Five Decisions Your Team Needs to Make Before Starting a Project
Huzzah! You got the project! Now what!? Here are some recommendations on what decisions you should make right now, before you start. 1. What’s the tech? Let’s start with the obvious one. Assuming you’ve decided to write some software, you’ll have to decide how to write it. Which programming language? Is your team going to […]
Building a Better Book Group
A little while back, there was a discussion around SEP about how to best keep track of the books we read for our own professional development. Notably, how to share our thoughts and reviews in an easy-to-use way. We had a solution, but in order to avoid swearing, we won’t talk about it now. We […]
Oracle Wallets and You … No, Not You, Behind You. Yeah, You.
Oracle databases are a complex system of interconnected parts. The toolset is comprehensive and robust. And so is the documentation. Possibly too robust, even. I have spent the last couple of days researching how to do One Specific Thing, while the documentation has delighted in telling me All the Things That Can Be Done. And […]
Human Complexity: It’s Not Just for Psych Majors Anymore!
There are complex systems, and then there are Complex Systems. And nothing makes a system more complex than dealing with people. People make things complicated. Let’s look at an example. I’ve recently been working on an employee time tracking tool. One of the tasks that this tool does is verification of a timesheet: are the minimum […]
The Point of Particularly Personal Personas
The Agile software development movement has a concept called user personas. During a project’s spin-up, developers are encouraged to create these personas as representative users. A typical persona may be “Victor the Vice President”. Victor is a VP at his company. He will use the software for high-level data reporting, but not data entry. On […]
