Categories
Agile Ruby Software

Testing trivialities … and double-entry bookkeeping

From time to time I end up in a discussion (as often as not with myself) about the point at which something is so trivial that it doesn’t justify creating a unit test (or behaviour spec, in more BDD-like language).

Categories
Agile General nonsense

InfoQ interview Mary and Tom Poppendieck about Lean

See the video here.

I’ll get round to watching the whole thing eventually, but first, use the link underneath the video to skip to “What are some of the other principles of Lean?”

I never realised that Tom Poppendieck was such an accomplished ventriloquist!

Categories
General nonsense Software

Out of step

More proof, as if it were needed, that I’m not up-to-date with the latest fashions.

Just as I’m teetering on the brink of switching from Safari to Firefox at home (mainly for all that plugin goodness), I read that Firefox’s market share is down, and Safari’s is up.

[tags]firefox, safari, browser wars[/tags]

Categories
BT Java Web21C

BT’s Java SDK part two: making phone calls

Yesterday we saw how easy it is to send text messages using the SDK, so now let’s try making a phone call.

Categories
BT Java Web21C

BT’s Java SDK

As I mentioned recently, I now work in the Web21C SDK team. The SDK provides a simple API for programmatically accessing various web services that BT provides, including SMS, conference calls and location services.

The SDK is in public beta, and is currently free (with daily usage limits). Up to now it’s only been available for those crazy .NET folks, but the next release (on Monday, all being well) will extend that to Java, PHP and Python. Rumour has it that Ruby’s in the works too.

I’ve been having a play with the Java version – here’s a sneak preview…

Categories
Agile Enterprise

Cultural blocks to adoption of agile development

A recent article in the New York Times describes the issues of introducing ‘The Toyota Way’ to non-Japanese factories.

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
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?