tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-123470392012-01-23T19:57:28.761-06:00Cautionary tales about Information TechnologyBernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.comBlogger441100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-65088757771227525822012-01-06T21:34:00.009-06:002012-01-16T21:52:06.326-06:00

The Way We WereSo if you have read earlier entries in the blog, you know that I once reviewed learning styles as categorized by David Kolb. They were all lengthy thoughts on how each person learns differently and how each person may respond better to certain teaching styles. And I think there is something to what was said there. But there was a news report not long ago about how Google (or rather

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-13736568215109927782011-11-06T22:56:00.000-06:002011-11-06T22:57:26.623-06:00

Ok, so I'm finally going to get more involved in using more operating systems and some languages on the side for learning purposes.To help a friend out with some projects I've picked up an HP laptop, the DV6 6047cl and I'll be dual booting with Windows 7 64bit Home Premium and openSUSE 11.4. I'll catalog this adventure in a series of posts that will encompass a review of the laptop, the various

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-91621800137727432322011-06-26T07:19:00.004-05:002011-07-18T23:59:46.579-05:00

I'm going to save this space to copyright a few terms I've come up with that have consistently amused my peers in IT. I'll add them as I find them.Outlook JockeyThis is what I call project managers that only superficially perform their duties. They organize meetings and send emails. But they don't control scope, they don't understand the business or the users, they don't forge relationships with

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-17950239689186188652011-03-28T20:10:00.004-05:002011-03-28T20:33:27.801-05:00

Employment 1960Be loyal and your company will take care of you.Sacrifice for your company and you will always have a job and be advanced.Get a college degree.Stay with the same company and work hard.A pension and full health coverage are expected benefits.Quality is job one.You are valued on merit.You are a family member.Blondie.The company does not believe in layoffs.Our policy is to pay for

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-61160039195798818552011-01-17T22:00:00.004-06:002011-01-17T22:03:42.045-06:00

Arthur Clarke is known for his theory that says:Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.Sorry Arthur, I disagree. Here's Dy's Corollary:Technology is easily distinguishable from magic. Stress test it; if it breaks, it's technology, probably software.

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-49632081333234550352010-07-21T22:47:00.005-05:002010-07-24T13:56:52.500-05:00

Karl Weigers, the author several books and articles on software requirements, has written another article found via a link on Dr. Dobbs.It's more good advice, but as one of the commenters noted, it's advice that Weigers and others have been espousing for years, and I don't know about the dedicated software shops, but I know most IT shops are still missing the mark.It's also interesting to note

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-54018604488762136342010-07-17T08:40:00.004-05:002010-07-24T13:57:05.917-05:00

I just finished Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover. It's an interesting book based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his wife Emma, and British naval hero Horatio Nelson. Sontag deftly blends the fictional with historical and does it with sumptuous prose. Sontag's life has been marked with some controversy and I don't agree with all her comments, especially those regarding 911, but I find her

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-22455567760890182562010-07-05T16:32:00.005-05:002010-07-05T17:10:56.970-05:00

I have two new Business Analysis stories to share. The first is a common pattern in recognizing that your business analysis approach is lacking. The second is a success story where I applied a lesson I learned from a previous BA class. Both are based on true stories though the names have been withheld to protect the author from frivolous lawsuits.How did we miss that?After a feature in a software

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-84308166553925945182010-04-25T23:11:00.005-05:002011-01-31T22:28:07.547-06:00

I've made another job change and this time I've returned to a mercenary's trade. I'm a contractor now (sometimes called consultant in IT circles). There's a long story behind why I decided to do this (some clues to which were in the last couple blog posts) but in the end I looked carefully at where I was and made a list of "reasons to stay" and "reasons to leave" and though there were some good

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-64739674217057050132010-03-07T10:01:00.006-06:002011-01-31T22:28:32.028-06:00

Passion: a powerful or compelling emotionProfessionalism (businessdictionary.com): Meticulous adherence to undeviating courtesy, honesty, and responsibility in one's dealings with customers and associates, plus a level of excellence that goes over and above the commercial considerations and legal requirementsAnother good one from Paul GlenI've enjoyed reading Paul Glen's articles on IT management

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-21982240616481069072010-01-30T00:52:00.005-06:002010-02-05T15:02:34.616-06:00

First, let me apologize for the previous blog post. I was in a disturbed state about a number of things, and that last post was all over the map. Sadly, my friend did pass away and the thought of his wife and young daughter continuing on without him is painful. We have no choice but to bear it.-----Have you seen the old joke circulating around the Internet called something like "The Math of Love"

