PUBLIC MARKS from greut with tag software

I’ve written previously about my allergic reaction to process maturity models for Agile development. Based on 5 years of empirical feedback being a part of or watching what  succeeds versus falls back, I do not believe their is a “cookbook” for Agile adoption

no cookbook

Our software is as brittle as 15-20 years ago. Reusable objects and framework superstructures have failed. UML has failed. Even design pattern have failed as they turned out to be more idiomatic than universal. What’s left are lightweight programming languages which let us glue things together. Some are user friendly and don’t suck badly. That’s still the best we have.

Lua, are you there?

RDF is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better format and data API designer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use RDF itself a lot. (You can get some beginning experience with RDF fairly easily by writing and modifying simple files like FOAF and DOAP for social networks and software projects, or RDFa extensions for XHTML.)

The Chicken Test

If it walks like chicken and clucks like a chicken, it probably is a chicken. And if the team is treating you like a chicken, then you are probably acting like a chicken.

Shindig is [...] an open source implementation of the OpenSocial specification and gadgets specification.

free the widgets^Wgadgets up!

WAgile, as all know, stands for "Waterfall-Agile", and is the pinnacle of dysfunctional development methodologies.

They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

because old advices are even more precious when they are old.

Bitten is a Python-based framework for collecting various software metrics via continuous integration. It builds on Trac to provide an integrated web-based user interface.

it sounds juicy

I'm not sure how people can stand three-pane readers. Graphical or console, I don't want to tab around multiple windows to read my news. The way I read, I want all of the headlines out where I can see them with minimal cruft. It should be one key stroke to do most common actions.

a python console based RSS reader.

Great software requires collaboration and communication. Fit is a tool for enhancing collaboration in software development. It's an invaluable way to collaborate on complicated problems--and get them right--early in development.

Fit allows customers, testers, and programmers to learn what their software should do and what it does do. It automatically compares customers' expectations to actual results.

How this can work with some web app requirements?

This testing [ongoing] has been motivated by the desire to clarify how and if screen reading software renders text content contained within the TITLE attribute.

following a debate about alt="" vs title=""

Using Evidence-Based Scheduling is pretty easy: it will take you a day or two at the beginning of every iteration to produce detailed estimates, and it’ll take a few seconds every day to record when you start working on a new task on a timesheet. The benefits, though, are huge: realistic schedules.

Realistic schedules are the key to creating good software. It forces you to do the best features first and allows you to make the right decisions about what to build. Which makes your product better, your boss happier, delights your customers, and—best of all—lets you go home at five o’clock.

A more general approach that the SCRUM one I got so far.

“One of the mantras that a large software development company uses is ‘Fail Often, Fail Fast,’ ” Wartenberg said.

I believe in failure too.

Vellum is a simple build tool like make but written in Python using a simple yet flexible YAML based format. Rather than attempt a full AI engine just to get some software built, I went with the simpler algorithm of a “graph”.

A GUI for Content Aware Image Resizing (Retargeting, Seam Carving)

in Qt4, lovely

Sim Daltonism is a color blindness simulator for Mac OS X.

Cargo-cult code. Nobody is perfect. Stop for a second and make sure you're not aping something that's even worse than what you might come up with if you started from scratch.

Need to show that to some people I know.