There is a poster boldly displayed on one wall of Dynamic Digital Advertising’s new digs that proclaims, “Don’t be afraid to be different.” I think that is the common thread that binds all who work here; we are each very different. Not weird different, but creatively, healthy, believe-in-ourselves different. 

A specific example would be our Programmers. David says our Lead Programmer,  Amy, can solve any problem to do with code.  She is also a whiz with an electric drill.  Tyler is our “Go To” guy for everything from small changes to clients’ websites to installing a complex phone system, while Reggie has become an expert at building gargantuan retail shopping carts, and Vinnie does a lot of action script work and helps with Coldfusion code issues and other language problems. If you put the four of them together, you would never mistake one for the other, and yet they are linked by this strange gene Programmers have for speaking little and spending hours solving problems. It is like there is a mind meld between them and their computers.  

Dynamic Digital, as an entity, is unusual too. There is no model we followed when David and I first started a decade+ ago. We grew organically, and David’s business instinct and vision helps shape what is our very complex organization today. But from those early days, we never lost the goal of providing marketing, promotional, and advertising services to businesses. Our old self-promotion brochures push digital photography, cd-rom development, graphic design, and print production among other things. We still do all that, but we just keep adding services. So many services that our Lead Designer, Carrie, wonders how she is going to showcase the new service. (P.S.-She always figures it out.)  Check out our website, the timeline graphically shows our growth, the changes, and the new services. And today, May 15th, 2008, I can promise you, there is real excitement planned for the coming year. Stay tuned. 

The principles of Software engineering consist of determining the feasible approach toward managing a software application. The normal processes of engineering software involve: the interviewing process, which is the research and studying of the problem domain; and the prototyping process, which refers to the understanding of the type of data needed for each level of the problem.

A good practice is to use Data Flow Diagrams to visually articulate how each process of the problem interacts with each other to solve the big problem. Using Data Dictionaries helps to define each data prototype and conceive the stability of managing each sub-unit of the problem domain. Each sub-routine that solves a specific problem should have its own specification.

If the software application utilized a database, the engineer is responsible for designing the Database, and designing the effective output and input. The final process is the software Documentation, which involves extensive testing to explain in detail the design and documentation technique, flowcharts, pseudo code, and procedures manual.

When I was a little girl, I was roundly scolded one winter morning because I took the blanket off my bed and gave it to a man knocking at our back door for help. He looked so cold, his lips were blue, and to a five-year old, it seemed getting him warm was more important than feeding him. Besides I was not allowed near the stove, and there were no grownups around when he knocked on the door. That was my dramatic introduction to random acts of kindness. I felt good about what I did, and the admonition “never talk to a stranger” soon vanished along with the angry words from my Dad. 

Today, as a business woman, I am often surprised at how indifferent and self-absorbed people can be. Surely, there is time to say “Good Morning” and “How are you?” and mean it. And surely, there should be more warm reactions to all the little gestures of kindness you encounter in your work day. Or is kindness missing where you work? Ah ha, the paradox. There are NOT too many work cultures that encourage kindness and cooperation among staff. Rather the norm is for everyone to out do the other with selfish agendas.

At Dynamic Digital Advertising, we have a very open door policy. We encourage teamwork among the graphic designers, advertising copywriters, and project coordinators assigned to a website design and seo content development job, we discourage  ”I” statements. Our more senior staff help guide and teach informally, and no one in that position be it our Lead Graphic Designer or our Director of Interactive Media ever behaves arrogantly with peers or clients. We have a very robust cc: system to keep all concerned in the loop.

A statement on our wall sums it up best “NO AVERAGE PEOPLE WORK HERE.” And by extension, no one unkind or petty.  Throughout our four-day work week, I hope each of us takes the time to practice kindness (even if we have to grit our teeth or pull our hair at some stupid occurrence). Let’s resist the temptation to be self-absorbed. Remember, it only takes seven muscles to smile.

Windows, Linux, Solaris, NetWare, HP-UX, and Mac OS are different operating systems developed on different machines because of machine dependency. Since each machine has its own unique sets of code, different sets of software had to be developed specifically for each machine. What does that mean for a web programmer? Many tools are developed to solve the cross browser compatibility. Each machine browser interprets code differently and each JavaScript interpreter in each different operating system are developed differently with their own specifications. So if a new feature of the JavaScript language is available in Firefox that doesn’t mean it will be available in Internet Explorer. The fact that some browsers cannot interpret certain code at all is a big issue; so, to alleviate the stress of bugs in a web application a specification of what all web browser share in common is formulated. There are tools to validate a web page html codes and JavaScript codes. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an organization working to make a standard specification for all web browsers.

In the development of Graphical User Interface (GUI) application or web application the Model-View Controller (MVC) architectural paradigm is often used to separate logic and the user interface. An event driven application such as web application or a Windows-based application would be implemented by first the model representation which is the data collection and logical set of regimented rules that govern the data. The view representation is the Graphical User Interface that users have to interact with and the controller is the events that are triggered behind the scenes as the user interacts with the application, which involves the communication between the model component and the view components. The Model-View Control Concept has been widely adapted in many languages such as the Java Enterprise Edition, mainly to solve the problem of interdependencies between all components of the application, which can have a cascading effect when adding more data and logic. The problem is often application maintainability, where the Model-View Control Concept comes in and separates business logic code, data access code, and representation code.

May Mondays should be clear and vibrant, and we should all be recharged from a long weekend celebrating Mother’s Day, and weddings, and birthdays. But in terms of weather, this Monday is raw and the forecast is for rain nonstop. Most of us have stashed our winter clothes, so we have all the portable heaters whirling under our desks, and as l watch the wind whipping the tree branches outside my window, I think, indeed, it’s not a clear day.