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-50358775065956858342009-07-06T20:21:00.010-05:002010-05-05T19:18:24.295-05:00

No, this isn't a reprise of Nicholas Carr's controversial but revenue-earning published treatise that "IT doesn't Matter"...although I suppose it is in a far grander and abstract sense. It's actually a reprise of a Bill Murray line from the movie Meatballs.Murray, a summer camp counselor in the movie, is trying to inspire a rag tag collection of youths that, if I recall correctly, have either

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-16621846830093680432009-05-31T09:13:00.011-05:002009-10-16T15:52:31.229-05:00

All right. I've had enough about this cost-cutting business. I've seen it cycle back and forth through my 20 year IT career, and I'm giving free advice here for anyone that cares. Although it's going to sound like a rant, there might be a couple crumbs of usable information. If anyone finds it valuable, you don't even have to credit me...just do something right in your organization to help your

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-6128290973235610902008-12-23T23:55:00.002-06:002008-12-24T00:02:59.146-06:00

The truth is an important thing when you want to get to the bottom of something and having the truth is the most important part of making decisions. This isn't just about programming but everything in life. The problem is that the truth is often at odds with tact.Things to remember about the truth:Sometimes, the truth will make people laugh.Sometimes, the truth will hurt.Sometimes, the truth will

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-13625121351321927472008-08-24T23:58:00.003-05:002008-08-25T00:24:52.787-05:00

Continuous ImprovementIt was encouraging to me that my company decided to host a continuous improvement activity for the development group in our IT shop. If you've never done one of these before, it's related to process improvement and such things as LEAN and Six Sigma.What I didn't understand before the activity was that LEAN is not about solving the root of the problem, it's about trying to

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-89532846311337363032008-06-29T17:00:00.006-05:002011-11-17T23:23:00.945-06:00

The concept of project management is becoming more popular, thanks in part to the efforts of the Project Management Institute and some institutional desire to better organize and control projects. The concept isn't new, but classically the project manager in corporate projects was someone that was either part of the delivery team and was expected to manage everyone or was a manager that may have

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-26361963267820702442008-05-24T07:31:00.007-05:002008-06-29T16:47:26.808-05:00

I'm at a crucial moment in a developing project. Once again I've been tasked with planning changes to shaky software for a high-profile project with an expected due date that was set before developers were consulted. I am looking at our list of change requests and some are downright scary.The Best Kind of Programming is RefactoringOn one side I'm trying to use this opportunity to continuously

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-89138109942351544662008-05-06T21:14:00.007-05:002008-05-07T19:44:05.433-05:00

InformationWeek and ComputerWorld both run annual salary surveys for IT. InformationWeek's was just published in the 28-Apr-08 issue. I like to read these because they have some interesting things to say, but you have to be careful about treating them as the truth. There was a famous thread a year ago at the JoelOnSoftware.com forums titled "How much do you make?" and it ran for weeks and got

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-68690636918734608462008-04-30T01:22:00.019-05:002009-02-03T09:47:05.971-06:00

Training DayComputerworld's editor, Don Tennant, wrote a couple of interesting editorials last month. In one, he took IT workers to task for not being more active in developing their skills to stay competitive with the global marketplace. Actually, he's done that several times in the last few years. However, he was also good to follow up that editorial with some of the feedback he got, and agreed

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-86245468546718846992008-04-29T22:17:00.011-05:002008-04-30T09:50:12.860-05:00

Giving Props to the Business AnalystsI am taking a slight change in direction and will be reviewing a recent class I took. I'm fortunate to be working for a company that is willing to invest some funding into developing its people. I attended a Business Analyst Boot Camp offered by ASPE Technology. To preface that, this entry is to pay some respects to the business analyst (BA) world and explain

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-79914129620542672922008-03-13T08:53:00.003-05:002008-03-13T09:19:14.564-05:00

Please forgive what appears to be a regression in my language usage. But I'm working with more code written by an expensive contractor and I've just got to say this because bad code is definitely a source of more overtime. It's hard to manage and hard to decipher and suffers higher risk for defects. I'd told this individual several times to try and reduce the complexity of the code and several

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-21519257312171244622007-12-02T20:36:00.000-06:002007-12-02T21:05:49.862-06:00

I took a sarcastic look at developer motivation to learn in the last post, but let's take a look at how developers learn. First, let's detour briefly to the realm of behavioral science, where David A. Kolb created a chart categorizing learning styles.I'm leery of the categorizations that social science tries to put on humans. You can't stick people in boxes because some parts of them won't fit

