Technology Thoughts

"Guys you will never have a chance to build the version 2.0, you have to get it right from the get-go, or keep suffering from your mistakes for the lifetime of the product." - Jiri Karpeta, my boss at LCS International, used to say. It was back in 1995, and while LCS's bread and butter were Helios, an ERP for the SMB segment, we were busy building Noris - the future LCS's flagship ERP for larger enterprises. Of course, given the above philosophy, LCS was quite heavily invested in CASE tools to support our software design efforts. That's where I learned the first time that software modeling matters. But back to the original statement above that you "never get a chance to build the version 2.0" . It may sound too harsh, too fatalistic. Well, you may be right, there are always exceptions to the rule. While I don't have exact statistics at hand, my experience shows that the statement is more often correct than not. I have interviewed hundreds of softw...

Back in 2007 Marc Andreessen , founder of Netscape Communications and an investor in GoodData , wrote his legendary blog post entitled “ The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet ”. He defined the following three levels of a platform as follows: Level 1 - “Access API”: “platform’s apps run elsewhere, and call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services – this is how Flickr does it.” Level 2 - “Plug-In API”: “platform’s apps run elsewhere, but inject functionality into the platform via a plug-in API – this is how Facebook does it.” Level 3 - “Runtime Environment”: “platform’s apps run inside the platform itself – the platform provides the “runtime environment” within which the app’s code runs.” In the same year, GoodData was founded by serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek to take on the calcified world of Business Intelligence (BI). Unlike other BI vendors, we chose a radically different approach. We did not try to build yet an...

Presentation was a part of FIT CVUT / MI-AIT (Případové studie aplikace a řízení IT). We compare the traditional organization model of separate teams for engineering, QA and operations to the DevOps model using autonomous cross-functional teams. The presentation uses GoodData as a case study. GoodData: The DevOps Story @ FIT CVUT October 16 2013 from Jaroslav Gergic

A presentation about what it takes to deliver a SaaS product as opposed to the traditional software engineering. Delivered to the students of computer science at Charles University, Prague on March 6 2013 as part of the Commercial Workshop series. SaaS - Software as a Service - Charles University - Prague - March 2013 from Jaroslav Gergic