Yet, right now there is a  clarity at Dynamic Digital Advertising that bodes well for the week. Only one person has reported sick, and the rest of us are going about the business at hand. The main Conference Room has been busy hour after hour with conference calls from companies interested in our many advertising and marketing services.  The Business Development team has its hands extra full for the day. After the initial calls, they now have to develop quotes for the interested parties on top of follow-up work from all the projects from last week.  The Video and Photography Studio has projects lined up to complete, plus a video shoot in New York City later this week.

Our graphic designers are equally busy with trade show graphics and web design. The copywriters and programmers are deep in thought as they wrestle with content development writing, and ColdFusion and broken code on a client’s site or “something’s wrong with my email” questions. As I write, Monday is almost half over, and again,  I realize as I do every Monday, that the DDA  staff will see clearly, and rain or shine the quality work we produce at DDA will make us all proud!  Whoever said the following was a wise person, “Most people don’t recognize opportunity because it is usually disguised as hard work.” Unknown Author  

An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is an application tool with the capability of facilitating a computer programmer with the environment of writing high language programs in their syntactic form and their regimented semantics. An IDE usually composes of a source editor, a compiler or interpreter, and a debugger. Working as a web programmer at Dynamic Digital Advertising (DDA), the main tool I’ve used to write code is called Abode Dreamweaver CS3. Dreamweaver CS3 supports web technology frameworks such as CSS, JavaScript and also various server side script languages such as ColdFusion, PHP, and ASP. At Dynamic Digital Advertising, the facility of Dreamweaver CS3 I mostly use is the server side script language framework of ColdFusion, which makes writing ColdFusion templates very easy. The IDE catches syntactic errors very easily. One thing I found difficult with the IDE is the inability to debug script templates at the local computer. Which makes sense because only the server has the script compiler or debugger.

ROI (return on investment) is a phrase used very often in business circles, essentially referring to the bottom line:  was this direct mail piece effective, or this product launch a success, or this marketing campaign profitable? However, from the perspective of a good business owner, ROI should mean are the employees and the company in sync? Does the whole team have similar goals? Is each and everyone happy to work at the company in spite of the long hours, intense days, price of gas? Compensation after all should be more than about money.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, we all need to have enough in our bank accounts to pay rent or a mortgage and have full gas tanks, with a little left over for fun things like going out to eat and vacations, and we should be able to depend on the weekly check, so money is necessary. But, earning a salary should include the realization that “I matter,” my ideas and skills and work ethic contribute to the greater good.  I work here because I can stretch my creative muscles, I work here because management empowers me, and I in turn produce. 

At Dynamic Digital Advertising, it is a business philosophy David and I constantly strive to maintain. An example would be the wonderful team in the video department, but it took several years to fill those chairs, and I am sure Laurence who is our Director of Multimedia Arts probably had his doubts about ever seeing his department become real.  If you walk into the new video and photography studios and see all the camera and video equipment, the sophisticated dolly system, the new sound booth, the special lights, the green screen on tracks, the double or triple monitors on desks, it is hard not to be impressed. And Laurence is still shopping for stuff! 

From my CFO position, I know there will be GREAT ROI from DDA VIDEO.  And our business development team, led by David and Toni will fill that pipeline to overflowing. The main conference room is constantly booked with scheduled calls from new inquiries. Our production team is very busy doing build out for projects, Vinnie and Rob have their hands full with flash and animation projects, so clients are finding Dynamic Digital Advertising, listening to our proposals and signing on. As a financial officer, can I ask for more? Yes. Let’s celebrate our busy days, and not get complacent. Have a great weekend all.

Parallel Programming algorithm is often implemented to speed-up an applications runtime. Amdahl’s law and Gustafson’s law state that if doubling the number of processing instructions in a given application, it should reduce the runtime to halves; hence the two are inversely proportional to each other. Of course considerable measure in the software engineering must be met when implementing parallel algorithms for an application. Knowledge in the understanding of data dependency must be obtained, understanding how the application shares resources to prevent software instability. Engineering software using parallel programming concept such as thread, which are subtasks, is a challenge for the programmer because of the many risk involved in achieved an optimal application within a defined specification. A programmer must consider a thread safe algorithm in the implementation cycle by considering all possible obstacles such as race conditions, mutual exclusion, synchronization, slow down and data consistencies.

Extensive knowledge of the computer specific domain of expertise must be ascertained such as bit-level parallelism, instruction-level parallelism, data parallelism. Such knowledge will serve well in implementing a successful application.

I loved being a college student. In those days, there was no Internet, and by extension no Google. So as an English major, I spent hours in the library and checked out enough books that carrying them from dorm to class and back to the library, and repeating this semester after semester had the added benefit of providing arm exercises! But I digress. Today’s students depend heavily on information gleaned through the web.  Instead of books, most carry laptops. Information is instantaneous and as I am discovering so is the urge to pilfer, copy, and violate copyrights.

Professors now have software to help them weed out the offenders. And in the business world, this is becoming a serious problem for companies that are on the leading edge of innovation, and who like Dynamic Digital Advertising showcase a lot of their work. Anyone can put up a website and call himself or herself a web master, but to make the site viable when that person has few skills, tempts the wannabe to troll and see “what’s out there” and then copy/paste images and content and pretend like it is theirs. Appalling, and Paul, who monitors our site for such thievery, finds that trollers come from as far as the Middle East and as close as Maryland. 

At DDA, we work to give the clients who select us, the best design be it for a trifold brochure or a trade show graphic. If the new client comes to us for a website, that company has the complete assurance that we start with a blank slate and build from there. The proof is in the looking. Check out our portfolio, where numerous samples of websites, trade show graphics, medical illustrations, video presentations for anything from a medical device to jewelry bolster my claim. If you study our website carefully, you’ll see we fit the classic Aristotle observation, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”