From the category archives:

Industry trends

No silver bullets. Really!

December 16, 2009

Fred Brooks wrote a seminal essay in 1986, “No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering“, a model of clear and cogent thinking that I consider to be required regular reading for anyone involved in information technology.  Despite the essay’s brilliance, and despite its wide promulgation and deserved fame, the phenomenon it describes [...]

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Cloud computing: misunderstood, but really not that complicated a concept

September 29, 2009

Consider these statements:

Baseball is a game where the pitcher throws to the catcher.
An iPhone is a device that lets you call anywhere in the world.
The Grand Canyon is a tourist attraction in Arizona

You’ll have noticed that these statements aren’t wrong, per se. But they still take you aback, don’t they? They miss the [...]

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On Twitter, if you follow back reflexively, the spammers win

September 13, 2009

Are you among those who believe that if you don’t follow someone back on Twitter, you’re being snobby and arrogant?  Then this post is meant for you. My purpose here, quite candidly, is to persuade you that reflexively following someone back is not only a habit which encourages spam, but is in fact a major [...]

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“Getting” Twitter, from the technology executive’s perspective

April 7, 2009

I don’t want this to be just another post about Twitter, the current hot trend of the Internet.  Rather, I’d like to relate this new Twitter fad to a long-planned important topic here.
Specifically, what can we in technology do to keep current and stay up-to-speed on our various areas of interest and expertise? There’s more [...]

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