Dear Jonah

Sorry for the influx of posts, but I’m rolling in an old blog into this site.

When I’ve been out selling my A Part-Time CTO services, I’ve sometimes run up against a company saying they have a CIO already, so why do they need a CTO? It’s a good question. I’ve been reading a lot about the role of the CIO and it’s constantly evolving responsibilities. A good primer on the [...]

When putting together a team of developers or engineers, there is a grand belief that most fall into one of two buckets: Senior or Junior. That designation never really worked for me because it’s so fuzzy. Unfortunately, it’s here to stay so I’ll be using it for this post. I’ll be using “Sr.” and “Jr.” [...]

Whenever I’m in a discussion about platforms or language choices, someone will invariability bring up how some language or platform theoretically performs and use that as a reason to use it / not to use it. This is especially true in startups. ‘Will it scale?’ is always a topic of initial conversations and choices. As [...]

Most development and engineering teams have long since seen the benefits of using a version control system (VCS) to maintain and version their source code. For many years the popular free choice was CVS. That was supplanted several years ago by Subversion. Subversion adoption steadily increased throughout the years until it supplanted CVS as the [...]

One of the main challenges of starting a products based company is how do you build your product? This is especially true of web based companies, whose product consists of mainly a web site and very little more. For many companies, their web site is their lifeblood. Unless you’re fortunate to have one or more [...]

For years, whenever I’ve been involved in building a new web based architecture, I’ve always advocated that the engineers follow a simple guiding principle: Design as though your web site is but one possible interface to your overall system. This is because eventually most systems will need to be accessed in a variety of different [...]

When starting any software project, there’s an age old argument: should we build something simple that solves our current problem or should we use an existing product that’s more complex, but more feature rich, since we know that’s where we’re going to end up in the future? This is especially true when starting a company [...]