When is perfect perfect enough?

By some crazy stroke of luck I was invited to participate in the Diablo III Beta program.  It’s been 12 agonizing years since the last iteration of the game was released (not including expansions).  12 years is a long time to wait for any sequel in a successful franchise, but even more conspicuous for a giant game company with deep pockets like Blizzard Entertainment.  Read more >>

SOPA/PIPA: Anti-Censorship Protest or Techies Revenge?

In the past week or so, we’ve seen something truly unique in the world of technology.  I’m referring to the highly effective protests of the proposed SOPA and PIPA laws by web giants “Google” and “Wikipedia” (among many others).  If you’re not sure what SOPA and PIPA are, you should go to Google or Wikipedia and read all about it (irony intended). Read more >>

A Decade of Fairway

Has it really been 10 years?  It certainly doesn’t seem like it, but judging by the desolate patch of forehead I used to call a hairline it may as well have been 50 years.

Things may be different today, but nothing’s really changed and I’m proud of that.  When I started Fairway 10 years ago I set out to work with only the people I wanted to work with.  The best and brightest from my own small but deeply talented nexus of engineering friends and acquaintances.  Our goal was simple; to provide the highest quality software development services in town.  I believe we’ve achieved that, and had a lot of fun and made (and brewed) a lot of memories along the way.

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Handling Session Timeout Gracefully

Nerd-Face

Have you ever been to those sites that show you a nice helpful popup to let you know that your session will expire in a few minutes?  You know, the ones that show you a countdown timer, and let you Continue Your Session, or Log Out?  And if you’ve been gone so long that your session really did expire because you were feeding your nerd-face, it automatically logs you out and shows you a nice message letting you know it was only to protect you?  That it was For Your Own Good?

Yeah, me too!   Then I said, “I want one!” and set out to build my own. Read more >>

Generating Software Diagrams

Introduction

In this post I’m going to describe how to automatically generate diagrams from source code.  I’ve found that diagrams provide the quickest path to understanding how a piece of software works.  Diagrams also provide a great means to discuss software at a high level.  They’ve proven invaluable in the software development and software consulting work I’ve done.

Often diagrams are created by hand.  Unfortunately hand-crafted diagrams are prone to manual mistakes and falling out-of-sync as the source code changes.  Many IDE’s can automatically generate diagrams from source code on the fly, but sometimes your IDE doesn’t provide the diagrams or options you want.  Being able to generate your own diagrams will give you the ability to create exactly what you need when you need it. Read more >>

The Audacity of Nope

The technology industry and indeed the world lost a titan of the modern technology pantheon yesterday.  Steve Jobs was a pioneer and an innovator and a progressive thought leader, but what may have been greatest about Jobs in my view was his audacious, fervent and oftentimes smug ability to say No.
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The Origins of Culture

Where does your company’s culture come from?

I had an interesting conversation with our HR manager the other day about how our company’s culture was created and cultivated. She claimed that culture begins and ends with upper management — that culture was purely a function of the top brass, whose direction determined how it evolved. This struck me as odd, and for someone I rarely disagree with I was surprised to hear her say this so matter-of-factly. I think I always assumed that at most companies the management team was at best an well-intentioned impedance to a genuinely enjoyable company culture. Sure, the brass can institute corporate-mandated fun or other culture-rific policies, but it is my belief that the actual core culture of a company — it’s soul — grows more organically based on the personalities of the people who work there.
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Scrum Overview in Prezi – not another boring slideshow

I’ve wanted to create something on the Prezi platform ever since I saw it a few months ago. It seems like a really cool interactive approach to presentations that breaks away from the PowerPoint mold.

After listening to Noah Heldman’s Code Brew this past Monday on scrum and Agile project management methodology, I thought it would be fun to turn his thoughts (and word doc) into a Prezi.
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Numbers don’t lie: LinkedIn Statistics

Numbers Never Lie is one of my favorite sayings. So is Follow The Money, but that’s another story. As a mild-insomniac, I found myself click-click-clicking around LinkedIn last night. I stumbled across a link which invited me to, “Check out insightful statistics about Fairway Technologies employees.”

I couldn’t help myself. As a closet math-nerd and sociology major, I’m a sucker for statistics. Click.
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What is your favorite software development tool?

I recently asked this question to some of our engineering folks here at Fairway Technologies.

More importantly, I wanted to know WHY each of their fave’s was top of mind.

Not too surprisingly, most of the tools they mentioned helped them work more efficiently. Our favorite tools help improve automation and simplify the software development process.
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