Archive for January, 2008

Apparently We’re Doing Well

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

From today's post by Tim O'Reilly: Beautiful Code, a collection of essays by master programmers about how they solved particularly hard problems, must have hit a nerve. It was our #9 bestselling title for the year, and the number one software engineering title industry-wide according to our analysis of Bookscan figures.

Code Sprint Day 3

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Florian and Adam opened the place up; Jeff and I were here 10 minutes later; Tony, Luke, and Yi Qing arrived in time for coffee, and DC and his hangover made it eight. Paul joined us for lunch (pizza... mm...); tests were written, bugs were found, tickets were updated, ...

Code Sprint Day 2

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

10:00 am start; thirteen of us busying away. We're opening as many bugs as we're closing (thanks to the testing team), but it still feels like progress. Lebanese food for lunch; coffee all 'round, and our first engagement announcement (congrats, David!). I'm reminded (again) just how much ...

Hippo Sightings

Friday, January 4th, 2008

Dmitri won the hippo for making the most contributions to the class last term.  It's now devouring him:

Code Sprint Day 1

Friday, January 4th, 2008

It's now 10:29 EST, and the room is fuller: Dave Wolever, Jeff Balogh, Dave Cooper, Luke Petrolekas, Blake Winton, and Adam Goucher are working on DrProject Martin Williams, Florian Shkurti, and Tony Yiu are working on OLM Yi Qing Sim is proofreading Pardis Beikzadeh is working on UTest David Chang is working on Flex (no ...

Data Portability

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

Via David Janes, dataportability.org: the open standards stack for the ubiquitous sharing and remixing of data.

The Year in Canadian Tech Law

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

http://www.thestar.com/article/288360 --- interesting read (as in, how did I miss half these stories?).

Social Objects

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

Via Adam Goucher (who's thinking about their application to testing): Hugh MacLeod on social objects.

Portals on Gears?

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

Optimistic version control systems like CVS and Subversion allow people to decouple their work: instead of simultaneously editing the master copy of a file (and stomping on one another's changes), each player changes a local copy, then merges it into the repository.  In contrast, most ticketing systems still use the ...

One, Two, Three

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

My favorite books these days are Boynton's Your Personal Penguin and Pratchett's Where's My Cow?, but since this is a magazine for programmers, not parents, I'll turn my attention to six others: one very good, two useful, and three that missed the mark. The first is Smith and Marchesini's The Craft ...