advocacy

Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian Computing

Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian Computing: This isn’t working. We’ve been stuck for years, the backlog never goes away, and we fight the same old fights with a new generation of management. The Enterprise is too complex, too turbulent, too confused, to be a fruitful place to study the craft of software. We don’t know when it’s right. Yes, we sometimes know when it’s wrong, when we can’t even deliver the software. But what is success? Praise from a self-interested manager? An incremental improvement in corporate throughput? A pile of surveys filled in by our students? A nice writeup in The Journal?

I propose that enterprise software is a hard problem that we can understand only after we solve an easier case, one that lies close to hand. Before we can tackle the enterprise, we need to write software for people. Not software for everyone, but software for you and for me. [Awesome piece. Not to be missed.]

A Few Steps For Shoes On A Mac

A Few Steps For Shoes On A Mac:

Will Larson: Stacks are containers that build downward, and flows are containers that build rightward and then downward. Flows are like words in a book. Stacks are like entries in a log file. The main Shoes window is a flow, and a stack or flow can have any number of stacks and flows inside of it.

This blog post here does a good job of getting people around some of the foul smells in the last Shoes build for OS X. I’ve still got to wrap up the video object for Mac before releasing the next build, which I hope will fall into place before the week’s end.

And, well, I could really use some Leopard users on the Shoes list.

[Interesting stuff.]
Source: hackety org

The joy of refactoring

Sooo you might remember that I happily refactored a site to use Seth’s custom javascript events. (I believe they have since been wound into prototype core, if you’re going to implement them now.) Anyway, recently we had a number of changes that needed to tie into various user actions, and since they were already custom events from back in February, creating the new classes and having them listen to the events, or in one case adding a new event to a pre-existing class and it’s subclasses took almost no time. I love when that happens. Thanks Seth!

MicroPlace Launches

MicroPlace Launches: MicroPlace, a site that lets you make small loans to workers in developing countries and receive a return, just recently launched. Josh Susser, one of the contractors that worked on it, wrote a great introduction to the project.

“As far as I am aware, MicroPlace is the first SEC-registered online brokerage implemented in Ruby on Rails. We had to go through an extensive security audit, and there were a lot of regulatory requirements for us to meet… But the bottom line is that we didn’t have any significant problems with either Ruby or Rails in passing those hurdles.”

Josh also mentioned that MicroPlace is owned by eBay, making this the first Rails project at an otherwise all-Java shop. Awesome, high-fives all around guys. I hope to see more posts about the development aspect of the site.

[Nice idea!]
Source: Riding Rails

Gestures, the iPhone, and Standards: A Developer’s Questions

Gestures, the iPhone, and Standards: A Developer’s Questions: Who will step forward with that leadership and be followed? Will Apple try to maintain a sole position as a platform or will it encourage the whole industry to follow its lead? Will Microsoft go the Open route, and follow its previous examples evangelizing XML and other very open standards, or will it try to create its own proprietary following? Will some members of the academic or FOSS community do the legal legwork, interface design, and initial coding to mimic the success of the Berners-Lee and later the W3C vs. proprietary systems such as those from AOL, CompuServe, and Microsoft? Who will fund that? Google? Nokia? Will there be inward-looking greed or industry leadership? [Good stuff.]
Source:

Twitter as a Utility Service

Twitter as a Utility Service: Evan, focus on reliability, at least until jokes dry up. Twitter has implementation flaws you need to flush out. Don’t just leave it to someone to handle it somehow while you enjoy the creamy part of engineering. Did you know that Twitter client developers are abandoning condition GET because Twitter servers frequently lies? Fixing just that problem (and letting developers know so they can return to using conditional GET) will reduce server load significantly. [Interesting.]
Source: Don Park’s Daily Habit