Long in the Tooth: What to Do with Aging Software
Software development has moved through several ages as both technical innovation and the cultural evolution driven by those technical innovations has moved from the early adopters through the late adopters and permeated our expectations of what technology is. But, now, we’re seeing a wave of projects driven solely by applications just getting long in the tooth.
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When a Fixed Price is a Reasonable Option
I still run into a lot of companies that have the expectation that software development can be done on a fixed-price basis. They’re either still used to waterfall management style, or dealing with goods vendors, or, maybe a few are still running into software...
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Persistence
Boston March 1911 Icy wind blew the pages of the young man's book from beneath his near-frozen fingers. His tattered gloves helped little. He huddled in an alley finding what warmth he could behind a bakery. The scent of baking bread made his mouth water but he dared...
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Our Takeaways from NAB Show 2017
A couple of us were among the 100,000+ attendees at the recent NAB Show in April. If you’ve never been to the show, it would be kind of tricky to describe it fully since it’s rather broad and all-encompassing when it comes to media and digital content. The National...
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12 Things I Learned About Starting a Business (by Starting a Business)
The first thing I learned by starting a business is that it's best just to do something. If you have an idea for a business, and you love the idea, and you believe it to be a good idea, then just run with it. If it doesn't turn out great, or even if it fails, learn...
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Rebuilding SXSW
Now, just hold on a minute. I’m not trying to say that SXSW is broken or somehow inefficient. Stop yelling at me. Look: SXSW has been around for about 30 years at this point. And it’s grown exponentially in that time. I started going to peripheral music events around...
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What We Saw at SXSW 2017
We attended the SXSW Interactive Conference last week and it was just as busy, exciting, and informative as one would expect. We went to sessions covering everything from art and technology to medical software, hearables, wearables, IoT, audio software, software...
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Architectural History and the Value of Maintaining a Clear, Consistent Database
Sometimes, old buildings have really interesting stories to tell if you have just a few additional bits of knowledge about them. Not that long ago, I found myself in an old church in Pasadena, California. It had been built in the style of European Renaissance...
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I’m Sorry: Your Software Project Will Never Be Finished.
No, really. In fact, when you go live, your software shouldn’t be “done.” If it is, you’ve done something wrong. You see, in the history of software, there’s never been such a thing as a piece of software that launched without bugs. Think of your favorite, most used platforms. Gmail. Facebook. Salesforce. All are brimming with bugs. Every day a user writes into their contact forms about a bug they discovered, and while a lot of them are PEBKAC errors, a lot of them are legitimate bugs. And the ticket tracker logs them, someone triages them, and, eventually, most of them will be corrected.
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Are You Attending CES 2017?
Are you going to CES? We’ll be there. We expect to see some exciting breakthroughs in virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) as well as new innovations in pro-audio equipment, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and much more. It looks like...
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Looking Back at 2016 and Looking Forward to 2017
As we reach the end of 2016, let’s take a look at some of the stuff we wrote about over the course of the year. We shared our thoughts on custom software development, looking at the such things as: the differences between composing and improvising; the value of refactoring; the nuances of following a lean-startup model; the conflict between Apple and the FBI; what happens when bad projects happen to good people; and a top ten list of the ways in which software development is like parenting.
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A Few of Our New Year’s Resolutions
Paul I resolve to brighten the lives and businesses of our clients and partners at every touch point. I resolve to be more creative and persistent in uncovering the deepest and most meaningful ways in which we can impact our clients' and partners' success. I resolve...
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Understanding: the Difference Maker
In the world of software consulting, it can be virtually impossible to determine what the fair market value for software development is. Nobody estimates work according to the same parameters: some firms have differing rates for differing services, some have offshore development services, some won’t provide a meaningful estimate at all (and for good reason).
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What Does It Mean to Be a “Thought Leader”?
I was recently given the opportunity to present myself as a “thought leader for my industry.” I’ve been pondering this. What do I know? What do I know so deeply and fully that others might want to hear my opinions on? Not much, it seems. Actually, I don’t have nearly as many answers as I have questions. But more than this, it’s the questions that really keep me interested. Here’s an example.
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IoT Smart-Locks: Apple HomeKit & Schlage Sense-lessness (or how to spend $2000 on a deadbolt)
The goal Upgrade home-office security and take the opportunity to join the Star Trek generation of smart-home IoT. Exec summary Describe my experience installing and configuring a couple of Schlage Sense smart-locks and configuring them to connect to a couple of Apple...
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The Apple Watch is Silly, Isn’t It?
I love my smartphone. Like many of us today, I couldn’t live without my phone. I don’t do anything these days until my phone tells me I need to do it. Ok. Maybe slightly hyperbolic, but I can certainly say without exaggeration that I’m a more organized and productive person because of my phone.
But, the idea of a smart, wearable device? I didn’t get the point of it. Why would I want to take the functionality of my phone and compress it into an even smaller screen? It’s already tough enough to navigate my 4.7-inch smartphone. The idea of navigating an interface only slightly larger than a postage stamp was laughable.
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Azure Load Balancing: How to Scale Out VMs
Cloud Computing shines in a cost-benefit analysis; virtually unlimited resources are available at a moment’s notice, and resources must only be paid for if and when they are needed. Unlike dedicated servers, Cloud-based resources scale quickly & automatically to respond to peak loads. They can also provide fault tolerance via replication both within and between data centers. Understanding the pros and cons of the different approaches available to scale your app up is critical to long-term project success.
Net Neutrality Day of Action
July 12, 2017 is a Day of Action on #netneutrality — learn about the issues and how to contact the FCC and your congressional representatives to keep ISPs from being able to throttle or block content.
Looking Forward to ARKit and AR Apps in iOS 11
At WWDC earlier this month Apple previewed ARKit – it’s initial foray into Augmented Reality or AR. Alongside the intro session at WWDC they published Understanding Augmented Reality which provides a nice overview of how ARKit works, best practices, and its limitations.
Following WWDC the development community has put together a number of great demos that highlight the possibilities and potential of ARKit and the Made with ARKit (@madewithARKit) site has been chronicling some of the best of these.
Here are a few of my favorites…
JSON Parsing, Conversion, and Caching in the Apollo iOS GraphQL Client
In my last post I took a closer look at how the Apollo iOS GraphQL client executes queries and what the resulting JSON looks like. In this post I’m going to focus on how the JSON is parsed and converted to the native Swift types generated by the apollo-codegen tool and also look at how the Apollo iOS client caches results.
