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...

It may sound old-fashioned and laughable these days when techniques like UML are so unsexy, but I can still remember the days back at IBM T.J. Watson in the early 2000's when we were working on a prototype of a new VoiceXML browser to inform IBM's standardization efforts in the space. (The language was supposed to be VoiceXML 3.0, and we abbreviated the research project to "V-3" - pronounced "fau drai" in reference to the German V-2 rocket .) We took VoiceXML 2.0 as a foundation but added full DOM and DOM Events support together with XForms as the data model representation. It was shortly after IBM's acquisition of Rational Software , so we took advantage of that deal and got our hands dirty with  Rational Rose . While one of our colleagues kept pushing us to start coding and iterate towards the result in the agile fashion, given the incomplete specs and many open questions stemming from the combination of so many complex technologies in one piece...

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

On Tuesday April 12, coincidentally on the 50th anniversary of the first human space flight, GoodData have launched Release 50 featuring GoodData Sales Analytics for Salesforce . I took this special opportunity to look back and recap the journey from the " R1 " as we call it internally to the latest " R50 ". Continue reading GoodData turned 50 in just 32 months! on our developer blog .

If you had asked me five or even three years ago what I thought of IT, I would probably replied that I had enough of IT for the rest of my life. Computers were fun in 90's when I was a student , but after the year 2000, with the increasing industrialization and maturity of the IT industry, things were starting to become boring for me. IT was no longer that exciting mix of science and art. This was especially the case of the enterprise IT as low cost country outsourcing turned the software development and enterprise integration into a full blown industrial process with lack of creativity: Armies of anonymous software engineers implementing endless customizations of a questionable business value, all this driven by multi-month waterfall projects and roll outs. Well, I exaggerate here a bit, I agree. ;-) It was the rise of Software as a Service (SaaS) which changed the rules of the game. By running a single multi-tenant instance of a service on top of a hardware and software stack of ...