My life as a Code Economist

Eric Sink (Update: I previously said Eric Rice - who does AudioBlog, not SourceGear - thanks to Ranjith Anthony for recorrecting me) continues his posts, certainly qualifying him to have one of the most valuable site for software developers and managers. This one is on Testing, or debugging, or the horrors of shipping on Halloween.

Especially in the wake of Microsoft's launch of Visual Studio, this post is an exceptionally good read. He describes each bug with four qualifiers: frequency, severity, cost and risk. Sound obvious? Read it - print it and then send it to your nearest manager. This is an article worth reading especially when he compares levels of severity:

# The top of the graph represents a bug with extremely severe impact:
"This bug causes the user's computer to burst into flame."
# The bottom of the graph represents a bug with extremely low impact:
"One of the pixels on the splash screen is the wrong shade of gray."

How many times have you had to fix the BOTTOM issue BEFORE the top one?

Comments

Blogs and RSS come to Microsoft.com

MS has just introduced their portal and it's pretty comprehensive. Nothing quite like learning that some people use AIM instead of MSN messenger, or that there really may be a need for supporting 4 monitors ( Cyrus Complains ) However, it's really a great sign that MS is serious about supporting the blogging community which seems to have um, exploded in size in the past year. Blogs and RSS come to Microsoft.com

Programmers vs. Developers vs. Architects

I received an email this morning from Brandon Savage 's newsletter. Brandon's a PHP guru (works at Mozilla) but his newsletter and books have some great overall perspectives for developers of all languages. However, this last one (What's the difference between developers and architects?) kind of rubs me the wrong way. Either that, or I've just missed the natural inflation of job descriptions. (maybe, it's like the change in terminology between Garbage man and Waste Engineer or Secretary and Office Administrator) So maybe it's just me - but I think there's still a big difference between Programmer, Developer and then of course, architect. The key thing here is that every role has a different perspective and every one of those perspectives has value. The original MSF create roles like Product Manager, Program Manager, Developer, Tester, etc - so every concept may pigeon hole people into different roles. But the statements Brandon makes are often distinction

FoxInCloud Stats

FoxInCloud sent this link a while back about their statistics regarding visits to their site: http://foxincloud.com/blog/2017/12/27/VFP-community-lessons-from-foxincloud-site.html What's interesting here is the breakdown of people. Yes, I think it's understandable that the Fox community is getting older. Another factor is the growth of the mobile and web environments taking over development. These environments really do push people towards the newer non-SQL or free SQL/hosted environments but more towards hosted storage options like Amazon and Google. A tool like FoxInCloud that helps MOVE existing applications to the cloud inherently competes with those environments. But FoxInCloud also allows developers to extend their application further by giving them a starting point using Javascript and the basic CSS (such as Bootstrap). If you're not rebuilding your application from scratch, it's certainly a great step forward. FoxPro VFP

Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

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