Again with the CEO? Seriously Yahoo!?

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Whenever I’ve spoke with former Yahoo! employees in the past few years, the overriding theme seems to be anger and disappointment. One does not feel emotional in this way about a company that cannot achieve; it is the mismanagement, lost opportunities and loss of direction of a team that used to consider itself a world-leader that results in such a temperament.

The question remains though, regardless of what happens in the near-term with their current CEO. Can (or should) Yahoo! be turned around, or should it be torn apart and sold for scrap? Continue reading →

The following post(s) are edited from a document that I wrote a few years ago to try and provide a consistent standard for HTML and CSS submitted by contractors for projects that my company was working on. At the time we found that we were spending a significant chunk of time on rework, in order to make things function properly across different browser types, and the goal was to reduce this, and simultaneously improve quality and customer satisfaction. I’ve edited things a bit, as the original was written with a sarcastic (and occasionally profane) tone that is slightly embarrassing in retrospect (although entirely necessary at the time). Continue reading →

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It seems like a strange idea – that people can build things that are so complex that they no longer understand them fully. It is more common in the realm of large projects where thousands of people work together on a single goal (think of the Space Shuttle, with its millions of moving parts), but it also happens on occasion in software development.

I can think of a handful of projects that I have worked on that have reached this point. One in particular, although the number of lines of code is not exceptionally large, has so many moving parts that it is actually impossible to determine in advance what effect any given change will have on its operation. Modifying its core functionality becomes a delicate game of trial and error. Continue reading →

Yes, I know – ideas don’t count for much these days. Continue reading →