Meeting Hell
From one of my favorite software engineering books, Eric Brechner’s I.M. Wright’s Hard Code: None of us is as dumb as all of us An especially evil form of interruption is the meeting. A meeting forces you to stop productive...
Category: Rants
The Math of Mediocrity
Professionally, almost nothing aggravates me more than the Math of Mediocrity. The only thing worse than observing failure based on the Math of Mediocrity is having to actively participate in it. Steve Jobs’ Parable of the Concept Car is a...
Why SPMetal Falls Short
First, SPMetal is good. It’s very good. Much better than life without it. It encourages more object-oriented programming (instead of XML string oriented programming – blech!) That said, SPMetal falls short of awesome by just a hair. Ideally, one would...
SharePoint 2010 Mobile Rendering (And Device Emulator Fun!)
I was recently tasked with taking an exploratory look at the mobile rendering capabilities of SharePoint 2010 to get a feel for it. The short of it is that it’s sad to say that in 2010 (the year, that is),...
Cloud Hype Rant
A few years ago, I read an excellent article in Wired magazine titled “The Thin Pill“: “FOR PATIENTS, disease puts a name to an affliction. It answers that question we all face at one time or another: What’s the matter...
Analysis Paralysis : Getting Carried Away With UML
UML is a useful tool, no doubt. It’s a tool to help model complex logic in a visual manner. It’s a language in and of itself and it can aid in communicating design ideas with exacting precision, leaving little room for...
On Healthcare: What We Can Learn From The Music Industry
Nathan Alderman has an interesting write up on the effect of a public option on the healthcare industry: A decade ago, the major record labels were fat and happy, making piles of cash off CD sales. They could use their...
Rental Car Diaries
Being a consultant means traveling from time to time (or all the time). Since May, I’ve been traveling to Boston on a weekly basis and I’ve had a variety of cars. Oddly enough, my favorite car has been a Hyundai;...
Thoughts From The Trenches (Giant Brain Dump Incoming!)
A random assortment of random thoughts (and rants!) from the trenches… You Know You’re In Trouble When… You have to convene three people to figure out how to create an instance of one of the core objects in your framework. ...
Automatic Properties (And Why You Should Avoid Them)
Ah yes, automatic properties. Insn’t it great that you don’t have to do all of that extra typing now? (Well, you wouldn’t be doing it anyways with ReSharper, but that’s besides the point.) For some reason, they’ve never sat well...