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-75197150042035457932007-09-08T13:15:00.000-05:002007-09-22T21:45:04.072-05:00

What Kind of Learning Developer are You?Getting to a place where a person calls himself a developer is just part of the story. The other half is really about how he develops himself once he's in his career.Ultimately, it depends on the kind of person the developer is. I've seen a couple scenarios in my experience:The Renaissance ManYou know the character that is always the nemesis of the everyman

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-26437802624492338772007-05-25T20:53:00.000-05:002007-05-25T21:38:26.156-05:00

I've done the very thing a blogger isn't supposed to do. I went nearly a year before posting. What happened?IT and HappinessA job change can always be a time sink. I made a decision last year to trade a little money for some intangibles. I've been busy as blazes trying to wrench a big project into order. Was the change worth it? I think so; as I tell my friends, you're not supposed to be able to

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1148926653065965092006-05-29T12:28:00.000-05:002007-03-29T22:23:50.323-05:00

Memorial Day (Observed) - May 29, 2006I'm going to take a quick break and just say a 'Thank you to our veterans.I continue to be impressed with members of The Greatest Generation. Whenever I talk to them at airshows or special events, they are always humble about the role they played in WWII. In particular, they avoid being pretentious about their achievements and are modest about them. What a

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1147522942131296312006-05-13T13:30:00.000-05:002007-03-29T22:26:34.763-05:00

Yes, this entry's title is a riff on Mitch Albom's book The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Largely inspired by the previous blog entry, here's a post about things typical developers ignore because they're either inexperienced, lazy, or plain stupid.These are the kinds of things that many developers don't want to think about; they just want to do the 'fun' part, the quick hacking together of a

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1147523011484579762006-05-13T07:22:00.001-05:002008-03-13T08:52:58.528-05:00

I'm working right now on something that should be fairly simple in most applications: adding two columns of data to a screen. I have to update the logic that retrieves and saves the data, and also modify the GUI to accept user input and display the new columns.The HorrorBut this task is taking me two or three times the normal amount of time because the original developer didn't understand the

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1146332973662714882006-04-29T12:38:00.000-05:002006-04-29T12:49:33.673-05:00

Hacking and methodologies and pointy-haired-manager busting and SQL and language wars and best practices and requirements gathering and testing and bugs and dealing with spaghetti code and arbitrary deadlines and corporate America and viruses and still trying to fit time in for family and gaming and reading. Whew. Take a break and enjoy a song from eccentric folk singer Johnathan Coulton. This

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1144646316838750672006-04-10T00:11:00.000-05:002006-04-10T18:40:26.063-05:00

If someone came to you and asked, "Are you happy with your IT job," how would you respond?Obviously, the person asking would have an impact. You might answer differently if a friend asked than you would if a manager asked.At the risk of sounding Clintonesque, I think you also have to clarify the question first, by saying, "Define happiness."If you spend time reading the mentally engaging

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1144645120209386212006-04-09T23:48:00.000-05:002006-04-10T00:20:25.013-05:00

My motto for a lot of this blog is, "Making software is easy, making it right is hard."Well, I was certain others had thought of that sentiment before me, and now I have proof. Donald Knuth had this to say in a lecture, captured in a document of the American Mathematical Society....my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It’s

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1136042715800670142005-12-31T09:22:00.000-06:002005-12-31T09:26:16.436-06:00

Here's a post to prove I'm a nerd. If you haven't seen Firefly or Serenity yet, and you're an SF fan that got tired of the Star Trek formula, you might want to give it a shot. Then the rest of this post will make some sense.-----Your results:You are Malcolm Reynolds (Captain)Malcolm Reynolds (Captain) 70%Zoe Washburne (Second-in-command) 65%Wash (Ship Pilot) 65%Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic) 65%Dr.

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1131042875064877862005-11-03T12:29:00.000-06:002005-11-03T12:43:14.543-06:00

I haven't been posting lately...getting settled into lots of new things. Had a job change just before the last post, and also on a bit of a different schedule now. But don't worry. I'm hardly out of ideas and rants.

