Axcient

By Dane Van Dyck, Axcient Engineer These comments are supposed to draw a comparison between today’s software as a service (SaaS) market and another, extinct software delivery model with some important similarities and differences. The purpose of that comparison is to provide insight into the modern SaaS market, while summarizing the history of an important [...]

“The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden [...] no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them.” – George Berkley, in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1734 I’ve often wondered, if Berkley was a software engineer instead of philosopher, how [...]

Within a technology company, Product Management entails turning the chaos of numerous competing demands into a coherent roadmap that yields meaningful product releases. It’s a challenging job, which varies considerably from one organization to the next. But throughout my career, it’s been a role to which I inevitably gravitate. With that said, I thought I’d [...]

In my last blog, I discussed the history of user interface (UI) design technology, going back to my early days as a developer at the time windowed operating systems were gaining popularity. The technology has come a long way. Now with the use of scripted languages like Python, Ruby on Rails, or PHP – plus [...]

I’ve often thought that my perspective on user interfaces has been shaped largely by the span of my career, having started out as developer right around the time windowed operating systems were gaining notoriety. The early windowed operating systems were of course crude cooperative multitasking systems, really little more than GUI shells. My objections at [...]

Datacenters are a source of fascination for me. The startups I worked on early in my career targeted enterprise-class customers, primarily telecommunications and financial services, which counted down time in ”millions of dollars per minute.” I particularly enjoyed the technical challenge of delivering products that would “measure up”. At one point the company I worked [...]

There was a time, very early in my career, where entire hardware platforms were designed from scratch. We designed processor boards and power supplies, bent sheet metal , did all the environmental testing, and secured agency approvals. These products worked very well and were extremely reliable but the development cycles were long and costly, and [...]

As the final installment in this series I will continue on the thread of testing methodologies in Agile environments. Testing is perhaps the most important component of software engineering, particularly when we’re releasing on six-week cycles. As discussed in my last blog, integration is continuous with Agile, so we’re spared the bloody integration points that [...]

My last blog on Agile software development discussed why the Agile release train methodology works well for Axcient. We develop and release on a fixed six-week schedule, with one week planning, four weeks development, and one week QA testing. Agile has various benefits for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) – for instance, it enables us [...]

Agile software development has been the subject of much discussion over the past two decades, although I expect the roots of Agile can be traced much further back. Thrust into prominence during the Internet boom of the mid-90s, Agile promised faster development cycles, improved developer morale, and created a means for fast response to changing [...]