It's not that spreadsheets are evil incarnate, it's just that there are so many ways to abuse them. Spreadsheets put a veneer of structure over some information. Bad spreadsheet design, worse yet, puts unstructured information into a hard-to-manipulate format.

I've complained about this before. See Great Quotes about the Spreadsheet …

Some of Cringley's The Truth About IT Consultants is good stuff. His Type "A" and Type "C" are both stories of consultants who are brought in because they have specific skills. In the "A" case, it's a technical skill, and in the "C" case it's project management.

In both cases …

I've seen a couple of recent use case problems. The first recent failure of use cases was particularly alarming. It was a small application; a few use cases, a couple of actors.

One of the actors was labeled as "End User". Seriously. Few labels could be as vague as End …

Processing XML and X12 messages is a struggle. You have a number of use cases (I listed a bunch of features in Synchronicity and Document Object Models ). These can be tackled a number of ways.

What spoils me is the Object Relational Mapping (ORM) in SQLAlchemy and the Django ORM …

Message-oriented applications involve an interface defined around messages (or documents). I've been working on applications that involve a fair amount of manipulation of XML and X12. Recently I started yet another, and started to recognize the essential design patterns.

There are four use cases. The first two use cases define …

Some recent thoughts on using Python, directly, as configuration file syntax. In a way, a configuration is a highly-specialized Domain Specific Language focused on the application's problem domain. The point is to leverage syntax we already have to create meaningful configuration files.

"Python is sometimes a good use for a …

Here are a few more Passive-Aggressive argument techniques that can derail a project. Rather than provide an alternative or improvement, this passive kind of aggression raises things which are "potential" problems or issues. Things which serve only to raise doubts.

This approach plays into the hands of risk-averse management. It …

Here's one recent example of a significant bug.

The code said A is not NULL OrElse A != " ", which doesn't do anything useful. If A has non-NULL data, this is true. The second part of the clause (A != " ") is only evaluated if A is NULL. If A is NULL, no other …

I have to say this first -- just because ERwin calls it "physical" that doesn't mean anything. ERwin uses "physical" model to mean "product-specific logical" model. They use "logical" to mean "product-independent logical" model.

ERwin doesn't do physical modeling. Not even a little bit. The physical layer of a relational database …

TC's full quote was "We consume a significant portion of the overall contract generating a functional specification whose sole use is to serve as the outline for the acceptance test. Those who choose to argue this point might like to explain the recurring customer comment 'You did an excellent job …