Build vs. Buy
A common question in IT departments is whether to provide a capability by building custom software or by buying a package. If the business process you are supporting is part of your competitive advantage you should build custom software, if not you should buy a package and adjust your business process to fit the way the package works.
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How to translate “business value” of things that are technically important
User Stories should describe what a user wants the system to do. Purely technical tasks should usually be implemented as part of a User Story. But, sometimes there are technical tasks which cannot be directly linked to customer value. Things like ...
Jason Calacanis vs. David Heinemeier Hansson on This Week in Startups - (37signals)
An intense debate about business models, bubbles, capitalism, quality of life, market share vs. profit share, running a business vs. selling a business, and a variety of other related topics from episode 46 of This Week in Startups.
makandra cards: A knowledge base on web development, RoR, and DevOps
What is makandra cards?
We are makandra, a team of 60 web developers, DevOps and UI/UX experts from Augsburg, Germany. We have firmly anchored the sharing of knowledge and continuous learning in our company culture. O...
Selling your software in China « Successful Software
The first thing I need to say, right off the bat: Chinese users will not buy your software. Period. That does not mean that there is no money to be made, it simply means that they will not pay for your software license.
The Case Against Queues
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use a queue." Now they have an unbounded number of problems.
Networked message queues like ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ, and a host of other Java inspired software tumors ar...
Web Operations 101 For Developers
This post is not about devops, it's not about lean startups, it's not about web scale, it's not about the cloud, and it's not about continuous deployment. This post is about you, the developer who's main purpose in life has always been to build gr...
Kanban vs. Iterative Development — Agile Web Operations
If you need big synchronization points, e.g. for big marketing campaigns, you might be better off using an iterative development approach. If you want to ensure a continuous flow of features, which are optimized for time to market (cycle time), Ka...
Who broke the build?
Retaliation is a Jenkins CI build monitor that automatically coordinates a foam missile counter-attack against the developer who breaks the build. It does this by playing a pre-programmed control sequence to a USB Foam Missile Launcher to target t...
Alex Payne — Node and Scaling in the Small vs Scaling in the Large
...you can apply every available anti-pattern and still come out the other end with a workable system, simply because the hardware can move faster than your bad decision-making.
Lessons learned from 13 failed software products « Successful Software
I asked other software entrepreneurs to share their stories of failure in the hope that we might save others from making the same mistakes. To my surprise I got excellent 12 responses, which I include below along with one of my own. It is a small ...