There’s an old adage “Fast, Cheap, Good; Pick Two”. This situation is called a magic triangle. You can have two and only two, if you try for all three you will compromise all three. Fools often try, losing everything. In the world of software development, another magic triangle exists. You can pick any two of …

Buying gifts for geeks is easy, you can’t go wrong with Star Wars (episodes 4-6), Star Trek, Battlestar Gallactica or Serenity. Buying a hacker a gift is a bit harder as they are usually quite a bit more discerning. I’ve compiled a list of the best gifts to get for the hacker in your life.

GitHub Code Viewer 2 is a plugin for wordpress that will automatically pull a file from github and place into any post using a shortcode You need cURL installed to use GitHub_Code_Viewer. It caches the code locally (in db), so it’s quite fast and can be even faster when combined with wp_super_cache or w3c_total_cache. It …

Last night I gave a presentation on MongoDB & Ecommerce. OpenSky is the first company to use MongoDB in production for ecommerce. I shared why we went this route, and why it’s an obvious and powerful combination. At OpenSky we use MongoDB to develop the next ecommerce platform. OpenSky also uses Symfony 2, Doctrine 2, …

I’ve been working in the technology industry for the last 16 years. I’ve learned a lot. I wanted to share the lessons I’ve learned over the past 16 years, I figured one for each year seemed nice. It’s harder to make a short list than a long one and I had to cut out some …

As anyone who reads my blog or follows my tweets knows, I’ve been working for a new startup called OpenSky since February 2010. We’ve launched a new ecommerce platform and aim to reinvent ecommerce as people know it online. One of the big things we are doing is making it so anyone can sell OpenSky …

Open Source licensing can be a confusing and daunting task. Most developers simply adopt licenses of other popular projects. I wanted to shed some light on the most popular licenses and provide some guidance on which one should be used and when. Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, I am not qualified to nor am I …

Earlier today RackSpace announced that they are releasing their Cloud technologies as Open Source under the newly formed project OpenStack. RackSpace is the second largest cloud provider, behind cloud computing pioneer, Amazon. They have partnered with some of the largest names in the industry to create Open Stack including NASA, Dell, Citrix, AMD, Intel, Right …

Image by Gustty via Flickr I came across an article today titled “Help! My boss is on twitter“. Allow me to share a secret with you, if you current boss isn’t on twitter yet, I can guarantee that your next one will be. Social media has caught on like wildfire. In all the excitement too often people …

Image via Wikipedia Regardless of your title or degree of experience, any misstep could result in a failed project. It’s a good habit to review the following two slide shows, if nothing else to provide a good confirmation that you are on the right track.