Business Focused Technical Advice
There are a whole host of thoughts and processes on what you need to do to get things done. Indeed there is a great book called Getting Things Done, by David Allen. If you aren’t too busy getting things done, perhaps you may have time to read it. Along there same lines is the brilliant blog of Merlin Mann’s www.43folders.com. (For a distraction, check out his Inbox Zero talk.)
Source control, revision control, version control, call it what you will, but at least use it! For those of you who don’t know what it is, it is roughly a process in software development whereby changes to source code, documents, applications etc. are tracked over time, in such a way that it is possible to reliably reconstruct any previous or current version. For a bit more of a comprehensive explanation have a look at Wikipedia’s Revision Control article. This blog is really is a cry from the heart to those people in software development not using it to start using it for code management. If you do use it and you are using a conventional centralised system, then take two minutes to read about distributed revision control - it may not be relevant to you today, but its worth knowing about.
Lets get right to the point! I’ve setup a working VPS Centos 5 LAMP server in 128MB of memory and it hasn’t gone into swap yet. It typically runs in just over 100Mb of memory and performs really well. So I thought I’d share the process of setting it up in our blog.
Continue reading ‘Setup of a Linux Web Server in 128Mb of Memory’ »
In this article I talking about a number of large companies (often not technology based) that shun the use of open source desktop applications, and possibly some other back-office applications like databases. In my experience it is either standard policy not to use them at all, or hypocritically, not allow their use on the desktops, but use them for the likes of web servers, or server operating systems - especially as the likes of Dell, HP and IBM provide supported solutions with some form of Linux installed.
Continue reading ‘Corporates Shun Open Source Desktop Apps’ »
This is a very short post about software development that I hope will be useful to anyone that finds it. I wanted to put on our blog a five key checkpoints that help identify risks in a software development project, based on the more human aspects. Some of these items seem obvious, other less so. As my background is software development and software development consultancy, this list pertains to that discipline, however many of the ideas cross over into project management in general. Continue reading ‘Software Development Project Risks - The Human Side’ »
About six week or so ago I posted this question on the Linkedin Website:
Continue reading ‘What is the most cost effective way to process card payments online?’ »
I was surprised to be reminded that it was around 8 years ago that I first came across The Joel Test, and am still shocked by the number of teams involved in the production of software that would not come close to getting any where near 12 out of 12. What am I talking about? Well, Joel Spolsky came up with 12 simple questions in 2000, published on his (highly recommended) website Joel on Software; the answers to which give a great insight into whether or not you have the environment and processes in place to develop and deliver great software. All questions require a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response, and as a consequence taking the test takes no more than about three minutes. So what are you waiting for - take the ‘12 Steps to Better Code’ test!
In a recent technical mentoring session that we hosted, a question came up that crops up regularly, so I thought I’d post a quick summary here.
The question is “How do I retrieve the id of a newly created record in a SQL Server table from my application?”
For this example, we’ll assume that the table in question is called tutor, and has just two fields, id and name, where the id field is a primary key with an identity field. The table definition would be
CREATE TABLE tutor (id INT PRIMARY KEY IDENTITY(1,1), full_name VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL)
Firstly I’d like to warn against the common use (miss-use) of a well known system variable called @@IDENTITY. This variable gets back the value of the most recently updated identity field, which on the face of it seems perfect. However, there are two key things to watch.
The other day I was watching some tug boats help manoeuvre a large tanker in to port. Despite the huge size of the tanker, the small tugs made swift work of such a difficult task. This got me thinking again about one of my pet subjects, which is why large companies all too often insist on getting similarly sized companies to solve some of their smaller software issues. If the captain of a tanker needs a quick change in direction, he doesn’t ask for another tanker to help with the manoeuvre.
We have always taken the Green side of life very seriously. At first glance one might not think that there is a great deal that can be achieved by an IT Consultancy such as ours to help the environment; or at least to reduce the impact of our actions on the environment. But, as time has passed I keep bumping into useful things - it seems to be in the zeit-geist more and more. The video below is taken from the Reuters website and talks about what companies are doing and in particular what products are selling at CeBIT 2008.