Jason M. Hanley :: Custom Software Developer

Tom Purves has created a nice graph illustrating what I’ve suspected for a long time — that Canada’s wireless oligopolies are pricing services way out of line with what a competitive market would. Not only are data rates bad, but voice and long distance are more expensive than they should be as well.

Wireless providers are second only to the banking cartel in Canada for collusion and price-fixing. ISPs aren’t far behind.

Unfortunately our Conservative government isn’t going to be doing anything about this any time soon.

read more | digg story

A common problem with software development project management is that most people don’t really understand how it works. Programmers are often likened to construction workers. Managers view them as skilled labour, like a carpenter or brick-layer. If you want something built faster, you hire more people, and things go quicker.

Software engineering is a different beast, though. Fred Brooks wrote The Mythical Man Month in 1974, and it is often considered the “bible” of software engineering. In the book, he explains how creating software is different.

Brook’s Law states that “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” It’s important to keep teams small and agile, especially in the early stages when the architecture is in flux.

Creating usable, high-quality software takes a lot of time, skill and experience. Trying to cut a deadline by adding more people will almost guarantee the opposite effect.

I just read an article that summed up some common mistakes when starting a business that rung true to me. They mentioned the following (which I’ve put in the order I think is most important):

1. Not focusing on the user
2. Not having enough infrastructure (money + time)
3. Forgetting about branding, marketing and sales
4. Trying to do everything (similar to #2)
5. Staying in “Stealth Mode” too long

Have a look at the original article here:
http://startupspark.com/the-5-most-common-mistakes-made-by-startups/

I’ve created a web development summary chart comparing the major web application development platforms out there today. I’ve tried to make the comparison as unbiased as possible, and stick to mostly to business and technical reasons for choosing each one.

As you can see, there is no one perfect platform. They are all very capable, and which one you go with depends a lot on your business priorities.

Last week I closed two accounts at Bank of Montreal. The one account was a corporate chequing account I’d had with them for 4 years. The other account was opened when I was 13 years old. It’s been active for more than 15 years.

Moving all of your financials from one bank to another is a pretty time consuming process, and not usually done unless there are significant reasons. I had several:

1. BMO wanted to charge me $500 just to apply for a corporate line of credit, whereas RBC approved me quickly with no upfront fee
2. RBC’s online banking system is better than BMO’s
3. I don’t like my closest BMO branch
4. The service fees at RBC are marginally cheaper for the number of transactions I do

The amazing thing? Nobody even asked me why I was closing two major accounts after being with them for over 15 years. The CSRs didn’t care – which means that upper management doesn’t care either.

In a normal competitive environment, a service company would be very concerned about losing a good, long-term customer. If you’ve ever tried to cancel long distance or Internet services in the States, you’ll know what I mean. Sometimes they’ll offer you several months of free service just to keep you.

The banking system in Canada is so messed up. There are 4 national banks, and they all have nearly the same account and fee structures.

You can shuffle between any of them, but they really don’t care if you come or go. They know you don’t really have much of a choice.