Phurnace Blog - April 2008

Follow the Pain

Daniel Nelson — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

About a month ago I had a conversation with the President of a professional services firm about what was more important to succeed in the market: a good product or a good sales team. Since his background was sales, and mine was in building products, you can probably guess which sides we fell on. The conversation turned into one of those Star Wars vs. Star Trek debates where neither of us could move the other, and we just agreed to disagree.

Which is all well and good, but I have found [...]

Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Frustration 4.0

Larry Warnock — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

I just read a blog by Aziz Gilani about “Enterprise 2.0” and his take on how enterprises will respond to the web 2.0 technologies and it’s new approaches. I think it was quite insightful and I agree with him when he comments on some of the basic assumptions by Forrester Group. Aziz writes "Having spent the past 8 years either working with CIOs or within the enterprise I can honestly say that no company will come out and say something along the lines of 'I really n [...]

How to Convince Your Boss to Pull the Trigger �

Robert Reeves — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

When you buy a software tool for your use, you aren’t just buying the application; you are buying the BENEFITS of what it does. Most often, you are really buying piano recitals, little league games and happy hours with your friends. You buy yourself time when you buy a good tool. Because with the right tools, you are in bed, fast asleep, instead of the datacenter at 3 a.m. pulling out your hair because of a deployment error or a server that won’t capture transactions, or whateve [...]

D�j� vu, all over again �

Larry Warnock — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

I’ve been in the enterprise software industry for more years than I would like to admit, although my staff never misses an opportunity to ask “seemingly interested” questions about punch cards, 8 inch diskettes, and what it was like when developers used Pascal. I have witnessed many mind blowing advances in technology, process improvements and creativity. What doesn’t seem to change however, are the fundamentals of growing a company and running a good business. [...]

Dull and Boring == Errors and Omissions

Robert Reeves — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

BBC has a news report on how boring tasks can lead to errors and omissions. Evidently, your brain will go into 'autopilot' mode when performing redundant, boring tasks. Apparently, there is a specific bit of brain activity that can occur right before you are about to make a mistake.

Until they can make a portable MRI for data ce [...]

"No Punks Allowed" - Thoughts on Developer Jobs

Shawn Spiars — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

As a software engineer I often find it entertaining reading the technology job postings. You can learn a lot about a company's values and culture by what they reveal in their job postings. I once had a job interview with a VP of Engineering who was bragging to me during the interview about how much money he saved his company by sending half of his development positions offshore. So I am thinking to myself "if I take this job just how long until my position goes offshore"?

On [...]

IBM IMPACT 2008

Daniel Nelson — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

Just got back from IBM IMPACT 2008 show

3 things I learned about WebSphere customers:

Last week Jessica (our Marketing Manager) and I spent about 4 days doing booth duty at a conference, IMPACT 2008. I thought I would share 3 quick impressions that I got from the show, the people there, and what companies where showing off. Two quick caveats: first, since I was only talking to people who went to IMPACT, my impressions should probably not be fully extrapolated to a state of th [...]

The Single System Lab

Pete Pickerill — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

Why buy the cow? Open Source QA Tools can provide a sturdy test and automation framework.

I’ve spent the bulk of my career in QA at startups so I’m not accustomed to operating with an abundance of resources. As such, I’ve researched a ton of free and open source testing tools in the hopes of automating or streamlining the test process to compensate for a lack of manpower. I’ve decided to use my blog posts to detail some [...]

Groovin' on Groovy

Wesley Willard — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

While Robert Reeves is correct in his assessment that scripting can be evil, especially in cases where scalable and durable automation is needed (like deployments of apps),there are occasions where a script can definitely serve as a useful problem-solving tool. A script can act as another way to view an application's data, allowing the developer to verify the state of the data independently. Creating a script does not generally require the same amount of time to code/compile/edit as a regu [...]

The Evils of Scripting - Part 2

Robert Reeves — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

In the first part of this two part post, I discussed how scripts are terrible at eliminating errors. In fact, scripts simply replace typos with system errors. A rather poor trade-off, I think.

The second problem with scripts is the burden they place on employees to maintain them and the decrease in productivity they can cause. This maintenance burden and productivity sinkhole are the two areas scripts were supposed to fix!

Frankly, I hold the tools architecture res [...]

SDLC's Dirty Little Secret

Daniel Nelson — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

If you have never been in the datacenter in the wee hours of the morning, trying to figure out what's wrong with a server, stop reading this. If you have never been in an all-hands-on-deck meeting where everyone is trying to figure out what went wrong with a deployment, then stop right now and go do something more useful with your time. Because if you haven't lived through that, then the rest of this post won't mean much to you.

I've been through plenty of thos [...]

Getting Past the iPhone Diatribes...

Alexander Bibighaus — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

Apple's iPhone represents a revolutionary mobile platform that has attracted people of all sorts to download the SDK and take a look. Today, it seems I search the internet for "iPhone" related information only to find hundreds of rants. Most rants are either about the lack of Flash and/or Java support for the iPhone. Perhaps this is because [...]