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1121630860872528562005-08-11T01:07:00.001-05:002008-02-25T19:35:50.511-06:00

At the risk of alienating some of the readers, I will tell you about my favorite writer. It's this angry guy named Harlan Ellison. He's quite famous in the fiction circles, though it was his non-fiction that really won me. He has a cynical streak and is very intolerant of the incompetent. It's pretty refreshing stuff to read as you journey through this life and become frustrated with the reality

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1119789261464992362005-07-17T14:18:00.000-05:002005-08-10T23:34:33.700-05:00

I'm hardly the first person to gripe about this, but there's an unsettling trend in America to send work offshore. The proponents of this practice defend it by saying that manufacturing and industrial jobs also went overseas but didn't compromise American supremacy.Well, they're half right. There are some responses to this trend in the July 2005 Software Development magazine's feedback section (

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1117891438699510922005-06-26T07:46:00.000-05:002005-06-26T07:32:48.603-05:00

I don't like the way many corporations use contract labor, especially in the IT market. I worked as a contractor and as a full-time employee, and my experience found that most contract programmers are mediocre. There are of course some good ones. The outstanding ones have a thorough understanding of the chosen tools and best practices, sport a respectable work ethic, deliver quality results (

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1117889158516164692005-06-04T06:54:00.000-05:002005-06-04T08:29:13.663-05:00

It's sad to think about how the relationship between corporation and employee has changed in America. At one time, you rarely saw people switch jobs; they took care of their employer and the employer took care of them. There was a sense of duty and honor on both sides. Things are different in the present. It's common to see people switch jobs with great regularity.What changed, and what caused

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1117385168216763702005-05-29T11:27:00.000-05:002005-07-17T14:31:48.280-05:00

I don't know why I didn't think of this the first time I saw Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, but seeing it again reminded me of a cautionary lesson everyone needs to know. Not just IT, but America as a whole. There's this wonderful scene at the end where Aragorn as the king sees the Hobbits pay their respects to him by bowing. He tells them, "My friends, you bow to no one," and everyone

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1116032966319087272005-05-13T19:28:00.001-05:002008-02-25T19:36:24.869-06:00

Another cautionary entry, but not entirely about IT. Infoworld's Chad Dickerson again writes a good one in his May 9, 2005 column. He's talking about how people are freaking out because of the heavy loss in interest students are showing in the computer science disciplines in college. But he makes a great point about it at the end, saying that the lack of a computer science degree doesn't mean you

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1115606663213329322005-05-08T20:58:00.000-05:002005-05-29T11:17:49.373-05:00

I'm going to try and set the foundation for future discussions here by thinking about some issues that I think are really holding IT back from advancement. Metrics, developer evaluation, management, development techniques, and outsourcing are all subjects to come. Right now I want to discuss something that's bothered me for a long time.Do we know what the heck software is?Of course, you say, we

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1115523676615413112005-05-07T21:30:00.001-05:002008-05-07T19:45:22.197-05:00

I'm not going to get too deep into this because there has already been plenty of other discussion and most of the IT guys out there already have an opinion that I'm not likely to change. But I've worked with several H1B employees in the last five years, and I'll share my thoughts.The corporate line is that they helped fill a gap in labor skills. This is probably somewhat true from an IT

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1115232920410018132005-05-04T13:32:00.000-05:002005-06-26T07:23:29.283-05:00

Well well, I barely get my first major rant out the door and there's a couple of articles in this week's weekly IT magazines talking about related issues.Paul Glen writes To Motivate, Don't Demotivate in Computerworld (2 May 2005). Pay attention to the part where Glen refers to "excessive monitoring" and relate that back to the last The Burning Ends entry. Also note his mention of internal versus

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1114956977085032612005-05-01T07:42:00.000-05:002005-05-29T11:11:20.656-05:00

I call this thing a blog that's mostly supposed to be rants about lessons I've learned in IT, so here is the first one. And it shouldn't be a surprise that it's about management (or lack thereof).Managers: I know you think you're big shots because you carry the title of "manager" but really, it doesn't mean you have carte blanche to be an inconsiderate buffoon. Most of the IT guys I know are

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1114642387643330252005-04-27T17:33:00.000-05:002005-04-27T18:02:59.866-05:00

I can see why blogs are popular. For the same reason that the Internet in general became popular. Any idiot with a keyboard and a delusion of literacy can suddenly become "published." When the masses put their weight behind the online printing press, they enable an incredible amount of rapid communication but the oft-mentioned signal-to-noise ratio becomes an issue (not that there isn't noise in

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12347039.post-1114141126025567502005-04-22T00:37:00.000-05:002005-04-21T22:38:46.026-05:00

Google's freaking amazing. They provide all this stuff for free? How do they do it? Ah well, I've got a blog now. I'm one of the masses. I'll have to think of something else to say.

Bernard Dyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08895465003862725861noreply@blogger.com0