O’Reilly and Eric Ries are doing an interesting webcast - Webcast: How to Build a Lean Startup, step-by-step. Having recently waded into this end of the pool - I’m getting a lot out of the whole lean startup idea. No great surprise, since it extends what I’m familiar with, from within product development, to all the [...]
Ok, so why are my friends and co-workers noticing my minor obsession about CouchDB? There’s a few reasons. First, I have a long-term unlove-affair with RDBMS. Why?
I started off working in the UNIX kernel (V6 anyone?) and there’s no stinking databases in there… just some filesystem stuff
After learning and using C, I jumped to Smalltalk [...]
With the economic downturn, financial pressures increases on technologuy budgets (whether commercial, large / small enterprise, startup or non-profit).Increased productivity + open source + prevalence in the ‘cloud’ (regardless of your definition of ‘cloud’) bodes well for the Rails + Ruby eco-system.I’m biased, as are the rest of us at FiveRuns - but we’re not the only ones saying this.Â
So I’ve made the plunge and bought an iPhone. Half the joy is in using such a beautifully designed product - every aspect of the experience shows so much thought. I can only add my kudos, and continue to be frustrated at how low the standards are for so many products.
So in the physical world, there’s tremendous constraints placed on a system by existing infrastructure. It defines and limits what can be done without significant extra resources expended - which means cost, complexity, risk, etc.
In a recent issue of Wired, there’s an article about how a new city in China is being designed with [...]
Ok - so maybe it’s a sign of just how much a shiny-gadget-geek I am, but I love what’s possible with MacFuse (and MacFusion). For example, I have an existing website (at omnis.com) that doesn’t have a ssh account, so the only way to deploy / work on what’s there is via FTP. So [...]
A great audio program on experiential computing (IT Conversations: Ramesh Jain - Experimental Computing) and Ramesh’s related blog (Ramesh Jain’s Blog » Blog Archive » Events and paradigms) gives me some inspiration to on two important points:
Patterns in Oggidigaw - using the notion of events with their attributes of who, what, where (spatial), when (temporal) [...]
Some ramblings on software development
A useful perspective on software devleopment is as an ‘integrated discipline’, i.e. a perspective that recognizes that software development is actually composed of three domains:
Business - this is the domain of the problem
Technology
People - all the people involved, e.g. development team, customers, users, support staff, marketing, product management, etc.
Nothing here is [...]
As I interpret it, the agile versus formal debate is generally treated as an either or question. For instance, in any given software development situation there may be an assessment that it would have worked better if only an agile approach was used or for a project like this, you must use a formal approach. [...]
How to reconcile formal, agile & no processes in a software development environment?
Previously in conflict, considered by some as irreconcilible
Integrated using a model that accounts for development stages/levels.
Fundamental pattern: learn the form to become formless