Crafting Effective Announcements

The only constant in life is change. Heraclitus In this world of omnipresent change, effective communication is key to survival. Information that will impact others must be shared, and how that sharing is done will be the difference between success and failure. Will recipients of your message be confused, or will the message be clear? … Continue reading Crafting Effective Announcements

The Importance of Upstreaming Issues

Any software builds upon other software – nothing truly starts from scratch. Even the most trivial “Hello World” demo program relies on a compiler, (most likely) a standard library, and then all of the low level system services, such as the operating system, drivers, and hardware. In any of those areas, it’s pretty much certain … Continue reading The Importance of Upstreaming Issues

Shuttleworth on Project Management

Mark Shuttleworth, of Thawte fortune and Ubuntu fame, has some (IMHO) neat ideas on how to manage software development efforts that may be interesting to spend a few human processing cycles considering. http://lwn.net/Articles/292031 Despite the article being written for Free Software and Linux, I think it’s incredibly relevant to all development efforts – read it … Continue reading Shuttleworth on Project Management

Distributed services – the past, present, and future of the Internet

The Internet started as a distributed network – ARPANET. Its protocol, TCP/IP, was designed so that hosts anyone could communicate without relying on a central authority, and if any one host went down, it didn’t affect the other others’ ability to work. Gradually, as ARPANET evolved into the Internet, that distributed architecture became more important. … Continue reading Distributed services – the past, present, and future of the Internet