Category: Articles (Page 143 of 258)

Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.

Acquisitions

October 30, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

For the past few weeks (years, even), it’s so easy to find articles that read something like this:

Today, I am incredibly proud and excited to share that VMware has announced plans to acquire Boxer. The Boxer team will be joining the industry leader in
enterprise mobility as a part of the AirWatch® team within the VMware End-User Computing business unit.

Case in point: This is an excerpt of an article that I read just recently. And when I read that, it stirs a mix of emotions.

Andy Adams and Pressware

October 29, 2015 / Tom

Periodically, I talked about Pressware – what’s going on with the business, how I run it, and plans that I have for it.

For those who have been reading for some time, you know that I’ve teetered on the line of offering both products and services.

When establish your own business and work to make it, ahem, work, there’s a period in which undergo what it is that you love doing.

And I don’t mean what you enjoy doing. Nor do I mean what you can do to earn money. I mean what you love doing.

Sure, businesses need to earn money to be sustainable. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do so while trying to maximize the work that you enjoy doing above all else.

If you stay on this route, and you’re able to be successful, it becomes challenging to handle all involved tasks.

Remember: Businesses are more than creating things and getting paid for it.

There’s insurance to take care of
There’s benefits to take care of
There are budget to follow
There’s forecasting to handle
There are relationships to form
…and many more and so on.

Sure, I could go on and on about this aspect of the business, but why would I do that? It can be enlightening for some. Today, though, I’m happy to share that Pressware has grown by one.

Working on a Software Development Team

October 28, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Software development is collaborative by nature. If you’re working for a company, regardless of size, you’re obviously working with others.

If you’re working in the world of open source, then you’re working on things that may consist of the largest team of people you’ve ever worked with (and may ever work with).

We’re a little less sweaty and a lot more caffeinated than this team, right?

In either situation, this doesn’t mean that the team dynamic is great, but that’s not the point of this point. For purposes of this post, I’m assuming that you are working with others and it is going well.

At least as well as one could expect, right? Continue reading

Your Annoying Blog Habits (Are Now Mine)

October 27, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Those of us who spend the majority of our workday (or even our entire day) on the web have strong opinions on how certain things should or shouldn’t be.

That is, we have ideas on how things should or shouldn’t work:

Modals are annoying and are of no use.
Mailing lists are generally meant for spam and product upsells.
Retweeting content you’ve already tweeted is redundant and annoying.
…and so on.

And maybe I’m off base in generalizing here. I mean, this is exactly how I viewed certain things for a long time.

But the more I interacted with others who live in a variety of timezones, and the more research I did on topics as it relates to blogging, the more began to second guess my initial opinions.

How Not To Upsell Your Product

October 26, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’m usually not into the whole “call out other applications when they do something I dislike.” That is, unless it’s something that I think is unethical or straight up dangerous or stupid.

We all have our boundaries.

To that end, I won’t be mentioning a specific application in this post. But I’m going to be using one as an example of how not to upsell your product.