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Note to self -> delete .svn folders

April 11th, 2011 No comments

Note to self:
The easy way to delete the .svn folders

find . -name ".svn" -exec rm -rf {} \;

at least when I copy a project, it doesn’t take hours to remove the svn folders.

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Design of web applications explained

November 9th, 2010 No comments

They build great products at 37 signals. Ryan Singer explains in this video the way they go about when designing a web application. They have a great practical and agile approach with result in days !

Ryan Singer at Future of Web Apps, London 2010 from Ryan Singer on Vimeo.

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SOA = Service Oriented Approach

September 20th, 2009 No comments

I had a long chat last week with Alef on the IT (application) infrastructure of a small healthcare company.

He made some interesting remarks that changed my view towards service oriented architecture. It is not only a technological solution, it is an approach towards servicing the organization as a whole. With that view in mind, you’ll find that agility – be able to change along – becomes more and more important, not only from a process development perspective (like SCRUM) but for the organization as a whole.

In my situation, there is a debate about to happen on old versus new, monolitic application versus services, screen oriented versus process oriented. And the major question remains, why do you need the Service Oriented Approach ?

Benefits of the Service Oriented Approach

  • Grow slow, get experienced – create oversee-able risk. Grow gradually and minimize the risk.
  • Grow fast, services and work on them has the option to scale.
  • Adapt to change
  • Keep your culture (important in mergers (of technology or organization))
  • Don’t be a hostage of your big time vendor (at least you have the option with this approach)

Drawbacks of the Service Oriented Approach

  • The tailor made services require more time of both the development team and the customer.
  • There is continuous deployment, system management remains busy with this approach
  • Most IT is constructed in projects, The agile, service oriented approach is a never ending cycle of adoption.

During the time to organize an agile, service oriented platform from a ICT management perspective, I found the opposite interests hard to unite.

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User interaction – do we need less clicks ?

June 17th, 2009 No comments

In my current project, a information system for medical care (see www.joiningtracks.org) we designed with minimalization of mouse clicks as a goal. The result provides us with a very compact screen that contains all the ‘choices’ available to the end user in a single view.

paying-party-compact

Another approach to the same functionality may be the ‘touch screen’ approach. When you are able to navigate the whole ‘touch screen like’, the screen(s) are easy to use and understand.

With that in mind, you could redesign this page above to the following sequence of pages:

First: There is the option to quickly select a known party

paying-party-alternative

Second: When isn’t already known, it is possible to find another party

paying-party-alternative-search

After entering data, it shows the matches and an option to create a new party. This forces the users to first look for an existing party.

paying-party-alternative-search-foundlist

When the party is not found (and selected), you are able to create a new one.

paying-party-alternative-search-createnew

This approach takes 4 clicks to actually create a new party. The first, more compact, approach takes 2 clicks. Which one is better ?

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Er zijn betere manieren om veiligheid te garanderen

October 9th, 2008 No comments

Vandaag even een rapport doorgenomen rondom de beveiliging van een nieuwe dienst voor patienten.

Er zijn vele regels en wetten waaraan voldaan moet worden, zoals NEN7510, WBP en WGBO. 

Deze wetten en regels zijn veelal gebaseerd op controle – ook wel een audit genoemd. Dit om vast te stellen of alles loopt volgens de voorgeschreven regels. 

Maar maakt dat het geheel wel veiliger ?

De controle kijkt veelal naar het feit of de regels wel zijn uitgevoerd – een papieren controle. Het betekent veelal dat er een papieren organisatie ontstaat die zowel in het opstellen als in het vastleggen van de uitvoering consistent moeten zijn. Dat kost veel moeite en meestal worden beide naar elkaar toe geschreven, wat direct tot gevolg heeft dit de papieren werkelijkheid niet meer overeenkomt met de realiteit. 

Dit kan eenvoudig uitgroeien tot een focus op een papieren veiligheid welke weinig meer te maken heeft met de werkelijkheid. 

Een inhoudelijke controle van de werkelijkheid geeft een beter inzicht en zorgt voor een focus op inhoudelijke maatregelen. Hierbij kunnen normen en regels als ondersteunend gezien worden maar niet als leidend, veiligheid bouw je niet in vanwege de regels maar omdat je de personen in het systeem wilt beschermen.

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