Some reading:

1. Flexible Software is Error-Enabling Software , by Sean McGrath. If users can make changes, they can make mistakes. Why would you allow users to make changes? It's their process, it's their data. But, everyone in IT is absolutely sure that end users a lying gypsies. After all, if you …

Let's look at one failing business model: record sales. See Ars Technica for one summary: Legal music downloads soar as CD sales fall . That's news from 3 years ago. Look at Digital Media Wire's report from this year "Digital Music Download Sales to Pass CD Sales by 2012 ".

What does …

See Martin Fowler's essay on Technical Debt . Also see Steve McConnell's thoughts <http://blogs.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2007/11/01/technical-debt-2.aspx.

We can use Agile techniques to get things done ASAP and ACAP (As Soon As Possible and As Cheap As Possible). However, we still need to …

Someone sent this question to their manager and included me on the CC: list.

"Would you consider tools like Django to quickly build web apps ?"

My suggestion is that a bald query like this can only get on of two possible answers: "No" (and a large number of unsubtle variations …

One issue in creating a database design is working around the limitations inherent in the SQL data model. I'm going to call it the SQL model because you can make the case that the entity-relationship (ER) model is an abstraction and could have a far more expressive implementation. I'm going …

Back in the olden days (ca. 1981) Barry Boehm's Software Engineering Economics provided a detailed and definitive guide to estimating. It did one really important thing: it provided a conceptual model of software development that had a (relatively) focused set of degrees of freedom, an input driver and a couple …

Michael Shermer's column, in the July 2007 Scientific American , "The Prospects for Homo economicus ", notes that we all impaired when it comes to making economic decisions.

Also, see Kathleen Melymuka's article in the July 23, 2007 Computerworld , "Boiling the IT Frog ". Harwell Thrasher suggests that simple ROI calculations don't work …

I read recently a quick note on a Very productive day . New development feels more productive than maintenance because it's more "linear"; it sounds like that means fewer dead-ends, less exploration.

I also read recently "How to innovate on time " where the trick is to increase your failure rate. In …

Python is a top-shelf toolset for creating sample data to do performance testing.

Let's say that you need to validate a data warehouse design, and you need a million facts that join with thousands of dimension entities across a half-dozen dimensions. You'll be generating data for seven different tables, and …

At this point, we have clex.py, which uses sqlpreproc.py to create a proper lexer for C source code. We use PLY 's ANSI C parser (cparse.py) as the backbone of our own analysis of C.

The C Language.

Separate from the lexical structure of C (the spelling …