Axcient

(With apologies to Abraham Maslow) One of the most interesting elements of working as a senior executive in a startup company is that such careers are typically punctuated with long periods of time off.  This is particularly true of successful exits, which provide the luxury of time off to think about the next great invention. [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again…I firmly believe that engineering data protection solutions for the SMB market is more challenging than doing the same thing for the enterprise market. I know what you’re thinking…enterprise systems are so much more complex, and they have extraordinarily high expectations for reliability and availability. Maybe so, [...]

I’m proud to be part of a company that has created a product design philosophy, methodology and process from the ground up. Everything we do is geared specifically to deliver high quality, high performance data protections services for the SMB market. Most days I wake up thinking I’m the luckiest software development manager on earth. [...]