You’ve got your web site purring along serving customers and generating revenue. Things are swell. Then you decide that you want to expose some of your functionality via an API (hopefully RESTful) that a mobile application can consume.

Today, Zac Sunderland became the youngest person to successfully circumnavigate the globe alone.

Names matter. They focus the mind, provide clarity and denote intent. Yes, Juliet, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but “Gumbus Weed” would not be nearly as popular on Valentine’s Day. Just ask any advertising executive.

Last March (2008) I was interviewed by Lab49’s Dan Chait at MIX08 in Las Vegas. MIX is Microsoft’s internet experience conference where they were discussing Silverlight 2.0 and related offerings.

The recent Google outage had lots of people agitated: Can we trust Google Apps? Can we trust Gmail? Can we trust cloud computing in general if Google can’t keep the lights on?

I decided to start a blog to share my thoughts and experience building information systems and software for the last 17-odd years. I’ve got a passion for building efficient systems (and building them efficiently) and leading teams to high levels of performance. I’ve learned a lot from my successes (and even more from my failures) and I want to share what I’ve learned with the larger community. Information Technology in general, and software development in particular, are exciting areas in which to make one’s career. It can be challenging, but ultimately very rewarding.