October 23, 2006 – 9:27 am
What if Salesforce.com were able to create a thriving online enterprise application marketplace with its AppExchange? Now that they’ve announced Apex, it looks like that’s their target.
However, though Salesforce might create a thriving market of Salesforce extensions, they may have little chance of creating a more broad-based online application infrastructure and market. Why? Because of […]
October 23, 2006 – 8:18 am
Why do many venture capitalists and technology executives feel that teams need to be geographically concentrated? As Cote’ pointed out, open source movements function quite well with internationally dispersed workforces, with team members who rarely if ever meet face to face. But open source efforts hew to an entirely different model of operations than typical […]
October 11, 2006 – 12:05 pm
From Elisa Camahort’s live chat coverage of Esther Dyson’s keynote interview at the Office 2.0 conference: “Work 2.0 is less about spreadsheets and word processing than it is about activity management.”
Coghead launched today, and its developers apparently agree with Esther. They embedded a BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) process engine into their offering for […]
October 10, 2006 – 1:13 pm
I was intrigued to hear about Salesforce.com’s announcement of Apex, their “on-demand multi-tenant Java-like” programming language that allows for arbitrary customization of the Salesforce.com customer relationship management product. To me, the most exciting thing about Web 2.0/Office 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 (or * 2.0 pronounced “star 2.0″ as Coté calls them) is the do-it-yourself web. There are […]
September 24, 2006 – 8:04 pm
Effective software development requires attention to design tradeoffs. You can’t get everything you want all at once. For example, sometimes it’s better to use flat files for data storage instead of a DBMS. Yes, databases give you all sorts of nice features: structured data, transaction control, easy querying and analysis, better protection against data corruption. […]
August 31, 2006 – 12:30 pm
UPDATE 9/2/06 10:50 am: Check out my proposed marketing solution to the where are the women problem.
The “where are the women” question has arrived in the hallways of the U.S. Supreme Court:
Everyone knows that with the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the number of female Supreme Court justices fell by half. The talk of […]
I don’t feel bad that I didn’t attend BloggerCon. The only session I read about that stuck in my mind was the one called “users in charge” that set users against developers. As though developers are all of one mind, of one temperament, of one type. As though developers aren’t themselves users.
The idea that only […]
You don’t usually see “JavaScript” and “Python” in the same sentence or even in the same article. That’s because they’re most often used for two different purposes by two different kinds of people. JavaScript is usually used within a Web browser whereas Python is used either on the server or as a general-purpose scripting language. […]
March 20, 2006 – 12:03 pm
Wouldn’t life be easier if there were a yes-no black-white this-not-that answer to everything? Well, there’s not, not for questions and situations of any complexity. Is Ruby or other interpreted, dynamically-typed language appropriate for enterprise software development? Are functional specs useful? The answer to both those questions is not yes or no, it’s maybe. To […]
February 18, 2006 – 7:50 pm
A couple weeks ago—a lifetime, in blog time—I noted an article by 37 Signals’ Jason Fried claiming that functional specifications were no longer necessary or desirable:
Functional specifications documents lead to an illusion of agreement. A bunch of people agreeing on paragraphs of text is not real agreement. Everyone is reading the same thing, but they’re […]
