Tag: february 2010

Blog harvest, February 2010

Some noteworthy blog articles, harvested for February 2010. If you ever asked yourself about the personality of your web framework, you’ll find the link to the answer here.

After the move to the new office is nearly complete, work begins to normalize again. Here is the February blog harvest with a little more entries, as I wasn’t unable to read other blogs, but to write on our own blog. There are many fun articles this time that I found share-worthy, perhaps because they made me laugh even in harder times.

This was the more serious part of this harvesting. Let’s read some articles that share their message in a lighter way:

  • What kind of woman would your web framework be? – If you ever have to sell a new hot (web) framework to management, why not take this plausible approach? At least they could relate to what you are talking about.
  • It’s Not the Recession, You Just Suck – Ouch! That hurt. This is a wake-up call for everybody who likes to blame it on higher means. And it reminds me to hurry up with this blog entry and get back to work.
  • I test therefore I log bugs – Ever tried to explain “programming” to your grandparents? You’ll end in esoterics (“teaching machines to have dreams”) or in obviousnesses. This is a story about consensus on the latter.

This blog harvest closes with a video:

  • Uncle Bob on Software Craftsmanship – Much of what Bob Martin says has truth in it, but for me the last two minutes are the most explicit and rewarding. By the way, Uncle Bob looks good in the T-Shirt (I always feared it would be teared, regarding the sounds when he stretches), but needs to switch his cell phone off.

Follow-up to our Dev Brunch February 2010

A follow-up to our February 2010 Dev Brunch, summarizing the talks and providing bonus material.

Today, we held our second Dev Brunch for 2010. It was the first one in the new office, with some packing cases still around. The brunch had some interesting topics, most of them small and focussed. We discussed if the topics should be announced beforehands to avoid collision, but defined these collisions as enrichments rather than duplications.

The Dev Brunch

If you want to know more about the meaning of the term “Dev Brunch” or how we implement it, have a look at the follow-up posting of the brunch in October 2009. This time, we didn’t urge all participants to bring their own topic. Presence is more important than topic.

  • Scrum adventure book review – There are lots of book on the Scrum project management process. But the one called “Geschichten vom Scrum” (sorry, it’s a german book!) will teach you all the basics and some advanced practical topics of Scrum while telling you the fairy tale of a kingdom haunted by dragons. By following a group of common fairy tale characters in their quest to build a dragon trap the Scrum way, you’ll learn a great share of real world Scrum and still be entertained. You might compare this book to Tom DeMarco’s “The Deadline”, a novel about general project management.
  • What is the Google Web Toolkit? – Based on the learning from the presentation of the Karlsruhe Java User Group (JUG-KA), we skipped through the slides to get to know the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) framework. Advanced topics were discussed in the next talk.
  • First hand experience with GWT – We talked about the sweet spots and pain points of Google Web Toolkit, based on the experiences in a real project. This was very helpful to sort out the marketing promises from the definite advantages. While the browser doesn’t affect the developer anymore, the separation of client (browser) and server will still leak through.
  • First impressions of the Lift framework – The way to go with web application development in Scala is Lift. It’s a framework borrowing the best from “Seaside, Rails, Django and Wicket” and combining it with Scala and the whole Java ecosystem. While this talk was just a teaser, it already looked promising.

As usual, the topics ranged from first-hand experiences to literature research or summaries of recently attended presentations. You can check out the comments for additional resources, but they may be in german language.

Retrospection of the brunch

It’s right to grant access to “non-topics”. This will lower the barrier for occasional guests while they are valuable for their experiences and insights. This brunch was enriched by yet another topic collision, which is the perfect situation for a more in-depth discussion.

Booked in February

A short book preview of the upcoming O’Reilly title “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” and our participation in it.

Ok, the title is a bit misleading – it’s a play of words(*). This entry is actually a book preview on the upcoming book “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” from O’Reilly.

97 Things Of Wisdom

The “97 Things” series started out with “97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know” early last year. The book essentially is a collection of short articles on specific topics that should bother today’s software architect. You may classify as a software architect if you don’t just stir up source code but are also in charge to give the system a shape.

The articles are straight to the point and can be read within five minutes each. Don’t expect detailed textbook chapters of the topics, but they work extremely well as creative appetizers. And there are nearly a hundred appetizers from well-respected members of the software architect community in this book.

Just imagine you would meet all the authors for five minutes each on a conference and just ask them for an appealing thought. This book serves as the best replacement for it.

Wisdom continued

Soon after the first book, there was a second book in the series, “97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know”. I haven’t read this one yet, but it is on my must-read list for 2010.

And now, next month, there will be another book, this time for the fellow coder: “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know”. As usual, there are 97 selected articles with bits of wisdom from big community names. Kevlin Henney is the editor for this book (we featured him in our last blog harvest). You can take a sneak peek online in the 97TEPSK wiki, where the articles were fostered (and a second part is likely to emerge). But don’t forget to buy a paper copy that you can foist on your peers to inspire them, too.

Telling from the articles I’ve read so far, the book will be great. Please don’t expect detailed language specifics, lengthy code examples or fancy UML diagrams. But expect a whole bunch of great ideas that stem from real experiences of real programmers.

One percent of a book

What’s our relation to the new book? We’ve contributed an article to it! Even if we thereby only wrote approximately one percent of the book, it feels great and we consider ourselves honored.

The topic of our article is Extreme Feedback Devices (XFD): “Let Your Project Speak for Itself”. We gathered quite a lot of these devices over the years and ran a few experiments, so we thought we are qualified to write about it. And there it is, the first bit of our wisdom, printed in a book.

We will, of course, continue to publish our wisdom on this blog first. If you’ve followed us over the last years, the article comes as no real surprise. But I’m sure some other articles of the book will. Go buy it!

(*) Play of words in a language other than your native tongue are always dangerous. I hope this one worked out well.