Software is too expensive to build cheaply…

I saw an an article on Seth Godin’s blog about positive thinking. Godin makes the valid point that people who think positively tend to succeed more, in part because their confidence means they don’t second-guess themselves. You can easily waste a lot of energy debating what to do.

A point that Seth didn’t cover is that positive thinking means it’s more likely you will attempt something new: if you feel you can accomplish a task, you’re more likely to try. Sometimes, when you try something new, you will succeed. Other times you will fail. When you fail, there’s a chance you will learn – and learning makes it easier to succeed next time.

One of the key take aways of agile development for me is “experiment, and fail early”. Fail early, fail often, fail cheaply. And learn every time.

from Martin Fowler: Software and Obama’s Victory. I like the last org model shown; it would be very interesting to work in a company structured in such a fashion, with middle management acting as guides & facilitators, instead of intermediates, filters and superiors.

Tags: fowler, martin fowler, obama, org structures

Mike Cannon-Brookes asks Is Atlassian still a startup? And when is a startup not a startup anymore? Well, Mike, the answer’s simple. If it still feels like a startup, it’s a startup.

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Tags: atlassian, culture, wotif

We’ve been doing a lot of recruiting at “Wotif”:http://www.wotif.com/AboutCareersPositionDetails.jsp?jobId=7 recently, so I’ve been doing a lot of resume skimming and interviews of late. And I’ve noticed, amongst many other things, statements like this: “Oh, yes, we did continuous integration; we used CruiseControl!”

Folks, using “CruiseControl”:http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net is not continuous integration. And that’s coming from a former committer on the CruiseControl project.

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The Australian IT on Tuesday had a “lovely article”:http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,18994350%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html?from=rss on the Trellis system rollout in WA – specifically, how it was a “Big Java Job [that was] blasted on blowout”. The implication, of course, was that Java was to blame.

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Wot “Jeffrey said”:http://www.developertesting.com/archives/month200604/20060430-MockingASingleton.html.

I’ll never be afraid to mock a singleton again.

One thing that I get sick of is how people take an estimate, expect it to be accurate, feed it into a plan, and when the plan is (inevitably) proven wrong, blame the estimate. This is a fallacy from the era of Waterfall development, but it still lingers on in many Agile environments.

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Looks like MS is “making VS Studio Express free as in beer”:http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/04/20/free_visual_studio/ permanently.

I wrote up my responses to the free beta “some time back”:http://twasink.net/blog/archives/2004/06/wow_free_visual.html; like I said then, I think this is a really good move for Microsoft, _and_ it’s driven by the quality of the free IDEs for other languages (notably NetBeans and Eclipse for Java).

“Joel’s”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ a pretenious schmuck a lot of the time, but he really does tend to know what he’s talking about. His latest article, “The Development Abstraction Layer”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html really hits the nail on the head in oh so many way.

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Joel’s busy complaining that teaching Java in comp-sci courses makes life too easy for people, because they don’t have to deal with pointers and recursion. News flash for you, Joel: the times have changed, and new tools are available.

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Tags: joel, programming