The way we build and deploy software is deplorable. The success rate of large projects is well under 50%. Even when successful, the capital cost is hideous. In his famous “Mythical Man Month,” Frederick Brooks observed that complexity comes in two flavors: essential (the complexity that comes from the nature of the problem) and accidental [...]

In the late 80’s, I was introduced to the “Don’t Care” Architecture by Sherman Woo, of what was then US West (now Qwest). The Internet existed but the World Wide Web didn’t. Sherman was spearheading something he called the “Global Village.” I don’t remember a lot of the specifics of it, although I do remember [...]

Most software projects start with an architecture, and most architectures are “stacks,” as in, “this is what our stack looks like.” This is where middleware, tools, languages and the like get decided. Two interesting things happen here. The first is the “platform wars.” Vendors of middleware and tools are very interested in which stack gets [...]

I’m guessing that many of you puzzle over the same thing I do: “Why do large IT projects cost so much?”As we now know, it’s not the development costs (the development is done) nor the licensing costs (typically a small portion of the total cost). There are many other factors, but the one that I [...]

[The names have been changed to protect somebody.] Once upon a time there was a firm. The firm had many, many employees and of course had payroll and personnel systems. One day the firm was visited by software vendors who convinced it that its systems were not “state of the art” and that if they [...]

We’ve been promoting an idea lately that has been around for a while but doesn’t seem to get much press. We’re calling it “headless apps” but it likely has other names out in the wild. We think it’s a major change in emphasis for how applications ought to be built. For almost the last 20 [...]

I was inspired by this article in the Atlantic called “Home Remedy” Turns out this tiny town of 1,730 couldn’t attract and retain doctors and nurses for their 25 bed hospital.  So they found townspeople who wanted to be doctors and nurses and helped put them through school. They have 23 nurses so far this way and [...]

Last week over lunch, my 18-year-old son Eli asked me, “Why are scanners so slow? They don’t even have as much to do as a copy machine. The copy machine has to move paper, put ink on the page. The scanner only has to scan.” He was referring to flatbed desktop scanners; we have a [...]

I’ve been working a lot lately with Semantic Web technologies. In particular I’ve been reflecting on the profound impact of basing everything on URIs. At one level it doesn’t look much different from primary keys or universal ids or GUIDs, but at a number of levels it is quite different. I might talk about that [...]

I was hoping I wasn’t going to have to learn SPARQL 1.1 from the specs. Bob DuCharme’s book Learning SPARQL 1.1  arrived just in time to save me from that fate. The book is well organized, progresses well and has great examples. What I particularly like and what you don’t get in the specs, are [...]