Here are some useful quotes:

• Andrew’s first law of career spotting: Accountants are people who, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use [A spreadsheet]”. Now they have two problems.
• [A spreadsheet] is a great prototyping tool, just don’t let it anywhere near your production …

If we look at a spreadsheet as a document we can develop a parser that locates the user-supplied information in that document. Like any language, we'll have to treat some elements of the spreadsheet as pure syntax, little more than punctuation. In the case of embedded formulas, these are elaborate …

See "When a Column is Not a Column " for a rant on failed attempts to scale spreadsheets up into relational databases. Bottom Line: A spreadsheet column is rarely an RDBMS column. Often the SS column's label is a key value, just like the SS row's label, and the cell's value …

Here's what I observed.

Customer: "Our business performance isn't what we want. We think some of our intranet is no good."

Us: "We'd love to look at it."

Customer: "Not so fast. You can't 'look at it'. You have to propose a measurable change in business performance, define a fixed …

To begin with, we're talking about the implementation's source code. Here's the situation: Ann says that Bob's code is no good, and she's provided an alternative implementation. How do we choose?

The first part of any scorecard is the SEI Quality Measures Taxonomy . It's marked "Legacy", but I haven't seen …

This is an important topic. I've blogged on the layers issue before ("Layers, Interfaces and Mutabilty "), and this AJAX issue is a great additional point.

With depressing regularity I also hear the complementary "stored procedure" question. This question takes a number of different forms, but they all mean the same …

I'm very excited to be giving a presentation at PyCon '07. A 30-minute slot is tough because the Star Schema can be confusing. The coding is pretty transparent (IMO), but the background for why I had to do this and places where it can be used are more interesting than …

Here's the full, minimally-edited question:

"We are having a debate about the basic way the UI, Business Logic, and Data Access layers communicate.

My experience has been that the UI talks to the BizLogic, and the BizLogic maps between itself and the Data Access layer.. like this:

::

UI -> BizLogic -> Data …

First, see "OSCON - Open Data " by Tim Bray, then see "Set My Data Free " in Kontrawize.

Here are some quotes "At the end of the day, information outlives software and transcends software and is more valuable than software." "Data matters. It shouldn't be an afterthought. It will outlive your applications …

See The hubris of calendrical calculations. And Calendrical Calculations, Part 2.

"Here are the exact words from the client when I suggested using the "official calendar": I’m aware of other systems having tables for Holidays but I don’t know that we can piggy back off any of them …