The Jolts are Back in Town

-




The Jolt Awards are back! Over the past year, the Jolt Awards underwent some restructuring. The group of judges spent a considerable amount of time and effort to redesign the process and format to adapt to changing times. Having been given the honor a few years ago to participate as a Jolt judge, I have been given a rare opportunity to be a part of the redesign, and I can honestly say that what we have now represents a great step forward.

A few months ago, though it seems like just yesterday, fellow Jolt judge, Mike Riley, contacted me about some ideas he had to revitalize the Jolt Awards process. The old format was a once a year event with awards being given to the top products, all at the same time. For the vendors and the software community in general, this event lasted a grand total of one day. For the judges, this process took about six months. The new format is based on a continuous cycle of reviews and awards, with one category under review per month. In a way, this represents a longer, continuous, effort on the part of the judges to evaluate products, but it also means that judges have more flexibility to participate and even dedicate more time to the process, based on our schedules. For the software community, people have a new awards event to look forward to every month.

It should be noted that none of this would have been possible, were it not for the dedication and support of Jon Erickson at Dr. Dobbs. His enthusiasm and evangelizing helped bring back the Jolts.

The Books category was first to be judged under the new format. We just concluded our reviews and announced the winners on the new home of the Jolt Awards - the Dr. Dobbs website. One thing that hasn't changed about the Jolt Awards is the difficult in choosing the finalists. With so many great titles to review, it was a real challenge to pick the winners. You can read the reviews of the Jolt Awards for the Books category here, here, and here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Let's end the archaic management of time

-
Image
Every once in a while, twice a year to be exact, I am forced to go through the house and change the time on all the clocks, and other appliances that have clocks. The atomic clock in the kitchen doesn't need to be changed, my cell phone is ok, and computers auto-adjust, but I still have to make the rounds for the other devices. When we are an hour early or late on our first trip after such time-changing events, I also realize I need to change the clock in the car. Growing up in Indiana, this wasn't as much of a problem, as we didn't change our clocks. The only impact was that TV shows started an hour early (or late) half the year. Fellow Jolt judge, David Dossot , reminded me of "beat time" from the late 90's. It never caught on, but what a concept? Could one time zone for the entire planet be possible? I have heard all sorts of explanations as to why we have to change our clocks, but that is just half of the problem. The other half is the concept of ti
Read more

Product support - not supported

-
Image
I was looking for information, or rather details, on Visual Studio 2010. Looking at the Microsoft website, information is everywhere, but details are hard to find. It's bad enough that Microsoft changes the names of the editions with each release, but trying to find out what is in each edition, and what the differences are from one edition to another is very difficult. I have recently been on something of a quest, to champion the use of UML . Without tools, UML is just a bunch of boxes and lines that simply makes working with Visio that much more painful. I know that in the past, Microsoft has kept UML at an arms length. They have told me personally that they use it all the time when whiteboarding, but when it comes to implementing a design notation in their tools, they want to use their own standard. I can appreciate that because it does give them the flexibility to build development tools the way they want, without tying them to a set of rules defined by some external org
Read more

Watching and waiting for the competition

-
It's no secret that I am a fan of Apple. I own a lot of Apple products. I also own a lot of non-Apple products. I have owned iPhones before, but for the past few years, I have used Android phones. There is a lot of variety when it comes to Android phones. There are many companies making phones of all sizes, capabilities, and prices. The main reason I switched to Android a while back was because I wanted a bigger screen, and I wanted to know what it was really like to live with an Android phone. When Apple announced the iPhone 6 back in 2014, I was very interested. Honestly, I was nearly drooling on my keyboard as I watched the keynote announcement. I was also very interested when Apple announced the Apple Watch at the same keynote. As interested as I was however, I did not buy either of these. My Android phone was working just fine, and I could not use an Apple Watch with my Android phone. Also, I was curious to see how the Android world responded to the Apple Watch. Where Apple
Read more