We recently hired a contractor to fix our aging deck. What a disaster! The contractor had a pretty bad contract and is a perfect example of why a contract sets expectations for both parties. Read More...

I've been tell you about my agile project over the past couple of months. This sprint was about laying the foundations for future additions to our prototype. It was also the sprint where we documented as much as we could. In addition to that we tried out a couple of bug tracking systems.

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Let's play CEO for a minute and pretend that we're Steve Jobs who takes (and probably deserves) the credit for a successful Apple turnaround. In a minute we'll also pretend that we're Steve Ballmer who is at the helm of the most dominate software company in the history of computing. Do you really think either one of them cares about REALbasic and REAL Software? Read More...

Tired? Grouchy? Working too many hours? I was too and then I decided to do something about. Read more about some of the things I did to fix that... Read More...

I ran across this blog today titled Wide vs Deep and it got me thinking (which is always a scary thought). The blog is about how programmers are promoted to managers even though the thought processes are different. Managers are wide and shallow and programmers are deep and narrow. Read More...

Is the Internet Age killing civility? I wonder about this a lot. The REALbasic Forums and NUG posts are often filled with vitriol (always wanted to use that word) and personal attacks. It’s as if the poster didn’t even realize that another human being is on the other end reading their post. Read More...

People hate you if you’re a developer and you sell software. Yes, it’s true. Get over it. No matter how hard you work at creating the perfect application someone will nit-pick something. It doesn’t matter if you spent a year in development and six months in beta testing, someone will log a bug within the first 30 minutes of release. Okay, the time frames are exaggerated but the end result is the same.

This means that you, as a developer, have to have thick skin. Someone will always complain about something. It happens all the time. If you add feature X, users will complain that they “need” feature Y. If you fix a bug and cause another one users will complain that your software is buggy and unstable. Read More...

Greetings and salutations! My name is Bob Keeney and I'm the Vice-President of BKeeney Software Inc. This blog was started after RBDeveloper magazine agreed to publish a BKeeney Brief's column on a regular basis. This is a very cool thing and I'm happy to do it. I've always enjoyed writing and did a lot of writing for various Mac user groups back in the day. On a regular basis we'll talk about being a developer and what it's like to make a living as a developer. Read More...