Tim Hoolihan

Tell me these aren’t relevant. Tell me it isn’t like a summation of Wall Streets mistakes leading up to 2008. Deming died in 1993. Deming’s 7 Deadly Diseases of Management* Lack of constancy of purpose Emphasis on short term profits Evaluation of performance, merit rating or annual review Mobility of top management Running a company [...]

…or some other catchy metaphor that will grab your attention. These technologies were hot over the last 5 years. Flex gained a particular amount of popularity in the Java community where UI technologies have a bit of a spotty record (that’s like saying my Bengals have a bit of a spotty record over a lifetime). [...]

I read The Myth of Multitasking this fall, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I let the book sit a bit after reading before writing this post, in order to see what type of difference it has made. Having read it, and worked through the exercises in the book, and put the principles into [...]

Let me say up front, Steve Yegge is my favorite blog writer. I think I started reading his blog in late 2007, and really picked up digging through the archives in 2008. He is the reason I still write blog posts. This blog does decent traffic for a hobbyist technical blog, but it’s still like [...]

“Beware of becoming an Agile zealout, because this can backfire and put people off. Don’t treat people who are not applying Agile as fools who just need to see the light! This is disrespectful, and people simply won’t listen to your rants.” -Rachel Davies in Agile Coaching1. Why is this comforting? Good communities self-monitor. Many [...]

Through the years, a fair amount of my projects have been with small companies and startups. One thing I notice almost universally, is that members of smaller teams tend to have hunger for success, and a real feeling of ownership over their product. They take personal pride and consider themselves invested in the project. That [...]

Build answered a lot of questions for developers who wondered about the future of the Microsoft platform. WinRT is the new API for “Metro ” applications, which are streamlined enable both tablet and pc inputs. These applications can be built in .Net or native C++ using XAML, or in JavaScript with Html5. The traditional desktop [...]

Things are often more complicated than they seem. Certainly in the worlds of economics and nationalism. It’s no wonder that as the largest economy in the world, America wants to protect that place and Americans are sensitive to any efforts to move jobs elsewhere. Certainly that is true today, with unemployment currently at 9.1%. In [...]

As a consultant, I’m sometimes a part of projects that do things I wouldn’t choose to do. Welcome to the real world, right? For example, on one project I worked on in the past, the connection string for an asp.net project used the “sa” account for sql server. Further, it was in the web.config file [...]

I’ve been reading Jon Stokes’ Inside the Machine, and it’s a very good read. In particular I was struck by a couple of simple aspects of how CPUs work. ISA First, let’s discuss ISAs (instruction set architecture). x86 is a famous one created by Intel. POWER is an ISA created by IBM. PowerPC was created [...]