Aug 29, 2016
One of the core benefit of cloud computing should be ease of deployment. At Lokad, we have been using Azure in production since 2010. We love the platform, and we depend on it absolutely. Yet, it remains very frustrating that .NET deployments have not nearly made enough progress as it could have been expected 6 years ago.
The situation of .NET deployements is reminiscent of the data access re-inventions which were driving Joel Spolsky nuts 14 years ago.
Mar 8, 2016
The art of crafting of programming languages is probably one of the most mature fields of software, and yet it’s surprising to realize how much potential there is in rethinking programming from a cloud-first [0] perspective. At my company Lokad, we ended-up writing our own programming language - a narrow domain specific language geared toward commerce analytics – and, we keep stumbling on elements that would have been hard to achieve from a more traditional perspective.
May 8, 2015
Data paging, that is, the retrieval of a large amount of data through a series of smaller data retrievals, is a non-trivial problem. Through Lokad, we have implemented about a dozen of extensive API integrations, and reviewed a few dozens of other APIs as well.
The conclusion is that as soon as paging is involved, nearly all web APIs get it wrong. Obviously, rock-solid APIs like the ones offered by Azure or AWS are getting it right, but those outstanding APIs are exceptions rather than the norm.
Mar 4, 2015
As a (small) software entrepreneur, it is amazing to witness how hell is breaking loose when certain large software vendors start deploying their “solutions”. Even more fascinating, is that, after causing massive damage, the vendor just signs another massive deal with another large company and hell breaks loose again. Repeat this one hundred times, and you witness a world-wide verticalized software leader crippling an entire industry with half-backed technology.
Any resemblance between the characters in this post and any real retail company is purely coincidental.
Feb 16, 2015
At Lokad, (almost) all we do is to crunch flat text files. It’s not that we haven’t tried anything else - we did - many times - and it went poorly. Flat files are ubiquitous, well understood, and they yield very good performance both of the write side and the read side when working under tight budgets.
Keep in mind that the files we crunch are frequently generated by our clients, so while ProtoBuf or Cap’n Proto are very cool, asking our clients to deliver such formats would be roughly equivalent asking them to reimplement their in-house Java ERP in Haskell.
Dec 15, 2014
My own SaaS company has always been struggling with its own pricing. For a company now selling its own pricing optimization technology for commerce, this was a bit ironic. Well, pricing of software is unfortunately very unlike pricing goods in store, and the experience we acquired working with our retail clients improving their own prices provided little insights about the pricing of Lokad.
Since the creation of the company, Lokad has been offering a metered pricing, charging according to the amount of forecasts consumed.
Oct 21, 2014
About one year ago, my company had the opportunity to expand into an area which was very new for us at the time : pricing optimization for commerce. Pricing optimization is quite different to demand forecasting; the latter being the original focus of Lokad at the beginning of the company’s existence. While demand forecasting fits rather nicely into quantitative frameworks that allow you to decide which forecasting methods are the most suitable for any given task pricing is a much more evasive problem.
Mar 6, 2014
In most companies, especially non-tech companies, the IT landscape is dismal: the old ERP (vastly unmaintainable) coexists the new ERP (mostly unmaintainable). Sales figures from the ERP diverges from the ones of the Business Intelligence which also diverge from the ones of the CRM. Systems are slow and unreliable. Major evolutions take years, etc. Technical debt has not been paid for years, and interests are usurious.
Root causes of dismal IT are many.
Nov 24, 2013
Two years ago, I was publishing some first thoughts on Bitcoin. Meantime, Bitcoin has grown tremendously, and I remain an enthusiast observer of those developments. I had originally proposed a vision in 5 stages for the development of Bitcoin with
Mining stage Trading stage End-user stage Merchant stage Enterprise stage Back in 2011, I had written that mining was taken care of. Well, since that time, Bitcoin has witnessed an explosion of the hashing power through the development of ASICs, that is, hardware dedicated to the sole purpose of mining Bitcoins.
Oct 15, 2013
As of October 2013, Google Trends indicates that the buzz around Big Data is still growing. Based on my observations of many services company (mostly retailers though), I believe that it’s not all hype, and that indeed Big Data is going to deeply transform those businesses. However, I also believe that Big Data is wildly misunderstood by most, and that most Big Data vendors should not be trusted.
Search volume on the term “Big Data” as reported by Google Trends
