By bfwebster on Nov 10, 2012 in Architecture, Art of 'Ware, Complex systems, Development, Product development, Project Failure, Quality assurance, Risk management, Software engineering, Surviving Complexity | 2 Comments
[Cross posted from And Still I Persist] [Note: I am currently in transit from Colorado to Florida and am composing this post as I have time and 'net access.] “All the most important mistakes are made on the first day.” – The Art of Systems Architecting (Maier & Rechtin) Project Orca was the Romney campaign’s [...]
By bfwebster on Oct 3, 2012 in Architecture, Competition, Education, Main, Marketing, Product development | 0 Comments
With the growing swell of articles about the still-hypothetical iPad Mini — see, for example, this thoughtful analysis over at Vodkapundit – I find it interesting that I see very little written about one of the hottest consumer niches for the iPad: kids. Which is surprising, since kids desperately want to get their hands on [...]
By bfwebster on Sep 25, 2012 in Business, Main, Product development, Professionalism, Quality assurance | 1 Comment
I travel a fair amount on business, though it can really vary from year to year and even during a given year. As it happened, I traveled a lot last year, requalifying for Platinum status on American Airlines. My wife traveled with me a lot as well, and she actually ended up with Gold status, [...]
By bfwebster on Sep 12, 2012 in Articles, Complex systems, Development, Main, Product development, Professionalism, Risk management | 2 Comments
A great post by Eric S. Raymond[*] (yes, that esr) on what he terms ground-truth documents: Here is an example: AIVDM/AIVDO protocol decoding. It describes the behavior of Marine AIS radios; I wrote it as preparation for coding the GPSD project’s AIS driver. It isn’t exactly or completely a hardware-interface specification, and some of its [...]
By bfwebster on Feb 22, 2012 in Main, Product development | 0 Comments
I spent a little time over at Google Groups, searching the USENET archives for posts that I had made and found (among others) the following: ====================== From: crash!bwebs…@SDCSVAX.ARPA Date: Sun, 30 Jun 85 01:26:31 PDT Subject: 2MB Macintosh! Well, space cookies, I did it. In a fit of passion, I went down to Levco Enterprises [...]