With the emergence of Project Management as a profession, formal planning processes are often regarded as absolutely essential to the success of projects and businesses. However, while well documented processes of planning with set time lines and task allocations allow everyone in a project or business to understand exactly what needs to be done when, there is also the danger that too formal and rigid planning practices can hinder success by reducing flexibility in an ever-changing environment.
20 Jan 2011
Developers are strange creatures. Give them complex problems to solve and they are happy as can be. Expose them to sunlight and they hide under their desks. Here are some tips that (in my opinion) will help you keep your developers happy and productive.
12 Jan 2011
At the beginning of every year we are faced with the challenge of formulating a business strategy for the coming year. In our case, technology is the underlying driver for everything we do. Fortunately there is no shortage of pundits to provide insight into what technology is expected to bring in the coming year.
But do we push the envelope hard enough ? Do we work our imaginations hard enough?
This book, released in 2008, is a must read for all that take web development seriously. It is a small book, 176 pages counting the appendices, but as Crockford warns in the preface, it is dense in its content. The author’s goal with this is to show that it is possible to write beautiful code with this misunderstood programming language and when you finish reading it, that is all you want to do.
03 Jan 2011
Happy New Year from the MIH SWAT team! To kick off 2011, Zuniad has compiled 11 tech predictions for the year ahead – let us know if you agree….
1) Group Buying
Group buying becomes wholly entrenched worldwide as modus operandi for online shoppers is first to find good deals. 2011 will see expansion of the concept with customisation for businesses, personalisation for consumers and group buying verticals. However, due to low barriers for entry, group buying could become more decentralised as online retailers look to harness the potential of group buying (e.g. October 2010: Wal-Mart used Facebook to run their own group buying offer, which got the 5,000 ‘likes’ needed to make the deal happen within 24 hours).
13 Dec 2010
One of MIH SWAT’s teambuilding activities this year was to assemble a 3D printer. We chose the CupCake CNC – an affordable, easy to build and 100% open source option. Based on the RepRap project, this printer is the main product of the MakerBot Industries, founded in January 2009 by Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer and Zach Hoeken with the goal of producing robots that make things.
08 Dec 2010
Passwords… We all have them, and quite likely, we all have numerous ones. Almost every online service, whether online banking or a social network, requires a password. Obviously, there are some sites where if your password is compromised, it will be inconvenient, but not a complete disaster. On other sites, like banking, it could have much more drastic consequences, resulting not only in the possible loss of finances, but also possibly a huge amount of debt.
27 Nov 2010
Just over a year ago we launched an experimental Facebook application that allows you to visualize how all your facebook friends are connected called the Social Graph. It offers Facebook users additional insight into their personal social networks, allowing them to identify different social clusters they belong to. You can read about how the Social Graph was developed in this introductory post.
25 Nov 2010
While I was at Oscon this year, just about every session that I attended, someone mentioned NodeJS. So when I found out there was a talk about it on the last day, I went along to discover what the buzz was all about.
01 Nov 2010
While at the Adobe MAX conference this year, the overall theme was about how to get Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) applications compiled and installed on many devices. The biggest group of these devices were Android ones, but Blackberry joined in by announcing AIR support for its Playbook tablet device. Of course the iOS devices are supported by plugins to cross compile to native Objective-C iOS applications, but this was not a highlight of this conference. There was one very new announcement at MAX, which for me was the highlight – project Molehill.
