Category: Your Vision + Our Engineering
The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 3: Framework for Structured Critical Thinking
Have you ever wrestled with a problem in your mind and then, while trying to explain it to someone else, had an epiphany of how to solve it? This has happened to me on numerous occasions. Or have you ever jumped in to develop some code for a piece of business logic that you felt…
Read more…
The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 2: Story/Task Decomposition and Estimation as Design
In my first post of this series, I discussed how ambiguity and lack of shared understanding between members of a product development team can occur when we rely on unstructured, ad hoc, and abstract communication processes (i.e., conversations and high-level user stories) for expressing our thoughts and ideas. We feel like we are painting a…
Read more…
The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 1
I was recently re-introduced to one of my favorite essays, Why We Should Build Software Like We Build Houses, by Leslie Lamport. Leslie is one of several thought leaders within our industry who I really admire, both for his insights into the nature of software design as well as for his contributions in terms of…
Read more…
DPL Education – Adding Product Search
Search is an essential part of any e-commerce application. If you don’t believe me, go to amazon.com. How hard is it to find the search box? Pretty easy, right? If search is essential, we need to make it work pretty well in our applications. Our Software Design and Development Clinics focus on teaching engineers the…
Read more…
DPL Education – .NET Core and SQLite
Our Software Design and Development Clinics focus on teaching engineers the real-world development skills that will make them more productive and effective. Part of the class is Doug and I covering several topics, but we try to have a real focus on actually doing things. We want students to develop skill and knowledge, which takes…
Read more…
DPL Education – Replace Dependency Inversion
Our Software Design and Development Clinics focus on teaching engineers the real-world development skills that will lead them to be more productive and effective. Doug and I cover several topics during the clinics, but we try to focus on actually doing things. We want students to develop skill and knowledge, which takes both learning and…
Read more…
DPL Education – Sales Tax Activity
Our Software Design and Development Clinics focus on teaching engineers the real-world development skills that will make them more productive and effective. Part of the class is Doug and I covering several topics, but we try to have a real focus on actually doing things. We want students to develop skill and knowledge, which takes…
Read more…
The Mechanical Turk (The Love Test for Entrepreneurs)
For the last couple of years, I have spent a significant amount of time talking to innovators both independent (entrepreneurs) and inside of organizations (intrapreneurs?). The conversations generally focus on a variation of these familiar themes: Uber for … Ebay for … Facebook for … Computer vision to … Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning to…
Read more…