We’re checking in again with Steve Naidamast and his exhaustive history of the tech industry. In part one, he went over the historical background of women in tech. Today, we’re exploring more recent history all the way up to today, including important lessons all of us should learn.

This article series resulted from a conversation Steve Naidamast had with a young woman who showed interest in learning how to program and possibly enter the IT profession. It is also an attempt to bring the realities of Information Technology profession as it is today into perspective so that a young woman interested in this field can make informed choices as to how she may be able to enter the field either professionally or for self-interest.

In the 1990s when Java began to appear on the developer scene it met its competition from Microsoft head-on in that it struggled to gain an acceptable place within the international development community. However, over the years Java appears to have arrived at more stable set of infrastructure and development standards than Microsoft appears to offer now. In this article, Steve Naidamast explains why the Java community is a well-oiled machine.

In his last piece A Simple Way to Make a WPF Chromeless Window, Steve Nadamast demonstrated how one could easily create a chromeless window using Microsoft’s “Windows Foundation Framework”, more commonly known as WPF. This time around he will show you how to make a customized WPF message box.

In this column, Steve Naidamast, senior software engineer at Black Falcon Software, notes that Windows Presentation Foundation, for the most part, offers desktop developers a quality foundation for delivering desktop and desktop-styled applications into production environments as well as multiple mobile platforms. The aim of this piece is to teach you how to make a WPF chromeless window.

One of the most difficult aspects of developing a game is one in which the genre you would like to develop for is such a niche area of development that standardized tools have yet to be created for it. With a lack of some level of standardized tools for such development, this realm of gaming has probably become one of the most difficult areas in creative activity within the game development field. There are several reasons for this.

In this column Steve Naidamast, senior software engineer at Black Falcon Software, comments on the state of game development and dissects the “dark art” in the software development industry. He also dips his toes into the semantics of this industry such as the language of choice among game developers and the struggle between choosing 3D and 2D modeling.

In this column Steve Naidamast, senior software engineer at Black Falcon Software, will comment on how technology looks like today, how it used to be and how the buzzwords in this industry are echoes of past events throughout history. In today’s article, he weighs in on the poor critical thinking skills and their effect on software development, among other things.

In this column Steve Naidamast, senior software engineer at Black Falcon Software, will comment on how technology looks like today, how it used to be and how the buzzwords in this industry are echoes of past events throughout history.

It is almost paradoxical to see the current spat between the FBI and Apple rage on about the latter’s use of strong encryption to protect their customers’ privacy. Though this conflict has become a political one with other overtones, and the FBI has recently claimed that they have successfully broken the encryption of a San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, thus no longer necessitating Apple provide them with a solution, this new conflict is far from over.

No technology is timeless in the eyes of a developer and all have their flaws and perks. However, as Steve Naidamast, a senior software engineer claims, the pendulum of history begins to swing back sooner or later, demonstrating that until the actual foundations of web development change, no new technology will actually be able to benefit anyone in the sense that it is some type of global panacea for such development.

Steve Naidamast, a senior software engineer, talks about the Apple-FBI encryption battle and reveals that the feud has deeper implications which may concern the population. Will we need encryption in the (near) future? That is one puzzle worth deciphering.

The same marketing hype that surrounded “Agile” has now switched to “DevOps”; the combination of the two is one way to solve all the issues that IT organizations have been known for. This has generated the chimera of the “full stack” developer, which simply means that now a developer is expected to do it all. What else could it mean?

In the sixth part of his common sense software engineering series, blogger Steve Naidamast gives us a valuable lesson: although many technical managers avoid using Function Point Analysis, this gem is one of the primary foundations in actual software engineering for developing accurate and sustainable project timelines.