At Freelock, we've been adopting a pattern for git branch management called Git Flow. If you haven't run across git flow before, go check out this article to get the basic concepts: A successful Git branching model.
We're growing quickly at Freelock, and I've been interviewing candidates for a number of positions. For the most part, we've been working with a temp service (CampusPoint) who has done a great job at sending us enthusiastic candidates that fit well on our team, but we also hire people directly, generally based on employee referrals or recommendations from contacts.
XSS is short for Cross-Site Scripting, but you probably might ask why the short term is not CSS instead. That's because CSS is already used for Cascade Style Sheets, a pre-existing language for defining styles for web pages, so using XSS will prevent confusion.
As we delve more and more into ways to make our customers' organizations run better, we keep an eye out for things we can do to make their jobs easier. One big problem lots of our customers have is out of date contact information for their customers, members, or audience.
What better way to keep this information up to date, than to get updates straight from the source?
As a Seattle Sounders season ticket holder, I'm on the Major League Soccer (MLS) mailing lists, and last week I received a request for an update that I thought was particularly well done. First, the email:
Robyn asks:
I work for a company in the automotive tech industry ... as a Technical Editor for the Technical Service Bulletin team and decided that now that I know I'm capable of doing tedious work I should make a lateral move into the Information Technology industry. ... In your opinion, should I invest the time to learn Drupal?
Hi, Robyn, thanks for the question!
First of all, there are many different paths to becoming a professional software developer. So the quick answer is, yes --
Business Intelligence. Customer Relationship Management. Big Data. High Speed analytics. A/B Testing. These are common buzzwords that promise to make your business succeed, through the analysis of things you can measure -- the number of visitors on your web site, the number of Twitter followers/Facebook Likes, the average rating a handful of survey respondents give to an event.
There's all kinds of things you can measure, and you can easily get lost in the possibilities. But does all this measurement help you succeed?
Will asks: I ... have been thinking about alternatives to QuickBooks. I sent these links to my bookkeeper but she has not used any of these. Do you recommend any of them, or is a “custom open source” option viable for me at this point? Are you familiar with any of these? http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/five-apps/five-alternatives-to-quickboo...
In the software industry, the definition of "success" isn't necessarily the same as it is for the rest of the world. The customer asks for a complex system composed of many parts, with a specified budget, and a timeline. A software project is usually considered successful if any part of the system is developed, at any cost, at some time. Not necessarily the functionality requested, the budget, or the deadline.
So claimed Steve McConnell at a recent talk about the business value of software processes Timon and I attended.
Surprising? Shocking, even? Not if you've ever been involved in creating a moderately complex web site, or software project. All too often, people charge in and build something, never taking a moment to plan, never stopping to look at the big picture.
And, I'm embarrassed to say, I have been guilty of this too.
Here is what we're doing to make sure we don't do it again.
Remember how as a kid you would break out into a run, just because you felt like it? My daughter is nearly two years old, and she runs more than she walks these days. Perhaps there's more to the joy of running than we ever expected.
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If you are a user of business software and are interested in finding out more about open source options for your business or office, you may be a little bit frustrated about the lack of introductory-level information on this topic...
The best single source of such information that I have found so far is John Locke's "Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems." It provides an excellent introduction to the concepts, advantages, and disadvantages behind open-source.
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