Back when I was looking for ideas for the 20 Things in 20 Minutes article, a developer suggested that the CIO use those 20 minutes to sign off on an upgrade to all programmer PCs. And plenty of people shouted, "Huzzah!" right behind him.
Too many companies have forgotten that automation is intended to take care of the ordinary class of problem-and that humans are a necessary ingredient for uncommon scenarios. The result is poor software usability, particularly for the developers, techies and admins who actually do know how to operate a computer.
Successful women who've served in both roles explain what makes a mentoring relationship work, how to find the right person and knowing when to part
When I read the database report from Evans Data that I wrote about yesterday, I noticed that the open-source databases-MySQL and PostgreSQL-fared rather poorly, in comparison to the commercial products (notably Oracle and DB2). Hmm, I thought. Maybe it's a case of "you get what you pay for."
Agile methodologies for software projects can help organizations create better software faster. Yeah, yeah, you've heard that before. Here, experienced programmers explain the key ingredients to make those goals achievable
Meetings are hard enough to run when the participants are all in the same room, fighting over the last chocolate doughnut. But any meeting you call, nowadays, probably has at least one person attending who works in a remote location. In some cases, everyone in the teleconference is dialing in. You may be great at orchestrating an in-person meeting, but running an effective teleconference requires new skills.
Ambitious women sometimes have a hard time getting noticed, but marketing one's accomplishments is a requirement for career advancement. Six female CIOs offer advice to up-and-coming women in IT and explain how they learned to network without compromising themselves.
An open-source algorithm called Author-Topic is now being investigated for analyzing corporate e-mail to flag employee behaviour and attitudes.
There are good reasons to insist that developers take extra time to make Web sites accessible-such as enabling it for the screen readers that blind users need-not the least of which is ADA legislation. But who's paying attention to making a site run well without JavaScript? It might be more necessary than you imagine.
For the last 25 years, I have lived in TCP/IP packets more than I do in the real world. I do have personal connections; I'm involved in community activities, and I have warm-blooded friends who would notice if I quit breathing. Those people have my phone number and physical address... but my virtual correspondents do not. If I disappeared from one of those online communities, would they notice?
After a week of traveling, I have a pocketful of business cards, a stack of taxi receipts, and a hissy fit to throw about conference facility Internet infrastructure.
Most of us don't know how to catalog information... and even when we do, our personal sense of categories doesn't generally encompass a wide enough range. If I create a photo blog and label a picture "Paris," will someone searching for "France" find my photo? Probably not.
During the Web's hype-filled early days, the voices of Internet proponents rang with promise. The Internet would make e-learning possible worldwide, human collective wisdom would create a vast storehouse of never-disappearing knowledge and we would end up with a huge knowledgebase with information, surely, at our fingertips. In my non-cynical moments I admit that some of these goals have been achieved... but I'm not very confident about that "never-disappearing" bit.
Most books on managing technical people, especially managing software engineers, have no use except perhaps as spider-squashers. One exception is Michael Lopp's Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager. Lopp's book-which came out from APress in June but has languished on my To-Read stack since then-is useful, insightful, and (certainly a rarity) funny.
To many non-technical enterprise departments, IT-and particularly security personnel-are viewed as "Uh-oh... here's the party pooper!" They're the ones who are always seen as the people who say No. Yet, one IT executive has found a way to make security part of the company mindset... and to get the message across at the board level. Dr Cladia Natanson, chief information security officer at Diageo, has accomplished this impressive feat by treating security as a brand to be marketed, not a service that's grudgingly tacked on to business-as-usual.