The idea of licensing software developers has been around almost as long as—well, OK, I haven’t done any actual research, but it’s been around a long time. It’s superficially appealing: if massage therapists and dog groomers need periodic re-certification of their skills in order to practice, why shouldn’t programmers? But then comes the hard part of deciding who should do the certification, what should be included in the exams, and the whole project slowly sinks into the sand.
The IEEE Computer Society has just (re-)launched its Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP) exam. You can take part in the beta testing from mid-November to mid-December (some restrictions may apply). Topics are wide-ranging (see the list below the cut), but definitely emphasize a process-heavy engineering view of software development—the exam’s authors were definitely building dams in their previous lives. The list of reference materials reinforces that: words like “agile” and “Scrum” don’t appear (probably because those guys were building backyard stills in their previous lives 
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I personally think licensure is inevitable: sooner or later, someone’s going to find a way to sue software companies for bad products, at which point those companies are going to start insisting on evidence that their bottom lines are in safe hands. I’d be interested to see the results of administering the CSDP exam to a hundred randomly-selected J2EE developers working at insurance companies, and to another hundred Rails developers working for social media startups. I’d be even more interested in the results for 100 randomly selected Computer Science professors… Read more…
Teaching
Yay. I don’t believe for a second it will actually change the mind of the parent who made the complaint, but yay and double yay.
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Basie (our Django-based rewrite of DrProject) is making progress: we now have pie charts!
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Another great post from OkCupid analyzing the effect of race on response rates at their online dating site. The most impressive thing (to me) is that they’re willing to ask and answer the question in public—it takes courage.
Equity
I hate drawing diagrams. The worst part of the two and a half years I spent working on my first book were the eight days I spent drawing the diagrams with pencil, straightedge, and eraser (lots of eraser). But now there’s PhotoSketch, which takes a hand-drawn sketch and creates a matching photo montage. Maybe technology is making my life better…
Or maybe I should skip a technological generation and start typing movies…
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It’s taken a little longer than planned, but what doesn’t? Here are the projects the students in our Government 2.0 consulting course have chosen to work on this term:
- SMS for managing queues at government offices—give it your cell phone number, and it’ll text you as your turn to be served comes up.
- A “where should I live?” tool that scores potential homes by what’s within walking distance.
- Privacy auditing for a medical records management tool used at homeless shelters.
- Dredging the web to find farmers’ markets and independents selling fresh produce in the greenbelt.
- Visualizing traffic accident data.
- Crowdsourcing translation of city information pamphlets and other small documents.
- Comparing individual homes’ energy consumption with neighborhood averages.
Our next deadline is November 2, when students will be presenting their ideas at the City of Toronto Innovation Showcase.
Government 2.0
The survey of software project portals that Jordi Cabot and I did has now been published by Doctor Dobb’s Journal. Hope you enjoy it.
Later: DDJ’s Jon Erickson just pointed me at this article on Mylyn, Tasktop, and related tools that you might also enjoy.
Research
…I just bought another MacBook. After all my ranting about how much I hate Macs, I bought another one, because every PC laptop I could find in the same price range had a messed-up keyboard. Enter your mockery below…
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