Featured
When the Architect Picks Up the Hammer
Something shifts when a senior technologist stops directing software to be built and starts building it himself, with AI as the pair. After four decades in software and twenty years away from the keyboard, the distance between intent and implementation finally collapsed. This is what that felt like, and what it revealed about experience, craft, and the future of building
The Decline of the Org Chart
For most of the last century, the challenge of organizing large groups of people around shared work produced a consistent answer: the hierarchy. Not because anyone designed it to be optimal, but because it solved five distinct coordination problems at once, and nothing simpler could do the same. Those problems are now separable. The structure built to solve them all at once is beginning to come apart, unevenly and in ways most commentary misses.
Themes
The Return of the Builder
Intent, clarity, and the craft of building software when implementation gets cheap.
6 articles →
The Self-Driving Enterprise
How AI is reshaping enterprise software, from ambient ERP to autonomous workflows.
21 articles →
My Life with AI
A personal narrative of building alongside machines, from a TRS-80 to today.
2 articles →
Random Thoughts from the Trenches
Software craft, leadership, estimation, and whatever else is on my mind.
38 articles →Articles
ERP and the A.I. Factor
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here. Once a topic of conversation, news, and science fiction, AI has finally entered our technology landscape. We are only beginning to see the impact it will have on…
Four megatrends that will reshape what software can do for us
Four major enterprise management trends are maturing simultaneously, and their imminent fusion has only begun to transform the way we conduct business. They are big data, mobile access, user…
Self-driving enterprise software
By using advanced technologies within pattern recognition, machine learning and computer aided decision support systems, as well as new IoT devices, software can make automated decisions on behalf of…
Patterns
Patterns is not a new buzz or anything, actually patterns, the use hereof and definitions started in 1994 when the book “Design Patterns” was released by the gang of four. Since then there have been…
Does multi-tenancy really matter anymore?
At risk of upsetting cloud purists, my answer is a resounding no. Fifteen years ago, multi-tenancy mattered because infrastructure was expensive. Today, with cheap cloud resources and container orchestration, the economic necessity has gone away.
Thoughts on Rewrites (Estimation)
Estimating rewrites is hard, and frequently developers got a tendency to underestimate such a task – as, in their mind, they know exactly how the system should work, as they already built it once.…
How to Predict next Disruptive Technology
On a very lazy Saturday I was pondering about what eventually could be the next great disruptor within technology, that I could lash onto and be among the first movers. But how would anyone be able to…
Random Thought
As a software professional I keep being astonished what users accept and put up with, when it comes to faulty, buggy and unfathomable useless apps or systems. You download an app from an AppStore, or…
Running apps without connectivity
The other day on my daily commute I was, as usual, reading the latest news on technology and other, to me, interesting areas, I ended up spending most of my commute reflecting on the subject of mobile…
Will Windows 8 bring MS into the tablet/phone game?
Recent I had a discussion about the contents of the following article: http://gizmodo.com/5839665/windows-8-slate-hands-on-its-fantastic-but-dont-sell-your-ipad, where I labeled a post: "Eventually…
Elephant butt, Software Development and Estimation
Okay, here's an interesting question: what does an elephant butt, software development and estimation have in common? At first thought not really much, but then again they actually have a lot in…
Smart Clients Versus Web Clients - What's the Answer?
For a long period of time every ISV jumped on the browser bandwagon, meaning creating web versions of their existing fat clients. This transition was driven by Google's everything web mantra, together…