CaseySoftware's biggest project right now involves the integration of numerous XML data sources into a single unified database. Each of the data sources consists of the same type of data, but each is in its own – sometimes proprietary – format. Please don't ask me how unencryped XML can be truly proprietary, but in the […]
Q: What's Microsoft's biggest strength? A: The fact that it is the defacto standard in desktop environments and has a fairly customizable yet standard user interface. Q: What's Microsoft's biggest weakness? A: I can't answer this one directly, but one of the arguments against Windows has been the issue of stability. My answer for years […]
After numerous different articles about the impending Venture Capital flood, I still had my doubt. I don't see the same thing as in the 90's where nearly everyone who had a webpage was getting money thrown at them, but there's enough going around to give me pause. CaseySoftware is a relatively small development house. We […]
As a regular reader of Joel On Software and heading a group prepared to go into the ASP realm with dotProject and Mantis, I read this post with great interest today. It's a long post, but I'll summarize it here: Software companies and software buyers have directly competing goals from the second the contracts are […]
If you haven't read KC's entry On Being “Thorough”, go check it out and come right back. I'm addressing the same point from a different direction. On Friday, I submitted an invoice for a huge amount of hours to our biggest customer. The contract is fixed price, but paid on an incremental basis depending on […]
During the analysis of a codebase from a recent client, I noticed something quite odd… The bulk of the codebase was of very low quality. Tabbing conventions for denoting loops/if-then statements were not followed, variables were not named consistently, passing data via globals, and whole functions where copy and pasted throughout the code. None of […]
I was contacted yesterday by someone who had received one of my proposals last fall. They loved it, but that project ended up falling through before it went anywhere with me. Regardless, I made a positive impression. Fast forward four months and the gentleman drops me a message with a description of his latest project […]
I try to stay out of politics and policy here, but I just couldn't pass on this one. I'm in relatively good health and CaseySoftware is nowhere near the place of having a health plan, so I'm in a bit of a dilemma. Do I attempt to go without health insurance and be one of […]
For those of you who haven't read this blog entry, do so and then come right back. There is some appeal to building a behemoth application that will replace Exchange/Outlook/Evolution and rule the world… muhahah… Realistically, unless we rule the world, that doesn't really do much for CaseySoftware, our developers, or our the bank account. […]
In case you missed the first installment, go check it out. With the advent of CaseySoftware's first non-founding member coming aboard, I thought I'd revisit the Distributed Development Teams and the related project management issues that are raised. First of all, CaseySoftware is based in Northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC. This has never […]