Bob On Development — Musings on the craft and business of software development

Dumb Computers Are A Good Thing

April 1, 2010

Eric Sink had some thoughts about a sea change he feels is underway in the world of computing. The short version: computers are no longer driven by the demands of uber-geeks, who are quickly becoming a minority. The new driving force are people who are willing to trade power and flexibility for simplicity. Shiny new […]

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Continuous Learning is Relative

March 27, 2010

The conventional wisdom in software development is that you must always keep ahead of the alphabet soup-and-acronym marketing juggernaut that drives the technology. While I don’t disagree, exactly, I have to confess that I’m seeing an awful lot of technology that’s driven by the need of traditional software vendors to sell version upgrades and counter […]

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System Administrivia

January 17, 2010

My son is a crack sysadmin, but it’s never been my area of interest. I’m a software developer. I like that if something goes wrong with software I wrote, I know exactly who to blame (me) and who can do something about it (me). With operating systems and hardware — I’m at the mercy of […]

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Python: Unraveling the Snake

November 24, 2009

Something has been making me restless lately. Maybe it’s the periodic need to shake things up; maybe it’s the growing sense that I may be getting a little parochial in the Microsoft-centric alternative reality that I’ve lived in for the past 15 years or so; maybe it’s simply indigestion. Whatever the reason, I’ve been looking […]

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The Kindle DX — Is it Worth the Money?

November 19, 2009

As a purchaser of the original Kindle 1 back around November of 2007, I’m a relatively early adopter of Amazon.com’s eReader technology. In general, I’ve been well satisfied with it, for a first-generation device. I find the ability to purchase most books for $9.99 or less in a very readable / usable / portable format, […]

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