mobrec

So
I found this posting to be a bit swear-y (you've been warned), but otherwise on the money.

The final paragraph nails it (I have definitely seen my share of those 'success' messages:

Above all else, have a wonderful holiday season and give your teams a break until the code freeze is lifted in mid-January. Then you can get back to shoving Agile on people, making them work 60 hours a week again and then having your directors send “we did it the Agile way!!!!” success messages after the project you executed took production offline, took twice as long to finish and cost 3 times as much.

So
Happy New Year! 2014 was filled with ups and downs (as to be expected). Hopefully, 2015 will see projects successfully completed and new directions explored. Coming into the new year with a bit of flu has been kind of a drag, but things should start picking up again in a few days.

So
It seems like only yesterday it was 2014...

So

So
[caption id=“attachment_793” align=“alignnone” width=“660”] UPS delivery fail[/caption]

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So
It only shows up when you are off line (and currently only in the Chrome Canary builds). That would be fun for about 2 minutes.

So

So
I saw that Google is testing a password generator for the Chrome browser. Hmm, I wonder if that means that they will stop storing passwords in clear text?

Password-generating tools like LastPass, 1Password, RoboForm, and others are a mainstay of browser accessories, and are often recommended by security experts because they can help create and manage “strong” passwords. “Strong” refers to passwords that are difficult for hackers and computers to guess. Google's effort, if it makes it into the regular version of Chrome, could encourage other browser makers to build password generators and make the field more competitive.

1Password has the advantage that it is multi-platform and not tied to a single browser, which I consider to be a very good thing. Having each browser create its own incompatible password manager would be even worse that each browser having its own incompatible HTML interpreter.

So
I had to chuckle when I read through this post titled When crafting your API strategy, put design first. It is very high-level and could/should apply to anything. Here are the main points:

Design for consistency Design for scale Design for people

Check. Yes to all of these. I suppose some folks need to be reminded of this. Especially the 'sling code first and declare victory at some arbitrary point' proponents. The ones with 60 hours of production downtime a month because design 'just slows them down'. Apparently downtime doesn't slow them down, but it sure slows down the consumers.

Another chuckle was this paragraph, which is nearly a direct quote from me (emphasis added):

Planning too little is dangerous. But so is planning too much. This isn’t a science experiment to find the ideal design. Perfection isn’t the goal: consistency is.