Here's part of a recent email, subject "Antique Programmer in search of face lift and/or brain transplant as appropriate...". It was from a VP/Director kind of person who'd been away from hands-on technology for a few years.

"I’ve got a new Vista PC with dual drives so …

Since I spend a lot of time on skill upgrades for my clients, my books are oriented around that theme. It's something that I learned from Jim Bullock : there's a Clue Absorption Rate, and you can't exceed that rate. These books are about building skills incrementally.

I've got three Python-related …

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 …

I can't find all of the Better Software Magazine articles on the Sticky Minds web site, so I can't provide a permalink. But look for "A Story About User Stories and Test Driven Development". It's good stuff, weighing out the good and bad features of "by-the-book" TDD.

Dr. Dobb's Journal …

In Lenses That Distort Our Software , I noted that the relational model of data can distort our view of the underlying reality that software models. In that posting I was whining about how meaningful structure is sacrificed to force fit information into the rows and columns of the relational world …

I see organizations stymied by a few individuals that seem to subvert initiatives and prevent progress. Or they somehow evade being useful and spend all their time in hand-wringing and "yeah-but"-ing. I'm not sure how to exploit what they can do, while getting past the stalls and evasions.

Here's …

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 …

When approaching reverse-engineering, we have to partition the big puddle of code into some useful pieces that we can manage intellectually, and will likely become parts of the resulting application. In some cases, this is either impossible or valueless. It may be that the application is so hopelessly bad that …

In order to talk about what goes in the database, we need to put the question into some kind of useful context. Weirdly, the question came to me in a context so twisted and bizarre that it's a little hard to sort out what -- precisely -- was going on. First, what …

A taxonomy of pipeline alternatives is a big, hairy deal, involving lots of alternatives. While your basic API methods are relatively few in number, each language and platform introduces new options. Without some focus, it's challenging to produce a big, fluffy description of all potential alternatives.

However, the interesting thing …