Software

Via the Seattle Tech Startups list, I came across probably the most vehement, well-written, detailed critique of the PHP language I have seen yet.

Not 2 weeks after my newsletter calling out how people take for granted that nothing bad will happen to their web sites, two of the biggest providers went down yesterday, Amazon and Akamai, in several separate incide

Here at Freelock, we've been making the transition to using Open Atrium as our project management platform, and thus far I've been quite impressed with it.

All the planning and preparation in the world won't prevent an incident, but it can greatly reduce the consequences.

Nothing better prepares you for responding to disaster than experience. In the world of web applications, sometimes we act as firefighters, coming in to rescue the smoldering remains of a hacked site, a crashed server, or an unexpected traffic burst.

No matter how diligent you are at preventing vulnerabilities and securing your environment, it's impossible to be completely secure on the Internet. What you can do is plan for how to limit the damage that people can do when they manage to compromise some part of your system. This line of thinking is called "Defense in depth" -- you can't just apply security updates and call it good.

It amazes me that still in 2011, the standard way web designers upload code to a server is FTP ("File transfer protocol"), a protocol that is completely insecure, easy to snoop, slow, hard to use, and often problematic through firewalls. There are many better ways.

Backups are the safety net and an absolute requirement. But the next most important part is doing what you can to stay out of trouble. We've all become accustomed to security updates on our computers. Today every operating system has an update system, and a huge number of attacks are on vulnerabilities that have fixes released but people have neglected to apply.

Cloud computing has been a buzzword for the past couple years, but what does that really mean, and why should you care?

Today, in the Washington State legislature, the House and the Senate are reconciling their two different bills to balance the State budget. Both involve significant tax changes, and there are different ramifications for software depending on which goes through.

There are basically 3 models for getting web applications built:

• Proprietary platform
• Custom code
• Open Source

[Originally published on the Open Source Small Business blog, in January 2008.]

I’ve seen a lot of code in various languages. As a technical writer, I used to write documentation for programmers teaching them how to use a particular interface or system. I’ve been involved with traditional software development projects at large software companies and startups. And I’ve done my share of actual programming of web applications.