Steve Freeman

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) [...]

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 [...]

In a previous life I took a music degree in Bass Trombone, which is a discipline that’s even more geeky and with a worse gender balance than Software (see this meeting if you don’t believe that’s possible). Over the course of the degree, I raised my bar from Enthusiastic to Not-too-embarrasing-to-appear-in-public. In the spirit of [...]

Copied wholesale from D-Squared

In business circles, particularly among a certain kind of aggressive American businessman (or consultant, or banker, or politician, they’re fairly interchangeable), there is a favourite proverb about a pig:

“When you have bacon and eggs for breakfast, you’ve got your breakfast from a chicken and a pig. The difference between them is that [...]

Just in case we still have to make the point:

There’s certainly evidence that that “exploratory” approach to computing is an important job skill. Beth Simon and Andy Begel’s recent series of papers on their study of new hires at Microsoft show that the first year of work is mostly spent understanding existing code, not [...]

Robert X. Cringley has another entertaining rant about whatever turned up this week. Two quotations:

First, while ranting about the IT research consultancies.

There are themes at Gartner and its competitors — ideas that are presented on an almost seasonal basis like adding fins to change a 1956 Chrysler New Yorker into a 1957 Chrysler New Yorker. [...]