Developers continually get asked to provide an estimate with a high degree of accuracy. They are expected to spend a fixed period of time to produce the estimate.
Continue reading “Estimation Anti-Pattern”
I’m leaving Suncorp in January, after about 3 years there. I’m taking up a position at wotif.com where I will be joining a small team that drives their website.
Continue reading “Moving on – reflections”
About two weeks ago, the server company I go through (iwebserv.com.au) had an “incident”… one of the hard disks on the main server died. This caused an extended outage (almost a week), and a total loss of data. For one reason or another, iwebserv have not been able to resurrect the data on the server yet.
Continue reading “Well, I’m back up… shame the server wasn’t.”
I’m now working on my second project with Hibernate, having delivered the first, and I’m playing with some of the features I didn’t have time to figure out last time. And I have to say: named queries rock, big time.
Continue reading “Hibernate named queries rock”
I was reading Alan Kay’s Early History of Smalltalk recently. Quite an interesting article.
Continue reading “Interesting article on Smalltalk”
That’s the title for my blog, and it’s a philosophy I believe in 100%. Software, like many other areas of life, is not a place to cut corners (at least, certain corners). There are certain expenses you have to be willing to pay if you want a quality product that will stand the test of time; avoiding them simply pushes immediate cost now to bigger nastier costs later.
Continue reading “Software is too expensive too build cheaply.”
I figured out why the web app I was trying to build before broken when I used the exported build script. Turns out that you need to run a setup script to get your environment “just right” before running the build.
Continue reading “Well, at least I’ve answered one question”
It just makes things break!!
(Followup at end)
Continue reading “I’m not sure exactly why WebLogic Workshop bothers to make things customisable”
I did a silly thing last week. I’ve been avoiding being given a task for the last nine months, and then all of a sudden I ended up volunteering to do it, for all sorts of reasons. The task: work out how to use WebLogic Workshop as a real tool, in conjunction with our other standard practices (like, oh, source control unit tests command-line builds and daily/continuous builds And I’m realizing why I tried so hard to avoid it.
Continue reading “Why do things have to be so bloody hard????”
The New Yorker has an article on talent management in modern corporations It looks into how companies manage talent to improve performance. Quite a good read.
Continue reading “Interesting comment on “talent””
Software is too expensive to build cheaply.... 