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Yes! The first thing that strikes me about Eric Evans “Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software” is how it seems to bring together the ideas that have resounded the best with me during the last few years. The central thesis of the book is that that enterprise software should to be built around the model that (non-software) experts in the field has of the problem domain. The shared understanding between the software..
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I was recommended “The Art of UNIX Programming” by Eric Raymond (esr) from Joel Spolsky’s “Joel-On-Software” blog. The recommendation in it self warrants some comments, as Joel Spolsky normally is very much a Windows-kind of guy. Despite the title, the book definately has much to offer people who never touch UNIX as well. esr focuses on the cultural aspects as much as the technical aspects. For organisations that are migrating into Unix inf..
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Oh No! DTO! Should DTOs have public variables? Or should they have private variables with getters and setters? [via Artima Weblogs] Finally someone with a little sense on the subject. Notice that this fits in with the idea of “accessors considered harmful”. (Which, just for the record, I noted before Holub) A final observation by Dave Astels: “Sometimes a data structure is just a data structure.”
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I have been looking for a while for a refactoring tool that could improve the encapsulation of my code. More specifically, I want to be able to analyse a closure of code (like what JDepend does), and make methods private, package protected or protected as much as possible. Of course, if it is to be useful, there has to be a good way of defining root classes and methods, ignored name patterns (getters/setters for those who are still addicted..
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Martin Fowler has an excellent piece about MDA on his blog. Also be sure to check out Fowler’s link to Dave “Bederra” Thomas’ article on UML. It seems like quite a few people who are knowledgeable about MDA dislike Fowler’s article quite a bit. I thought it was time someone who knows MDA and is not starry-eyed about it chipped in. Yeah, that would be me, your humble host ;-). I have worked quite a bit with Compuware’s tool OptimalJ, and pre..
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I have been real bad about writing in my blog lately, but I am finally back. It’s been a crazy few months, including a new job, which of course takes up some time. I have now officially stopped working as a consultant, but I still take some projects on the side when time permits. My next interesting event will be Software 2004, where I am both a speaker at the .
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This paper documents the creation and testing of a game playing artificial intelligence (AI) agent program. The agent is designed to play a game of Connect Four by Milton-Bradley. The game is played by dropping pieces into a game board consisting of a grid of 6x7 slots. The object is to make a vertical, horizontal or diagonal line of four pieces before the opposing player does. The agent designed in the current study is able to play against....
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A Literature Review The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the existing literature concerning speech segmentation, categorical perception, and some other issues concerning bilinguals of English and Japanese. It will touch on some of the differences in the two languages and how they affect learning the L2. The paper will start by providing background information about some of the two languages and some of the current issues....
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Note: This term is also used about mixed economies. Central dogmas: The purpose of government is to work for a vision of a good society A good society is one where wealth is distributed in such a way that no-one suffers and everyone is given incentives to produce at their fullest capability. Distributed control is superior to central control Monopolies hurt
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It is funny how little incidents reminds us of more general principles… Today, when I went to the store, there was a baby that was crying, and it’s mother kept going, “be quiet now!”, “sit down!”, “hush!” in a real angry voice (the dog-peed-on-the-rug-voice). The whole thing just reminded me of two funny things from cognitive science: Punishment is actually a very ineffective way of teaching. Indeed some researchers believe that punishment ..
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My notes and impressions from a talk Cem Kaner gave at the 2003 Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference in Portland, Oregon. The title of his talk was “How Many Lightbulbs Does It Take To Change A Tester?”
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If a beginning programmer was to read just one book, this would definately rank high on a list of candidates. (But then again, why should a beginning programmer only read one book) “Agile Software Development: Practices, Principles, and Patterns” is in many ways Robert C. Martin’s magnum opus. After having read much of his papers on Dependency Inversion Principe, the Open-Closed Principle and other object-oriented methods, as well as Extrem..
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I have come to a conclusion: I do not want to be on any more fixed price, fixed scope projects. From what I hear, that is all the projects the consulting business is getting today – if that is the case, I will have to find something else to do. The main reason I take this stance is simple: To me, seeing the value of my work in the real world is the only real measure of accomplishment.
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Update: Cleaned up mess made by “WYSIWYG” tool) Rating: Must-buy The agile movement has started to gain speed and become more mainstream, and the Poppendiecks’s “Lean Software Development” added an important part of the puzzle for me. Like so many manifestos before it, Lean Software Development compares software development to other industries (lean thinking takes its roots in the Toyota manifacturing system). However, the authors reach a v..
