Jeffrey Hammond

Fall means that software conference season is in full swing and that I’m on the road more than I’m off it. This week was an interesting one, as I found myself pinballing from one end of my coverage to the other. On Monday I spent some time at IBM’s Agile Engineering Summit in D.C. Attendees […]

It’s a busy week with the Digital Transformation Forum kicking off in Chicago tomorrow, but I managed to slip in a quick trip to Seattle to this year’s Microsoft Build developer conference. It’s hard to believe that it’s been four years since Satya Nadella took over as CEO, but time flies. We detected early on in […]

These days every company is in the software business. Fast, iterative delivery of high-quality software means better customer engagement and higher satisfaction, so an effective development organization is more important than ever. But in 2018 software development leaders will face new opportunities and challenges as software technologies and platforms pivot into new areas where traditional […]

As our clients know, I’ve been writing a lot about strategies for recruiting and retaining developers, and building shop cultures where they can thrive. In the U.S. we’re currently in a sellers market when it comes to development talent. According to the BLS, firms will need to find almost half a million developers between 2014 […]

This morning, Adobe announced that it will end support for the Flash Player at the end of 2020. Over the past 20 years, digital firms have used Flash content for everything from clickable ads to games to interactive learning and rich internet applications. When I started at Forrester in 2006, Flash ran neck and neck […]

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." – Lao Tzu   Today’s Build keynote felt a bit like the final steps of a thousand mile journey for Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise group Scott Guthrie, if not the larger Microsoft. It’s been a multi-year journey, forging a cross-platform, cross-language and […]

The big number at this year’s Build: 270 Million. That’s the number of copies of Windows 10 that consumers and enterprises have purchased or upgraded to since Microsoft’s latest flagship launched last year. And the message that Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Windows and Devices group Terry Meyerson sent to developers at the Build conference […]

Today Microsoft announced that it is acquiring Xamarin. Terms were not disclosed. Our lead mobile app dev analyst Mike Facemire was on a plane somewhere near Buffalo at the time of the announcement, so I’ve posted the team’s combined thoughts here. Our take: This move makes Microsoft a must-consider option throughout the stack when it comes […]

"I will utterly reject harm and mischief." These words, taken from the Hippocratic oath, are ones that I think application development and delivery professionals should consider carefully as we watch the latest example of "Software eating the world" gone wrong. In this case the software algorithms in the "defeat device" that Bosch created for VW […]

Happy iPhone 6 day. If you're reading this you're proabably not standing in line hoping to get your hands on Apple's latest devices. My colleague Mike Facemire drove past the local Apple store in Back Bay last night at 1 A.M. on the way home from Logan airport and described the scene as "nuts". The line was completely around […]

Occasionally I like to yield my "bully pulpit" to folks on our team that I collaborate with on joint research projects – and today is just such an occasion. Over the past few months I've been working on research with Vivian Brown on the in's and out's of public and private hackathons. It was interesting […]

Ok, confession time: Those who know me well know my upbringing holds a deep dark secret. Yes, I was born in West Virginia, and grew up in Kentucky. Yes, my dad worked in the coal mines (OK, he was an electrical engineer, and only went down below once every couple of weeks . . .). […]

I get a lot of questions about the best way for developers to move to the cloud. That’s a good thing, because trying to forklift your existing applications as is isn’t a recipe for success. Building elastic applications requires a focus on statelessness, atomicity, idempotence, and parallelism — qualities that are not often built into […]

During the summer, it seems that I spend almost every Saturday mowing the yard. I’m using a self-propelled walk-behind these days, so it takes a good 2 hours to get the whole thing done. The best part is always that feeling when you cut the last swatch of long grass and know it’s time for […]

Co-authored with Eve Maler Yesterday Intel set off of a flurry of tweets and news stories when it announced it had acquired Mashery. For those who aren’t familiar with Mashery, it is one of the earliest (and largest) vendors in the emerging API management space. Companies use API management platforms to secure and expose their […]

Ever hear about the myth of the “seventh wave”?  Surfers use it to describe the big one — the wave that you can ride all the way into the beach. While it’s been a while since I’ve tested its premise at the shore, I often think about the seventh wave when dealing with the constant […]

We’ve all heard the aphorism “a picture is worth a thousand words.” These days, that’s certainly true of the balance between content and behavior that modern application developers face. There’s long been a certain amount of creative tension between designers and developers, but good developers generally appreciate the value of effective visualization. This week I’m […]

I’ve previously written about how modern application architectures are shifting toward compositional, service-oriented architectures — “for real” this time. RESTful services using XML or JSON payloads proliferate because they’re easy for developers of omnichannel clients to use on virtually any device they need to support. It doesn’t matter if they’re building native apps in Objective […]

Nothing like starting off the day with a koan, right? How would one develop a mobile app without developing a mobile app? In my latest piece of research on the future of mobile application development, I make the point that if developers overrotate their focus to building mobile clients, we risk creating the same sorts of […]