Results tagged “agile programming”

In the Beginning was the Project
And then came the Assumptions
And the Assumptions were without form and void
And the customer conversation was completely without substance
and the darkness was upon the face of the workers
and they spoke among themselves, saying
"It is a crock of shit and it stinketh."
And the workers went unto their Supervisors and sayeth,
"It is a pail of dung and none may abide the odour thereof",
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers and sayeth unto them,
"It is a container of excrement and it is very strong,
Such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors and sayeth,
"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength."
And the Directors spoke amongst themselves, saying one to another,
"It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors went unto the Vice Presidents and sayeth unto them,
"It promotes growth and is very powerful."
And the Vice Presents went unto the President and sayeth unto him,
"This new project will actively promote the growth and efficiency
of this Organization, and in these areas in particular."
And the President looked upon The Project,
And saw that it was good, and The Project continued many generations, and many were overpowered at the size, ineptness and illogic of it
And this is why you are here

This is my first shot at collaborative blogging -- where you, the user, have just as much control over the blog as I do.

I'll ask the question and you guys respond, both by voting, giving options, and commenting. As things progress, you can send links to other people to join the conversation, add in text, images, video, video conferencing, IM, mindmaps, embed the results in your own blog, or whatever. Whatever you think is appropriate for the topic.

Then you can monitor the changes as other people add their thoughts effortlessly -- using the web.

We're using Google Wave, so if you don't have it and would like it visit the site or ask for an invite. It's all web-based (works best in Chrome) and it's probably the future of something-or-another. That's kind of what we're trying to figure out. Not sure, but I think you're going to need a high-speed connection for this.

I'm building a new startup -- it allows people to collect and share quotes from books and web articles. As you add each quote, you tag it. When people vote up or down your quote (or comment on it), the system trains itself to learn which tags each user likes. I may like quotes from American History. You may never want to see any quotes about politics. Over time, the system learns this and acts accordingly. That way you can have a broad range of subjects with a large user base and the app still has the feel of a private forum.

A while back, Paul Graham wrote a language called Arc. After he wrote it, he challenged other languages to create a simple set of web pages in as few tokens as possible. In Paul's philosophy, the fewer tokens a language has (or needs) the more robust it is. Therefore the more likely it is to last a hundred years

I've been thinking about Paul's assertion for over a year now. I've programmed in lots of languages -- to me they're just tools. Old friends. I can't say I am crazy about one language or another, no matter how many tokens it has.

As I and others pointed out, you can make a computer language do almost anything in as few tokens as you like as long as you've set up a DSL (Domain-Specific Language) for the problem domain.

Since I'm building my product almost from scratch, I thought I would take you through a quick tour of how you end up with powerful "languages" that have maximum expressiveness and minimum tokens, no matter what tools you are using. For this discussion, we'll stick to a (mostly) .NET stack, with some major modifications, but the stack is really not important.

I've been busy working on my startup for the last month, and as an agile-big-corp guy, many of you are probably wondering: how am I doing in the micro-team startup field?

Very well, actually.

Here's a brain dump of things I've learned over the last month. As always, take what you can use and leave the rest:

A friend yesterday twittered and posted into FaceBook a status update about Kanban and programming teams:

"list of electronic tools for lean and kanban teams http://bit.ly/6WW8cS #kanban"

(Kanban is a way of doing work where you use a board to show a "flow" of work and limit the number of activities in any one stage to a certain number)

To which a friend of his replied:

"Yeah, the whole idea of managing the pipeline in a structured way makes a lot of sense. In fact, strange as it sounds, I can see how you could apply the principles to a larger enterprise waterfall of iterative project[s]. You could use it to focus the team on the immediate pipeline...

Yikes!

I was reading a technology forum the other day when somebody asked a question that kind of went like this: "I am a programmer. I've noticed lately that my attention span is getting shorter and shorter. Could you guys provide me with quick advice on how to make my attention span longer?"

I suppose something in the form of a XKCD comic or a couple of sentences might not be too much?

On one hand, I really feel for the guy, as evidenced by my own struggles with distractions. But on the other hand, something's out of whack.

I'm a startup junkie. I use my free time to see if I can form teams to make something useful for folks. As part of that, I was talking to some guys this week about a new opportunity and one of them suggested that I write a mock-up UI to better demonstrate what we were talking about.

So I thought I'd just whip out C# and make something easy in WinForms.

Ugh.