The glamorous life of a software engineering consultant, Pt. 1

Larry O'Brien says: (7:46:07 AM)

I see you're pushing testing and *scribble* out of 1.3.

Client says: (7:46:23 AM)

we need to move forward

Larry O'Brien says: (7:46:26 AM)

Well.... Not really....

Client …

Sez Who? has taken the offshore risk profile and rewritten them as recommendations. Sadly, his piece is apparently in use at more companies than mine. >

The June 2008 CACM contains the article "A Risk Profile of Offshore-Outsourced Development Projects"

Since this is a common profile, I thought I'd reproduce the Top 10 Risks. Some of these are universal across all project profiles ("Lack of top management commitment"), but others are definitely more problematic for offshored …

I have a client who needs a Web-page component that does some photo compositing. Nothing super-fancy, but it needs to be professional, obey some business rules, and do some things dynamically based on static data.

The prototype is in Flash, but is filled with hideous programming -- magic numbers, a big …

Daniel Choi has created a Ruby gem that consolidates feeds into a Kindle-readable format! Say aloha to paying \$2 to subscribe to a single blog! link

The Midori coverage from SD Times has gone mainstream, even making the front page of BBC World News this morning. Since I reviewed the technical portions of the documents for the story, I thought I might clarify some things. First, though:

• I have no idea who wrote the document
• I …

Via Mike Gunderloy comes this link to the claim that a crossword puzzle app for the iPhone is bringing in the developer \$2K per day.

A forthcoming column of mine observes that while Microsoft is still the absolute king of corporate development, Apple has become increasingly appealing for development of …

I am aware of the irony that I talk a lot about software quality and the infrastructure of this blog is... well, I think it's up more often than Twitter! ...

But, yes, I'm aware. The cobbler's children go barefoot, and all that...

Not only am I as old as dirt, I started programming professionally when I was 16. So this may just be me being crotchety. But I perceive that the average quality of the code in today's software projects is going down.

That doesn't mean that software projects today don't have …

I have a job that is probably about 120 hours total work for a good Flash programmer. By that, I mean I estimate that you could probably do it in about 30 hours, but if you can deliver in 120, everyone is happy.

The only caveat is that you need …