Better software development estimates
Is it possible to estimate software tasks better? In certain circumstances, my experience tells me yes! It's not just a wish (/me waves to commenter on last post).First, to establish what kind of...
View ArticleCommentroversy, plus owls are the trendiest fowl.
Commentroversy is a five-year-old word according to Urban Dictionary, but it was new to me, when I saw it in the comment section of Yarn Harlot's latest blog post. And the storm in a teacup that has...
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Girls in games
The cultural gestalt these days seems to include more talk about women and video-games than ever before. Suddenly, women are 47% of video-gamers and game designers (and game advertisers) are still...
View ArticleModern Web architecture, cookie-cutter, view from the trenches
Web architecture has come together quite nicely of late. The components work together better than ever before, and it's easier to put together a great Web site or service -- putting more emphasis on...
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Two meetings was I invited to, And sorry I could not both attend, at two o'clock, what could I do,the time was firm for each, I knew,so I composed regrets to send.I chose the meeting Paul had called...
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Bleak House
Bleak House by Charles DickensMy rating: 5 of 5 starsI love Bleak House. Dickens uses incredibly lush and complex metaphorical descriptions for London, estate houses, and especially, the Chancery...
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UX for Lean Startups required reading
UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design by Laura KleinMy rating: 5 of 5 starsI loved Laura's book. As I read it I kept on putting it down thinking "I need to put this...
View ArticleOrder of Operations
I recently taught my son to ride his bike without training wheels. He was very resistant and afraid of falling down. I discovered that the order of learning skills was very important. Before he...
View ArticleAn information coordinator is useful
An information coordinator is a useful person, and after two years of working with a partner or alone, this weekend was a nice reminder of that.The classroom camping trip was Saturday night, and since...
View ArticleArticle 6
Kevin Liddle makes a case against cucumber in his blog post. Since he doesn't have comments, I'll basically comment here.I agree with Kevin that the idea that product managers will write cucumber...
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Article 5
I'm reading Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug, and just read the section on home page messages. That's why I laughed out loud (surprising my cat) when I saw this home page:Amazing, huh? It's got...
View ArticleSystems thinking vs algorithm thinking
I was chatting with another programmer about our different styles. He's an incredible algorithm solver. He's done compression and encryption algorithms in school, and codecs and video processing and...
View ArticleOpportunities arising in fall 2013
Working on a new project using cutting-edge AWS stuff and iOS 7, I note some opportunities.1. A really good Ruby library for working with AWS. Although Amazon really should hire more Rubyists, this...
View ArticleAWS Persistence for Core Data
I like DynamoDB, and I like architecture that reduces the amount of backend engineering one needs to do in a company whose product is an app. So I was quite interested to investigate AWS Persistence...
View ArticleCorrectness impedes expression
In kindergarten and grade one these days, teachers encourage kids to get their thoughts onto paper any old way. They don't explain how to spell every word and they certainly don't stop kids and...
View ArticleUsing DynamoDB, work in progress
At work we're using Amazon Web Services'DynamoDB for a backend. This is early days and a work in progress, but I thought I'd post about what we're doing so far because I've seen so little elsewhere...
View ArticleTesting Rails apps when using DynamoDB
Once we decided to use Dynamoid to replace ActiveRecord in our Rails project, we needed to figure out how to test it.First off, testing against Amazon's live DynamoDB is out of the question. I'm not...
View ArticleYou must be this tall to ride the Elastic Beanstalk
Elastic Beanstalk seems like it’s meant to allow a startup to easily deploy Web sites using the most common Web frameworks, and scale those sites gracefully with an integrated AWS scaling group. I’m...
View ArticleHow I hire engineers for startups
I went looking for articles on how to interview programmers/engineers for startups. I didn't like much of what I found (I did like Elad Blog's take), and none of them addressed engineering skills and...
View ArticleStreets are safer than ever
I recently looked up some data in response to a sad person thinking that "our streets" (the writer was writing from New York, but the perception is widespread) are less safe for kids than they were in...
View ArticleDear applicant
I wrote up a series of overly honest responses to job applicants a few years ago. Didn't send them, of course, it was purely therapeutic writing. Now that the job posting itself is stale and I don't...
View ArticleHTTP error responses in APIs
I've seen a bunch of mis-use of HTTP status responses in HTTP/JSON or HTTP/XML APIs. It's not merely a matter of taste when interoperability can suffer, as when status responses are used by...
View ArticleManagement of Risk in Software Testing
I read a rather old book called "Technological Risk" while working on startup software test plans, and this is making me think of the tradeoffs in a very abstract manner.In the same way that there's a...
View ArticleTrello for agile development
I've now observed a few development teams using Trello to manage their work. Trello feels great to use and it seems to promote creativity and participation, which is also great. There's some things...
View ArticleVoting, consensus, and the tyranny of structurelessness
I am in a new organization with growing pains. We all want to work together but nobody knows how to make decisions in this organization. The funny and frustrating thing is that everybody is mature,...
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