act:ualise | technology

The No Fluff, Just Stuff 2009 Tour rolls into Seattle on September 18-20th. The line-up has some interesting speakers:

Brian Goetz, Author of Java Concurrency in Practice
Brian Sletten, REST Expert
David Geary, Author of Graphic Java and co-author of Core JSF
Howard Lewis Ship, Creator of Tapestry and HiveMind
Ken Sipe, Technology Director, Perficient, Inc. (PRFT)
Mark Richards, SOA and [...]

There isn’t much more to say than Flickr, ur doin it right! Respect..
The way that metrics are being used for the continual feedback and ongoing health and monitoring of system and features is very Lean and not something I get to see too often.
10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr

View more Microsoft [...]

Eric Ries, formerly the co-founder CTO of  IMVU, is running a special Agile Vancouver workshop on the Lean Startup which he promises will involve more than just the usual slideshow and Q & A.
Whats makes Eric and the IMVU story so interesting (certainly to me) is that they are unique in having developed their business and [...]

Alistair Cockburn (@TheOtherAlistai) has posted a humorous yet incisive article reminding us that what absolutely certainly matters in software development is:

Coding
Testing
Listening
Designing

..  ergo, “That’s all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.”
His compulsion to remind us of this core essence comes from the emergence of all kinds of newfangled buzzwords.. [...]

I happened upon the Clean Code Cheat Sheet and thought it worthwhile to share. It draws together a number of principles which help you achieve cleaner and more habitable code.
It includes:

The Get It Done Adagio

Make it Work
Make it Right
Make it Fast

The Three Rules of TDD
SOLID Principles

SRP
OCP
LSP
ISP
DIP

Law of Demeter

Bad smell
Local methods
Local fields
Local params
Local objects

Connascences
Coupling
Cohesion
Common Metrics

A must [...]

My friend and associate Chris Pitts, an Agile Coach in London, has weighed in on the ongoing debate about software craftsmanship.
Chris is focused on trying to move the debate from just being open to interpretation toward specific codes – as drawn from other present day crafts such as carpentry, surgery, architecture/building and so on. 
He proposes that [...]

Gus Power and Kris Lander of EnergizedWork just presented ‘No Excuses: Concept to Cash Every Week‘ at QCon London which highlights the manner by which development is executed within the EnergizedWork stable. 
It’s worth reviewing the slides (available via ‘No Excuses’ link above) to get a sense of how using such methods can help achieve the [...]

I was so open-mouthed with amazement at this post by Uncle Bob that I had to re-post! 
I know Joel Spolsky has a lot of followers so you would expect statements like “Quality doesn’t matter that much” to be backed by something substantive; Uncle Bob lays right in with a swingeing assault (go Bob!).

Reading this question/answer on Stackoverflow I tangentially wondered whether working to Agile practices played any greater a role in my technical skills development compared to ‘back in the day‘ when I wasn’t using Agile methods.
There ought to be no difference in technical skills development whether the context is Agile or any other process – indeed [...]

Whilst this article is clearly specific to Lean in manufacturing processes what I find pleasing is how fundamentally similar a ‘Morning Market’ is to the morning Scrum in software development.

Its a short morning meeting
It’s not a forum to attempt to solve problems or to discuss them in detail, but a place to surface them
Where problems [...]