Artificial intelligence (or AI) has had a bad rap for since the rise and fall of companies in the 1980’s such as Thinking Machines. Google’s mission to answer all questions posed by anyone at anytime around the world such as: “Where shall I go on holiday this Easter?” or “What…
During my recent visit to India, I interviewed several potential candidates for our offshore development team. In doing this, I learned some valuable lessons about interviewing in India that I will share with you so you can avoid some of the pitfalls that are obvious – but probably only…
My boss, when our team was building the architecture methods (see Enterprise Architecture), was involved with the UK Government’s development of ITIL. Because I became aware of both the ITIL documentation and the analysis that we used in developing architecture methods, I think that there’s a significant issue that’s…
I’m often asked why I prefer to use Ajax HTML rather than XML or JSON etc. There are multiple reasons I cite, one is it’s easier to maintain but the more important one is that it’s faster and less work (both on the frontend and the backend).
Here’s…
Back in the early 90’s I was a consultant in a large systems integrator. Moore’s law and de facto and de jure standardisations were breaking proprietary systems’ stranglehold on customers, driving the ambitions of organsations to increase the scope of their IT across the value chain and to get economies of scale of technology ownership, while increasing the end-to-end automation of their enterprises to reduce business operational costs.
This weekend I was again enjoying the company of my nearly four year old nephew (the nearly being important at this age) when it struck me how in many ways the journey to our new release of Tideway Foundation has parallels to him growing up.
Whilst I…
A lot of software companies use contractors to supplement their in-house Engineering teams, instead of hiring more permanent staff to develop a bunch of shiny new features. But how do you decide which route to take? What are the deciding factors?
We happened upon a very interesting Opera quirk at work today!
A developer decided to add an @import link to a non-existent CSS file that would be included at a later date. During testing we saw some interesting results with the page rendering, things being positioned in the…
Before co-founding Tideway, I worked at a commercial research lab in Cambridge. The lab started life as Olivetti Research Limited, commonly known as ORL. Later on, it became the Olivetti and Oracle Research Lab (still ORL, just with an invisible second O), and a while after that, it became AT&T…
When we are not quite sure what we need to build, we build a prototype as a way of experimenting with different options and allow ourselves to take shortcuts and use hacks that in production code would be completely unacceptable. The intention always is to throw away the code at…