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The video from my presentation at this year’s JavaZone are available. The conference has done a lot better job of follow-up this year than last. Thanks, JavaBin. This is actually the first time I get to see a full-length video recording of myself speaking. I was afraid I would be real disappointed, but I am actually fairly happy. Most of the problems with the presentation was things I already was aware of, like the fact that I had way too l..
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Warning: Boring, personal entry) I am writing this entry on a bus. More specifically, on the bus from the airport to the conference Sanntid 2003 (Real-time 2003), where I am scheduled to speak tomorrow. The airport in question is Kjevik airport, which is a military/civilian airport in the south of Norway. Normally, when I ride busses, I like to read. I brought along Mary Poppendieck’s fascinating “Lean Software Development”. This time is di..
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Are those CMM-mandated procedures too difficult and onerous to complete? People will find a work-around, bypassing the intent of the CMM and filling in whatever documents are required to get by. Is that comprehensive (and manual) test plan overly lengthy and tedious? People will take short-cuts. The “extra-legal,” or alternative system will evolve in any social setting where the official mechanism doesn’t cut it. […] [via /\ndy’s Weblog] An..
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Beyond Software Architecture (Luke Hohmann) is an invaluable read for any aspiring project manager or program manager. There is so much more to getting successful programs out the door than just the classical analysis, design, development, test. The most important feature of this book is how it helps frame software development in a larger picture. The point of software development is to create value for someone. It is important not to lose ..
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I came to remember my thoughts on Open-Source software while talking to a friend after lunch today. The idea is that even though reuse of third-party software is something that a lot of companies want to encourage, we don’t really know the total cost of third party software. The problem as I see it is that under almost any circumstance, an organization delivering a composite product is always responsible for the totality of the product.
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Just a little reminder list to myself. Check out this Java technology before next Java project: Pico Container eXo portlets Hibernate
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Read: http://martinfowler.com/ieeeSoftware/whoNeedsArchitect.pdf. The following is an except: Ralph Johnson: So, a better definition would be “In most successful software projects, the expert developers working on that project have a shared understanding of the system design. This shared understanding is called ‘architecture.’ […] the architecture only includes the components and interfaces that are understood by all the developers.â€..
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I have just recovered from JavaZone 2003. This year was quite good. A lot of good speakers this year. I had great fun holding my presentation. I didn’t get through my whole program, but I do think people were entertained, and that was all I hoped for. It is a real rush to present for such a crowd. eXtremeProgramming.no god off to a good start. Along with the other funders, I got to meet Kent Beck.
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Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets by Frank Partnoy is a fascinating book. Partnoy describes how the ever raising performance-related bonuses for brokerage bankers in the 1980s lead the brokers to create a succession of schemes to inflate bonuses. The early waves of this phenomenon was in the dervatives business. Derivatives are financial instruments the payoff of which is determined by other factors. The ..
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dATAPLOT art show at St. Xavier University Gallery, curated by Nathan Peck. September 2003 update: 20 year retrospective exhibit at the Beverley Art Center, Chicago
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Joel Spolsky, of Joel-on-software fame was in Oslo, and had an open invitation to dinner for readers of his website. I think around 30 people showed up, which totally blew my mind. It is always nice to meet people who care about software development beyond having a job to go to from 9 to 5. Maybe there is enough interest to have a regular network event for technical people who care about what they do?
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Learning OO is such a disappointment. When you go from the models and into the code, you pretty much discover that it is all bunk, anyway. In your neat customer-order-product design, each entity explodes into circa 10 artifacts if you implement it in J2EE, or gets fragmented into mostly pure data management if you use .NET. You can hardly find the classes again anywhere in the implementation. What went wrong?!
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On the Agile Management mailing list, David J. Andersen writes: It would get a little more involved than that but the you get the basic idea. Pay for the value delivered, not the effort expended. Incentivize the vendor to deliver high quality. Most agile methods use a variation of a backlog. In an ideal project, the payment would be only dependent upon the value of each feature requested. Most software projects are much more resilient to un..
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This project was the final culmination of a 13-year exploration of the world of get-rich-quick schemes. In high school I sent away for John Wright’s “The Royal Road To Riches,” a home-publishing business that suggested the easiest way to become a millionare was to reprint books about reprinting books and sell them in the classified […]
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Ullman’s book describes the lives of two people related to a large software development project in the early 80s. Ethan Levin is the programmer who is judged responsible for the bug. As it proves to be impossible to reproduce reliably his life seems to spiral down into dispair, loneliness, and depression. Ullman is a master at describing the almost hypnotizing urge to “just fix this last problem before” when programming. The dysfunctional t..
