
Atomist–making software development observable, programmable
I recently sat down with the cofounders of Atomist Rod Johnson and Ryan Day to discuss the state of software development today and how their platform meets the needs of companies undertaking digital transformation and replatforming projects. Organisations are being told to break down monoliths into hundreds, if not thousands, of services but […]

6M Developers Are Creating Big Data And Advanced Analytics Apps Today
2M developers are working on IoT applications, increasing 34% since the last year. Over 50% of the developers working on IoT applications are writing software that utilizes sensors in some capacity. 4M enterprise developers play decision-making roles when it comes to selecting organizational IT development resources. Another 5.2 million hold decision-making authority for selecting IT […]
Authentication as a Service: Slow Progress, But Are We There Yet?
Authentication as a Service solves a problem every Cloud Developer, mobile or desktop, has to solve. As one player in the space, AuthRocket, puts it: Do you really want to write code for users, forgotten passwords, permissions, and admin panels again? To that I would add, “Do you really want to have to be a world class […]
How Moore’s Law Put Apple in the Driver’s Seat and Cost Steve Ballmer His Job
With the Mac’s 30th anniversary, lots of folks are writing all sorts of articles about it, so I thought it only fitting to bring up my own thoughts on what happened and how Apple got control away from Microsoft. It’s not a theory I have seen anywhere else, but it’s the one that makes the […]

You Have to Have an Overseas Dev Team to Scale? Baloney!
ba·lo·ney 2 also bo·lo·ney (b -l n ) Slang. n. Nonsense. interj. Used to express disagreement or exasperation. Recently, I was doing something on LinkedIn, and it asked me to endorse various people’s skills like it often does. One face in particular popped out at me: Anders Hejlsberg. I’ve known Anders for many years, so […]

How Many Software Companies Monitor Their Software as Well as Tesla Monitors its Cars?
The unfolding story of how the New York Times’ negative review of the Tesla Model S may have actually been faked is a cautionary tale for software vendors. Basically, there is enough instrumentation and feedback built into the Tesla S that Elon Musk was able to “shred” the review, as Dan Frommer writes. The graphical […]

Gaining the Wisdom of Crowds in a Bootstrapped SaaS Company
When you’re bootstrapping a small company, sometimes it’s hard to do the things larger organizations take for granted, like making sure you’re listening well enough to your customers. On the other hand, you can take advantage of your nimble nature and the availability of some great technology to do some things that even a lot […]

Building Apps is Wrong!
Software developers, too many of them in fact, are still building apps. That could be a mistake. For decades, software developers have identified business functions and transactions that they could create applications around. The job of an application usually was to permit the recording of a business or accounting event, perform some computational magic upon […]

The 7 Kinds of Software Developer Wushu
James Governor got me thinking along these lines by asking how to segment developers. He asked whether the web “killed” the professional developer, or at the very least radically reshaped the segments. I don’t know about all that, in fact I’m pretty skeptical. But what I do know is that the way James talked about developers […]

Those Special Customers Developers Love (Well They Should Love Them!)
Do you have any special customers that your developers hate? These are the customers that can mysteriously break your products over and over again, even though perhaps thousands of others report no problems. How does this work? First, understand the psychology of bugs. Developers don’t consciously create bugs, they come about as errors of omission, […]