Something about describing a developer as a rock star is slightly off putting. Maybe it’s because when I think of rock stars the phrase “temperamental divas” comes to mind or maybe it’s because I never really understand what it means. Maybe it means this — Photo By gammaman / CC By 2.0 I think that I understand the intent. Technology firms and start ups really want talented motivated individuals who love what they do to apply for positions....

I recently migrated back to Wordpress as my blog platform of choice. The change has been painful, in fact, many of my older posts haven’t been migrated to WordPress. The change has been worth it though since it makes publishing easier. Today’s post is about the importance of focusing on the core workflows of an application and ensuring that they are as easy as possible to complete. ...

A (really) short post on the priorities of hobby projects, 1st draft projects, final production grade ap­pli­ca­tions. As per the post tag the below is only 1/4 serious and 3/4 for fun- Hobby / 1st drafts: Novelty (Can I use this new shiny thing?) Per­for­mance (Can I make this new shiny thing go faster too??) Re­li­a­bil­i­ty (Oh yeah–it fails sometimes, but I just restart it.) Cor­rect­ness (Wait you mean it was supposed to solve problem X and not problem Y?...

One of the hardest parts about building software for people is the people. The last couple projects I have worked on have been user oriented data exploration tools (generally speaking, one was for a marketing group and the other was for an automotive firm). In both cases there were two overarching questions that had to be answered for every feature we implemented. The questions were what would a new feature do and how would a user use the new feature. In a version of form over function we discovered that a number of times how a user would use a feature to find data would influence how it needed to be implemented. ...

I’ve been brewing and developing systems for a few years now. Today’s post is about some similarities and differences I have noticed between brewing and developing and differences (this will make more sense later). ...

Today’s post is on how new hires out of college seem to learn best at my firm. Keep in my that the following is purely my opinion and is based on my experience as a consultant working on custom software development projects with recent college graduates. ...

Summary A brief tip on the symptoms of con­fig­u­ra­tion gotcha I ran into when binding Nginx on IPv4 and IPv6 networks. The fix was to set ipv6only=off in the listen directive. Recently I upgraded to Nginx 1.4.0 on my the host for this website from an older version of Nginx. After the upgrade I found that con­nec­tions to port 80 from IPv4 hosts were refused. Con­nec­tions from IPv6 enabled hosts worked fine....

A short post on the priorities of hobby projects, 1st draft projects, final production grade applications. As per the post tag the below is only 1/4 serious and 3/4 for fun. Hobby / 1st drafts: Novelty (Can I use this new shiny thing?) Performance (Can I make this new shiny thing go faster too??) Reliability (Oh yeah–it fails sometimes, but I just restart it.) Correctness (Wait you mean it was supposed to solve problem X and not problem Y?...

In this post we’ll discuss what it means for a piece of software to be done (if ever) and some of the implications of that. ...