Category Archives: The DevXpert

When a New Year comes around we all pick up our hopes for the months ahead and lay them out on the table. They are nice, shiny hopes, all full of promise and untainted by the stain of failure. We have usually invested much time in creating and nurturing these hopes, some of us for years. Some of these hopes have been picked up and polished for so long that there is hardly any hope left on them, they’ve been worn that thin! Continue reading →

Even if it is entirely their fault, suppliers will do their utmost to stay in business, and running unprofitable projects is not a good way to remain solvent. They will under-deliver on what was promised, scale back on resources allocated to the project, either by using less or cheaper labour, and they will hit back with that dreaded weapon, the Change Request. Continue reading →

Back in the eighties, a smart and eager young COBOL programmer became the butt of many a joke when, entirely unbidden, he wrote some assembler code to read and write records. This he claimed was more efficient than using the equivalent COBOL statements. Now it does not matter if you are technical or not, suffice to say this is the equivalent of putting a small motor in your wall with a gyroscope attached in order to keep your pictures level when you hang them Continue reading →