Is there a rational way to measure coder skills and contributions and the way that software teams fit together? Could metrics help you improve coder self-awareness, teamwork, mentoring, and goal-setting? Could more detailed data help you make better hiring decisions, help make performance reviews fairer, and help your software teams...

These words may contradict each other, but they express the roller coaster of sentiments felt by real-time strategy games players like me. I remember spending countless hours playing brilliant games such as EA/Maxis’s SimCity and SimCity 2000,...

Programmers may spend a good part of their careers scripting code to conform to commercial statistics packages, visualization tools, and domain-specific third-party software. The same tasks can force end users to spend countless hours in copy-paste purgatory, each minor change necessitating another grueling round of formatting tabs and...

I hate the term the cloud. I really do. In a surprisingly short period of time, I’ve seen the term twisted out of shape and become a marketing buzzword and applied to every bit of technology one can conjure up. I have no doubt that in a few years, the term the cloud will be relegated to the same giant dustbin for bad technology...

Software arch itects occupy a unique space in the world of IT. They are expected to know the technologies and software platforms on which their organizations run as well as the businesses that they serve. A great software architect needs to master both sides of the architect’s coin: business and technology. This is no small...

In the last year,...

Where. Whether it refers to where you have been, where you are, or where you are going, the concept of where is important. Where links data to the physical world. A shopping list can be a very useful collection of data on its own, but that data can be even more useful with more context. If you map the location of the stores needed for...

My degree is in physics, but I also worked as a software...