http://www.m3p.co.uk Working software daily Fri, 09 May 2008 22:49:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Wait for a minute in. This requires a lot of practice. via http://centripetalnotion.com/ http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/05/09/glass-virtuoso-remarkable/ “Keyboads dirtier than a toilet” (BBC) It justifies my view that eating lunch at the desk is uncivilised, and that pairing stations should have two keyboards. Now that everything is USB, maybe we should just carry our own input devices and just plug in when wherever we’re working. Hmmm. Sounds like my ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/05/03/maybe-pair-programming-isnt-such-a-good-idea/ I seem to be blog-stalking Keith again. In his post on Creation under Constraints he uses a post from Andrew Binstock to write about the benefits of discipline on creativity. After all, is there anything more constrained than the form of a Rock’n'Roll song? Bartok had a thing about using ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/05/01/two-kinds-of-yagni/ There’s been quite a buzz in the narrow world that I inhabit about this recent interview with Donald Knuth. For us “TDDers”, the relevant quote is: […] the idea of immediate compilation and “unit tests” appeals to me only rarely, when I’m feeling my way in a totally unknown environment and ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/05/01/were-famous-kinda/ We’ve just sorted out the venue (after a couple of bumps along the way) for this year’s event. No details yet, but watch this space. http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/04/15/xpday-london-1112-december-2008/ Joseph Pelrine and I are involved in (or is that “committed to”?) starting up a Narrative Inquiry project with the Agile Alliance under their Agile Narratives programme. This one will be done jointly with Cognitive Edge using the Cynefin approach, here’s their announcement. I’ve started a Yahoo Group for ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/04/14/what-is-going-on-out-there-a-narrative-inquiry-project/ I bumped into an old colleague recently who told me her tale of woe. She’d been consulting for a while with a small business that provides quite a successful online service. The company had been bought out and, for a while, she improved their naive development practices while coping with complexities ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/03/23/suddenly-ive-become-less-sympathetic-to-non-technical-managment/ My son has discovered Pokemon cards and now all I hear about is “Look, this one’s got a Damage of 7 and an Energy of 10.” “Really? You don’t say.” I have no idea what he’s talking about and it all seems overpriced. That said, there’s one important difference, which is that my ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/03/15/suddenly-ive-become-more-sympathetic-to-non-technical-management/ Yesterday, during the XpDay Sampler track at QCon, Keith Braithwaite presented the latest version of his talk on measuring the characteristics of Test-Driven code. Very briefly, many natural phenomena follow a power law distribution (read the slides for more explanation), in spoken language this is usually known as Zipf’s Law. ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/03/14/its-really-about-language/ Two conferences back-to-back. On Thursday 13th March, I’m chairing a track at QCon London called XpDay Sampler. The idea is to build on the long-running success of the XpDay and run some of our sessions for, we hope, a new audience. We think we have a pretty strong track, finishing with ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/02/12/a-busy-march/ Mike Hill and I will be taking our new Example Driven Development and Fit course out for its first spin on March 7th. It’s about using examples to communicate, to tease out what really needs to be built in a format that everyone can understand, using FIT tables to help ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/02/12/example-driven-development-course/ http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/01/20/verity_stob_short_curly/ http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/01/20/verity-stob-brilliant/ In another brilliant article for the New Yorker, Atul Gawande writes about how Peter Pronovost, a doctor at John Hopkins Hospital, has been proving the value of the humble checklist in situations which are “now too complex for clinicians to carry them out reliably from memory alone.” Eliminating bugs (both ... http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/01/13/checklist-driven-programming/ This stuff from Buglabs looks really cool. http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/01/10/the-lego-of-gadgets/ According to this survey, I belong in Generation X. That can’t be right. http://www.m3p.co.uk/blog/2008/01/08/generation-x-moi/