Makai's Blog

The NoSQL one is especially great.

The WSJ on the growing business behind big data.

TechCrunch hyping up the DC technology scene. It’s good to see a little East Coast love on the site.

Let’s tease the truths from the hyperbole in this article:

True

1. Bad programmers can cause extra work for other developers on the team.
2. Programming is hard work that requires concerted mental activity and minimal interruptions.
3. Software that is constantly changed without regards to an overall design will become inconsistent and result in greater risk of project failure due to increased time necessary to make subsequent modifications.

False

Entropic failure of conceptual integrity is probably the most common reason for software project failure. (The second most common reason is delivering something other than what the customer wanted.)

What does the research on actual industry projects say about this topic (courtesy of one of my UVA professors, Ryan Nelson):

http://gates.comm.virginia.edu/rrn2n/MISQE%206-07.pdf

Scrolling down to page 74 shows a list of reasons why projects fail. Technical causes are not found until #23 on the list. Mismatch between the expected product and requirements is #8 on the list.

Source: Nelson, R. R., “IT Project Management: Infamous Failures, Classic Mistakes, and Best Practices, MIS Quarterly Executive, Vol. 6, No. 2, (June 2007), pp. 67-78.

An interesting article on the explosion of machine generated data and what uses it may have both today and in the future.

Jason’s on to something big here: 

Social Context

Having Facebook Connect or seeing which Twitter users you follow on an app used to be something to tout as an innovation. Now this is becoming the standard.

There are two broad methods for getting your startup’s new product or web application in front of other people: push and pull. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and advertising are mostly pull models because users have to be searching for something similar to your product or service to see the advertisement. But with the social context, you can add the pull model: seed your great service to your large network and keep plugging it. Get people to love it and use incentives to get them to broadcast it to their friends, expanding the influence to other potential users.

Pull won’t replace push because it’s still very important to capture users who actually are looking for your service. But with the growing importance of the social context, it would be foolish for consumer-based startups to ignore gaining new users through the pull model.

Did a presentation on GWT on Friday. Prezi is great.