Steve Freeman

A Liberal is a Conservative Who Hasn’t Been Mugged

I discover that our book Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests is already up with the file sharers. This is before Nat and I have even seen a printed copy. I don’t know whether to be flattered that someone thinks our effort is worth pinching or annoyed [...]

I’ve been mostly off-line for a couple of months: no blogs (reading or writing), no twitter, no open source (sorry, users), very little chat. That’s because Nat and I have been finishing up the copy editing of our book. We’re very much looking forward to it being done.
With that out of the way, I [...]

Two “facts” heard on the radio today:

there are now more mobile phones than people in the UK
half of UK children have had no fresh fruit or vegetables in the previous week

Update: Nice follow-up from “TestObsessed”, you can get your free certification from her. As she suggests out, I’d rather be a sucker for an elaborate joke than have this be true.

There is now, apparently, a “World Agile Qualifications Board” offering Agile certification programs (I won’t link to it directly, but it’s at waqb (dot) [...]

From D-Squared

Cay Horstmann, Professor of CS at San Jose State University, Sun Java Champion, and consultant in Internet Programming, says
I perform an occasional unit test after I’ve encountered a failure that I don’t want to have recur, but I rarely write the tests first. If so many experienced developers don’t write unit tests, what does that [...]

I run my own company, perhaps I should make a business card like this: .

from Alexander Kjerulf via Diana of Portland

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 [...]

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 [...]