Agile is the hip new software development methodology. Everyone from Fortune 100 firms to doughnut shops are trying to implement it these days. When even a US Department of Defense contractor is trying to become agile, a serious paradigm shift away from the traditional waterfall approach to a better methodology must be happening because agile […]
I’m a firm believer that the things that destroy organizations are not the big problems, they’re the little ones. The “bikeshed problem” is the type of problem that everyone loves to squabble over: the completely trivial, stupid issue.
UMass offers a software engineering course (CS320) that teaches the software design process — on real projects, with real teams. It is managed by select students who have successfully passed the course. Below are some rules I (tried to) live by while managing my 12-member team.
Because everyone and their grandma is coming out with a book on “usability for people who aren’t user interface designers,” I’ve decided that I too am qualified to say something on the matter. I’ve been writing some docs in preparation for my hiatus from Etna, and below I’ve included some snippets from those docs. This […]
If there’s anything I’ve noticed that plagues many less-experienced programmers, it’s what I refer to as the fencepost problem (or fencepost error, if you will). The problem can be most succinctly summed up using this thought exercise: Imagine a fence that is 100 meters long. A fencepost is needed every 10 meters. How many fenceposts […]
I’ve used CakePHP for a lot of projects now. Verdict: there’s no comparison to Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is smartly integrated, well-designed, and sits on top of an elegant language. CakePHP is an admitted ripoff of Rails that sits on a popular but terrible language. It copies Rails – almost randomly – without […]
I’ve been using the Windows 7 RC since early May, so after 4 months I thought it’d be a good time to review it before the official launch. TL;DR: Windows 7 is a highly polished, production-ready environment that will redeem the Windows product line.