If you live in the United States, you have been witnessing the struggles between President Obama (a Democrat), the House of Representatives (controlled by the Republican Party), the Senate (controlled by the Democratic Party).  Compromise is often key to getting things done in politics, but we must never sacrifice the quality of life of our citizens and visitors.  When we are defining the feature set for our products, we have great input from our customers about everything they need and want.  A...

Programming is magic.  Developers are pulling software rabbits out of their hats every day. At the same time, what we do is also very real to our users.  When my daughters were young they played Magic the Gathering card game by Wizards of the Coast.  I would buy the card packs and individual cards for them and they would spend hours assembling their game play decks.  They would also trade cards with each other and with their friends.  They would play against each other and also go to the local h...

I've always thought that software design and programming is a very creative process.  Developers create something from nothing using their mind, hands, hardware, and development tools.  I love that we can create software anywhere.  I can be sitting at my notebook computer on the beach, in a coffee shop, at home, at work, in an airport, on an airplane.  One of these days it would be cool to work on programs while riding a bike, skydiving, surfing, and scuba diving (talk your about extreme program...

Some software projects are started because you receive a contract to build and application.  Sometimes you join a company that has a project and needs additional developers.  Often you are working on the next version of an existing application.  I hope that sometime in your career you have an inspiration and start a company to create the application.  Thomas Edison is quoted as saying (back in 1932), "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration".  In the 1971 movie, "Will...

Programmers often live in a solitary world focused on their integrated development environments while peering deep into their source code.  At the same time we are often members of a larger development team and a developer community.  In Extreme Programming's Pair Programming two developers work together, one keyboarding while the other kibitzes, before the code is committed to the repository and production. At Embarcadero developers work in mini-teams (using the SCRUM agile methodology) that, p...

Do you like games?  What type of games?  There are many types of games: computer games, board games, football games, Olympic games, basketball games, or the game of life?  I would answer that I like all sorts of games.  In computer games, you love great stories, great action, and great high definition graphics. Performance is a key aspect of great computer games.  With our modern PCs, Macs, consoles, smartphones, tablets, and hand held devices, we have a wide range of fabulous games. What doe...

I am up in Hood River Oregon today for the wedding of Martha's niece.  It is a glorius day with plenty of sunshine and no clouds in sight.  During the day, we drove up to Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood.  There was plenty of snow still on the mountain and people were skiing and snow boarding on the upper slopes. I saw several brides and grooms up on the mountain, obviously in love. Tonight we attended Sarah and Jeremy's wedding at the historic Columbia Gorge Hotel on the banks of the mighty Co...

"Ain't no mountain high enough. Ain't no valley low enough. Ain't no river wide enough. To keep me from getting to you." The lyrics, from the song written by Ashford and Simpson, keep telling me that there is nothing that can stop advance of computer software, developer tools, and operating platforms. "Climb Every Mountain", the song in the movie, The Sound of Music, tell us to keep going, search everywhere, follow every path, cross every Geoffrey Moore chasm, try every idea, until we find ou...

When I look at a piece of software, I see several things.  I see the text.  I see some patterns.  I see variables that might have some meaning.  I see data structures, constants, and other data definitions.  I might see some loops, functions with parameters, and I might even see some comments.  Can I train my eyes to actually read and understand the source code?  I remember a blog post by Grady Booch about "code reading". Grady referred to an earlier blog post about the book, "Code Reading" by D...

I love singer/songwriters.  One of my all time favorites is Joni Mitchell.  Joni Mitchell wrote, in the song "Both Sides Now", "I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down, and still some how, it's clouds illusions I recall, I really don't know clouds at all".  We have so many choices for cloud computing architectures and services, one can spend a lot of time exploring the options and figuring out how to include them in your applications.  Previously, I wrote about "Want more...S...