Disqus - Latest Comments for JFred

Re: Is there more to life than money?

JFred — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:42:08 -0000

In the US, registered nurses (RN's) make more money than the vast majority of software developers. The very best profession for making a bunch of cash was recently reported as Investment Banker. Many lawyers are poor.

Re: Rails 2.0 Timestamps | ruby on rails blog

JFred — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 09:28:55 -0000

Nice website. What do you use to color code the ruby, syntax?

On the 't.timestamps', I thought it was singular, t.timestamp. And if you do 'rake db:schema:dump', it comes out t.datetime. I think it's the same thing.

Re: Chris Matthews calls out Rudy Giuliani on his lies

JFred — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 07:31:55 -0000

The Clinton administration was shuffling and pushing at doing the right thing, but not effectively. Terrorism and Saddam Hussein (not the same thing) were seen as problems. If the Republicans had formed a solid bipartisan effort to work against these enemies of the US, they and President Clinton would have gotten more done. So Guiliani has a point.

Instead, though, the Republicans focused on 'Monica' and impeachment, weakening the foreign policy of the US.

Re: Why Distributed Version Control Matters to You, Today

JFred — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:46:00 -0000

Thanks for the article. I've been wondering what git was all about and why people were using it. Now I know.

Re: Why Distributed Version Control Matters to You, Today

JFred — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:46:00 -0000

Thanks for the article. I've been wondering what git was all about and why people were using it. Now I know.

Re: Thread

JFred — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:45:00 -0000

Mr. Spolsky is partly right. Using old-fashioned management tends to fail on software projects. But there are other, more essential inputs:

1. You have to have a market. The coders who put together all the spreadsheets that competed with Microsoft Excel didn`t all fail technically. They ran into Microsoft`s marketing muscle.

For embedded code, it isn`t enough to have technical success. Somebody has to want to buy the airplane or telecomm gear you`ve made.

2. It helps greatly to have managers who know what they are doing. I`ve written code for people who turned out not to know what a computer really is, nor what software is. People like this drive projects over cliffs.

3. It helps greatly to have customers who know what they want. It is quite hard for computer users to get used to a new system, especially if the new system is just barely working. It is easy for them to throw an expensive system in the trash and blame the software. It is impossible for them to know if a product is going to start working for them next week, or never.

4. Sometimes it isn`t much of a cure to involve the users in the development; They have their own jobs to do and can`t spare the time to work on creating software.

5. Software developers themselves don`t know if they`re incompetent. I`ve taken over half-finished projects from other coders and found hard-working, diligent souls can produce an utter mess. And neither they nor their bosses had any idea how incompetent they were.