O’Reilly: Inside RIA

A few months ago, the team my husband works on was hiring a new developer, and I overheard my husband talking to a friend he was considering recommending for the position. I surprised myself by my gut reaction which was,...

One of the responsibilities of being a technical manager is to optimize work flows and create self sustaining systems for the teams that you manage. One of my teams operates on an extremely short development cycle. They begin coding in...

Maybe I'm just an aging curmudgeon, or a classic DiSC C-type personality but I'm not a fan of social networks. I've tried to get into them, I gave them a chance. Years ago I tried MySpace and Xanga and just...

I didn't get a chance to go to MAX this year, unfortunately. But since my husband did make it, and he is both a Community Expert and a User Group Manager, you can probably imagine that I got an earful...

So after writing in one of my early articles about how once you've found a company that you consider a home that you should invest your time wisely and take advantage of the company's tuition reimbursement benefits, I decided to...

In the past, I've talked about the advantages of telecommuting. Today, I'd like to talk about the mechanics of telecommuting. Specifically, how to communicate when none of the members of the project are colocated. In the past, I've participated in...

When you finally do find a company that is a home, it's important to recognize that and invest time with that company. As I detailed in the first part of this series, there are many benefits to jumping from company...

Beyond the obvious questions of: am I paid fairly, is the company stable, do I like what I do and the people I work with, there are a number of questions that you need to further ask to easily identify a home. One such question is, "Are there working managers?" In some companies the manager of application development is not actually a developer and never has been a developer. Most of the times when this is the case the company has no career path for developers beyond senior. Or there may be titles created beyond senior but no path that leads to VP or a C-level position. In those companies that path is reserved exclusively for "managers".

One of the things I love about what we do is that it's possible to do it as effectively from the comfort of your living room as from an office. Working from home makes it possible for me to have...

The current economic climate notwithstanding, developers tend to change employers quite a bit in comparison to other professions, at least according to my own anecdotal evidence. From my own experience I've been at six different companies over the last ten...

Given that I believe RIA technologies should only be used to improve usability and user experience in web software, I'm ecstatic that the role of the usability specialist is getting wide spread attention. It gained a spot in the U.S News list of Best Careers for 2008.