In Alessandro Di Fiore’s HBR article, “How to Get Past Your Customers’ lies“, he writes about the importance of doing your own market exploration instead of using market research analysts. Or in his own words: These people have to be smart about business, strategy, and people because they’ve got to be able to spot the really significant behaviors and issues. And the best people to do that are going to be the...

Michael Wolfe on Quora posted an amazing analogy explaining why software development estimates are routinely way off, which results in developers padding their estimates to factor in the fudge of such inaccuracies. Another thesis I’ve been pondering over lately are the terms “Software Engineering” and “Computer Science”, which imply that software development is purely scientific and engineering in nature. Most colleges run those...

I recently listened to the audiobook to Peter Drucker’s book entitled the Effective Executive. Here are my key take aways as to what makes an executive effective. They ask what needs to be done? Do not ask “what do I want to do?” Concentrate on just one task, two at most, and never more than two at a time. Set priorities and stick to them. After completing tasks 1 and 2, instead of moving on to number 3 ask again what...

If you’re trying to get ColdFusion (particularly CF8 and CF9) working on a 64bit Windows machine using IIS7 or IIS7.5 you may encounter an error like this: HTTP Error 500.0 – Internal Server Error The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred. Detailed Error Information   Module IsapiModule Notification ExecuteRequestHandler Handler AboMapperCustom-58087 Error...

This week I’m looking into integrating a CMS into a Grails application. Initially there won’t be much tight integration but it could involve single sign-on and lead into much tighter application embedding CMS content. As it happens, there is a CMS built on Grails called Weceem – it took some trial and error to get it working as the documentation could use a lot of work. Here are some tips if you’re trying to get it...

Was watching this short discussion panel regarding strategic advice from Angel investors (Ron Conway and Mike Maples) to start-ups. Here are some take aways: Keeping your burn rate extremely low buys the company the added probability of getting lucky. The luck from a low burn rate comes from having the cash to experiment with various ideas until you find the right model/combination/technique/strategy. Whereas with a high burn rate,...

So I’m still in learning mode w/Groovy & Grails, and I have basic CRUD for managing users. The user domain class has the properties that you’d expect, including a FirstName and LastName: class User { String firstName String lastName } So I wanted to create a simple right side wildcard search that would effectively be the same as this in SQL Server: where (firstName like '#searchTerm#%' or lastName like...

Tariq Ahmed is a technology manager located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Areas of interest include organizational change, leadership, agile/scrum, business intelligence, web development, rich internet applications (RIA's), ColdFusion, Flex, jQuery, Groovy/Grails, and Mobile applications. He's also the lead author of the Flex In Action series.