programming

First Look – Gurobi Optimization

March 2, 2011

Gurobi is the latest entrant to the mainstream optimization engine market (IBM/ILOG CPLEX and FICO Dash being the two main players with CPLEX having by far the largest market share). Gurobi was founded by Zonghau Gu, Ed Rothberg and Bob Bixby in 2008. The three of them were instrumental in the development of  CPLEX, the [...]

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First Look – Microsoft Analytics

September 8, 2010

I got an update from Microsoft recently. We covered lots of different products in and around data/analytics – some public, some under NDA. Microsoft is making a serious investment in SQL Server as well as into SharePoint and Excel. BI tools, they say, are not getting to most people and Microsoft sees this as an [...]

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Business rules v programming (again)

July 22, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
I got another comment on an old article of mine that is linked to a popular programming site – Don’t soft-code, use business rules. This remains my most commented post and the new comment basically repeats some of the arguments made before – that making a change to code [...]

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First Look – Revolution Analytics

May 6, 2010

I got my first formal briefing from REvolution Computing recently. REvolution has been around for about 2 years. Originally they focused on bringing parallel computing power to R and providing some consulting around the language. They raised some new funding recently and now have a new management team, including CEO Norman Nie (co-founder of SPSS) [...]

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Is the Speed of Decision Making Accelerating? Yes

July 22, 2009

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Paul Brasch wrote a nice piece on Is the Speed of Decision Making Accelerating. He concludes, and I agree, that it is in fact doing so – the need to decide while customers are on the phone or on the website and the need for real-time systems to communicate and act instantaneously is [...]

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Business Rules are a failed abstraction – so what?

July 3, 2009

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Jeff Attwood had a great post over on Coding Horror – All Abstractions Are Failed Abstractions in which he discussed a Joel Spolsky article in which that states
All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

At some level, of course, this is true and Jeff goes on to say
But I’d also argue that virtually [...]

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Business rules for more effective development

June 17, 2009

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Noam Tamarkin had a post recently on Efficient or Effective in software development in which he asked an important question – would you rather be more efficient or more effective when it came to developing software. Most would, like Noam, answer that they preferred to be effective. Yet I see many programming teams [...]

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A Response to a cowardly programmer

April 22, 2009

I got a comment recently from “Joe” who was too much of a coward to actually post his name, his email or to link to his own blog/site/twitter feed. You can read it on my post Here’s a couple of skills developers will need in the years ahead. His comment was so indicative of the [...]

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Here’s a couple of skills developers will need in the years ahead

April 9, 2009

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I saw this list of 10 skills developers will need in the next five years – developers not programmers you notice – and I was struck by several things.
First and foremost it still assumed that application developers would be programming – not assembling applications from components, not specifying the behavior of a system [...]

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First Look – WorkXpress 2

April 2, 2009

I got a chance to see a pre-release demonstration of WorkXpress 2.0, announced today, some weeks back. WorkXpress are focused on customized business application software for large and small businesses. About 7 years ago they started building out what we would now call a Platform-as-a-Service or PaaS offering and have had customers for about 5 [...]

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First Look – RuleXpress

March 2, 2009

RuleXpress is a tool from RuleArts designed to allow business analysts to capture their vocabulary or terms and source business rules relevant to their business and their business problems. RuleXpress is not a business rules management system nor is it a modeling tool in the sense of a UML modeling tool. It is a tool [...]

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Business Rules to Programmers – Methink thou doest protest too much III

February 27, 2009

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Concluding my response to – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To it’s time to answer the specific comments I got. First, the reasonable ones:
Ken said:
It depends on the business requirement. If business rules need to be changed on the fly then a rules engine framework makes the most sense. If, as [...]

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Business Rules to Programmers – Methink thou doest protest too much II

February 27, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Continuing my response to – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To it’s time to take some of the arguments Alex makes and show why I think his arguments should lead one to adopt a business rules approach. Despite the vociferousness of some of the comments and the tone of Alex’s post, [...]

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Business Rules to Programmers – Methink thou doest protest too much I

February 27, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Well last week was exciting on the ebizQ blog – thousands of new visitors after a link from a popular programming blog. This article – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – referred to an old article of mine – Don’t soft-code, use business rules that had been prompted by his [...]

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