Engineering & Tech

About the software development process (the coding part), Agile, new technologies, and my mid-career transition from Product Management to Engineering.

Brewer's CAP Theorem for Non-Techies

Brewer’s CAP theorem explains the tradeoffs to storing and retrieving large quantities of data. It basically says that you can just pick 2 of the 3 following characteristics for your distributed data architecture: consistency, availability, and partition tolerance.

Analogies that Demystify NoSQL

I love it when a gnarly technical concept can be elegantly explained via a good analogy. In fact, I have found myself searching for these perfect analogies throughout my career. I’ve been working on NoSQL projects of late, and

Quora: What level of coding experience should a good product manager have?

My answer, originally published on Quora [http://www.quora.com/What-level-of-coding-experience-should-a-good-product-manager-have/answer/Sue-Raisty] . Q: What level of coding experience should a good product manager have? My Answer Caveat: I'm assuming we are talking about software products. In THEORY,

The Five Stages of Debugging

A guest post, from the point of view of an engineer, about the difficult emotional journey involved in tracking down a nasty, horrible, elusive, hard-to-reproduce bug.

Q&A About Agile Product Management

Below is an online Q&A from a presentation I gave on Agile Product Management.  Just wanted to share…. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: How do you deal with a management team that is entrenched in the Waterfall method and a development

The Joy of Big Data

The enterprise software landscape has shifted away from the big BI and RDBMS monoliths and toward startups with awesome new “Big Data” technology. These technologies could solve customer problems that were previously assumed to be unsolvable. What is “Big Data”

The Veteran Software Engineer: Hard Proof At Last

I received an email from a reader regarding this blog's recent guest post, The 7 Types of Engineers [https://blog.sueraisty.com/humor-7-types-software-engineers/]. > To Whom I May Concern, > I have attached a picture of the real

How they fit: Hadoop, traditional data warehouses, and ETL

Hadoop is starting to come into mainstream consciousness.  As a result, a lot of people are grappling with understanding the relationship between Hadoop and traditional data warehouses, and how ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load technology)  fits into the picture.  On

How to Get the Respect of Development

Heresy Against the Church of Agile Software Development

I am a big fan of anything that will get quality, innovative, market-killing products out the door more quickly. Sincerely. I would even trade in my extensive work wardrobe of jeans for a pile of business suits if it would

So You Think "Agile" Methodologies Exempt You From Product Management

GUEST POST: The 7 Types of Software Engineers: Identification, Care and Feeding

9 Agile Mistakes

1. Trading off company strategic fit versus product-level features 2. Assuming a few customers represent the broader market 3. Adding new features without considering the business value 4. Starving the architecture in favor of features 5. Wandering from the roadmap