Software Development

Articles, guides and tutorials on software development, covering methodologies, tools, languages and best practices for building production-grade software.

Salesforce Integration: Limits, Rails and Real Cost

A salesforce integration almost never fails on protocol. Authenticating is a solved problem and posting a record is a solved problem. What ends projects is the daily request allocation and the shape of the data model, both usually discovered about three weeks after go-live, when the nightly job starts returning errors...

WordPress Plugin Development That Survives Core Updates

Most WordPress plugin development follows the same arc. Somebody needs a booking form, a feed importer or an extra field at checkout, a developer writes it, it works, everyone moves on. Two years later the site is stuck on an old version of WordPress because nobody is confident that plugin will survive an update, and...

Postmortems That Actually Change Something

A postmortem is easy to hold and hard to make useful. The meeting happens, a document is written, four action items are recorded, and six months later the same failure occurs and somebody finds the old document while searching for something else. The word “blameless” gets most of the attention in discussions of this,...

Software Escrow: Who Actually Needs It

Software escrow exists to answer a reasonable fear: the supplier who built and runs your critical system goes out of business, and you are left with something you depend on and cannot maintain. An escrow agreement puts the source code with a third party who releases it to you if that happens. The fear is legitimate....