by Dave McComb | Nov 8, 2011 | The Whiteboard
I’m guessing that many of you puzzle over the same thing I do: “Why do large IT projects cost so much?”As we now know, it’s not the development costs (the development is done) nor the licensing costs (typically a small portion of the total...
by Dave McComb | Oct 25, 2011 | 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...
by Dave McComb | Oct 17, 2011 | The Whiteboard
We’ve been promoting an idea lately that has been around for a while but doesn’t seem to get much press. We’re calling it “headless apps” but it likely has other names out in the wild. We think it’s a major change in emphasis for...
by Dave McComb | Oct 5, 2011 | The Whiteboard
I was inspired by this article in the Atlantic called “Home Remedy” Turns out this tiny town of 1,730 couldn’t attract and retain doctors and nurses for their 25 bed hospital. So they found townspeople who wanted to be doctors and nurses and helped...
by Dave McComb | Sep 30, 2011 | 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...
by Dave McComb | Sep 19, 2011 | The Whiteboard
I’ve been working a lot lately with Semantic Web technologies. In particular I’ve been reflecting on the profound impact of basing everything on URIs. At one level it doesn’t look much different from primary keys or universal ids or GUIDs, but at a...
by Dave McComb | Sep 15, 2011 | 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...
by Dave McComb | Sep 9, 2011 | The Whiteboard
CIO magazine had an article this month “Why CIOs Still Like Do It Yourself Software Development” and while the article wasn’t terribly compelling I do think it makes what is about to become inevitable, acceptable. We’ve spent the last couple...
by Dave McComb | Sep 5, 2011 | The Whiteboard
Most software projects start with an architecture. And most architectures are “stacks” as in “this is what our stack looks like.” This is where middleware, tools, languages and the like get decided. Two interesting things happen here. The first...
by Dave McComb | Aug 19, 2011 | The Whiteboard
I just saw an article that Foxconn (China’s largest private employer, and manufacturer of among other things the iPhone) has unveiled a plan to install 1 million robots in its assembly plant. (They currently employ 1 million employees) What’s wrong with...
