Outsourcing is the business practice where a company uses outside firms to do select projects and special work that might normally be performed within that company. Some examples of what might be outsourced (besides software development) include payroll processing, shipping and distribution, and accounting. You are essentially sending your work to be done by an […]
Patterns for Getting Your Ideas Heard
Here at SEP, we have some pretty awesome engineer-led sessions…book clubs, academy courses, and [brown bags](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_bag_seminar) (just to name a few). Recently, I gave a brown bag on a topic that I am excited about – getting your ideas heard. I wanted to give this brown bag for a few reasons- I heard a common theme […]
Get a List of Months by Locale in Android…
I was working with a client trying to decide on long and short DateFormats for an international mobile application. (Yes, that’s a mouthful.) I wasn’t able to quickly find any documentation on the Java SimpleDateFormat strings by locale…so I did what any Passionate Programmer would do, and I wrote a method to do it for […]
Too many options for Android threads? Let me help!
As smartphones continue to gain popularity, the demand for mobile applications also continues to grow. The increase in usage of smartphones elevated the issue of “multitasking” on mobile devices. (I’m not going to go into details of my opinions on the myth and illusion of multitasking.) Ultimately, users want to have multiple applications running, syncing […]
3Q Book Review: Persuasive Business Proposals
Persuasive Business Proposals by Dr. Tom Sant What’s the point? The point of this book is to write clearly and concisely, to differentiate yourself, and to better equip yourself with tools for writing persuasively. Ultimately, this book is designed to help you and your company write winning proposals. How was it? Good. I honestly felt […]
Conversations in Outlook…
If you’re anything like me, you probably get a TON of email each and every day. In addition, you probably get emails that span a conversation over multiple days. Well, Outlook 2010 has this amazing feature called, Conversations. This will transform your inbox to look/feel more like a threaded forum (or, more like your gmail […]
More bragging about SEP…
Okay, I don’t think it’s a secret that I REALLY enjoy working at SEP. However, I’m going to continue to brag about this company. Recently, SEP was awarded the #1 BEST place to work in Indiana! That is some exciting stuff. Today, when I went to Google and searched for “beast place to work in Indiana”, […]
Extending Discovery into Business Value
Our industry often sets its context too small to address the question of why software is so expensive. While addressing costs, we missed optimizing the other side of the equation – VALUE. To move to a new level of optimization, we need to expand the context of our development process to engage more of the […]
Is Developing Software REALLY expensive? Another thought…
The Lean Software and Systems Consortium conference in Atlanta left me with a lot to think about. My main reason to go was to learn more about becoming a more agile enterprise but that is a topic for another day. To summarize my previous post, software projects are often categorized as “too expensive”. However, it […]
