I remember attending the Debut of Dot Net back in the late ‘90s, attending a presentation in Indianapolis, IN, USA. They made a statement at the time I have not forgotten. I didn’t quite believe, or understand it. But it stuck with me. “Microsoft believes the future for software is going to be software as a service, not software as […]

Documentation is essential for any computer system. It doesn’t matter if you are purchasing a product off the shelf, or write custom software. There are many decisions that have been made to make the software and hardware work. Those decisions are best maintained when the appropriate level of documentation is created and maintained. If you have followed me for any […]

Can big business go to the Cloud? Unless I am mistaken, the only way many big companies are going to make it into the cloud is when their survival depends on it. Maybe even then it may not happen. Large organizations are entrenched in ideas and methodologies that have been proven for years. They often have huge investments in software […]

There are a few data design patterns that are easy to get hooked on because of their flexibility. Like any tool, the value diminishes if it is used incorrectly, or where not needed. Here are some of my favorites that have a place in database design; just not all of the time. EAV – EAV stands for Entity Attribute Values. […]

In my recent research I came across the term MEAN web development. Ok, nice name; now I’m interested. Reading on, I found that MEAN is an acronym for a tool set used to do rapid, economical web development. Data is persisted using Mongo db. Since Mongo is available as open systems software you can deploy it for little or no […]

Many seasoned software developers complete a career without studying software development patterns. They write fully functional code, and often use patters without being aware. As I have shown people different patterns it is not unusual for someone to say something like, “Oh. I do that all the time. I just didn’t know it was called that.” What, then, is the […]

What’s wrong with this? Following is an example snippet of code written in C#. It is syntactically correct. It is functionally correct. It accurately returns the results specified by the requirements (that I just made up). Still, there is a major flaw in this snippet of code. This is not a trick question. Can you see the problem? For (int […]

Just ship the software already! Have you ever felt like getting on top of your desk and shouting this phrase? Have you ever worked on the project that just wouldn’t quit? Every time I get into a situation like this I remember the story I was told about my Father’s travel trailer business. My father was a mechanical engineer. When […]

Data scientists have been attempting to influence the creation of a new data type for storage engines relating to time. Currently, we have data types based around date, time and the combination, date and time. If you wish to know something about the durability of those features, it requires an additional instance. So, if a fact is true from Monday […]

12 years ago I was working at a company developing electronic telephone bills. We put their data into a proprietary format, and burned it along with one or more CDs, including data and the latest version of our application. This was shipped to the customer monthly. It was a very automated and smooth process for everything except the building, testing […]