Consulting Services
1Does your organisation need to improve its business processes? Do you require an application or productivity tool? Do you need your development team to be more effective? Enquire about my consulting services.
Mentoring & Leading
2Do you want a confident team leader who can come in and give assurance to your IT projects? Do you want someone who can bridge the gap between management and technicians, who can speak clearly and convincingly?
Training
3Would you like to improve the technical skills of your development team? Do you want them to communicate better, or learn to liaise with your clients? Learn from an expert with years of commercial experience.
Custom Applications
4Do you need a website, or a web-based application, or a mobile application? Do you want it built rapidly, but with better quality? I can build applications using tools and techniques from the US that are years ahead of Australia.
Rapid iPhone & Android Development
Mobile devices are the new “IBM PC” and will steadily replace the desktop as the primary tool for productivity. This will mean that productivity applications will need to be rewritten for the mobile platform, just as they were rewritten for the web with Software as a Service (SaaS). Currently there are large obstacles preventing the rapid reproduction of applications for …
A database in 5 minutes
For lean projects and rapid demos or prototypes, you need to look at some of the technology being used in the US. NoSQL databases have replaced heavy relational databases as the force du jour. Let’s have a look at one and how easy it is to get it up and running. Iris Couch uses a Couch DB implementation and currently …
How to motivate your development team
Development teams have varying dynamics. Each member is enthusiastic about their work at a high level, but can become drained and unmotivated as the same work drags on for months and months. How do you motivate them in such a situation? There are several methods to address this issue. A change is as good as a holiday For most developers, …
Case Study: Critical Business Application
The Good Guys retail chain required a software solution for managing the prices and promotions of their entire product range for their 90 stores Australia wide. JadeLynx were employed to build the application. Initially the software requirements were vaguely understood and poorly documented, at which point I came into the project and spent several round table sessions with the staff …
Case Study: Social Youth Portal
The Department of Victorian Communities engaged Eclipse Group to build a web solution that would be young, energetic and allow for community contribution. Eclipse Group chose InfoGlue Content Management System. I assessed the Open Source CMS and identified the gap in desired functionality. I immediately went about customising the software to bridge the gap, and gave it the additional functionality …
Case Study: Rapidly Develop a web-based User Interface
I consulted with a small software vendor who had built a comprehensive back office software solution for desktop PCs. They wanted to see how they could reuse their existing business rules and database system by applying a web front end. I looked at the range of options available for rapidly building Rich Internet Applications, and settled on SmartClient. SmartClient allows …
Understanding Code
According to Microsoft research, 95% of programmers consider understanding existing code to be an important part of their job function. One Microsoft employee claims that 70% of a developer’s time is spent understanding code. It’s not hard to see why understanding code represents such a time-consuming activity, and the situation is not improving with modern methodologies that claim “to make …
The Goals of Rubicon
The Goals of Rubicon are To not rewrite or refactor code until absolutely necessary. To have, at each stage, code which has a solid foundation that can be reliably built upon and easily extended. To deliver a product or solution that closely matches the needs of its users. To apply Occam’s Razor – “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”. …
What is Rubicon
Rubicon is a software development methodology that aims to improve upon the previous methodologies Waterfall and Agile by recommending and enforcing particular behaviours that promote good software development. Rubicon recommends splitting up code into components which will knowingly undergo change, and components that will most likely not change. By isolating our code like this, we enable development teams to build …
Why “Rubicon” or “Streams” ?
Some time ago the “Waterfall” methodology was scorned. It was seen as outdated and the cause of the failure of many an IT project. The claim was that Waterfall is slow, cumbersome, and unyielding to change. In contrast, IT projects by necessity are hurried, nimble, lean and capable of undergoing rapid change if they are to succeed. Along came “Agile” …