Technology Divergence and Conway's Law

Conway's law is an observation that "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure". As a developer, it's easy to believe that this dynamic is the result of management decisions - however, sometimes the reality is more nuanced.

Posted by Howard Sunday, February 5, 2017

Evaluating Software Design Choices

Why does it seem that some software projects are constantly running into barrier after barrier when it comes to adoption while others sail smoothly into acceptance? I've put together a framework to try and help answer this question as well as to guide future decision making.

Posted by Howard Thursday, January 12, 2017

Generating Documentation Sites for Linked Data Vocabularies

Over the last few weeks I've been working on a Metalsmith plugin that will generate Web documentation similar to https://schema.org for any RDF vocabulary

Posted by Howard Friday, December 2, 2016

Reading List: Business and Management

I was asked by a colleague recently to share my backlog of business and management related books, so I wanted to share them with you as well.

Posted by Howard Tuesday, November 29, 2016

The "Must Haves" for a Service-based Architecture

There are lots of options and even more opinions about how to properly build a service-based system. Here, we cut through the buzzword bingo and get back to the fundamentals.

Posted by Howard Saturday, November 26, 2016

Some Functional Javascript Goodness

The best code is the code that you don't have to write. Functional techniques can help write less - and therefore more reliable - code. Even in Javascript.

Posted by Howard Thursday, November 17, 2016

Linked Data and Mutations

Whenever talk about linked data, there are generally 2 questions that get asked: what are the practical benefits of applying linked data principles and how do you handle mutations (changes) to data? This addresses the latter.

Posted by Howard Monday, November 14, 2016

Service Ownership and Linked Data

It's hard to tease apart services. It's easier to tease apart data.

Posted by Howard Friday, November 4, 2016

The Misappropriation of Terms: Andon Cord

Software developers tend to be a bit hipsterish in that we seem to have an inherent attraction to novel things - especially when those novel things are lifted from the old things of other disciplines. The Andon Cord is one of those nuggets lifted from the same corpus that brought us much of what is now termed “agile”: Automobile manufacturing - specifically, the manufacturing practices of Toyota. While more thoroughly described by others, the Andon Cord was a physical cord that ran along side Toyota’s entire production line and when pulled, stopped the assembly line.

Posted by Howard Friday, October 28, 2016

There Is No Data Center

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Posted by Howard Friday, October 21, 2016

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ABOUT ME
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I’m into a bit of everything. Some might say that makes me attention-deficit - I like to think it gives me the ability to see things from more angles. I’m a huge technology enthusiast, and while I've worked for some pretty large tech companies, my interests are pretty broad. The opinions here are mine alone.