A common dilemma of many tech managers and businesses in general is when presented with a business problem, do you build your own software or do you buy? For some companies, this is an easy answer. Some development teams are not equipped with the skills to build a particular tool or product. Other companies just [...]

All good developers need time to decompress. This ability to decompress comes in 2 basic flavors. The first obvious method would be getting away from the mundane routine of coding. This form of decompression is common to most jobs. Developers like anyone else can benefit from some time away. This can come in small doses, [...]

A few weeks ago I wrote that good design is a dying but important art. While I do believe that is true, there is also too much of a good thing. Sometimes you can get too caught up in the ‘ideal’, worrying and designing things to be perfect. Deciding what is the right blend of [...]

For years, SmartMoney had project manager(s).  This was more of a necessity during our early years, when projects were large 9-12+ month long beasts.  Our projects were managed in a more classical software development approach commonly used at the time. Projects had weekly status meetings, pages of specs and documents that were always in need [...]

Here at SmartMoney, we have been using iterative development techniques for years. Even before the term was made popular in the technology field, we ditched the long drawn out style of project development. For the most part, we now employ a more cyclical style of development where individual features are coded, tested, deployed. New features are added [...]

Let me give you a little information about where I am coming from. I would like to show you that you can merge modern development techniques such as getting real, agile development, pragmatic programming in a corporate environment. Currently I am the Director of Web Development for a large financial website. We publish original content, [...]