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An Information System Fairy Tale

by | The Whiteboard

By Dave McComb [The names have been changed to protect somebody.] Once upon a time there was a firm. The firm had many, many employees and of course had payroll and personnel systems. One day the firm was visited by software vendors who convinced it that its systems...

Headless Apps

by | The Whiteboard

In brief: A headless app is an application built as business logic (validation and side effects) behind an API, with no user interface of its own beyond a simple test scaffold. User interface developers then build as many interfaces on the API as users need, without...

Why are scanners so slow?

by | The Whiteboard

Last week over lunch, my 18-year-old son Eli asked me, “Why are scanners so slow? They don’t even have as much to do as a copy machine. The copy machine has to move paper, put ink on the page. The scanner only has to scan.” He was referring to...

Bob DuCharme’s book: Learning SPARQL

by | The Whiteboard

I was hoping I wasn’t going to have to learn SPARQL 1.1 from the specs. Bob DuCharme’s book Learning SPARQL 1.1  arrived just in time to save me from that fate. The book is well organized, progresses well and has great examples. What I particularly like...