Software developers get so used to their Culture of Complexity, they hardly notice it.

See Asshole-Driven Development for more thoughts on this. The comments add lots and lots of examples of dysfunctional development. Many of these are additional examples of complexity run amok.

My personal addition is Next Year's Dollars …

On Stack Overflow I was captivated by "What tools would you used to write a modular database in Python? " and "Implementing a 'rules engine' in Python ".

Both questions are quite amazing because they already have a modular, flexible rules engine (called "python") but it's not good enough: they want to …

There's this huge gulf between "protecting" our intellectual property (IP) and making money off our intellectual property. In our case, we have experts creating business models that we embody in some source code as business rules.

What's the IP? The software or the model? Where's the value? Is it out …

How do we provide some kind of admin support/tools/procedures for the sales team?

We know they'll invent new scenarios. We know they'll want to save that configuration. With Django's admin utilities, we can do a "dumpdata" that preserves the interesting parts of the the database. That much is …

This is a long, sordid story. Maybe a the title should be "Seduced by Technology", rather than "The Business Analyst Lied."

Initially, it sounded like this:

"Our customer asks for a recommendation regarding an offering. Based on the description of the offering, we use web services to get some scoring …

First, look at "Protecting your MySQL database from SQL injection attacks with GreenSQL ". Okay, a longish article on the ins and outs of installing something that blah blah blah

Wait -- what? GreenSQL is a proxy for MySQL that checks the SQL for certain kinds of injection attacks!?!?!

Now read Twisted …

Here's a great quote from a reader regarding Big Plan for Change : "[the advice] doesn't account for project tracking requirements of the organization. Budgeting. Metrics. Hiring. Documenting. Transitioning to new staff."

Good point. Let's look at these in a little bit of depth. We'll cover the three management practices first …

See Fast, but Slowly . ComputerWorld, Frankly Speaking, August 25, 2008, by Frank Hayes.

This is a very cool restatement of some essential Agile principles.

Sure, we can train and plan -- and we should. But there are too many unknowns to train and plan for everything. A slow ramp-up lets us …

An old professor of mine writes "There are lots of pathological propensities at work ..., "Gee, we've got a way to use the computer to ..." In short, automation for the sake of automation."

See jbox.dk Quotations on Simplicity . The fundamental principle is that simplicity is really important. But how do …

Two recent conversations with the Non-Compromisers.

NC: "I can't use Yahoo! mail"

Me: "What?"

NC: "Yahoo! mail has a "Home" tab which isn't the inbox. It always lands there."

Me: "Yep. That's a javascript thing. The tab isn't bookmarkable."

NC: "The fact that I can't land directly on the "Inbox …