(Note: This post is part of a series for new technical leaders that are joining a new company, or taking over a new organization or team; and while written for new CTOs, VPs of Engineering, or Software Managers, could be applied to other technical positions. This is also written largely for smaller to mid-size teams [...]
(Note: This post is part of a series for new technical leaders that are joining a new company, or taking over a new organization or team; and while written for new CTOs, VPs of Engineering, or Software Managers, could be applied to other technical positions. This is also written largely for smaller to mid-size teams [...]
As any experienced mobile developer will tell you, it requires 100s of hours to craft a great mobile application. So much of that time is invested in pouring over the myriad details critical to delivering a quality user experience, carefully designing and coding the interactions, workflow and functionality that will blow people’s minds. However, all [...]
Since earlier this summer I have been working on a book chapter for the Architecture of Open Source Applications text book. It is a pretty cool project because there are a lot of great contributors, and all of the profit made from text book sales goes to Amnesty International. My chapter assignment was Distributed Systems, [...]
Recently I have been getting some flack about the lack of “personal” updates on my blog – people keep saying I am too serious. Silly people. But to appease them (or at least one of them who suggested I write about my weekends and people I meet) I am writing a post about all the [...]
So a few weeks ago one of my friends who is a CTO at a very successful consumer facing startup was talking to me about how they do vendor selection. We were discussing this as my team was pondering an upcoming vendor selection for a new project. It was apparent almost immediately our two companies [...]
Cloud computing, it is now another one of the buzz words that is being used like crazy. However, in talking to some of my other CTO counterparts it is obvious a lot of people don’t really understand what it means to move their services into the cloud. There are lots of articles talking about the [...]
I have always thought that the reason places like Google catered food was because it was a nice perk for the employees. A year ago I would have never thought that I would be advocating this practice for all start-ups. So how did I change my mind? Let me tell the story. Not all that [...]
In talking with some of my CTO friends, one of the things that has come up is what a pain in the butt it is to choose a CDN. There isn’t any widely available testing tool and there are so many different things to think about when negotiating a contract with these people. While this [...]
So Amazon just announced that they will be providing premium support for the web services (EC2, S3, and SQS). They are including a service level dashboard to keep users up to date on issues and the health of their services. This is very exciting news, since it shows Amazon’s commitment to web services and providing [...]