It’s mostly about understanding how people spend their money, that is : who buys, how they buy and what the choice criteria are. who buys? And more importantly, who is important in the buying decision? That’s not always the same thing, the person that conducts the transaction is often different from the person that’s going to use the product. Both can be different from the person with the power and the financial authority to make the ultimate choice regarding which product to buy (parents?). And of course, there may be some other persons influencing the outcome of the decision or even trying to impose their choice criteria on the decision. As you see, there may be many actors that you would need to convince that your product is the right one. how do they buy?...

Whether you are an independant developer or a company, you can't just do your own thing and make programs that you find cool. You have to consider the microenvironment and the macroenvironment in which you operate, to adapt and take advantages of emerging opportunities and to minimize potential threats. Your microenvironment consists of actors that affect your ability to produce effectively in your chosen markets. Those actors are...

I had to take a marketing class in my last year. At first, I didn't see the point for a software developer to learn those things, but then I realised that it's very important. I am sharing here, the key points I am keeping, regarding how marketing applies to the software business. I hope this note would be of some interest to both (aspiring) programmers and marketers. Now there is a lot that could be said on that topic, here I just try to stick to the key points, and as it’s still a lot of information, I would rather not send it all at once. Instead I would spread that as small blog articles. Let's first define "Marketing". It can be defined in many ways but it's basically the achievement of corporate goals through meeting and exceeding customer needs better than the competition. Indeed, the marketing concept is a philosophy of business that puts the customer and customer satisfaction at the center of things. Why should developers care about it?...

5 years ago, if I was told that I could run a blog, I would not have believed it. As a software engineer, I was spending more time designing and writing programs. However, a priori, nothing suggested that I could write good articles too....

If you are not into programming, I need to start by telling you that a programming language is basically an artificial language (system of communication) designed to communicate instructions to a machine, typically a computer. Now there are a lot of programming languages out there. Some are more popular than others, some are more recent, some are more powerful to some extent. In an ideal world, each programming language serves a specific purpose. So an engineer should be able to adapt to the on going project and choose the optimal technologies. But the truth is,...

One of the hidden differences between outstanding Success Stories and the average Joe stories, lies in a huge sacrifice. This is also referred to as "losing an arm". This is indeed about some irreversible loss and the pain endured at the time of execution would be unbearable for most of us. You will not find a single person who has accomplished a monumental work without giving up something generally considered very precious. In many cases, they decided to "lose an arm" in order to make their dreams come true. They ultimately accepted a physical or emotional pain that most of us would not have accepted. Sometimes they put up with it over several years....

If you are a programmer, there are probably a lot of reasons that motivate you to do what you do. I hope you find here some more motivations. If you want to be a programmer, you may find here some more reasons to go for that awesome path. However, I guess I am writing this mainly for those who don't know what to do with their life. Here are some clues about a job that is fun, useful and satisfaying to many extents. From the top of my mind, here are 8 reasons why you would enjoy being a programmer. I hope this inspire you. 1. Programming makes your dreams come true. When you understand programming, you can give life to your thoughts by applying them to real life. You can litterally create things....

This goes to those who haven't decided yet what they are going to do in life. It's important to start thinking about it now, no matter how old you are. You better start early because it takes time, effort and dedication to improve one's skills and to reach goals. The earlier you start, the more time you have to mess up (and you will probably mess up on the way). To decide about what to do, there are basically 3 things you need to consider:...

The dimensions of the controller are roughly 6 x 3.5 x 2 inches. The Dual Shock has on the left side, the same directional pad found on most controllers. However, on the right, the action buttons are labelled with original symbol; this is also an innovation by Gotoh while conventional controllers normally used numbers and letters to label the buttons, as he states himself: "Other game companies at the time assigned alphabet letters or colors to the buttons. We wanted something simple to remember, which is why we went with icons or symbols, and I came up with the triangle-circle-X-square combination immediately afterward." In an interview reported by Games Radar, Gotoh explained how it came up with the symbols "I gave each symbol a meaning and a color. The triangle refers to viewpoint; I had it represent one's head or direction and made it green. Square refers to a piece of paper; I had it represent menus or documents and made it pink. The circle and X represent 'yes' or 'no' decision-making and I made them red and blue respectively."...

We just reviewed the evolution of the game controller in general. Now let’s dip in the very interesting story of the creation of the PlayStation Controller. The facts reported here mainly come from Kevin Gifford who wrote the "PlayStation 1 Design" article and from Reiji Asakura who wrote the book "Revolutionaries at Sony – The Making of the Sony PlayStation and the Visionaries Who Conquered the World of Video Games."...