No more delicious posts

Oct 23th, 2008

I’ve decided to stop posting my latests delicious bookmarks to this blog. It makes no sense, specially when you can add me to your network or subscribe to the RSS feed.

No Silver Bullet reloaded

Oct 23th, 2008

Don’t miss the No Silver Bullet Reloaded Retrospective OOPSLA Panel Summary post by InfoQ. It’s a worth read. Great panelists and great content.

Some statements that I’ve found interesting:

Dave Parnas:

Desire for people to seek better tools rather than “actually learning the trade.” Dave used the metaphor: “there is an old saying: ‘the poor workman blames his tools’ – people are poor workmen, I think most programmers are poor workmen.” Dave also said that people are looking for silver bullets to avoid learning the trade.

Linda Northrop:

We still need great designers, and I think we still have far too few, and we still need to cultivate an atmosphere of hard work but also an inner-disciplinary perspective that takes us uncomfortably out of our coding world.

Dave Thomas:

He called today’s state of the art in software development (especially middleware) a gratuitous disaster due to overly quick fast pace of change in API’s and frameworks which create immature software and also create too much difficulty for average software teams to track and stay up to date with. Dave claimed that the majority of today’s enterprise systems are basically just CRUD applications: “In the end these people are trying to do things that are fairly straight forward, and if they were working on a mainframe using a 4GL, they would actually have the thing done.“

He has seen “real successes” in niches, citing highly specialized domain-specific and specialized language applications in airlines reservations and hedge funds;

Martin “Werewolf” Fowler:

You can’t measure your output, you can’t measure your productivity, no way you can run sensible experiments to figure out whether one technique is better than another. …

The biggest difficulty in software development is the communication between the people writing the software and the people for who the software is being written. The conceptual attacks, the essence problems, focus a great deal on trying to improve that communication. The trouble of doing that, of course, is that it’s hard to get that communication flowing. Some of the business people don’t want to talk with software people, and fortunately the software people are hopeless when it comes to social interaction, they can’t talk to business people.

You seem to think that with hardly any information at the beginning of the project you can map out exactly what’s going to happen, pin down costs, commit yourselves to all sorts of unrealistic plans. And then you wonder why it is that I always manage to turn up. That illusion of control, the idea that on basis of hardly any data you can let make these grand predictions, that very folly is one of my greatest strengths.

Fred Brooks:

I know of no field of engineering where people do less study of each other’s work, where they do less study of precedents, where they do less study of classical models. I think that that is a very dangerous thing.

links for 2008-09-17

Sep 18th, 2008

Top 100 Software Development Blogs

Sep 15th, 2008

Jurgen Appelo has collected a list of the top 100 blogs for development managers. The list of blogs is quite impressive, rated using five different statistics (Google Page Rank, Technorati Authority, Alexa Rank, Hits, Comments). You can find the usual A-List bloggers, but also some other interesting blogs you might not know about (oh no! no more feeds please!).

This is the top 10. Check his post to discover the rest.

  1. Joel on Software – Joel Spolsky
  2. Coding Horror – Jeff Atwood
  3. Seth’s Blog – Seth Godin
  4. Paul Graham: Essays – Paul Graham
  5. blog.pmarca.com – Marc Andreesen
  6. Rough Type – Nicholas Carr
  7. Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – Scott Hanselman
  8. Martin Fowler’s Bliki – Martin Fowler
  9. Rands in Repose – Michael Lopp
  10. Stevey’s Blog Rants – Steve Yegge

Bonus track: It seems that Jurgen’s hobby of collecting lists comes from afar. Check these other lists he has collected:

Comments

Comment by Anton on 2009-04-17 13:09:07 +0000

nice listing! thanks!

links for 2008-09-14

Sep 15th, 2008
  • IBM developerWorks : Blogs : Tooling platforms and RESTful ramblings 
    <div class="delicious-extended">
  Simon shares some Jazz REST Services (JRS) introduction slides
</div>

<div class="delicious-tags">
  (tags: <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/IBM">IBM</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/Rational">Rational</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/Jazz">Jazz</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/JRS">JRS</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/rest">rest</a>)
</div>
  • CA, IBM First to Demonstrate CMDB Federation, Interoperability 
    <div class="delicious-extended">
  CA and IBM announced the ability to share information between their respective configuration management databases (CMDBs)
</div>

<div class="delicious-tags">
  (tags: <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/CA">CA</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/IBM">IBM</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/CMDB">CMDB</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/ITIL">ITIL</a>)
</div>
  • InfoQ: Microsoft Joins the OMG: UML or DSL? 
    <div class="delicious-extended">
  Microsoft joins the OMG (Oh My Good! or Object Management Group, depending on who reads the acronym)
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<div class="delicious-tags">
  (tags: <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/microsoft">microsoft</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/OMG">OMG</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/UML">UML</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/MDD">MDD</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/DSL">DSL</a>)
</div>
  • Mike Walker's Ramblings about Industry Architecture : Oslo – a tool, a language, a repository 
    <div class="delicious-extended">
  Microsoft Oslo preview: a tool to interact with models, a tool to create DSLs and a relational repository
</div>

<div class="delicious-tags">
  (tags: <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/microsoft">microsoft</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/oslo">oslo</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/tools">tools</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/DSL">DSL</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/MDD">MDD</a>)
</div>
  • IBM developerWorks : Blogs : Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development 
    <div class="delicious-extended">
  some disciplined agile strategies to succeed at large-team agile
</div>

<div class="delicious-tags">
  (tags: <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/agile">agile</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/enterprise">enterprise</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/bestpractices">bestpractices</a>)
</div>
  • How Hard Could It Be?: How I Learned to Love Middle Managers — Fog Creek Software — Small Business Advice 
    <div class="delicious-extended">
  A history about middle management
</div>

<div class="delicious-tags">
  (tags: <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/software">software</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/development">development</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/Management">Management</a>)
</div>
  • Home Page for 97 Things [97 Things] : Near-Time 
    <div class="delicious-extended">
  97 great axioms for software architects which will be published by O'Reilly in a book, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
</div>

<div class="delicious-tags">
  (tags: <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/architecture">architecture</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/software">software</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/development">development</a> <a href="http://delicious.com/frodenas/bestpractices">bestpractices</a>)
</div>