Yup – it’s true. Twitter has experienced one of the longest outages in years, while Facebook has been experiencing intermittent disruptions for a number of minutes (becoming hours) already today. The reason for Twitter’s down time is a “denial of service” (DoS) attack according to their status blog. The reason’s for Facebook being down/disrupted are [...]

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A recent study shows how a disturbing number of development projects still fail due to poor upfront analysis. I think that this oversimplifies – the devil is in the detail. From experience it is about far more than just “the wrong scope” (I’m referring to the project requirements as the “scope”) – it is also [...]

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Off we go! Another year of discovery, excitement, change and quite possibly some daunting challenges awaits our brave developer hearts once more. As we walk bleary-eyed to our desks again, fresh smells of coffee filling the office, it’s an excellent time to refocus – amongst other things – on our technical goals; how we’d like [...]

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South African online buyers can now receive quotes in Rands and make credit card purchases through PayPal. “Just the other day, I found out that South Africans can now get PayPal accounts and link them to a local credit card. When you buy something, the amount is deducted from your credit card and the system [...]

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* this article is loosely related to a real case but is primarily concerned with highlighting some principles about the value of great systems and well run projects. White Wall Web (WWW) is involved in development projects that have a far greater affect on companies, industries and the economies of the countries in which these [...]

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Introduction First up, I have to mention that my first experience in the programming world was with C# .NET. I thought that I would never move to another language never mind leaving the .NET framework.I started working at WhiteWallWeb and the oddity language PHP4. Coming from a completely object oriented approach to the scripting PHP4 [...]

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Over the past year we have endeavoured to discover and consolidate the tools that we use to manage project planning, tracking and reporting. We have a variety of contractual relationships with clients. This adds complexity to consolidating tools across the company especially since each of these relationships has its own project planning, tracking and reporting [...]

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As a company with several Afrikaans engineers, the English spelling on our solutions has been an issue from time to time and part of testing has involved checking spelling. Spelling errors on web sites, blogs, intranets etc. can be rather embarrassing as they undermine credibility of both the organization and the engineers. I find the [...]

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