Steve Freeman

After several people at the Software Craftsmanship event told me how much they liked Spotify, I thought I’d give it a go. Then I looked at the terms and conditions and noticed this in “10. Advertising and use of computational resources”:

Spotify has a right to allow the Spotify Software Application and the Spotify Service to [...]

Yesterday morning on the the Today programme, James Lovelock said that he was feeling quite optimistic because he now thinks that the Earth will still be able to support 1 billion people by the end of the century—as against nearly 7 billion now.

Sometimes the current financial crunch feels like a dry run for the bigger [...]

…which is why maintaining quality is so important.

From Hillary Johnson at Agile Open Northwest

In very bad taste, but very funny: “Hitler’s Nightly build fails”.

and we should remember that Stalin won…

So, Jurgen Appelo is unhappy that some of the more experienced Agile names have been telling him what to do. In particular, apparently they’ve been doing so without understanding complexity theory; he’s not reacting well.

In between the ranting, much of what Jurgen says is obviously true. For disorganised teams, adopting Scrum and nothing else will [...]

In the run up to Software Craftsmanship 2009 it’s worth reminding ourselves how far we have to go. Recently the (London) Times put the dire state of UK government IT projects on its front page.
One bright correspondent suggested:
Why not use university computer science departments for large public sector IT projects? They could form [...]

Dave West has written a cautionary posting (Lean and Agile: Marriage Made in Heaven or Oxymoron?) on the dangers of taking a simplistic view of Lean and Agile. He’s right that a naive reading of a Lean approach to software will just trap us in another metaphor, manufacturing, that’s as inappropriate (or appropriate) as we [...]

Excellent series of images from Derick Bailey. Here’s an example:

Single Responsibility Principle
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

RT @Jtf

Apple have declared the 12″ G4 PowerBook obsolete. If you can be bothered, you might notice that the document is dated December 2008, but the news has only recently attracted attention, in my case via The Register.

This is something of a blow. Our venerable PowerBooks are still very useful, although my wife’s has lost [...]

“Why have you got six screens? Because I haven’t got enough room for eight.”

BBC Documentary, “Living with Alzheimer’s”