In my book, The Nomadic Developer, I have a section of the book that defines various terms in a section called, appropriatley, Appendix B, A Consulting Lexicon. One term I define is a new term I like to call “Faith Driven Development”: Faith Driven-Development A development practice also known as “code n’ pray” or “Waterfall”. [...]
Lets face it, when times are good in consulting, when recruiters are constantly complaining that “there just are not enough people”, it is easy to feel secure in your job so long as you are not gratuitously unqualified. When things are going the other way, however – when business declines – my god how things [...]
As friends of mine who became victims of the recent US economic crisis start to look for jobs, I am often getting, usually over (a few) beers, very scary stories about what it is like interviewing today. Sadly, it is reminding me that not much has changed since last time I interviewed during hard economic [...]
I recently got an email from 4 former colleagues, all on the same day, that a firm I used to work for a long time ago had missed payroll. It was a very saddening thing, for sure – one of those things that make you ache for people that are stuck in companies that are [...]
Now that my book is largely done, I finally have time to focus on some things that have not received the attention they deserve lately. Thankfully, Jason Jarett was kind enough to introduce some great new ideas to i4o, which after having mulled over them for far too long, I am releasing into the wild [...]
In IT, too often, we are viewed as a cost, when we should be considered an investment. Are you measuring ROI? We sure do talk about it a great deal. But when asked, few can point to the actual rate of return on their historical investments. This, as it should, create skeptical investors – which [...]
As we go into 2009 and start to wonder if there is any future for technology at all, it might not be a bad idea to first look remember that technology is one of the greatest generators of productivity known to man. In an era where leverage is limited, and therefore you can’t simply [...]
Last weekend, while at the Twin Cities Code Camp, over a few drinks some fellow consultants and I were able to share some “war stories” from our consulting pasts. Boy, and I thought I might have ever had it bad. Some fellow Magenicons (my former employer) described to me some experiences they had at employers [...]
There, I said it. I hope, finally, we can start to put the old Dynamic vs Static language schizm issue to bed. C# now is a dynamic language. Rubyists eat your heart out (and I mean that in good fun). Lets go down the line – things that make a language dynamic: ‘Eval’, or more [...]
It is with great pleasure that I announce yet another flavor of LINQ – MetaLinq – the ability to query over and edit expression trees using LINQ. Why MetaLinq? Well, Oren Novotny, who is working on yet another project, SLINQ, aka Linq to Streams, and who also has contributed to i4o, was asking me if [...]
