a bit of code on a Saturday night ... I've written before about a simple way to measure and report IT value to the business - quantifying alignment with strategic initiatives project spend in context. It all culminated with a single, simple slide - numbers, with some Tufte-esque Sparklines thrown in. Well, technologies come and go, and without going into the boring details, I've had to come up with a new way to generate the mini-bar charts along the left…
The start of a new year gives me a rare chance to measure my knowledge capture output over time. I maintain electronic journals for the various projects I am driving, business units and functional areas I support, and people I work with. This results in a hundred or so separate MS Word documents, with generally the same format - still, it would be quite tedious to take a word count each week to check my output. However, at the beginning…
A significant difference between us old-line IT coders and the new graduates is the variety of our platforms and tools. I'm not talking about the large number of languages and tools learned over the course of a career - we all have a healthy collection of certifications and acronyms peppering the bottoms of our resumes. I'm talking about the amazing array of stuff required to get development done on a single project, "right now". Over the past few weeks, I've…