When was the last time you heard someone say “push technology,” “customer self-service portal” or “World Wide Web”? All are terms that have largely vanished from the technology vernacular. Push technology essentially disappeared into RSS, pretty much everything is a customer portal in today’s online experience, and it’s comically passé to distinguish the World Wide … continue reading
It’s 2 AM, just hours before development is set to begin on your new multimillion-dollar project. While everyone else is sleeping, you’re wide-awake in a cold sweat. “Is that framework we selected really the right one?” you’re wondering. “Will we regret it later?” Sound familiar? Rest assured, you’re not alone! New JavaScript frameworks are under … continue reading
In May, the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) was signed into U.S. law. At the signing ceremony, President Obama remarked: “Unfortunately, all too often, some of our competitors, instead of competing with us fairly, are trying to steal these trade secrets from American companies. And that means a loss of American jobs, a loss of … continue reading
“Cogito ergo sum.” — Rene Descartes, 17th century French philosopher and mathematician. To me, software processes are a kind of intelligence, and that means to me that every program is alive. This is how I really see it.” — Benjamin Shapiro, founder of Thinking Software. You’ll get the connection soon. But first… Long story short, Shapiro, … continue reading
The pressing need to engage in digital transformation and build new processes and systems, coupled with severe developer shortages, has created an opportunity to promote model-driven platforms, often offered in public cloud form (PaaS) to bring the value of high-abstraction to a broader audience that is not trained in software development. Driven by shifting IT … continue reading
Today’s DevOps and “Continuous Everything” initiatives require the ability to assess the risks associated with a release candidate—instantly and continuously. Yet, as the release date looms, development teams are still focused on answering the question, “Are we done testing?” Fundamentally, this is the wrong question. It ties the concept of “quality” to static tests that … continue reading
Did you hear about the hacking attack carried out a few years ago on AT&T that resulted in exposing the contact details of more than 100,000 iPad users that were stored on their system? It was one of the high-profile attacks that targeted a “security misconfiguration” vulnerability in AT&T’s system architecture. That was not a … continue reading
Traditional relational databases, the powerhouse of software applications since the 1980s, work well when your data is predictable and fits well into tables, columns, rows, and wherever queries are not very join-intensive. But there are rich, connected domains all around us that relational software isn’t so well equipped at dealing with. Relational database-management systems (RDBMS) … continue reading
Healthcare workers, airline pilots, sea captains and others are held to a code of professional ethics, as they hold people’s lives in their hands. Should software engineers working in those fields be held to the same exacting standards? I recently spoke with Prof. Andrew Boyd, an assistant professor of biomedical and health information sciences at … continue reading
The pace of business (heck, the pace of life) gets faster and faster. Faster processing, faster delivery, faster innovation—and faster adoption and abandonment of that innovation—is the reality we all live in today. Leaders run fast businesses to win and to stay apace or in front of dynamic customers and disruptive competitive forces. They can’t … continue reading
If you’ve been developing software for more than five years, you’ve probably seen this cycle before: New architecture emerges. Developers abandon previous best practices. Developers eventually realize that some of those “old-school” practices apply to the new architectural approach. Microservices are no exception. Some developers see microservices as a way to throw out established service-oriented … continue reading
While the phrase “DevOps” suggests a cross-pollination of skills between Dev and Ops, in practice most think of it as Devs assuming some Ops roles, with their influence ever increasing across the app life cycle. I predict this is only the beginning of the diminishing role Ops will play. In fact, I will go as … continue reading
You can’t deal with Big Data that is also real-time data without feeling overwhelmed. It’s as if money were falling from the sky at an ever-faster rate, and you were scrambling to capture it all without worrying about which bills might be counterfeit. You want to be able to sort out what’s important later rather … continue reading
Since the introduction of GitHub’s awesome new “squash and merge” functionality, there’s a whole lot more squashing going on. With UI-level access to this Git power-user feature, more teams are squashing commits to make code review easier and provide a cleaner-looking history in tools like gitk or SourceTree. But squashing for the sake of creating … continue reading
