My Viewpoint as a Software Developer

Here is an assortment of references or viewpoints as it pertains to the field of Software Development. I have been a software developer for almost 20 years now and learned a lot of stuff (and refused to "learn" a lot of other stuff).

There have been an awful lot of changes in our field and in the last couple of years the speed of changes has really skyrocketed.

Some things however, have not changed at all. You may be surprised at what they are.

Well, at least it's true advertising - this new program is really smoking!

Just like in a good magazine, let's do the funnies first...

Look at my resume!

Computer Systems Development

Story 1:	This system cost $20 Million to build and $60 Million to get rid of!
Story 2:	CFO: "If you all can't clean up this accounting mess with your computer, I'm going to hire 200 Chinese people with abacuses!" (coming soon.)
Story 3:	"We'll give you the final specifications for the system on Monday." "Implementation date and going live? Er... Monday!" (coming soon.)

Trouble at the Helpdesk

These are stories that I did not encounter personally but which are very funny and reported to have actually happened!

Beware crashing productivity...

The high cost of thrash...

How do computers = productivity?

What's the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of coffee?

Boy, was I shocked when I read this Computerworld article. I guess I am glad that I don't drink coffee. I only carry 10-liter jugs of spring water into the office. I wonder what the Total Cost of Ownership of that is...

High Performance
Fat Clients with
PowerBuilder

This 22 minute audio-visual presentation (5.2MB file) shows how a freely downloadable ODBC driver (MS Visual Foxpro) can be used to program client-centric PowerBuilder systems that have very high performance.
These systems only need a file-sharing server (e.g. Novell) and have very little performance degradation if the number of concurrent users increases.
You need Win95 or WinNT 4.0 to play the Camcorder presentation file and need to have 25 MB diskspace for a temporary working file. The file is self-extracting and does not need any other software to run.

Email and tell me what you think! Also tell me if you have any similar stories.

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