Category: Rants

Great software project teams are able to produce application features quickly that provide users with the most amount of value. If you don’t have a UI/UX designer on your team, you’re risking the design of your application experience short-changing your users.

During the 1990s object-oriented programming was beginning to take the software world by storm. C++ and Java were some of the most popular programming languages. Walking into a bookstore and browsing to the computer section you would find books of all sorts on object-oriented development and design.

There are so many risks when we make changes to software systems. A defect can cause a minor frustration, cause a loss of 440 million USD in 45 minutes, and put Knight Capital Group out of business or worse.

Adding management and processes to an organization can have lasting affects that you don’t see for years.

As a coder, the builder pattern is my go-to. It makes data setup extremely easy – instantiate a class, chain some methods together, and finish by executing a build method. However, every time I write a builder class, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a more functional approach that completely removes state.

In today’s IT landscape, a lot of people see the quick wins of cloud offerings and miss what they’re giving up. Cloud platforms make it easy to stand up new workloads in particular configurations, but they are severely limited scope, lack of developer agency, and closed implementation leave much to be desired. While some applications run well this way, containers and Kubernetes are a competitive alternative for many mid and large sized organizations.

Globals are bad. Data should be encapsulated and only available when needed. These are some of the first things you learn when you start to program. If there are multiple actors that can write to shared data, side affects can occur.

I am old. Yes, you heard that right, I am old, well over 40. I can remember the wild west of software development when developers could do anything to a production database and deploy their own code by copying files from their computer. Developers were able to break and deploy production systems with ease.

Danielle Brommer was recently selected as a 2021 Technology Association of Iowa Catalyst. Read Danielle’s speech from the event sharing her thoughts on how the Iowa tech community can encourage more diverse executive leadership.

Being successful in the digital economy relies on being able to answer “how are we doing and where can we improve?

We’ve all had that code.

Zooming back in time to the 6th century BC, there was a wrestler named Milo.

In the world of Agile software development, a natural tension has emerged between the engineering and UX functions.

The Importance of Cultural Change in Digital Transformation

Odds are that you’ve heard about digital transformation.

The latest COVID-19 casualty was announced this week as Agile2020, the world’s premier Agile conference was officially canceled in its physical form. This news, while disappointing, provides us with a new opportunity. An opportunity to completely rethink the conference experience as we take it virtual.

For many organizations, time, scope, and budget have been the standard for measuring success of software delivery projects. Teams are tasked to build what sounds like a promising idea for an agreed upon amount and by an agreed upon date. And when they do, everyone feels good, they celebrate the accomplishment, and move on to the next big thing. But what happens when those things we build don’t actually help our customers? In this article, we explore project vs product mindset and why it matters.

Protecting the safety and welfare of livestock has never been a more pressing issue. As the human population deals with the coronavirus outbreak, agricultural leaders are placing renewed attention on their biosecurity protocols.

Plumbing is software is any code related to wiring things together. This could be code that listens to queue messages. The code that listens for queue messages is plumbing code that is often written over and over again in applications.

More than a decade after Marc Andreesen talked about software eating the world, we continue to see digital natives — and even mature companies who have moved to a digital-first strategy — consume more and more market share at an unimaginable pace.

Coding standards can get a bad rap.

Picture this: your roadmap is already buckling with too many priorities and the Finance Manager hits up your inbox with an ALL CAPS, flaming hot request.

One of the most critical decisions technology and business leaders must make is which software solutions to build and which to buy.

“We should log that.” Developers often throw this phrase around, using it as a catch-all for any type of error or information storage. Although logs are an invaluable tool, they aren’t the only option for recording and tracking events. In this article, let’s dive into the differences between logs, metrics, and audits and their ideal use cases.

Without validation and testing, the software development process would be a mess. Engineers would deliver a lot more sloppy, broken code, and users would run into all sorts of bugs and issues. There’s no doubt — quality assurance is a critical part of software development. But what if we told you there’s a way to do QA differently?

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations need to be able to expertly leverage technology to create a learning culture, accelerate growth, and fuel innovation. While most companies today have started this transformation journey, it can be hard to know where you’re at and how you’re doing when you’re in the thick of it. Learn more about the digital maturity tool and how it can help you understand your current digital maturity level and identify actionable steps for improvement.