I have a confession. I looove gadgets. With many knobs and blinking lights and cool stuff. Stuff like Blinkenlights makes me quite excited. When I was young, I used to play with hours with math. I invented the hyperparabola, which was my own term for a formula that combined a hyperbolic function and...

Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design Elden Nelson interviews Kent Beck, the founder of the Extreme Programming method and author of “Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change”; and Alan Cooper, the prime proponent of interaction design and author of “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”. Th...

Yes! The first thing that strikes me about Eric Evans “Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software” is how it seems to bring together the ideas that have resounded the best with me during the last few years. The central thesis of the book is that that enterprise software shoul...

I was recommended “The Art of UNIX Programming” by Eric Raymond (esr) from Joel Spolsky’s “Joel-On-Software” blog. The recommendation in it self warrants some comments, as Joel Spolsky normally is very much a Windows-kind of guy. Despite the title, the book definately has much to offer people who ne...

Oh No! DTO! Should DTOs have public variables? Or should they have private variables with getters and setters? [via Artima Weblogs] Finally someone with a little sense on the subject. Notice that this fits in with the idea of “accessors considered harmful”. (Which, just for the record, I noted befor...

I have been looking for a while for a refactoring tool that could improve the encapsulation of my code. More specifically, I want to be able to analyse a closure of code (like what JDepend does), and make methods private, package protected or protected as much as possible. Of course, if it is to be ...

Martin Fowler has an excellent piece about MDA on his blog. Also be sure to check out Fowler’s link to Dave “Bederra” Thomas’ article on UML. It seems like quite a few people who are knowledgeable about MDA dislike Fowler’s article quite a bit. I thought it was time someone who knows MDA and is not ...

I have been real bad about writing in my blog lately, but I am finally back. It’s been a crazy few months, including a new job, which of course takes up some time. I have now officially stopped working as a consultant, but I still take some projects on the side when time permits. My next interesting...

Note: This term is also used about mixed economies. Central dogmas: The purpose of government is to work for a vision of a good society A good society is one where wealth is distributed in such a way that no-one suffers and everyone is given incentives to produce at their fullest capability. Distrib...

It is funny how little incidents reminds us of more general principles… Today, when I went to the store, there was a baby that was crying, and it’s mother kept going, “be quiet now!”, “sit down!”, “hush!” in a real angry voice (the dog-peed-on-the-rug-voice). The whole thing just reminded me of two ...

If a beginning programmer was to read just one book, this would definately rank high on a list of candidates. (But then again, why should a beginning programmer only read one book) “Agile Software Development: Practices, Principles, and Patterns” is in many ways Robert C. Martin’s magnum opus. After...

I have come to a conclusion: I do not want to be on any more fixed price, fixed scope projects. From what I hear, that is all the projects the consulting business is getting today – if that is the case, I will have to find something else to do. The main reason I take this stance is simple: To me, se...

Update: Cleaned up mess made by “WYSIWYG” tool) Rating: Must-buy The agile movement has started to gain speed and become more mainstream, and the Poppendiecks’s “Lean Software Development” added an important part of the puzzle for me. Like so many manifestos before it, Lean Software Development comp...

The video from my presentation at this year’s JavaZone are available. The conference has done a lot better job of follow-up this year than last. Thanks, JavaBin. This is actually the first time I get to see a full-length video recording of myself speaking. I was afraid I would be real disappointed, ...

(Warning: Boring, personal entry) I am writing this entry on a bus. More specifically, on the bus from the airport to the conference Sanntid 2003 (Real-time 2003), where I am scheduled to speak tomorrow. The airport in question is Kjevik airport, which is a military/civilian airport in the south of ...

[…] Are those CMM-mandated procedures too difficult and onerous to complete? People will find a work-around, bypassing the intent of the CMM and filling in whatever documents are required to get by. Is that comprehensive (and manual) test plan overly lengthy and tedious? People will take short-cuts....

Beyond Software Architecture (Luke Hohmann) is an invaluable read for any aspiring project manager or program manager. There is so much more to getting successful programs out the door than just the classical analysis, design, development, test. The most important feature of this book is how it help...

I came to remember my thoughts on Open-Source software while talking to a friend after lunch today. The idea is that even though reuse of third-party software is something that a lot of companies want to encourage, we don’t really know the total cost of third party software. The problem as I see it ...

Just a little reminder list to myself. Check out this Java technology before next Java project: Pico Container eXo portlets Hibernate

Read: http://martinfowler.com/ieeeSoftware/whoNeedsArchitect.pdf. The following is an except: Ralph Johnson: So, a better definition would be “In most successful software projects, the expert developers working on that project have a shared understanding of the system design. This shared understan...

I have just recovered from JavaZone 2003. This year was quite good. A lot of good speakers this year. I had great fun holding my presentation. I didn’t get through my whole program, but I do think people were entertained, and that was all I hoped for. It is a real rush to present for such a crowd. e...

Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets by Frank Partnoy is a fascinating book. Partnoy describes how the ever raising performance-related bonuses for brokerage bankers in the 1980s lead the brokers to create a succession of schemes to inflate bonuses. The early waves o...

Joel Spolsky, of Joel-on-software fame was in Oslo, and had an open invitation to dinner for readers of his website. I think around 30 people showed up, which totally blew my mind. It is always nice to meet people who care about software development beyond having a job to go to from 9 to 5. Maybe th...

Learning OO is such a disappointment. When you go from the models and into the code, you pretty much discover that it is all bunk, anyway. In your neat customer-order-product design, each entity explodes into circa 10 artifacts if you implement it in J2EE, or gets fragmented into mostly pure data ma...

On the Agile Management mailing list, David J. Andersen writes: It would get a little more involved than that but the you get the basic idea. Pay for the value delivered, not the effort expended. Incentivize the vendor to deliver high quality. Most agile methods use a variation of a backlog. In an i...

Ullman’s book describes the lives of two people related to a large software development project in the early 80s. Ethan Levin is the programmer who is judged responsible for the bug. As it proves to be impossible to reproduce reliably his life seems to spiral down into dispair, loneliness, and depre...

Watched a show about Ada Lovelace today, and I thought about all the great names we should remember better. It would be so cool to have posters of these. I am just including dead ones. It feels kinda creepy to have living heroes. Ada Lovelace (why do great mathematicians die young?) Alan Turing (of ...

Bush ’not mad’ at France [via CNN] “I’m going to remind him, like I’m going to remind a lot of people, that we can do a heck of a lot more together than we can arguing with each other,” [Bush] said." ITYM, “I can do heck of a lot more on of what I want if you stop hasslin’ me”, Dubya. Dubya might be...

Not waiting for the U.S. Congress to take action against spam, the California State Senate passed a bill Thursday that would turn spam from a misdemeanor to a felony offense and cost spammers an estimated US$500 per unsolicited e-mail sent. [ - from MacCentral ]

free culture Creativity and innovation builds on the past The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it Free societies limit the future by limiting the past Ours is less and less a free society