You want justification? Lets discuss. First off, I’m brighter than you, have a better job, am better looking, went to a better university, and didn’t vote for Bush/Blair/Kerry/Hitler. You, on the other hand, are less relevant than _anything_ found on the bottom of my shoe.
As you’ll no doubt of heard many times, most problems in computing can be solved in a variety of ways. Knowing which (if any) of the known solutions are best, is typically down to experience, and the desire to experiment with unknown solutions that could yield positive benefits. In a project context, it can be all too easy to just do the known thing – better the devil you know and all that. However if managed properly, there is scope for limited experimentation during a project.
A colleague of mine has successfully used the approach where new best practises are adopted for a short duration – such as a a single iteration. I would actually advocate these best practises being very rigidly enforced, more so than normal. The aim is that people get a good feel for another approach, and will be better able to make an informed judgement call in the future. Such altered practises might include things as simple as “no getters allowed”, or “use the visitor pattern instead of the iterator pattern”, or more process oriented changes, such as automatically running “findbugs”:http://findbugs.sf.net/ when you check in to CVS, or “hansel(Automatic code coverage of JUnit tests)”:http://hansel.sf.net/ when you run your JUnit tests.
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John Peel “died today(BBC News – Legendary radio DJ John Peel dies)”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3955289.stm whilst on holiday. Radio 1 will never be the same.
Act 1: In support of the pessimist
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- Fred:
- So, I’ve made this thing for you
- Bob:
- Cool! What’s that tube for – and why the electrodes?
- Fred:
- Don’t worry about that, have a play…
- Bob:
- Cool, now – what does this do? Oh, and if I poke a stick there, put my finger there, then stick my tongue in the power socket…*ouch*!
- Fred:
- Dammit! That’s not how you’re supposed to use it! I’ll never get that out of the carpet now….
Skinning GMail
Over at “persistent.info”:http://persistent.info/, Hammers has used the “URLid”:http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/uriid extension for Firefox to create a “personal skin for GMail”:http://persistent.info/archives/2004/10/05/gmail-skinning using CSS. The result is less than stunning, however does show the potential. Personally, GMail’s interface has put me off – not just the look (which is so 2002), but the actual UI – I frequently find myself hunting for links, and find the interface far too busy. Now whilst I can’t change everything I’d like to, I can change some of it, so I should probably stop moaning about the excellent free service.
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Simple code that works is only considered a bad thing by programmers who either don’t care about maintainability, or like to hide their inadequacies behind complex solutions.
My morning routine before leaving for work goes a little something like this:
# Get up & dressed
# Wash
# Watch BBC Breakfast to see if aliens have landed
# Check the web for Underground news (“London Underground”:http://tube.tfl.gov.uk/)
# Check the weather (the “BBC”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/5day.shtml)
# Quickly scan mail to see if anything needs a reply before I leave (“Gmail”:http://www.gmail.com/)
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So let’s look at the figures. Number of posts: 272. Number of comments: 506. Number of trackbacks: 12. Spot the odd one out? “Trackbacks(What is a Trackback)”:http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/03/what_is_trackback_part_one.shtml have been enabled since virtually day one of this blog, and have been surprisingly underused. I’m starting to wonder if they were worth the bother.
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My new design is up. There are a few kinks to work out, but I decided to do that on a running system. More information on the redesign to follow. Feel free to “provide feedback”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/contact if anything seems screwy…
An email from Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes pointed out something which I really hadn’t noticed – the “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us links being spliced in using “FeedBurner”:http://www.feedburner.com seem to be getting a huge number of hits – not just compared to the normal dross I put out, but compared to everyone else too. So far I’ve been unable to see how this could be happening – Javablogs only tracks reads made via JavaBlogs itself, which implies someone/something is hammering these specific entries via Javablogs itself. I think Mike is going to look into this a little more, but if we can’t find a fix I’ll pull my del.icio.us links from the Javablogs feed.
magpiebrain 