Categories
BT

I’m now on the SDK team

It looks like Paul Karsten has succeeded in making the case for more developers: Paul, Alkesh and I are now part of the Web21C SDK team (they assure us there’s plenty of Java as well as .net, and if we’re really good they might even let us play with Ruby).

This is good news on several fronts – Paul’s team seems to be one of the few remaining places in the company where in-house developers are still valued, they’re as keen all things XP and agile as we are, and as far as I know this is the first time anyone’s succeeded in moving an established team to a new project en masse since the new ‘resource management’ strategy was introduced.

Categories
Software

The other kind of SOA (reprise)

Jason Kolb has an insightful post today on the same kind of issue that I was talking about in the other kind of SOA.

Categories
Agile

Fighting Developer Abuse

This ThoughtWorks recruitment ad is pure genius.

Categories
General nonsense

I guess I need a thesaurus

…looking at the titles of the two posts I made on the 17th.

Categories
BT

Rating a company by its coffee provision

Marc McNeill makes some interesting observations on how you can judge a company by the coffee facilities it provides its employees. He lists, in order of decreasing clue:

  1. Vending machine that serves [quality] coffee on free vend.
  2. Kettle and filter coffee / Cafetiere to make my own.
  3. Kettle. I buy my own instant coffee.
  4. Vending machine that serves [quality] coffee that I have to pay for.
  5. Vending machine that serves [tasteless] cofee that I insert coins into.
  6. Vending machine that serves [tasteless] coffee that I insert a vending card into.

Where I work, we have a choice of options three or six. We also have another, that slots in one side or the other of number four:

  • Coffee bar that serves [quality[ish]] coffee that I have to pay [through the nose] for.

At the training centre where I’ll be on Wednesday (formerly a BT site, now run by Accenture), they’ve managed to find another option, which I guess ranks (and having tasted the coffee, I choose the word rank advisedly) at around 4.5:

  • Vending machine that serves [tasteless] coffee on free vend.
Categories
Agile BT

I guess we’re now a cool international telco

Overheard last night at XtC:

“I work for Dresdner.”

“Ah, they used to be a cool international investment bank.”

“What are we now then?”

“An international investment bank.”

“Why aren’t we cool any more?”

“Because you lost JP.”

Categories
General nonsense Software

I guess I really ought to learn Lisp

I was having a discussion last night about the value of learning new programming languages. I said I still felt I ought to learn Lisp, even if I was never likely to use it in anger, because it would hopefully give me a new way of thinking about problems which would be transferrable to other languages (especially ones like Ruby). Alkesh (come on, get a blog so I can link to it!) felt that Lisp was a dead language, and would be no more useful than learning Fortran or COBOL.

Then this morning I tried the Which Programming Lanuguage Are You? (via Steve Freeman).

You are Lisp.  Very few people like you (Probably because you use too many parenthesis (You better stop it (Reallly)))

Fate?

Categories
Agile Software

The other kind of SOA

Most large organisations have been using SOA for years, and they’ve been doing it despite their IT strategy, not because of it. No, not Service-Oriented Architecture, but Spreadsheet-Oriented Architecture.

Categories
Agile

We don’t have a Lord – team leadership and decision-making

Simon Baker has posted a response to John Scumniotales’s post on Team Leadership and Self Organization, and I have to say I’m with Simon.

Categories
Agile Java

“Given when then” in JUnit

AS I mentioned at the end of this post, I’ve been convinced by Dan North’s case for using the “given when then” pattern for specifying scenarios during behaviour- or test-driven development, and while I wait for JBehave to be released, I’ve been playing around trying to come up with a way of using the pattern to clarify intent in (Java) unit/acceptance tests.