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???) As in: I want to try something new that’s fast, usually works, and normally returns me the right thing (for what I thought I was solving). ...

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. ...