Software Engineering

“Changes to one team’s service may be implemented by another team who needs the enhanced capability by what is called an Away Team. This team works on the Home Team’s code to add what it needs according to established engineering standards and then leaves that code in good order to be maintained by the Home Team who owns the service, with help when needed.”

Many years ago I suggested building in async facilities into Django. I got ridiculed for that both for technical feasibility (rightly) and necessity (short-sightedly). Now finally we have a proposal to build those features into the framework that demonstrates the same need and that can be implemented.

A Mac app that turns any website into a handy application, another wild app exploration by Morten Just.

The newsworthy thing about the Accenture/Hertz story is not that they failed to deliver but how badly they failed and that they are getting sued for it. Getting something that’s not very good for far too much money is an accepted part of doing business with consultancies of that size.

A clear write-up of how GOV.UK kept things running smoothly while their petitions website suffered an immense rush of signatures.

Zoom is an excellent video-conferencing app which turns out to be built on some technical excellence of its own (running WASM encoders and decoders in the browser).

Some amazing work by Morten Just turning a phone into a 3D mouse using all the sensors that it has embedded in it. This is mindblowing and hints at all the things that are already possible using the technology we have.

Most of my programming career has been focused on keeping things simple and eschewing premature abstractions summarized aptly by: “duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction”

A thorough and hugely insightful breakdown of six software rewrites with the conclusion that you can always create something new without throwing away the value you already have.

In this comprehensive list of matureness in engineers, John Allspaw elaborates on many of the non-technical skills that constitute seniority.

The things that will actually allow you to hire great engineers are things that are very hard to quantify, as listed in this article:

An excellent talk by Tanya Reilly about the career impacts of technical and glue (non-technical) work especially for underrepresented groups: “Being promoted is diversity work.”

I’m not a data scientist but I’ve been trained for it (as part of my computer science degree) and I’ve worked in a bunch of related fields. I wholly endorse this take by Vicki Boykis on the state of data science and what you need to be successful at it.

This piece about Stephen Wolfram’s productivity system is too much but also too fascinating to stop reading.

I dropped by the UIKonf unconference yesterday and gave a quick code/architecture talk. Normally I do mostly design/strategy type talks which are a lot more handwavy, so this felt a bit out of my water.

I saw a starter task fly by in the Swift Weekly Brief and jumped on it. Now it turns out that the Swift project has a util directory full of various Python scripts that perform various tasks including cloning and building the project.

As was mentioned earlier and has been due for something close to a year this blog is closing in its current form and moving on.

I’ve been taking a peek at the CSS layouts at Dynamic Drive and especially at CSS Fixed Layout #2.1 and I’m slightly stumped.

SoundManager 2 for JavaScript is a neat little library to fill in one of the blank areas of JavaScript/DOM development: decent sound output. It is very cool that it’s there, but it’s a shame that it has to use Flash to do the playback because browser sound playback is so dismal.

For another maddening detail in the horrid world of PHP.

I am trying to import a database to the MAMP install on my Macbook using phpMyAdmin’s import tool. Trying to do this yields:

Ik heb het ‘Waarom?’ verhaal van mijn pagina tegen softwarepatenten uitgeschreven en Google-baar gemaakt.

I’m playing around with Flash a bit to try and make a dedicated player for last.tv.

We’re over the first rush but still… Eelke and me won the “Ben jij beter dan Microsoft?” mashup contest with our Last.TV concept.

Eelke en ik hebben net de programmeerwedstrijd “Ben jij beter dan Microsoft?” gewonnen!

Sole redeeming quote in an otherwise vacuous article with vague predictions:

Eelke en ik waren aan het medeoen met de mashup wedstrijd “Ben jij beter dan Microsoft?”

Eelke and myself were competing in the mashup contest “Ben jij beter dan Microsoft?” (trans. Are you better than Microsoft?).

I was expecting one package but I got two. So I thought the Threadless guys had messed up somehow.

Tim Bray:

Eclipse’s fifth birthday party yesterday was a big hit. Eclipse’s contribution to software development was celebrated by a merry group of beer drinking programmers.

Eclipse is turning five and next Tuesday November 7th there’s a slew of parties worldwide to celebrate the occasion.

The company I’m working for currently —TOPdesk— is organizing a Coding Battle Novemer 27th.

I forwarded this sheet from Stephen Walli’s presentation on the Gartner OSS Summit to a friend. We were having the discussion that selling people software based on cost reduction is bogus because in most cases that amount of cost reduction is never going to be realized and is not really that relevant.

This latest Screening Room on IronPython shows some great stuff about how IronPython can be used to leverage all of Microsoft’s technologies on Windows.

Who is the bitch now? Who is?

I’m spending a lot of time hacking Drupal and the PHP it is built out of. My impression of PHP is worsening by the day. Drupal itself is a mixed bag. It does a lot of stuff for you, which is good but the documentation is lacking if you want to do anything non-standard or slightly complex.

I had been toying around with various PHP based systems for a while now but now I have finally settled on Drupal and I am liking it a lot. I have widely varying needs of scale, management and complexity and Drupal certainly fits the bill for two sites I am currently building.

I have finally buckled under the pressure and I am doing an attempt at learning PHP. I’m perusing the manual at PHP.net and what I am reading is highly appalling.

The guys from Dojo are going at it relentlessly. The current release is so very much improved from when I last seriously looked at it half a year ago, it’s impressive.

I am quite turned off of the whole CSS Zen table-less design ethic. It is most unpractical. The most basic layout primitives have a less than straight forward translation to CSS.

From the R Language Definition:

Emil gives Joel’s list of stuff you couldn’t do so far in web applications and this list is rapidly decreasing. We will probably get very decently usable web applications by the end of this year. Expect to see the arena explode.

Revision 0.4 of Firebug was just released and this revision also sports an impressive number of added features mostly focused on JavaScript debugging right within the Firebug console.

Yesterday I saw the talk Treating Digital Broadcast as just another API and other such ruminations (Suw Charman transcript) by Tom Loosemore from the BBC here on XTECH. He showed us some interesting trends and advances in digital broadcasting but he also shattered my perception that the BBC is very ahead in these matters.

I was thinking along the line of calendars and events and such, among others after the talk of Frank Mantek about the Google Data API on XTECH and I had the idea:

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