Bill's Blog: the business of software
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- Switching to Blogger. Up until now, I have been bu...Switching to Blogger. Up until now, I have been building my blog manually. Each page crafted one by one. This allowed be to keep a style consistent with my web site. Unfortunately, publishing entries is time consuming. And the more entries, the more time.
So I am switching to Blogger. With this being my first entry. After publishing this meager note, I intend to copy my current blog entries over to Blogger. And then the writing continues.
Wed, 07 Jun 2006 12:48:00 +0000 - WHAT AM I DOING?
Bare with me you seasoned vetern...WHAT AM I DOING?
Bare with me you seasoned veterns of blogging. I am slowly making the transition from my home-grown blog to Blogger. I initially started by pasting my old entries into Blogger. But this morning I had to smack myself in the head and ask the question: "What am I doing?" Doh! Silly me. Instead of moving every article to blogger, I should simply move over the index page. From there, all my loyal fans can read the older articles. Happy happy joy joy.
Fri, 09 Jun 2006 12:43:00 +0000 - RUNNING WITH SCISSORS
I just finished the book Ru...RUNNING WITH SCISSORS
I just finished the book Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. First I should let you know that there is nothing technical and no business lesson in the book. It is simply a memoir of the author's thoroughly screwed up adolescence.
The book is a quick read. I finished it in less than a week, reading only on the train during my commute (when I was not sleeping). There is no cohesive plot, and virtually no character development or plot tension. Instead each chapter reads like a short story. You could easily skip around the book, like a Quentin Tarantino movie, without confusion.
Each little tale is interesting, humorous, and disturbing all at once. And the strong gay theme makes the book a bit uncomfortable. I probably wouldn't have read much more than a chapter, but curiosity over what could happen next kept me going.
I don't care much for Burroughs' writing. He seems to waste words drifting off on tangents. And the characters are so underdeveloped that the reader forms no attachments. Reading the epilog was no more interesting than reading a newspaper article. With all the craziness, you'd think the author would express some passion, but instead he drones on almost completely detached.
I found the book entertaining enough to finish. But I would not recommend it. Save your summer reading for authors who pour passion into their work.
Mon, 12 Jun 2006 13:01:00 +0000 - WHERE'S IS PASSION FOR DESIGN?
I work for a softw...WHERE'S IS PASSION FOR DESIGN?
I work for a software company with no passion for design. It goes beyond no passion, there is no concern. It goes beyond lack of concern, there no value in the importance of design.
Imagine if all companies operated this way. Apple. Audi. Sony. Our world would be a mess.
Let me start by saying that I am a huge believer in the importance of software design. I should also note that I am referring to the visual design of software. I believe that good design is engineered into software from the start of a project. I believe that good design will generate sales. And I believe that good design will lower costs, specifically, training and support costs.
And in my field, I believe these values are the minority opinion.
At my current firm, our products are a collection of client/server and web applications written over the last ten years. In all, there are nine applications and only the most recent web apps share a common look and feel. None of the applications have thoughtful designs. Our applications break nearly every design guideline I can think of; too many to list specifically.
What's worse, in my mind, than the poor UI design, is the apathy around correcting the problems. I dread the phrase "let's get it working, and worry about the look and feel later." I dread that phrase because I know that the UI design will not be given appropriate attention. And the end result will suffer.
I am embarressed to admit that we recently released software where this was the case. The project started appropriately, with thoughtful UI design. In fact a non-working prototype was built and approved that could have raised the bar for software design at my firm. Unfortunately, that's not what happened. Several factors contributed to our failure to implement the original design. These include emphasis on back-end development, change of developers, postponed development of the UI, and apathy from senior product management.
Of all our the factors contributing to the bad design, apathy from the product manager was the most insulting. She had reviewed and presented the prototype and was therefore familiar with the design approach. During development, my programmer wrote a number of "quick and dirty" web pages to peak into the databases. In this way, we could test the business rules and backend processing prior to development of the UI. Unfortunately, the product manager signed off on this test UI, leaving the product with an ugly and barely usable interface.
Through it all, though, I learned a valuable lesson. And that is, start work on the UI at the beginning of a project rather than the end. In fact, I recommend writing the user manual first, then coding the system to match the manual. Now all I have to do is find someone who can write a respectable manual.
Wed, 14 Jun 2006 13:13:00 +0000 - OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
As a builder and seller of s...OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
As a builder and seller of software, you may think I would not be a proponent of Open Source. And you would be wrong. I love Open Source; not for idealogical reasons, but because I can get great applications at little or no cost. Our firm is fairly small, and it's important that my modest development staff remain focused on engineering products. For internal requirements, we often turn to Open Source.
One such application is the Blogging software blojsom. And no, this blog is not written with blojsom, I use regular ole Blogger here. Blojsom was easy to set up and meets our needs for corporate blogging; which is actually a journal style knowledge base. Blojsom isn't perfect, administering a blog is clumsy, as is adding and editing entries. But the application is stable and attractive.
We also use Moodle. Moodle is software for running web based education. It is very mature and feature rich. We have only scratched the surface of the application's capabilities, but I am impressed. Moodle has the advantage of an active community.
Of course underneath these applications is Open Source infrastructure. In our case this includes MySQL, Apache Tomcat, and PHP. I don't believe any of these are up to the task of their commercial counterparts, but for the internal needs of a small business they are perfectly fine. With the exception of PHP, these were very easy to set up on a Windows 2003 Server. PHP was a bit more difficult as we configured it with Microsoft IIS instead of the recommended Apache web server.
Although not open source, we also use the free application Actitime from Actimind. Actitime performs timetracking. Interestingly, it uses a combination of ASP.NET and MySQL. I highly recommend Actitime and have considered using their developers as consultants on some of our development projects.
These are real apps being used by a real company to do business on a daily basis. Our usage of these applications clearly demonstrates the traction made by open source providers. I look forward to expanding our list; anyone know a good open source accounting package? Or how about CRM? ERP?
Wed, 19 Jul 2006 16:15:00 +0000