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Watched a show about Ada Lovelace today, and I thought about all the great names we should remember better. It would be so cool to have posters of these. I am just including dead ones. It feels kinda creepy to have living heroes. Ada Lovelace (why do great mathematicians die young?) Alan Turing (of course) Edger Dijkstra (pioneered software and computer science as a discipline) Grace Murray Hopper (championing accessible program writing) Kr..
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Bush ’not mad’ at France [via CNN] “I’m going to remind him, like I’m going to remind a lot of people, that we can do a heck of a lot more together than we can arguing with each other,” [Bush] said." ITYM, “I can do heck of a lot more on of what I want if you stop hasslin’ me”, Dubya. Dubya might be “not mad” at France, but I sure hope France is still mad at him.
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Not waiting for the U.S. Congress to take action against spam, the California State Senate passed a bill Thursday that would turn spam from a misdemeanor to a felony offense and cost spammers an estimated US$500 per unsolicited e-mail sent. [ - from MacCentral ]
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free culture Creativity and innovation builds on the past The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it Free societies limit the future by limiting the past Ours is less and less a free society
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welcome spammers Dear Spam Robot: I don’t have much time to read emails, and I especially don’t have much time to read unsolicited commercial emails. But I have decided to make an exception. If you would like to send me unsolicited commercial emails, then I agree to read them on the condition that you promise to pay me $500, and subject to the additional conditions mentioned below. You can accept this offer by sending unsolicited commercial..
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I went to the rOOts 2003 conference this year. As always, it was a great convention. ROOTS draws a fairly small, yet advanced audience. A recurring theme this year seems to be agile development. It also seems like all the speakers concluded with the fact that “everything was better in the good old days” (more or less). This seems to be a sign of the times, and was also reflected in Alan Kay’s keynote at the O’Reilly Emercing Technology conf..
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Originally produced in May 2003 for Spatial Intersections at the University of Iowa Museum of Art seminar version performed for Version>04 Invisible Networks based on the book ALLOY Dully Servant (Soviet No-Gang Shriners) reads from the twisted linguistic cosmology of >KIND TRICKS as [tele-psychic puppet] action-script for Skeleton Bride (People’s Republic of Delicious Foods). An […]
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How Mortal These Fools Be… …Wherein we explore what it means to be a computer, or computation, or computrons, or a computer programmer, and why Ken is even touching a computer when he’s on vacation. (From Ken Arnold’s Weblog) [via Artima Weblogs]
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I am so sick of reading about the poor economics behind arguments when it comes to tax cut. Being a Norwegian citizen, I am used to taxation levels that would make an American faint. And I don’t know if it really hurts us at all. What I miss in the discussion goes back to the basics of economy: I am not an economist, but this is how I understand it:
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A is for Apple You may have already known that A is for Apple. But did you know that O is for O’Reilly? Check out what Google reports for single character queries. (From Ward Cunningham’s Weblog) [via Artima Weblogs]
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Book: "Testing Extreme Programming" by Lisa Crispin and Tip House
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jhannes.github.io
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23 years ago
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This book talks about the role of a tester in an XP project. So it is about acceptance testing, not unit testing (see Test-Driven Development by Kent Beck for that). The long and short of it is that I would really like to run an XP project with people who have read, understand, and become excited about this book. My experience is that a project suffers from not having someone who’s job is 100% quality.
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The best thing to happen since the inceptions of C#: “anonymous methods” are .NET delegates cum closures. Finally we can write syntax like: addButton.Click += new EventHandler(object sender, EventArgs e) { list.Add(new ListItem()); } Even better: Anonymous methods will be closures, so you can use variables from the scope. This is a much needed amendment. Why was it not there from the start? (whine, whine)
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Very noteworthy quote: “I think that in the long term the larger code generation efforts, the “application generators,” will become a thing of the past. They are there because the underlying technologies and architectures don’t yet support programming at a high level. " (Pragmatic Dave Thomas) Truer words were seldom said.
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Attributes. Keeps getting better ’n better. Check out Extensible C#, Clemens Vasters new demos, and the underutilized ContextBoundObject ADO.NET. The ADO.NET model for modeling and transporting data hits right on the spot. Better FFI. P/Invoke wins against JNI, hands down (too bad it is probably overused, though) Not EJBs! Getting rid of the defunct EJB model saves a lot of headaches. Better UI. For the user, that is, not the developer!
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