Interactive ASP.NET

There is an old Far Side comic where a professor is working complex math on a white board. At one point he’s written “and then a miracle occurs” and then successfully finishes his difficult problem. I’ve talked to a lot of programmers that feel software actually tries to do just...

In my post on “code is really design” post, I mentioned that I would further address the paradox that software is created in “thoughts units” but the most important people to the success or failure of a project are the sponsor and customer . In this post, I’ll explore that paradox further by discussing...

Lossy Compression In computer science, compression is an indispensible tool. Anyone familiar with .zip files knows what I mean. Interestingly, there are two kids of compression, lossless and lossy. Lossless compression is like .zip compression, you put a file of, say, 100kb in and the end result is a...

It seems to me that “overtime” is a much talked about subject, both in literature and just around the water cooler, but that people tend to take one of two extreme views on it. The first view is that overtime is immoral unless the development team screwed up. This point of view says, “if...

Trying to estimate software projects is difficult to say the least. But sometimes, it’s just impossible. I just finished resolving a problem on my project that I spent the last two days working on. The task was to issue a Purchase Order (PO) to a vendor using the SAP interface available to me. ...

In a previous post I mentioned Robert Glass’ “fact” that estimates are made at the beginning of the project before the problem is even defined, thus the estimate is invalid from the get go. While I don’t disagree with Glass, I do believe he is under estimating (pun intended!) why we human’s prefer estimates...

In Robert Glass' excellent book, Fact and Fallacies of Software Engineering , one of his “facts” (I.e. Qualified opinions) if that “Most software estimates are preformed at the beginning of the life cycle... before the requirements are defined and thus before the problem is understood...