being it a Rails-oriented win, makes it even sweeter. Thanks Pat. Thanks Apress.
As another great addition to this blog, I here introduce to you “Bilal”, our newest addition to the family. Bilal was born on the 31 December 2007, at 8:10 PM in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, at this hospital. It’s funny that Bilal was meant to come to this world on the same day (31 December) as his beautiful sister.He was...
Most software development salary surveys I came across are either inaccurate, generic or obsolete. This is an individual effort to capture the pay scale of Canada’s Software Developers & Consultants. It is also an effort to highlight the wide scale of activities usually handled by professionals in the field, which sometimes goes unvalued monetarily or professionally. Results will be...