Author: Johannes Ernst

  • Tom DeMarco: Software Engineering’s Time Has Come and Gone

    Imagine the pope declaring that perhaps god doesn’t exist. Tom DeMarco just published a short, but equally shocking article in IEEE Software. Recall he’s as much as the pope of software engineering as one can imagine, having authored influential works such as Peopleware and influenced virtually any methodologist and software architect since. His article culminates […]

  • We Will Miss You, Nick

    Nick Givotovsky was one of the smarter people I ever met. To this day, I only ever understood half of what he said. For years, I was debating with myself whether the other half was just nonsense or whether I simply didn’t manage to understand it. Well, when I finally realized that the first half, […]

  • Information Cards Have the NASCAR Problem, Too

    Paul Trevithick notes that most users don’t know what the purple information card logo might mean on a website and thus have no incentive to click on it to attempt to log in. That observation is of course correct, and identical to the observation about the OpenID logo: most users don’t know what that means […]

  • Off-Subject: Head, Neck and Back Pain

    If you suffer from any of the above, or any pain at all, and haven’t come across the writings of Dr. Jolie Bookspan, I recommend highly you take a look. She just put something I wanted to get off my chest on her blog at Healthline. For somebody with an engineering background like me, I […]

  • Phriend Phishing in the Wild

    [Additions in red in response to Bavo’s comments.] Should have guessed that Phriend Phishing was first going to happen to somebody famous. Now, how could that have been prevented? What if: Twitter adopted OpenID as the only way of authenticating. Twitter showed the authenticated OpenID identifier instead of a (possibly made up) user handle on […]