Domain: blackbaud.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to blackbaud.com.
Comments · 6
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Budget makes a big difference...
I am not sure how big your budget is, but I've heard nothing but good things about Tessitura:
http://www.tessituranetwork.com/Products.aspxThere is also Raiser's Edge - but their product (in my opinion) feels like it was put together by a programmer (i.e. - written to bad specs by someone whose job isn't fundraising), not by a user - and thus has lots of quirks that make it not as useful as it should be...
http://www.blackbaud.com/products/fundraising/raisersedge.aspx -
Re:Al Sharpton
Nice coincidence that at the same time they speak out against Imus, the Duke lacrosse team is found innocent. Sharpton defended her, and Jackson gave her a scholarship. There was no evidence to point to their guilt, and they obviously made their claims of guilt based on skin color.
P.S. Nice touch firing him on the day of his annual fund raiser for sick children. If you want to donate despite the cancellation of the radiothon, you can call 877-877-6464, or donate online here. This information was provided by the Opie and Anthony radio show, which I happened to catch that morning. -
Don't evolve; stay a *standard*
I'm sorry, but this comment simply doesn't hold:
JS is not going away, so it ought to evolve. As with sharks (and relationships, see Annie Hall), a programming language is either moving forward, or it's dead.
No, when a programming language doesn't chance, it's called a standard. Look at what we've been able to do keeping html, css, and javascript a stable target for so many years! It's like Space Invaders on the Atari 2600 -- nobody who created that console, its hardware designed specifically for playing Combat and Video Olympics, expected someone to be able to slap six sprites in a row, much less have the player shoot then down one at a time. The 'standard' that was the 2600, however, gave a stable platform for programmers to learn tricks that would give the console life well beyond its creators' expectations.
We've got something like that with javascript, and we can see what happens when we compare to something like Visual Basic 6. Developers are still upset about Microsoft's decision to drop official support for VB6 in an attempt to force people to upgrade to VB.NET. Know what? Those upset programmers have found that VB6 hasn't rusted and simply continue using it to create their apps. There are more companies than you'd know (here's one) whose major apps are/were written in VB6, the 'prototyping language'. They're not quite ready to cast the baby out with the bath.
Fix bigs in javascript? Absolutely. The issue is that we've reached a point where nearly every browser anyone uses supports a 'single' flavor of javascript and we're all familiar with how to make our code work with the few quirks that remain crossplatform. There is a standard on nearly every box on the net that coders can assume will be there for them. I wouldn't want to see anyone mess this stable delivery platform up, splitting the user base into something like what we had in the Netscape 4.x/Mozilla/IE 4 & 5 days. Now *that* was an ugly time to code.
The bottom line is that evolution is an overused metaphor. You've got two choices if you'd like to propagate your genes into the future: immortality or reproduction. Immortality was a little too difficult to accomplish for living, unique individuals. Perhaps there were little organisms that could live forever, but something squashed 'em. They're gone. That's not a problem in the digital world, folk. We can make as many exact copies of an individual as we'd like. Javascript modules are not unique. They don't need to evolve. (I mean, come on, he even mentions sharks, a design that hasn't changed in millions on millions of years!)
Javascript should shoot to become an immortal standard, not another field of play and debate. -
Re:Educational Software?
Software to run the finances.
Software to track the students.
Software to track the grades.
Software to track the busses.
Software to track the books in the library.
Software to track the sports games and practices.
We also have a lot of specialized software in the classroom too. -
Non-Profits and technology.
Having worked for Blackbaud, the largest supplier of fund-raising management software, I can attest to the fact that Non-Profits generally do not have more than a few networked computers and rarely have in-house IT staff. Often, they have no one on staff that is more than rudamentarily computer literate. One of my job functions was to restore databases for examination by the programming and QA staff and I can't count the number of times that I received a tape from a client that was marked "return ASAP" because it was their only backup tape. It was infuriating. Now I'm a private consultant and I don't LET my clients get into such a situation.
:) -
Working vs VolunteeringIf you want to volunteer your time, you'll find almost anyplace is willing to accept your generosity.
However, I got the impression that you're looking to make a (less than ostentatious) living at it.
First off, the magic word is "nonprofit", rather than "charity". As in nonprofitjobs.org and the like. If you drop by your local bookstore, you'll find a number of titles about working in the nonprofit industry.
Be aware that (in the USA) most of the nonprofit agencies which are big enough to make it worthwhile to have full-time, paid IT personnel are located in the greater Washington DC area, close to the source of the grant money which is their lifeblood. If you don't want to live in DC, nor in Manhattan, your options will be greatly limited.
Oh, another tip. In the nonprofit world, the word "development" means "fundraising". Be sure they're talking about software development.
If you're a VB hacker, check out BlackBaud, which is one of the big providers of software for nonprofits. There are others, but that should get you started.
And, of course, there may be a branch or two of the US government whose work you might admire. Again, you'll probably end up in the greater DC area if you want to stay in IT.