mortals wear shoes
[Garak takes a drink of root beer]
Quark: What do you think?
Garak: It’s vile.
Quark: I know. It’s so bubbly and cloying and happy.
Garak: Just like the Federation.
Quark: And you know what’s really frightening? If you drink enough of it, you begin to like it.
Garak: It’s insidious.
Quark: Just like the Federation.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - [...]
In virtually everything to do with software, there is often some kind of metaphor used to describe it. Often, these are taken from the building or manufacturing industries (even some of our titles are taken from these: Architect, Engineer, etc.) and many times different metaphors seem to suit different situations better. If you [...]
I’ve been playing with Google’s App Engine as part of their beta and I started thinking about what benefit Google got from it. Presumably, there will be some kind of monetary payback as those apps which exceed their “free” limit then start paying, but at the prices they are charging it seems unlikely that [...]
MJ recently wrote about the Wise Fool, as a contrast to the Wisdom of Crowds. However, I’d like to ramble for a bit on why the Wise Fool is a great thing to have in a software development team.
Developers solve problems. This is their raison d’etre. If you have a technological itch [...]
MJ writes about the iPhone for games:
The tools for building are readily available and free (though there’s a £50 charge for the certificate)
Due to the App Store distribution, the customers are accessible and many of them are looking for new software to load
The hype machine is already built
.
I think this outlook on the existing mobile [...]
MJ recently blogged about identifying one’s own strengths. I thought it would be useful to share a tool that I’ve used over the last seven years as a herder of cats (read: software development manager). I call it the self-development window (or the career development window, as I often use it for that [...]
mj writes:
are university degrees worth the bother?
are universities correctly servicing the IT industry (and specifically the games dev market) with skills, knowledge, toolsets?
why have IT graduates decreased from 1900 in 2004 to 600 in 2007?
are we seeing a knock on effect from technology failures in the province, e.g. Nortel, Seagate
with the improvement of toolsets, a [...]
Software is not about code. It is about your company’s relationships. I have started seen companies with innovative products that use cutting edge technologies fail, simply because they didn’t understand their relationship with their customers, or didn’t understand it in time. Likewise, companies with demonstrably crap software (or even vaporware) thrive because [...]
1 - The coffee tastes like shit so I’m never tempted to order one
If I forget myself and accidentally order one I certainly never order a second (I usually drink hot chocolate in Starbucks).
2 - You have to pay for wi-fi so I’m never distracted by IM/IRC/RSS
In the UK, all the wi-fi at Starbucks is [...]
There’s been a lot of traffic on the MacSB mailing list and on various blogs (e.g. Panic and Atomicbird) about how Apple is handling the release of Leopard in the same way as they did with Tiger, and about how indie developers get the short end of the stick because we don’t see Leopard until [...]