After intending to dual boot my unstable Vista into Ubuntu for a while, I finally had enough time this weekend to do it. Let me just say that Ubuntu is living up to its claim of making Linux for Human Beings. The boot from Ubuntu CD was a no-go. I found that Wubi would essentially install Ubuntu (without the...
Steve Howard from MLE Systems has started talking to me about Sales techniques and, man, do I love it! Although, Sales is a modern “survival” skill, it’s hardly taught in schools for non-business majors (what a shame). Being a techie, you become more involved into tech details and, like it or not, social skills (including sales) quickly withdraw from...
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...
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...
UPDATE (September 2009): During the past 4 years, this post has managed to be the no. 1 hit for people looking for IPATO exam samples. It was a hope for some and desperation for others. To my knowledge, no one was able to get those “screenshots” or any further insider’s info from the people who were here before (except...