Categories
Software

More Google reader neatitude

A couple of other neat features that have made me glad I switched:

Shared items

You can mark individual items in your subscribed feeds as ‘shared’, and they become available on a public page. Like-minded people can then subscribe to your shared items feed, instead of you having to keep forwarding them links. I’ve added a link to my shared items over there on the left.

Starred items

Like many of you (I’m pretending here that people actually read this: humour me!), I keep a bookmark folder where I drop things that look interesting but that I don’t have time to read straight away. The problem is that it doesn’t help much when I see something at work that I want to read properly at home (or vice versa). Since most of them come from RSS feeds, all I need to do is click the star next to the item in Google reader, and it goes into a list that I can come back to later, rather than trying to remember which feed it was from. I guess many standalone RSS readers have a similar feature, but it comes into its own when you can access the list from anywhere.

[tags]Google reader, RSS[/tags]

Categories
Software

Google reader

Like several others, I’ve recently switched to Google Reader instead of a standalone RSS reader.

Categories
Agile

Agile is something you are, not something you do

A post by Perryn Fowler reminded me of something I’d been meaning to say for a while. Perryn says:

agile is an adjective, not a noun

Saying ‘Agile Practices’ makes about as much sense as saying ‘Fast Running Shoes’.

Saying ‘Agile Best Practice’ makes about as much sense as ‘Fastest Running Shoes’.

It seems quite common (and I’m sure I’ve done it myself) to say you’re ‘doing’ agile. I think you can ‘do’ XP, Scrum or your methodology of choice, but agile has to be something you are.

So, how do you know if you are agile? I think it’s down to whether you believe in the manifesto, and more importantly whether you follow the principles.

[tags]agile[/tags]

Categories
Agile

Customer value of development team consistency

We’ve nearly completed the process of handing responsibility for the internal system we’ve developed to an outsourced team, and I found this comment from our customer/user representative interesting:

“I have to spend so much of my time discussing how everything should work now. With the old team, I could just describe what we needed and I knew you’d understand what I meant and come up with a good solution.”

Let’s hope there’s enough continuity in the new team for them to build up a similar relationship. Of course, turnover of people (and hence depth of domain knowledge) is one more thing that you lose control of when you outsource a project.

Categories
General nonsense

You say potato…

Why is it that in the US they say “math”, but we say “maths”, yet we say “Lego” and they say “Legos”?

Categories
Java

It’s official: two generations out of date

Sun released JSE 6 today, and some of us (for reasons beyond our control!) are still using 1.4.

Still, an as-yet-unknown new project beckons in the new year, so who knows?

Categories
Agile General nonsense

Scrum for cats

For some reason Twiglet seems fascinated by Ken Schwaber’s Agile Quality talk.

Twiglet watching Ken Schwaber

Categories
Agile

XP Day photos

I see Adewale Oshineye has posted some excellent photos from XP Day. Fortunately all you get to see of me is the back of my head (and hard as it may be to believe for those that know me, I’m not deliberately hiding my face in the second one!)

Love in the Age of Software Are Your Tests Really Driving Your Development?

[tags]xpday[/tags]

Categories
Agile

XP Day 06

Here are some notes from the recent (excellent) XP Day conference. This is based on my internal BT write-up, with a few company-specific bits removed.

Categories
General nonsense

Google’s best product yet?

Beer tokens!

Google beer token

(From XP Day 06).