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Content Tagged with User:jerryk + Development

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• Then you go agile and start shipping every six weeks or so. You deliver value on a regular cadence, respond quickly to your customers’ needs and are suddenly nimble enough to leapfrog your competitors. But being agile has one Achilles’ heel – it’s hard to know when to celebrate.

Wow… when you’re so 733t and your breath smells so good and your teeth are so straight, it’s hard to know when to celebrate your wondrousness! Life must be pain for these folks, living as they do under the supernova-like radiance of their futures so bright that they need to wear #14 welder’s glass shades.

Seriously though, Agile clearly has some things to recommend it… I love test-driven development to pieces, although in saying that I’m assuming that they still claim that as one of their distinguishing marks even though they clearly didn’t invent it.

On the other hand, 2001 was a while ago and maybe it’s time for a new fad.

If “Agile” was the software development pet rock of the early to mid 2000s…

...and Gang of Four Patterns were the hula hoop of the late 1990s (even if most of their contribution to the field was an utterly soporific book that appeared to be more an utterly unwitting and pathologically un-self-conscious apology for C++’s wet, sloppy, poop for brains type system and object model (I can’t say I’m sure because the universe doesn’t contain enough carbon to produce sufficient crank to enable me to get through the thing and Yog-Sothoth knows that I try to read it roughly once a year…

...and UML was the glorious panacea in an extra fancy and really expensive patent medicine bottle of the early 1990s…

...then I don’t quite know where we’re supposed to go next. I could channel Steve Yegge and his statement (really almost a theorem I fear) that if you add enough Hormel canned chili to dog shit, it will eventually taste like chili, but that would lack originality, and I would feel crippled by guilt at such a monstrously shallow and droll recycling of somebody else’s hard-won and richly earned cynicism.

Really, though, I think it’s time for something like UML, the Rational Urinary Process (that was what it was called wasn’t it?), to return, bottomless hat in hand, like a half-witted, threadbare messiah…

...and if it can bring along with it a cottage industry of charlatan consultants, books that make Nostradamus look like the pinnacle of intellectual integrity and scientific rigor and a vast armada of tools whose actual value is inversely proportional to the number of digits after the dollar sign on the price field in the Programmer’s Paradiso catalog then all the better!

Sign me up for some of that! See you at my first workshop on the JACKSMACK methodology… it’s $1000 a head for the one day seminar, but don’t worry… you get a healthy portion of the finest chocolate dipped strawberries the soulless Courtyard Marriott near the highway on-ramp has to offer.

Along with Marc Wandschneider and Alex Bosworth), I’m one of the developers of the new SWiK site. In the past, I’ve worked on many things including operating systems, multimedia, security and crypto software, a virtual machine, niche embedded stuff, network appliances and more. SWiK’s the first web-based tool for the open source community (indeed the first web application of any real size and traffic) on which I’ve had a chance to work, and I think it’s quite neat what Sourcelabs is trying to give back to the open source commmunity by sponsoring the system’s development and hosting it and its ever-growing heap of content.

I’m generally interested in building multi-language systems where, to speed development, a system is decomposed into subsystems whose implementation technologies are chosen independently to make life easy. Pieces can then be replaced, tuned or re-implemented as reality and empirical measurement dictate, hopefully leading to less development time spent and cost being incurred than would happen building a giant hairball out of technologies that are lower-level (and thus more expensive to work with) than they need to be. It appears that someone has given roughly this idea a cute pattern name: AlternateHardAndSoftLayers

So, I guess I’m an AlternatingHardAndSoftLayerer since 2000. Before that, I spent a few years working in a place where one used the company’s doctrinally correct and ideologically pure technologies for everything, whether they made any technical sense in context or not. When I moved over to work on and with more open source software, the sense of relief was comparable to finally being allowed to use clean one’s teeth with a special-purpose brush after years of being permitted only to use an old screwdriver with a bent blade and a cracked handle.

SWiK, which is mostly implemented in object-oriented PHP 5, with a smattering of side-utilities written in Java, and a few bits in Ruby, is sort of an example of this idea, and has served to get me interested in Ruby, which has in turn moved me to look at Rails. In particular some of the efficiencies to be gained from metaprogramming in general, and from Ruby’s particular expression of some ancient and frequently rediscovered ideas from Lisp and Smalltalk has caught my attention. I’ve not yet had a chance to build something really big with Ruby or Rails, but my initial experiences have been quite pleasant, and so I’m on the lookout for opportunities to do so if these technologies genuinely appear to be (at least part of) the right solution.

For some of the same reasons, I’m also hoping to pick up Python again, after having briefly dabbled in it a year or two ago, before I was sidetracked by something else. Strangely, on returning to Python, it seems just a little bit less nice than it did two years ago. I don’t know how much of this is due to readjustment pangs, and how much comes from subconscious comparisons to Ruby’s arguably nicer structure and syntax. Time may tell.