This post is for people who have started learning about hypermedia and feel that it over complicates the elegance of REST. When I started hearing about hypermedia I felt it was adding architecture acrobatics for the sake of buzzword enhancement. After having applied these techniques in a few places not only have a …

It's a month past due so here is my obligatory "I changed my job" post. Over the last nearly 8 years at Comcast as part of the 'Online' group and later as founding member of mighty Comcast Interactive Media I've made many business connections, met a number of excellent peers and forged a few relationships …

On Monday we are kicking off an innovation week (more to come on that topic) and I've devised a little project that includes nearly every buzzword I'm interested in. I'm spending some time doing some technical spikes to see what is possible and I found a need to load a particular file from a git repo given the path and …

Development at work has been trending well in the new year and the team is getting excited about our formal incorporation of practices such as TDD and pair programming. I'm definitely perceive an intangible benefit in culture and fun. With a full test suite and engaged developers working out loud coding is fun again. I …

I’ve been reading about India’s concept of Jugaad, possibly poised to enter our buzzword vocabulary since it came up in the context of what Obama can learn from that country. Where the Agile Manifesto starts with “Individuals and Interactions” the Harvard Business Review kicks off Jugaad with “Thrift not Waste”. All …

Came across the Heinlein quote again today: http://personalmba.com/core-human-skills this time in the context of a "Business" professional. There is another point made in the blog post about how to be successful. You can either be an expert in a narrow field (top 1%) or be very good (top 25%) in multiple …

This about this: If you have a project with an estimated cost of $1MM and you expect a return of $1.1MM then strict governance and process controls are critical to success. A variance of 10% will take you from profitability to a loss. If you have a project with the same estimated $1MM cost but an expected return of …

Because I happen to be both buying a new car and deploying new infrastructure the realization dawned upon me about how similar these two activities are. You start the investigation with some preconceived "gut-level" notions. code: Multiprocess distributed job engine is what I need car : I want a Mazda 3 …

I've mentioned the book Adrenaline Junkiesin a previous post and I'm not seeing the value in a common language for discussing problems. Today's pattern is the 'Onion of Stupidity'. This is a common pattern where you build up hack upon workaround upon compromise, inject a little shortsightedness and wind up seeing a …

Sometimes the answer really isn't that hard. We were recently having a lunch conversation and talking about how to get involved in the local tech community. Kevin simply stated "Just show up". It was a stunningly simple answer. To people that have had the great experience of being involved in the Philly tech …