Republican presidential candidate and former tech-executive Carly Fiorina has called on Apple and Google to provide greater access to information about their users to the FBI and law enforcement in order to aid investigations.
Whether you are an IT manager or an individual contributor, there's one thing you can always do to increase the value you provide to your organization, get yourself noticed and increase the likelihood that you'll get a promotion. It doesn't matter whether you want to stay technical or move in a managerial direction. It doesn't matter whether you are just starting your career or are a veteran. At every level of every organization, the ability I'm talking about is always in short supply.
If you could deploy existing resources to improve the quality and timeliness of your software development projects, you'd probably jump at the chance.
IT pros looking to cash in on the rising demand for IT consultants, know this: IT consulting isn't all golf meetings and extended lunches. In fact, it can often involve thankless work fraught with unexpected detours, murky goals, and the occasional sudden jettisoning of your project.
Computer languages have a strange shelf life. The most popular among them experience explosive growth driven by herding behavior akin to that of the fashion industry. But when they fade from the spotlight, something odd happens. Instead of disappearing like a pop song or parachute pants, they live on and on and on and on. The impetus behind this quasi-immortality? It's often cheaper to maintain old code than to rewrite it in the latest, trendiest language.
Everyone wants faster database queries, and both SQL developers and DBAs can turn to many time-tested methods to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, no single method is foolproof or ironclad. But even if there is no right answer to tuning every query, there are plenty of proven do's and don'ts to help light the way. While some are RDBMS-specific, most of these tips apply to any relational database.
Last week, I submitted an expense report to a client. The accounts payable representative made me revise the report four times to put things in the right buckets and correct a $1.04 error. (Really.) Of course, I can't charge anybody for his or her time, and the A/P department is really busy because it's "understaffed." (Uh-huh.)
By now, you know about agile methodologies and how they can help improve your software development efforts. In this series of articles, we will discuss benefits of going agile (Part 1), some traditional concerns with agile at enterprise scale (Part 2) and offer some strategies you can use to become more agile in your shop while minimizing those concerns (Part 3). We also include screencasts to show agile in real-world scenarios.
There can be many benefits to outsourcing your company's project management functions, with equally as many pitfalls. There aren't any one-size-fits-all solutions based on your industry, type or size of business. Just as you would with different project management methodologies, consider the risks and rewards carefully and take the time to thoroughly evaluate why outsourcing project management may or may not be a good move for your organization.
Last week I discussed design considerations for APIs, given that APIs aren't applications and shouldn't be treated as such. At small scales, APIs that come along for the ride with bulky Web frameworks might be fine, but beyond that you're asking for trouble. If you're building an API that will serve a large number of clients, your API code should be thin and tight, as well as make liberal use of caching. Otherwise, the future headaches will be crippling.
Out with the old, in with the new, as the saying goes -- but when it comes to an overhaul of one of the Internet's most fundamental protocols, what exactly is coming in with the new?
Capacity planning needs to provide answers to two questions: What are you going to need to buy in the coming year? And when are you going to need to buy it?