Category: General

Lately in the software industry, everywhere you turn you hear about "Agile". Its in the conferences, in the literature. You have Agile Modeling, Agile Software, Agile Requirements, Agile Architecture, and a whole host of acronyms that make your head spin. And then people start combining them (XP and CMMI! Scrum and XP! Scrum and CMMI!)….

The term hackers has been quite sensationalized in today’s media. From movies depicting characters who break into electric substations using Ethereal to being able to do in-depth digital zooms and facial recognition with your cell phone, many of the so called "hackers" are miscategorized and just flat out wrong. In Hacking: The Art of Exploitation…

Just a quick announcement that I’ve finally settled on a format for the Agile FAQ site. If you haven’t heard about it – this site came about from two incidents. The first was a post to the XP Yahoo! mailing list from a gentleman who I felt had the concepts of agile software development just…

This week I realized that I just broke the 100,000 mile mark in my frequent flyer miles. Not bad for a year and a half of working for billg. It’s actually been a lot of fun, but the travel is brutal when you have two little girls and a loving wife just wondering when you…

This evening I had the chance to dive back into some Rails stuff. I came across a problem of which there was surprisingly no straightforward documentation from start to finish, so I wanted to put it here. Let’s say you have 3 tables – restaurants (id, name), categories (id, name), and restaurants_categories (restaurant_id, category_id). You…

This week I happen to be at one of our offices, and we had a ton of MSDN Magazines there. Flipping through one, they had an intro to F#, a functional language that runs on the CLR. I figured it would be fun to see how hard it would be to get it running with…

Esther Schindler recently published an article in CIO magazine entitled Getting Clueful: 7 Things CIOs Should Know About Agile Development. The article starts well enough, but quickly falls into the Agile trap with headers like: Agile Creates Better Software and Agile’s business value comes from organizations’ ability to focus on which projects to do, what…

This afternoon I was on my way up to the local home improvement store when I saw a strange looking car pulling out of a parking lot. Well, the car wasn’t strange, but it had a weird, tall antenna looking thing on top of it. As it turned onto the road, I saw the Google…

On Thursday, Microsoft hosted a day of Patterns and Practices at the Tampa office. We happened to be there for some unrelated meetings, so I ended up staying for the festivities. Besides finally getting to meet David Hayden in person, Ron Jacobs was down from Redmond to do a talk on TDD in the UI…

Here’s something to ponder over your morning coffee: Microsoft bids $45 billion for Yahoo Purty nutty… Update:  Here’s some more interesting details including that the proposal was made directly to the Yahoo! Board of Directors – write after their chairman resigned last night. More Updates: Microsoft is going to hold a conference call at 0830…