SolutionStreet

September 17th, 2019

How Do You Find Great Software Developers?

One of our clients whose team we supplement recently said to me, “Your team is the best team I’ve ever worked with in my 20 years of experience. I don’t understand how everyone on the team is so good. How do you find them?” I simply replied that we find thoughtful problem solvers who have […]

August 20th, 2019

You Are Probably Doing Some ChatOps Even If You Don’t Know What It Is Yet!

In my last newsletter article I talked about team communication and how having a team communication contract can increase productivity and happiness across the team. One of the communication options for teams that is experiencing significant growth is “chat.” You have probably heard software teams raving about HipChat (now part of Slack) or Slack and […]

July 24th, 2019

Writing Software Is Like Making Pizza!

Well…it’s a bit of a stretch comparing software development to pizza making, but let me take a crack at this. First, some background. I have been writing code for 38 years and I have been making pizza for 29. I consider myself a pizzaiolo (pizza maker) who is still learning to perfect my craft, even […]

June 24th, 2019

Team Communication Contract

Does your team have a communication contract? Recently I was having drinks with a former manager of mine and he was relaying a story I had completely forgotten. He used to send me at least a half dozen emails a day with various thoughts, ideas and actions for me to address. He said that one […]

May 29th, 2019

You Really Should Be Using GraphQL

Origin of GraphQL   Back in 2012, Facebook was dealing with an issue that many of us software developers who build products with multiple front-ends (web and mobile) must address. How can we build a server component Application Programming Interface (API) that works seamlessly with both mobile and web applications? How can we have the […]

March 27th, 2019

A Contrast in Corporate Culture: How Corporate Culture Shapes an Organization

I recently watched the popular Netflix documentary Fyre, about the failed 2017 luxury music festival.  (Warning: The documentary is rated TV-MA and contains profanity and one very graphic anecdote). The festival was essentially an elaborate scam perpetrated by the recently incarcerated scam artist Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule.  Like most who have seen it, […]

March 8th, 2019

The Women of Solution Street

In celebration of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, get to know the women of Solution Street.   “I have been very fortunate with my experience in the technical community. I made the switch to software development after six years studying Russian. I attended a coding bootcamp, where more than 50% of my cohort […]

February 14th, 2019

Where’s Your Roadmap?

Introduction   About 15 years ago, I was working as a Software Engineering Director at a prominent Internet Infrastructure company and I inherited a new Vice President, Tom Bright. One of the first requests Tom made to me was to see the technical and product roadmap for the products I was supporting. I looked at […]

January 23rd, 2019

What Your Software Development Vendor Isn’t Telling You

When it comes to implementing a critical business application, many businesses seek to hire a software engineering firm to build their application. After building and implementing countless applications, we at Solution Street have found that there are key questions that businesses should ask potential vendors that are critical to the project’s success. Indeed, these questions […]

December 18th, 2018

Story of a Rails Upgrade

How to Upgrade Rails   Recently, my team upgraded our Rails gem from version 4.1.16 to 4.2.10 on a project that is five years old. For reference, the most up-to-date release of the Rails gem in the wild is 5.2.2.rc1. Although the project had been upgraded since its inception, the last update occurred before I […]