Not Invented Here

I am in a new organization with growing pains.  We all want to work together but nobody knows how to make decisions in this organization.  T...

I've now observed a few development teams using Trello to manage their work.  Trello feels great to use and it seems to promote creativi...

I read a rather old book called "Technological Risk" while working on startup software test plans, and this is making me think of...

I've seen a bunch of mis-use of HTTP status responses in HTTP/JSON or HTTP/XML APIs.  It's not merely a matter of taste when interop...

I wrote up a series of overly honest responses to job applicants a few years ago.  Didn't send them, of course, it was purely therapeuti...

I recently looked up some data in response to a sad person thinking that "our streets" (the writer was writing from New York, but ...

I went looking for articles on how to interview programmers/engineers for startups.  I didn't like much of what I found (I did like  El...

Elastic Beanstalk seems like it’s meant to allow a startup to easily deploy Web sites using the most common Web frameworks, and scale those...

Once we decided to use Dynamoid to replace ActiveRecord in our Rails project, we needed to figure out how to test it. First off, testing ...

At work we're using Amazon Web Services' DynamoDB for a backend.  This is early days and a work in progress, but I thought I'd ...

In kindergarten and grade one these days, teachers encourage kids to get their thoughts onto paper any old way.  They don't explain how ...

I like DynamoDB, and I like architecture that reduces the amount of backend engineering one needs to do in a company whose product is an app...

Working on a new project using cutting-edge AWS stuff and iOS 7, I note some opportunities. 1.  A really good Ruby library for working wit...

I was chatting with another programmer about our different styles.  He's an incredible algorithm solver.  He's done compression and...

I'm reading Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug, and just read the section on home page messages.  That's why I laughed out loud ...