bitwix

Tangential comments about Software Development

Friday, March 19, 2010

Gothenburg SDC 2010

Diana Larsen
Management by wishful thinking
Too often, managers either abdicate or clamp down
Five tracker skills, inspired by Gervase Bushe:
1) How would it look if you were a different person, with a different skill or perspective?
2) Look at the “dead zones”, the areas you usually ignore because they’re not the significant / important / dynamic parts. What’s there?
3) Balance your inputs. If you get most of your knowledge in certain ways, use some 40 methods that others use.
4) Learn the patterns you wish to see. Take the part you like most / are proudest of, and break that down into constituent parts.
5) Reduce one’s disturbance, increase one’s awareness. As bosses, we may be told what people think we want to hear. Try to get to unvarnished, unfiltered truths.
"Employees can't change if their leaders don't" McKinsey Quarterly November 2008

Rik Arends
Mentioned Etherpad, which Google have swallowed up, and Bespin

Nathaniel Schutta
Principle of Least Surprise - the JQuery ordering of function arguments sometimes fails here
Look at the Ext grid http://www.extjs.com/products/js/
Jeremy Keith on Behavioral Separation

Thomas Lundström
Behaviour Driven Design demo of Cucumber and Webrat.
"Lots of crooks and nannies"

Brian Marick
Likening an Agile Team to a Monastery - not the cut off aspect
Unremarked Agile Values : naivete, ease, technical skill, reactive, decency, being wrong, joy, working software
The Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship
If you ignore the future, you get good at change. So yes, don't build tomorrow's request even if you're certain that you'll be asked for it.
Work with ease - that's the first step

Kent Beck
The effect of accelerating releases from Annual to Quarterly to Monthly to Weekly to Daily to Hourly
Getting an organisation to stop doing something is even harder than getting it to start
Change "we can't do X because of Y" to "if we did X we'd have to do Z"

Other Observations
Blåbärspaj has the three versions of a, and tastes nice too
The triangular tower blocks of Kortedala should be more famous, especially in Kortedala

Monday, March 08, 2010

Flashy or Anonymous

"The students should be trained to work in teams - also with students of related techniques - in order to learn methods of collaboration with others. [...] The nature of teamwork will lead the students to good 'anonymous' architecture rather than to flashy 'stunt' design."

Walter Gropius, The Search for a Better Architectural Education, 7th CIAM Congress, 1949

I know what he means about flashy 'stunt' design in programming. Interesting that the alternative is 'anonymous'. If it's good, maybe that's what you see. Perfect code, without the maker's hand visible.