Nappi Sight

Is Windows 8.1 to Windows 8 what Windows 7 was to Vista?  Is this some form of marketing strategy to release the a major new version, let it take a lot of heat, then release a relatively minor version and watch everyone suddenly embrace it ?  I never saw much of a difference between Vista and Windows 7 but the former was a flop and the latter a success.  Is the same thing happening again?

  A few years ago I took a data warehousing course with the Kimball group and remarked at the time that the data warehouse field appeared to have a highly structured approach to designing data warehouse solutions.  While building data warehouses seemed to have well established patterns and methods for how to construct them, software systems seemed to be like snowflakes, each one built with different methodologies uniquely suited to particular project/team/company. And no shortage of debate about the competing merits of varying approaches and methodologies.  Data warehousing felt like engineering while software development was more like art. That perspective changed a few months ago when I had the opportunity to attend the IDesign Architect's Master class taught by Juval Lowy .  In this course, Juval presented a highly structured methodology for software design.  I found the course riveting and eye opening.  It was my first experience with a comprehensive proven methodology th

“It’s better to be wrong than vague” – Frederick Brooks Jr. More on Craftsmanship -Ted Neward’s continuing debate with software craftsmanship. Windows 8 LOB Story -Rocky walks us through the pain of deploying winrt apps to the enterprise. I had a recent discussion around the seemingly arbitrariness of the 40 work week.  It appears that its far from arbitrary with “150 years of research proves that long hours at work kill profits, productivity and employees “ We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor Why Working More Than 40 Hours a Week is Useless Bring back the 40-hour work week When culture turns into policy - A fine line exists between spelling out company culture and inadvertently engraving it as policy Every Employee Should Work From Home - More remote work fallout of the Yahoo and BestBuy policy changes.

These posts, originally intended to be weekly, are coming much less frequently. Oh well… “The fantasy model of collaborative design reflects a monumental unconcern about conceptual integrity. Jill pats the design here; Jim nudges it there; Jack patches it yonder. It is spontaneous; it is collaborative; and it produces poor designs. Indeed, we know the process so well that we have a scornful name for it—committee design. If collaboration tools are designed so they encourage committee design, they will do more harm than good” – Frederick P. Jr. Brooks Better remote collaboration will make protectionism harder - A case for the economic advantage of remote work. On Knowledge – “There are three kinds of knowledge: what you know you know, what you know you don't know, and what you don't know you don't know” Michael Montgomery of IDesign points out a major gap in Agile, the lack of architecture. Able Architecture: Part II Agile and the Architect Silverlight is "Dea